Law as critical cartography: global value chains, borders, and the spatialisation of vulnerability

ABSTRACT How can law(yers) grasp spatialized regimes such as global value chains, surveillance infrastructures or platform-based information exchanges? How effective is ‘jurisdiction’ in capturing the border-crossing materiality which defines these expansive, socio-material regimes of power? This article suggests that accounts according to which the ‘transnationalization’ of legal orders is the most recent stage of ‘state transformation, are myopic, largely Western ones. Such narratives are inherently orientalizing and racializing as they invisibilize the dependency relationships between the Global North and the Global South. The dominant ‘globalization’ story that lawyers have been telling themselves paints the state as a victim – first of ‘privatization’ (and neoliberalism), then of financialization and globalization (and, of course ‘terrorism’). A more adequate map highlights the ‘upstairs-downstairs’ dynamic of subjugation and exploitation of the South by the North, a dynamic of which these regimes are a further manifestation.