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Global territories: zones of economicand legal dis/connectivitySven Opitz a & Ute Tellmann aa Inst itute of Sociology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg,

GermanyVersion of record f irst published: 13 Dec 2012.

To cite this article: Sven Opitz & Ute Tellmann (2012): Global territories: zones of economic andlegal dis/ connect ivity, Dist inkt ion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 13:3, 261-282

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Global territories: zones of economic and legal dis/connectivity

Sven Opitz and Ute Tellmann*

Institute of Sociology, University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

This article develops a notion of global territoriality for understanding theproliferation of special oshore zones in the context of globalization. It furnishesan account of how political territoriality is used for shaping global dis/connectivity. The argument is developed through the exploration of two distinctcases of oshore zones that are usually not theorized as a common phenomenon:one case is the nancial oshore center on the Cayman Islands, the other case isthe Australian oshore center for processing refugee claims on Christmas Island.Whereas the one site deals with non-resident money, the other one administersnon-resident subjects. The article shows that despite the dierent aims that thesesites serve, they are homologous in how they employ territorial strategies formodulating connectivity. We focus on three dimensions: the topological enfoldingof inside/outside relations, the bifurcation between legal and physical presence,and a politics of visibility. By studying how these uses of territoriality entail arecalibration of the obligations and accountability tied to monetary and legalrelations, this article develops a dierent notion of the global. Instead ofunderstanding the global in terms of scale, it suggests an understanding of theglobal in terms of a politics of connectivity.

Keywords: connectivity; exception; global law; globalization; money; oshore;territory; topology

Christmas Island is a small isle lost in the Indian Ocean. Tugged away from the

Australian mainland, surrounded by steep reefs, it can be reached only by a four-

hour ight or by a supply ship that docks every ve to six weeks (Onishi 2009). It is

an island full of natural wonders; two-thirds of it is declared a national park. The

Cayman Islands are about 20 hours by plane from Christmas Island. It has equally

beautiful natural sites to oer for tourists. But it is unlikely that someone would ever

try to make that trip. These islands belong to very dierent types of global

circulation: one is known for handling non-resident money, the other is known for

processing non-resident subjects. Christmas Island has become infamous for its

asylum seeker detention center, instituted by the Australian government with the aim

of creating a hub for the oshore processing of refugees. The Cayman Islands are

infamous for their status as an oshore nancial center, oering a hub for migrant

money. They are both small islands and specic places. At the same time, they are

intimately tied to what has been described as the global space of ows from which

*Corresponding author. Email: [email protected]

Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory

Vol. 13, No. 3, December 2012, 261282

ISSN 1600-910X print/ISSN 2159-9149 online

2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2012.724432

http://www.tandfonline.com

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they gain their signicance. As we want to argue in this paper, they are both shaped

by what we call global territoriality.

The term global territoriality appears at rst sight to be an oxymoron. It links

two terms that have been taken to mark opposites. The global is often associated

with transcending the xity of territoriality. It has been linked to expansion and

planetary reach. Territory, by contrast, is often associated with the sovereignty of the

nation-state and the pacication of global movements. It is linked to tying people

and things to the ground. This common-sense dichotomy between the global and the

territorial is deeply rooted in political liberalism and also in early sociological

accounts of globalization. Both tend to understand the emergence of the global in

terms of a decline of the territorial. From this angle an oshore place like the

Cayman Islands must appear either as economically insignicant or as a sheer

anomaly. It does not t the understanding of money as a placeless medium (OBrien

1992; Simmel 1990). Likewise, Christmas Island must appear as an aberration to the

human rights regime, which was set up after the Second World War and came into

full force with the onset of globalization during the 1970s (Moyn 2010). This regime

aspires to protect individuals by the law irrespective of their location and political

aliation (Galli 2010, 11720). Consequently, an oshore processing regime on a

territory such as Christmas Island can only be an anomaly of global law. Taken in

sum, the talk of global territoriality runs against deeply rooted assumptions and

expectations about the universalism of law and money.

