ABSTRACT
Foucault's genealogy of the art of government and the forms of the state is exceedingly sketchy and sweeping in its conception. Nevertheless, bringing together theories of the art of government with the development of governmental apparatuses and forms of knowledge designed to develop knowledge of the state provides us with a framework to specify geo-power as a historical problematic of state formation. Arguably, the problematic of geo-power in England began with the reforms of Thomas Cromwell during the English Reformation. By the late nineteenth century, a new horizon of geo-power was sur-facing as the last pockets of unclaimed and unstated space were sur-rounded and enclosed within the colonizing projects of expansionist empires and territorializing states. Geopolitics is not a concept that is immanently meaningful and fully present to itself but a discursive "event" that poses questions to us whenever it is evoked and rhetorically deployed. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
