Embedded borderings: making new geographies of centrality

ABSTRACT

Embedded borderings: making new geographies of centrality. Territory, Politics, Governance. The organizing thesis posits the emergence of specific operational spaces that recur in country after country but are not necessarily framed by national or international law, or by visible legal markers, even as they use particular national institutions such as laws and courts. These operational spaces contribute to the making of cross-border geographies that include only parts of national territories, often excluding most of the pertinent ‘sovereign territory’ that houses them. These operational spaces look like they belong to those countries as they are marked by thick territorial insertions: whether it is financial centres with their massive concentrations of buildings, or human rights activists tracking tortured bodies in prisons or abandoned fields. Yet, they are in fact tightly bordered territorial fragments that keep out what they do not want in. This specificity holds even for actors operating within a given economic sector, such as finance, where the two cases examined here – the financial ‘system’ and so-called ‘vulture funds’ – each has its own operational field. But it also holds for the operational spaces of actors as diverse as human rights activists and ISIS, to mention extremes, which I do not focus on here. The result is a proliferation of cross-border geographies constituted via specific components of each country; these geographies weave themselves across old divisions – north, south, and east–west. The actors in these new types of transversally bordered spaces range from small resource-poor organizations to powerful corporations.

摘要

镶嵌的划界：创造核心性的崭新地理。Territory, Politics, Governance. 本文设想，反复出现于各国的特定运作空间正在浮现。这些空间未必由国家、国际法律或可见的立法机构所构造，即便它们需要使用特定的国家制度与机构，如法律与法院。这些运作空间使得跨边界地理格局得以成形。这一地理格局仅包含国家领土的部分组成部分，并将作为承载物的所谓“主权领土”排除在外。这些运作空间看起来属于那些以稠密的领土性介入——无论是高楼大厦大规模集聚的金融中心，抑或是追踪在监狱或荒野之地饱受折磨之人的人权活动人士——为特征的国家。然而，事实上，它们恰恰是有边界的领土碎片，将一切不欲之物排除在外。这一特殊性也适用于在某一经济部门内运作的行动主体，如金融业。本文检视了其中两个个案——金融“系统”与所谓的秃鹫基金——各有其运作领域。但是，这一特殊性亦同样适用于行动主体极为不同的运作空间，如人权活动人士与ISIS组织——这些是极端性的情况，本文的关注点并不在此。其结果是由各国特定组成部分所构建的跨边界地理格局的扩散；这些地理格局使其自身超越了旧有的划分方式——北方、南方，以及东方、西方。这些具有横贯性的新型有边界空间中的行动主体从资源匮乏的小型组织到强有力的企业集团。

RÉSUMÉ

Encadrements intégrés : La construction de nouvelles géographies de la centralité. Territory, Politics, Governance. La thèse de l’article concerne l’émergence de certains espaces opérationnels hautement spécifiques qui s’installent parmi plusieurs pays, mais qui manquent souvent une insertion précise dans la loi nationale ou internationale, ou dans d’autres indications de légalité, même si ces espaces se servent d’institutions nationales telles que la loi et les cours de justice. Ces espaces opérationnels contribuent à la construction de géographies transfrontalières qui incorporent seulement une portion des territoires nationaux en jeu, fréquemment excluant la grande partie de ces territoires souverains qui les contiennent. Ces espaces opérationnels semblent appartenir aux pays où ils fonctionnent, étant donne leurs insertions territoriales souvent robustes – qu’ils soient des centres financiers indiqués par leurs concentrations massives de bâtiments, ou qu’ils soient des activistes de la cause des droits de l’homme, cherchant des corps torturés dans les prisons ou sur des terrains abandonnés. Pourtant, ces espaces ont leurs propres frontières a l’intérieure des contextes nationaux qui leur permettent d’exclure tout ce que ne leur intéresse pas. Cela vaut pour les acteurs engagés dans le monde financier ample, dans lequel les deux cas en question, le ‘système’ financier et les soi-disant ‘vulture funds,’ ont chacun construit son espace opérationnel. Cela vaut également pour des acteurs aussi divers que les activistes pour la cause des droits de l’homme et l’EI: des exemples extrêmes sur lesquels je me ne concentre pas. Le résultat est une prolifération de géographies transfrontalières qui se composent des éléments spécifiques de chaque pays; ces géographies traversent nos anciennes divisions – du nord au sud, ou de l’est à l’ouest. Les acteurs dans ces nouvels espaces transversalement définis vont d’organisations modestes jusqu’à des sociétés puissantes.

RESUMEN

Fronteras arraigadas: La construccion de nuevas geografías de la centralidad. Territory, Politics, Governance. La tesis del articulo es el emerger de espacios operacionales altamente especificos en pais tras pais y generalmente sin encajes en la ley nacional o internacional u otros indicadores legales visibles, mismo si se benefician del uso de instituciones nacionales tales como la ley y las cortes de justicia. Estos espacios operacionales contribuyen a la construccion de geografias trans-fronterizas que incluyen solo una porcion de los territories nacionales en juego, y a menudo excluyen la gran mayoria del territorio de cada soberano que los ‘hospeda.” Estos espacios operacionales parecen pertenecer a los paises donde funcionan dadas sus robustas inserciones territoriales: sean centros financieros con sus masivas concentraciones de edificios, sean los activistas por los derechos humanos trazando cuerpos torturados en prisiones o en campos abandonados. Sin embargo, estos espacios tienen sus propios bordes al interno de los paises donde operan, y excluyen todo aquello que no les es de interes. Esta especificidad se da mismo en el caso del mundo financiero amplio, donde los dos casos examinados aqui – el ‘sistema’ financiero y los fondos buitres– cada cual ha construido su espacio operacional especifico, a menudo en conflicto uno con el otro.

