Personhood, jurisdiction and injustice: law, colonialities and the global order

Abstract

Set against the colonial and neo-colonial unevenness of the globalized neoliberal order, this article offers a critical reading of legal personhood and jurisdiction as mechanisms of privilege and predation. Transnational corporations (TNCs) are, we suggest, the ultimate insider construct for the neoliberal capitalist-techno order. Meanwhile, increasing numbers of corporeal human beings on the move as the marginalized products of that same order (especially refugees and migrants) are confronted by boundaries and barriers all too material in their effect. In an age of anxiety-driven border hardening against mass human migration and of seamless, instantaneous movements of transnational capital and corporate location across jurisdictional boundaries, we examine the patterns of injustice implicated in and between these phenomena, tracing a Eurocentric logic visible in the complex continuities between coloniality, capitalism and the production of precarity in the Anthropocene.