However, during the last decade the globalist (Tsing 2000) image with its sharp

dichotomies between the uid and the xed, the unbound and the bound, the global

whole and the territorially fragmented parts has also been subject to criticism by

anthropologists (Ferguson 2006; Ong 2006), political geographers (Elden 2005; Paasi

1998), and sociologists (Brighenti 2010b; Sassen 2006). Territoriality, according to

the general argument to be found in this literature, has not waned in its importance

but if anything has become more important as part and parcel of doing

globalization. In this light, oshore places such as Christmas Island and the

Cayman Islands are not anomalies of globalization but are at the heart of it. By

putting the global and the territorial into one conceptual coinage, this article intends

to further this line of research by studying oshore zones as a very specic link

between the territorial and the global (Tellmann 2009). We want to take the

heterogeneous insular sites of Christmas Island and the Cayman Islands as

exemplary cases for exploring two related conceptual questions: What kind of

form does territoriality assume in the context of producing and imagining global

circulation? And how do we have to modify our understanding both of the global

and the territorial when we are confronted with spaces that are both at once?

Following the recent methodological debates about socio-spatial investigations,

we study these questions by focusing on historically specic geographies as simple

entry points into a more complex inquiry on how networks and territories intersect

(Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008, 392). By looking at two dierent oshore zones as

a type of global territory, this article allows us to question the conceptual opposition

between topology and topography. This conceptual opposition imagines space either

to be constituted by networks and relations or to be demarcated by an older

topography in which territoriality was dominant (Amin, Massey, and Thrift 2003, 6).

In this understanding the notion of the network is juxtaposed to territory framed as

something more xed. But as Jones has recently argued, we should [. . .] not be

forced to adopt a network versus territories scenario (2009, 494; Painter 2010).

262 S. Opitz and U. Tellmann

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The phenomenon of the oshore zone supports this view. It very much demonstrates

that territories and networks, topology and topography are linked. But how are we

to understand this interaction? How exactly is this link forged?

Christmas Island and the Cayman Islands might appear as a very specic

and rather peculiar choice for a comparative inquiry of global territoriality. While

the Cayman Islands are among the most well-known nancial oshore centers

since the 1970s, Christmas Island has only recently been picked by the Australian

government as a geographical location for managing what is considered to be a

threatening inux of refugees. Both territorial constructs have very dierent

histories. But despite their dierence, both can be looked at as paradigmatic cases

of global zones: they have both been established either in light of global ows of

money that one sought to attract or global ows of subjects that one hoped to

deter. They both belong to the phenomena of zoning strategies that have

commenced with the start of globalization and proliferated since the last decades.

Zones are here understood as specic juridico-territorial constructs that emerge by

parceling o a bounded area as a specic regulatory space. They are creatures of

political decree, and they have become ubiquitous in governmental rationalities

that hope to address a planetary horizon of circulation (Foucault 2008, 5175;

Elden 2007, 577). Jonathan Bach (2011) and Keller Easterling (2007) have recently

pointed out that although the zone is a key location for understanding processes

of globalization, it is generally an under-theorized and under-researched

phenomenon (Bach 2011, 116).

Drawing on and hoping to contribute to the existing scholarship on global

zones and territory, we propose to study the specic territoriality of global zones

in further depth. We seek to analyze what these territories do to the money and

subjects entering them, what kind of form they have, and how they are tied to the

imaginary of global circulations. We look at territoriality as a political technology

in the sense that Foucault (2007) has given this term, meaning that it belongs to

a strategic ensemble of governmental rationalities and practices. Specically, we

are interested in understanding how the phenomenon of creating spaces o the

map while in itself not a historical novelty belongs to negotiating the global

(Ruggie 1993). Our vantage point is the observation that the territorial strategy of

constructing such zones has proliferated in the era of globalization, surging from

a mere handful in the 1960s to over 5000 barely a lifetime later (Bach 2011, 100).

Zones can host very dierent practices: they can be about production regimes

aimed at export, as much as they can be about logistical hubs, knowledge, and

technology centers. They constitute border sites that control immigrants as well as

money they range, as Saskia Sassen (2005, 530) has put it, from banks to

bodies. These zones are constructed, maintained, and championed in light of a

liberal planetary horizon of circulation that they intend to serve. While not

exclusive to it, they seem to belong to our contemporary global assemblages in

particular ways (Ong and Collier 2004). Could it be that these zones help us

understand that the global might not be simply larger in scale than the nation-

state, but is a dimension that is broken, poorly formed, [. . .] comes in patches

(Law 2004, 18) and, as such, is not about scale but more about dierent types of

connectivity?