KEYWORDS:

• operational spaces
• territorial insertions
• multi-state geographies
• transversalities

关键词:

• 运作空间
• 领土性介入
• 多国地理格局
• 横贯性

MOTS-CLÉS:

• espaces opérationnels
• insertions territoriales
• géographies multi-états
• transversalités

PALABRAS CLAVES:

• espacios operacionales
• inserciones territoriales
• geografias multi-nacionales
• transversalidades

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This text is part of a book manuscript (Ungoverned territories? in press with Harvard University Press) based on the Storrs Lectures in Philosophy and Jurisprudence delivered by the author at the Yale University Law School. The full elaboration of some of the issues raised can be found in Sassen (2008, chs 5 and 6; 2012; 2014).

2 Among familiar components are privileging low inflation over employment growth, exchange rate parity, and the variety of items found in International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionality and Basel rules. There are specificities for diverse periods. Thus, after the Southeast Asian financial crisis, we saw revisions of some of the specifics of these standards: for example, exchange rate parity was to be evaluated in less strict terms. Whom these changes benefit has not changed much. I develop this at length in Sassen (2008, ch. 4; 2013; 2014, ch. 1).

3 There are other factors that are significant, particularly institutional changes, such as the bundle of policies usually grouped under the term deregulation and, on a more theoretical level, the changing scales for capital accumulation. For a full analysis of these issues, see Knorr-Cetina and Preda (2014), Eichengreen (2010), Eichengreen and Fishlow (1998), and Krippner (2011) on deregulation and re-regulation in the financial markets today; on new scales for capital accumulation, see the special issue of Globalizations on ‘Globalization and Crisis’, especially Gills (2010); and for a state of the art examination of how the making of specialized corporate services for global firms started three decades ago, see Bryson and Daniels (2009).

4 The term ‘vulture’ is not new to the world of finance. It was used in the US at least as early as the mid-1800s to describe financial firms that specialized in buying devalued assets with the aim of making a profit. It emerges again as a descriptive term used by popular news sources in the early 1900s.

5 The US and the UK, the countries with the two major financial centres at the time, passed, respectively, the US Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act (FSIA) of 1976 and the UK State Immunities Act of 1978. Both reduced the scope of sovereign immunity.

6 Let me clarify that I have written an extensive critical analysis about these initiatives and the embedded understanding of what it meant to rescue a sovereign debtor (see Sassen, 2001, 2008).

7 It should be noted that the large international banks that accepted the discounted debt were not completely innocent in the making of this potentially catastrophic debt scenario. There was a massive push to sell loans in the 1970s and early 1980s stemming from the abundance of so-called petro-dollars of the 1973 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) windfall and their decision to put this money into the hands of large international banks. Thus these banks had to find takers for their loans, as this was not yet the highly financialized system that it is today (see Sassen, 2010; 2014, chs 2 and 3).

8 It is important to note that the debt of these countries was partly the outcome of common practices of Global North actors – both particular governments and what were then called ‘transnational’ banks (see Sassen, 2014, ch. 1; 2016).

9 For a detailed account of the rise of vulture funds in the 1980s and a range of specific cases across the world, see Sassen (2008, ch. 5 and its appendix).

10 For a discussion involving champerty as it relates to vulture fund litigation, see Wheeler and Attarand (2003). See also Anon (1897).

11 The Argentine default was US$98 million. The 1998 Russian default was US$72 billion (Takushi, 2013), though some estimate it was closer to US$100 billion.

12 See, for example, the UK court victory (Croft, 2011) and the Belgium pari passu victory (Zamour, 2013, p. 61). There was also a victory in Ghana, but this ruling was overturned by the UN Tribunal on the Laws of the Sea.

13 This was the first case of its kind for Elliot – the debt was purchased in 1995 and the suit was brought in 1996 (Elliott Associates v. Banco de la Nacion and the Republic of Peru, 194 F.3d 363, 2d Cir. 1999).

14 For a discussion of pari passu, see Zamour (2013).

15 In the case of sovereign contracts, the creditor ‘knew or should have known’ about the special considerations inherent in lending to sovereigns (using the reasoning of the Tinoco arbitration between GB and Costa Rica) – see Lienau (2013, p. 134).

16 For a critique of the legal and political worldview that tends to sacralize versions of our institutions that ceased to be workable or desirable (such as a conception of sovereignty that fails to account for the many ways it must adapt to accommodate new forms of human social, political, cultural, and economic connection) see Barrozo (2015).

17 See Waibel (2007) for an examination of how the interest of the diverse parties to a sovereign debt settlement can diverge.