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n Geopolitics of Knowledge-based Economy, political geographer Sami Moisio embarks on an analysis of the current geopolitical condition. The book builds on Moisio’s long-term engagement with reconceptualization of geopolitics, state spatial transformation, and city-regionalism. The knowledge-intensive forms of capitalism provide an important subtext for understanding inter-state relations and interspatial competition, yet the influential imaginary of the Knowledge-based Economy (hence KBE) has not been subjected to geopolitical analysis before. As the concept of imaginary suggests, Moisio builds his theoretical and methodological framework on the cultural political economy approach (Sum and Jessop, 2013), which allows his geopolitical analysis to engage with both the discursive and the material elements of the KBE. I will comment on Moisio’s research design and the empirical foci and conclude by raising some issues regarding the blind spots of the visionary script of the KBE.

The book is compact and complex: in 182 pages Geopolitics of the Knowledge-based Economy presents a compelling interpretation on how space, economy and politics intertwine in the early 21st Century, and how a particular economic imaginary has become central in exercising social power through manipulating expectations on the future. According to Moisio, the KBE is not a “neutral” project of seeking economic dynamism through information technological innovation, but a modality of productive power towards political spaces and subjects. Thus, it needs to be understood as a historically contingent phenomenon and as a political project with geopolitical consequences. The main stylistic virtue in Moisio’s writing is his finely tuned combination of analysis and critique: the critique operates by stripping the ideas constitutive of the KBE of their carefully structured aura of inevitability. This enables the reader to acknowledge the productivity of power that renders the world knowable in a certain manner. At the same time, the tight focus in Moisio’s discourse immerses the reader within the imaginary of the KBE in a way that encourages one to look for exits. In other words, the concise form of the book calls for further development regarding some of the key insights. I focus here on the unexplored possibilities of materialist geopolitics as an analytical framework for assessing the viability of the immaterial value creation in the KBE.

Moisio’s approach challenges the view that the era of globalizing capitalism would mark a transition from geopolitics to geoeconomics. The distinction between geoeconomics and geopolitics is indeed suspect because it implies a distinction between economy and politics. Instead, Moisio argues for the materialist conception of geopolitics, where capitalism is interpreted as a dynamic geopolitical process that produces spatial organization and geopolitical subjects. This reorients the geopolitical analysis from issues of national security and military confrontation towards the space economy of capitalism, characterized by spatial metaphors of nodes, hubs, networks and flows. From the perspective of materialist geopolitics states engage in geopolitical conflict marked by economic competition, which requires efforts to territorialize and nationalize “the hubs and flows” through political action. The specific focus of the analysis is on the spatial process of state transformation through knowledge-based economization. In the coda, Moisio provides a cogent summary structured around the themes of spatiality of knowledge-based economization, the role of the state, the relationship between neoliberalism and knowledge-based economization, and the prospect of socio-spatial polarization. Moisio expresses a hope for more diverse and inclusive forms of knowledge-based economization, where the productive forces unleashed by knowledge-intensive capitalism could serve progressive societal development. This  includes allowing for public provision and welfare policies as well as a broader understanding of what constitutes a virtuous citizen-subject.

To analyze the KBE from the perspective of economization draws attention to its processual character. Here Moisio builds on the suggestion by Çalışkan and Callon (2009) to study different modalities of economization, which shifts attention from the reified “economy” to controversial analyses that constitute the economic forms of life, as we know them. This lays emphasis on expert knowledge-production in constituting economic imaginaries as distinctive semiotic systems. Accordingly, three key dimensions in the geopolitics of knowledge-based economization are geopolitical discourses, calculative practices that produce geopolitical objects, and geopolitical subject-formation. The focus on calculative practices is especially welcome, given the immense social power exercised through them. Regarding subject formation, attention to how calculative practices force orientation and command behavior at institutional and individual levels, would have merited even closer attention.

