Territory and Territoriality in the Global Economy

By Saskia Sassen. 2000

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This is part of a larger research project on governance and accountability in the global economy. What is the impact of economic globalization on the territorial jurisdiction, or more theoretically, the exclusive territoriality of the nation-state? This is the organizing question in the article; it is an effort to respond critically to two notions that underlie much of the current discussion about globalization. One is the zero-sum game: whatever the global economy gains, the national state loses and vice versa. The other is that if an event takes place in a national territory it is a national event, whether a business transaction or a judiciary decision. I argue that, on the contrary, national states have been deeply involved in the implementation of the global economic system producing the necessary legal encasements for this system; and, second, that a global transaction may well take place inside a national territory. My working hypothesis is that while globalization leaves national territory basically unaltered, it is having pronounced effects on the exclusive territoriality of the national state - that is, its effects are not on the boundaries of national territory as such but on the institutional encasements of that national territory.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da4a05a06a30594da955a8bcaa941f7a4288b07e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

In Political Science and International Relations

Citations in the corpus

Fragmented sovereignty: land reform and dispossession in Laos (2011, background): “…sovereignty very effectively from philosophy (Foucault 2003), political science and law (Hibou 2004, Werner and de Wilde 2001), and sociology (Sassen 2000, 2006), over history (Benton 2002, 2010), geography (Agnew 2005, Brenner 1999), anthropology (Appadurai 2003, Hansen and Stepputat 2006,…”
The Secondary Circuit of Capital Reconsidered: Globalization and the U.S. Real Estate Sector1 (2006, unknown): “E-mail: kgotham@nsf.gov American Journal of Sociology 232 and McGrew 2002; Sassen 1999, 2000, 2001).”
Chains and networks, territories and scales: towards a relational framework for analysing the global economy (2001, background): “A network link that crosses international borders is not just another example of ‘acting at a distance’, it may also represent a qualitative disjuncture between different regulatory and socio-cultural environments (see, for example, Dicken 1998; Sassen 2000; Smith et al. 1999; Taylor 1994).”
MNEs as border-crossing multi-location enterprises: The role of discontinuities in geographic space (2013, background): “Note that we are not arguing that nation-states do not matter – quite the contrary (McCallum, 1995; Sassen, 2000).”