Towards Geopolitical Reading of ‘Periphery’ in State Spatial Strategies: Concepts and Controversies

This article aims to tackle the inner-regional question within political geography debate addressing an important conceptual and empirical deficit in our understanding of periphery as political construct. It analyses the role of state spatial-making in the process of constructing the narrative of peripherality of subnational territories, in national-territorial politics. It examines the concept of ‘inner region’ as it is employed in state spatial strategy focusing on territories that are ‘locked’ into a configuration outside the core, that is, territories that are peripheral and remote. In particular, study’s concern is with the geopolitical rationality that implicitly guides policy framework in the National Strategy for Inner Areas (SNAI) and the new Metropolitan Cities in Italy. If inner regions and city-regions become a particular expression of state space-making, their development offers considerable opportunity for shedding more light on the relationship between local dynamics and wider geopolitical relations. Against the only apparently neutralizing discourses of citizenship, polycentrism, and economic development which dominate that policy, the new strategy is a highly geopolitical instrument potentially accelerating the neoliberalization of peripheral regions.