Moisio fleshes out his analysis through reading the ideational elements of knowledge based-economization in the work of key scholars, including Michael Porter, Manuel Castells, and Richard Florida. The case of Finland provides an empirical context for analyzing the transforming spatial strategies of the state and exemplifies the “place-bound social practices of translation and learning of geopolitical discourses” (50). From a geopolitical perspective the Finnish experience of knowledge-based economization allows the examination of building elite consensus around the imaginary of the KBE, which is historically bound to the emergence of a successful ICT-sector and the influence of this capital fraction on the state. In Finland this led to re-interpretation of the content and rationalities of geopolitics from pressing concern with national security to almost exclusive focus on economic competitiveness, and consequently effected a profound change in state’s spatial policies. Orienting using the theoretical tools of materialist geopolitics and economization, the analysis in the book moves through the topics of discourses and objects of knowledge-based economization, geopolitical subject formation, higher education, and city geopolitics.

Regarding geopolitical discourse, Moisio reads Porter’s work as a form of popular management knowledge that has provided a coherent account on the post-Fordist geopolitical condition, and exercised substantial influence on civil servants, spatial planners and politicians. The objects of knowledge-based economization have their epistemic base in calculative social practices of measuring, modeling and indexing. These allow discussing states, regions and cities as actors in the inter-spatial competition of knowledge-intensive capitalism. The key insight here is that the virtual spaces of comparison effected by the calculative practices exercise productive and even disciplinary power on political communities.

In his discussion of subject formation, Moisio focuses on the process of envisioning a collective geopolitical subject in the work of Castells. This kind of approach does not allow one to delve deeply into formation of a particular kind of self or that of a political subject. Instead, it orients the analysis towards governmental processes of regulating population and space for production of a profitable and self-managerial citizen-subject that fit into the logics of capital accumulation. In that approach, higher education figures as the central governmental technique for structuring behavior, skills and orientation, and engendering a population with capacities useful in the KBE. Through his reading of Castells, Moisio establishes the spatial assumptions conditioning the geopolitical subject formation. These include the spatial metaphor of network, emphasis on movement of information and capital that produce the space of flows, the fierce and volatile inter-spatial competition, and the exclusively urban focus. In the latter respect, Moisio’s analysis of city geopolitics proceeds through establishing changes in the state spatial strategies that evince a movement away from the city geopolitics of spatial Keynesianism towards that of the competition state. The theoretical rationale of the transformation is explored in the writings of Florida, which have furthered the ontology of fierce international competition through its popularized spatial hierarchies of peaks, hills and valleys.

The imaginary of the KBE is premised on the categories and calculative practices of mainstream economic theory that exercise significant ontological power. Consequently, the selective focus of the imaginary results in a complete negligence of the material world, i.e. the resource economy and related environmental and ecological concerns. Within the imaginary of the knowledge-based economization, these aspects are externalized to peripheries of global networks and are imagined to be managed through market control enabled by the high productivity of the KBE. Materialist geopolitics provides a useful way to acknowledge the ontological commitments of economic imaginaries, e.g. the taken-for-granted assumptions concerning the spaces of flows amounting to a veritable “flow ontology” (or onto-theology), which would need to be studied in terms of its material underpinnings. The idea of knowledge-based economization harks back to discovery of “the limits to growth”, and from this perspective, the KBE is an attempt to explain how the exponential economic growth would be sustainable. The answer provided by the knowledge-based economization regards human innovation as the limitless source for immaterial growth, which does not resolve the problem of materiality but sidesteps it. To provide an example, the material flows supplying the global network of innovative cities are completely dependent on the fossil economy, which introduces serious doubt as to the sustainability of a future built on ever-intensifying urban agglomeration. Thus, the notion of materialist geopolitics can be extended beyond the economic categories to take into consideration not just the value formation and capital accumulation, but the material conditions of possibility for the existence of knowledge-based (or any other kind) economy. This would allow the geopolitical analysis to engage seriously with environmental change and the consequent prospects for the future.

In sum, Moisio provides a theoretically accomplished and empirically well-grounded account of the current geopolitical condition, which will be useful across multiple academic disciplines. It encourages thinking on the limitations of the dominant imaginaries as well as viable alternatives to the space economy of capitalism. 

References

Çalışkan K & Callon M (2009) Economization, part 1: shifting attention from the economy towards processes of economization, Economy and Society, 38:3, 369-398.

Sum N & Jessop B (2013) Towards a Cultural Political Economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar