Nordia Geographical Publications 44: 4, 29–35 29 Natalie Koch Introduction One of the perennial questions in political geography – and social sciences more generally – is how something so abstract and diffuse as the “state” acquires the appearance of unity. Inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, scholars of governmentality do not take the state for granted as a naturalized “thing,” but have instead worked to trace its many, often ephemeral, sources of power rooted in individual actions, material synergies, and the everyday. While these scholars have been diligent in their efforts to take apart the state, they have not always been so skilled at piecing it together again (Jessop 2011; Lemke 2011). But if geographers do not consider how all those practices and performances are woven into the myth of coherence – the “state effect” – then how else, Alec Murphy (2013: 1215) has asked, “can we come to grips with the fact that countless people around the world identify so strongly with the political territories where they live that they are willing to risk their lives to defend those territories?” Within political geography, these questions have arguably been best answered by Anssi Paasi (1996) in Territories, Boundaries, and Consciousness, where he builds on his early efforts to conceptualize the “institutionalization of regions” (Paasi 1986) to explore the idea of “spatial socialization.” Keywords, Anssi Paasi (2011: 161) has argued, “motivate and even oblige scholars not to ‘surrender to them’ but rather to defy them and to develop new ones.” And yet, academia has a funny way of fetishizing certain keywords and letting others fall by the wayside. In this article, I will revisit “spatial socialization” as one such concept that has fallen away without due attention in political geography. This idea is the hallmark of Paasi’s uniquely geographic approach to identity and an exceptionally useful analytical lens for understanding the persistent “tenacity and “Spatial socialization”: Understanding the state effect geographically Natalie Koch Department of Geography, The Maxwell School, Syracuse University Abstract: This article revisits Anssi Paasi’s concept of “spatial socialization.” The hallmark of Paasi’s geographic approach to identity, the concept offers a way to move beyond statist approaches that either reify the state or dismiss its signiicance. Spatial socialization sheds light on how the myths of coherence of “states,” “territories,” and otherwise-scaled regions come to be institutionalized through everyday practices and spatial imaginaries. Although Paasi is best known for his theoretical contributions, his long commitment to empirical research in Finland suggests the power of his contributions to think through unlike contexts, which I illustrate through a case study from my own research on the “state effect” in Central Asia.