The state as a space of health: On the geopolitics and biopolitics of health-care systems

The state as a space of health: on the geopolitics and biopolitics of health-care systems. Territory, Politics, Governance. The historical transformations of state spaces have recently been theorized and conceptualized from multidisciplinary perspectives and in various spatial and temporal contexts, but less research has been concerned with the entanglement of biopolitics and geopolitics in transforming state spaces in the OECD world. This article seeks to develop an approach to the geopolitics/biopolitics interface by inquiring into the ways in which health' has been one of the key aspects of the territorial constitution of the so-called welfare state in the Finnish context, and how health care has been an important constituent of the recent re-working of state territory and citizen subjectivities. The paper suggests that the health care/state space nexus can be scrutinized through an analysis of historically contingent geopolitical and biopolitical rationalities and related governmental techniques, as well as through a context-sensitive inquiry into how the territorial system of health care has altered over time.