Law and the geographic analysis of economic globalization

Abstract

This article focuses on the curious absence of law in geographic accounts of state restructuring in relation to neoliberal economic globalization. It argues that law is ever-present in many of the issues at the center of geographic debates, yet rarely given sustained attention. In response, three approaches are offered, each emphasizing a different aspect of the law and each producing different geographies. First, I consider the absence as symptomatic of the problematic of state theory. Second, I review arguments from outside the discipline of geography concerning the ways actors involved in state restructuring engage with and think about the law. Third, I argue for a historical-philosophical investigation into the way that law produces the pockmarked landscape of the global economy through both the extension of legal frameworks and the legally authorized suspension of legal systems. The final section examines how these different approaches deepen our understanding of economic globalization by considering the role of transnational corporations as regulatory institutions in the global economy.