It is important to note that the notion of the zone as a global form does not imply

a strict uniformity of the phenomenon. As the following exploration of the dierent

cases will bring into view, zones are versatile technologies, serving dierent aims and

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having dierent eects. But they also share common traits. By asking what the zone

does to the money or the subjects entering it, we are able to show that the

phenomenology of the zone is characterized by the following dimensions: it consists

rstly in a peculiar folding of inside and outside, secondly in the disjunction between

physical and legal presence, and thirdly in a politics of visibility. In each case, the zone

eects a modulation of relations, for example, between money and political space, or

between subjects and rights: they mark and unmark bodies as bearers of rights or

money as bearer of obligations. Using the notion of modulation, as coined by Deleuze

(1992, 47; 2003, 1167), helps to bring into focus that these spaces are mainly about

calibrating, undoing, or modifying relations, instead of being merely about

disciplining the subjects or objects that have come into its reach.

The remainder of this article proceeds as follows. The next section situates the

concept of global territoriality in the recent debate on territoriality and the global. It

claries what it means to look at territory as a political technology and introduces

the zone as a specic territorial form as part of what Aiwha Ong has called

graduated sovereignty. Drawing critically on the debate in human geography, we

want to argue that the territorial operation of zoning is not primarily about

demarcating possessions or bordering an exclusive polity and requires a more

topological approach to territoriality. The subsequent sections explore the meaning

of global territoriality by comparing the territorial form of Christmas Island and the

Cayman Islands, respectively. The following questions will be addressed: How

precisely does oshoring operate as a territorial strategy of zoning? How do the

oshores for processing non-resident money and non-resident subjects belong to the

same global form? And how do they articulate dierent entanglements of the global

and the territorial?

Territoriality, zones, and the global

The rst waves of globalization theory have today acquired a status of classics that

share the same mistaken presumption: they framed the global dimension mainly in

terms of spatial expansion and as an overcoming of the narrow bounds of the

territorial state. The global world appeared as a smooth space (Hardt and Negri

2000), a boundless space of ows (Castells 1996; Shields 1997), or a supraterritor-

ial (Scholte 2005) domain that had overcome the narrow bounds of adjacent, clearly

demarcated states. The global implied that the only location was about being

situated on the planet earth (Scholte 1996, 1968). Undoubtedly, this aspiration to

think the global beyond the state was often linked to a well-founded critique of what

had been termed the territorial trap (Agnew 1994; Ruggie 1993). The global

dimension allowed questioning the geographically bounded, territorially demarcated

state as the basic unit of analysis. In hindsight it looks as if the laudable attempt of

leaving behind such methodological territorialism (Jessop, Brenner, and Jones

2008, 391) implied throwing out the baby with the bath-water. Since these early

accounts of globalization, the suspicion has grown that overcoming the territorial

trap only meant to fall into a non-territorial trap (Jones 2009, 494) in which

territoriality was wrongly thought to be irrelevant.

Today it is widely recognized that theories of globalization have been ill-served

by an implicit understanding of space that only oers the choice of thinking

internally contiguous, xed, and somehow pre-given territories on the one hand and

an image of the globe as if seen from outer space on the other hand: unied,


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planetary, all-encompassing (Jazeel 2001). In fact, as Neil Brenner (1999a; 1999b)

has argued already a decade ago, the notion of the global scale in many accounts of

globalization presupposes a concept of state territoriality simply writ large. His

argument insinuates that the territorial and the non-territorial trap might suer

from similar aws. They conceive of global space either as a pre-given geographical

container or [. . . as] a form of territoriality stretched onto the global scale (Brenner

1999a, 54). Hence, both traps emerge from the same implicit understanding of space.

If indeed the early notions of globalization were hampered by their implicit

commitment to an old notion of bounded space, one has to conclude that rethinking

the global and rethinking territoriality are co-determined. Avoiding the non-

territorial trap and the territorial trap alike thus implies that territory has to be

understood not as isomorphic, self-enclosed blocks of absolute space, but as a

mosaic that is neither congruent nor contiguous (Brenner 1999a, 53). Re-

theorizing territory is thus the key for a better understanding of the global, insofar as

it helps to conceptualize the contemporary multiplication of territories (Brighenti

2010b, 52). But rethinking territory is not an easy task as it embroils rethinking our

conceptions of space and the techniques for commanding and calculating it (Elden

2009, xxvii). Understanding territory has been the challenge a decade ago and still is:

Territorys time has come, or so it seems (Painter 2010, 1090). But how are we to

address the complex territorial logics of the present (Elden 2009, xviii, xx)?

We want to suggest that one fruitful vantage point for thinking the territorial

anew can paradoxically be found by going back to an old understanding of territory

as a contingent outcome of territorial practices (Delaney 2005; Paasi 2003). Robert

Sack had in his classical study on Human Territoriality (1986) dened territory as a

technology of power that wishes to aect, inuence, and control people,

phenomena, and relationships, by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic

area (Sack 1986, 19). According to Sack, territoriality can be used on dierent levels,

from the personal to the international, and for dierent purposes (1986, 1). As a

particular technology of power it performs two basic operations: rstly, territory is

about establish[ing] dierent degrees of access to people, things and relationships

(Sack 1986, 20). Secondly, its eect is the constitution of inside/outside demarcations

that can have dierent degrees of xity or depth. Sack emphasizes that territorial

strategies are never purely geographical. Territory always requires non-territorial

actions to back it up (Sack 1986, 16). Marking a territory might employ legal,

symbolic, military, or other means for signaling and parceling out a certain area.

Sacks notion of territoriality is still instructive, because it does not presume that

territory always has the same self-enclosed shape; it does not link territory solely to

the nation-state, nor does it naturalize territorial practices as belonging to a notion

of Lebensraum (Friedrich Ratzel). Furthermore, it allows understanding territory as

an eect of highly malleable and versatile strategic practices, which can result in

dierent forms of inside/outside relations. It enables one to take into view the

combination of spatial and non-spatial strategies for modulating inside/outside

relations (Opitz 2012, 11437). Sacks framing of territoriality certainly lacks

historical specicity, for which it has been rightfully criticized (Elden 2010). But this

lack can easily be rectied because his notion of territory is dened mainly on a

formal level. Even though this denition of territoriality oers only a very broad and

rather thin heuristic, it turns out to be fruitful for analyzing the specicity of global

territoriality. As can be seen below, particularly the notion of territory as modulating

access to relationships will be very important for understanding the global territory


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as a form that can be articulated as part of dierent assemblages of power (Collier

2006, 400). Looking at territoriality as a composite of spatial and non-spatial

practices that engender particular types of boundedness and grant dierential access

to relationships allows for both sucient focus and openness in understanding the

phenomenon of oshores. It avoids the simple binary and epochal renderings of the

two eras of the territorial nation-state and of borderless globalization.

As already indicated above, this article focuses on the oshore zone as a

particular case of global territoriality (Bach 2011; Easterling 2007; 2008). We dene

the zone as a strategic construction or deployment of juridico-political territories.

These juridico-territorial enclaves have been linked to a notion of extrastatecraft,

meaning a type of infrastructure that disassembles the contiguous territory of the

state (Easterling 2008). Zones are bounded spaces, which are exempt from their

surrounding jurisdiction and constitute dierential regulatory spaces. They belong to

changing practices of sovereignty that create what we might call nested

exceptionalisms (Bach 2011, 99). Understanding the zone as a space of exception

highlights a crucial feature of the zone that consists in the juridical dierence that

exists between the onshore and the oshore zone. A zone is a space that is marked

o from its surroundings, either through a sovereign act of enclosure or through

using a given political territory as such dierential space (Brown 2010, 52). It is tied

to sovereignty as a border concept, insofar as the zone is dened by organizing the

space both inside and outside the entity (Brown 2010, 52).

Nevertheless, the notion of exception needs some clarication in this context,

given that the denition, which Giorgio Agamben (1998; 2005; Opitz 2011, 10511)

has given this notion, has been very prevalent in the recent years. Agamben refers to

the exception as a state in which the protection of law is suspended; he claims that

this situation of fundamental exposure to sovereign power without protection

irreducibly belongs to the making of territorial-sovereign law. But as Aiwha Ong has

already remarked, if one seeks to use the notion of exception for understanding the

strategic deployment of territoriality as part of always contested neoliberal

calculations, Agambens stark opposition between bare life and protected life

needs to be dierentiated (Ong 2006, 20). As we will show below, it would be

misleading to describe the oshore-processing zone on Christmas Island in terms of

a total absence of legal procedures as Agambens notion of exception would imply.

While abrogating the status of the legal subject, it upholds so-called global

standards, yet delinking them from political space and visibility. The case of the

Cayman Islands is an even more complicated case to t into the current debate on

legal and political exceptions as inspired by Agambens work. Money, while being

oshore, is never subjected to what Agamben calls the ban, describing a relation

without legal-political protection; quite the contrary, it enjoys a heightened status of

legal safety. Furthermore, cases such as the Cayman Islands require us to broaden

the understanding of the emergence of such zones: they are often the outcome of a

strategic deployment of a geopolitical position within a system of sovereign

territories, instead of being the internal shadow of an inward foundation of

sovereignty, as Agamben would have it.

Following Aiwha Ong, we suggest the conditional use of the notion of exception

for understanding the fragmentation of human territoriality in the interest of

forging variable and contingent connections to global circuits (2006, 19). We seek to

supplement her reading of neoliberalism as exception by focusing on other zones

than she does. The zones we are looking at are not mainly about techniques of


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optimization, which aim at subjects and productions. As we want to suggest, the

Cayman Islands and Christmas Island are about the dis/connectivity of law and

money itself. We look at these zones in terms of how they modulate what relations of

money or law are about. Our aim is to deepen the understanding of the very

phenomenology of the zone by asking: what kind of territorial bounds constitute the

phenomenon oshore? How are they linked to non-territorial demarcations? What

happens to legal and monetary relations when entering the zone?

By suggesting studying the zone as a particularly instructive case of global

territory, given that this modular form proliferated in this context, we do not want to

presume the meaning of global circuits or global networks that it belongs to. There

is no doubt that the liberal political imaginary of today thinks itself in terms of

networks and ows that are supposed to be molded and served by such territories of

exemption. Zones are consciously set up as super-corridors of nomadic capital or as

necessary spaces for managing allegedly global oods of migration. The metaphors

of uidity, water, and ows are conspicuous in the understanding of globalization and

often mislead us to imagine a continuous stream that is somehow pre-given (Ferguson

2006; Pryke 2006, 7). In analyzing those zones and their relations to the global, how

are we to avoid tapping unconsciously into such an imaginary of smooth liquidity?

Instead of presuming the world of global ows and nomadic capital, to which the

zone is perfectly tting, we argue that one has to analyze the constitutive role of these

territories for managing, establishing, or operating what we term global dis/

connectivity. The notion of connectivity takes up the question of circulation and

ow, but re-articulates it as a contingent and multidirectional relationality (see the

Introduction of this issue). There are no ows that precede the zone. Instead, we are

dealing with the making and unmaking of connectivity: between money, law, subjects,

spaces, obligations, and accountability. The modulation of relations and the access to

them is crucial for dening the role of global territories, as the following cases will

demonstrate.

Offshore finance and monetary connectivity

Monetary ows are often taken as the paradigmatic example for understanding

issues of globalization. No other aspect of globalization is so deeply tied to the

imaginary of globalism than the common-sense understanding of monetary ows.

Money is classically understood as de-territorialized, quickly changing hands and

spaces, eeing regulation, undermining boundaries, movable like quicksilver

(Simmel 1990). Yet, in contradistinction to this imaginary of money, global money

also occupies specic spaces (Clark 2005; Leyshon and Thrift 1997; Tickell 2000).

These spaces are not just the big stock exchanges and the big cities where

globalization is managed (Pryke 1991; Sassen 1991). These spaces of ows are also

found in the territorial enclaves and sovereign spaces that are known under the name

of oshore (Hudson 1996; Maurer 2005; Palan 2003; Roberts 1995). The attribute of

oshore conjures up a plethora of images, which range over exotic landscapes, brass

plates, beaches, nefarious business, and dirty money (Baker 2005). But while the

cases of dirty money have occupied the minds of government ocials, tax

departments, and non-governmental organizations, it is important not to forget

that oshore is a rather signicant site for what is considered global money (Palan

2003). As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) puts it, nancial oshore centers

have captured a signicant proportion of global nancial ows (IMF 2007, 3).


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The Cayman Islands are one of the oldest and well-established nancial oshore

centers. It is the fth largest nancial center in the world, the largest oshore mutual

fund registration center in the world and the second largest oshore insurance

center (Moodys 2010). It hosts at least a third of globally operating hedge funds. In

total, there are 72,994 oshore corporations registered at the Cayman Islands; the

islands are the domicile of 2 trillion dollars of banking assets (Cayman Islands

Government 2011a; GAO 2008; Sharman 2010). Oshore sites like the Cayman

Islands are used by multinational corporations but also by pension funds and

university endowments to handle cross-border relations of money. Oshores

facilitate combining investment streams from dierent countries in a single portfolio.

They make it easy to leverage more capital as the corporations licensed there are not

subjected to high capital requirements. Oshores have also become laboratories for

inventing and putting to work complex nancial instruments. The complexity of

international nancial services, their increasing cross-sectoral and cross-border

integration, and the sharing and transferring of risks across sectors and agents that

they allow nd their abode in oshore centers such as the Cayman Islands (IMF

2006, 9).

The Ugland House on 201 Church Street in George Town on the Grand Cayman

island has achieved some fame for being the registered home of 18,857 nancial

institutions (GAO 2008, 11). They t into this small building only because of the fact

that most of them have no physical presence there. These entities registered at

Ugland House are legally present, but not physically, and they are not allowed to

oer their service to those that are their neighbors in the physical space they inhabit.

These corporations pay a premium to reside somewhere other than where they are

actually located (Palan 2003, 4). They are there and not there at the same time. Their

legal personality is divided among dierent jurisdictions (Palan 2003, 106). The

very recombinatory possibility that the oshore allows between physical and legal

presence has been recognized to be at the core of the oshore phenomenon (Picciotto

1999): it allows negotiating degrees of being there. The inside/outside demarcation is

thereby modulated in a specic way. In order to understand the oshore as a general

global form one has to inquire more deeply into how precisely this complex and

elastic demarcation between the inside and the outside works.

Oshore places look on the surface like geographical places, but they are not.

They are regulatory spaces. Oshores are dened by a constitutive split or inner

cleavage, which is already signied in the very name oshore: oshores are o some

shore. But which shore (Hudson 1996, 107; 1998)? It is easy to underestimate the

complexity of what it means to be o some shore. All too often, oshore is only

understood as a relation between a major industrialized nation, considered onshore,

and a small island, understood as oshore. The relation between on- and oshore is

then described by the dierence of the density of regulation and tax regime that exist

at these two places. Onshore and oshore are competing in this account for a

presumed global ow of money to domicile in their territories and to generate

revenue for the state. While there is certainly truth to this narrative, its analytical

framing underestimates the internal cleavage that oshore is about. Oshore centers

like the Cayman Islands are not simply o the shore of the USA, for example. They

are in a sense also oshore to the Cayman Islands themselves: the foreign nancial

institutions registered at the Cayman Islands have mostly the status of being exempt

or are licensed in such a way that they are prohibited from trading with or providing

services to the Cayman Islanders themselves. Hence, we are dealing with combined


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splitting between countries and jurisdictions that thrive upon internal divisions, as

much as external ones.

The most recent Special Economic Zones Order from 2011 that instituted Cayman

Enterprise City is a case in point for the proliferation of shoring something o

internally. Not only insurance, pension funds, and hedge funds have their exempt

zone, but also a Media Park, an Internet and Technology Park, a Commodities and

Derivatives Park, an International Academic Park, as well as an Outsource Park, the

last-mentioned being designed as a small dedicated unit to facilitate the production

and manufacturing for SEZ-based businesses of products in other jurisdictions.

Each of these parks invites business to operate globally out of Cayman (Cayman

Islands Government 2012, 4, 8). Being onshore and oshore at the Cayman Islands

at the same time, while aiming at businesses that conduct oshore operations on

other shores this complex layering makes oshore an elusive category regardless of

whether it applies to nancial or to other economic practices. It comes not as a

surprise that dening a nancial oshore center is a dicult undertaking. Each

article on the phenomenon of oshore starts with a comment on the troublesome

eort to say what it is. The condition of oshore might be very much in the eye of

the beholder (Sharman 2010). This diculty of denition, one might say, resides in

the complex relationality of the oshore that is about internal and external cleavages

at once.

The complex enfolding of the inside and the outside also pertains to the

jurisdictional status of the Cayman Islands. At rst sight, the Cayman Islands

appear as a straightforward sovereign political space. The Cayman Islands employ

the conventions of political sovereignty, understood here as the fundamental right of

self-governing, for creating a regulatory space on a territory. But already this

seemingly clear starting-point has to be qualied: the Cayman Islands, just as some

other Caribbean islands in the net (Maurer 2001), are not an absolute independent

sovereign state, but a British Overseas Territory, which means that the nal executive

authority is vested in the British Crown. While assuming independence as a

territorial jurisdiction, the sovereign prerogative of making laws is restricted by the

constitutional bounds that are issued for the Islands by Great Britain. At the same

time, the constitution is geared towards political independence. Hence, it is neither

totally outside of Great Britain, nor inside of its jurisdiction. This simultaneity of

inside/outside paradoxically heightens the stability and exclusivity of this territorial

jurisdiction. It oers the guarantee that the tradition of common law will be

respected at the Cayman Islands and will not be undone by a radical political

change. As Moodys credit rating report nds, The Cayman Islands status as a

British overseas territory has contributed to its strong legal and accounting systems

(Moodys 2010). At the same time, the degree of jurisdictional independence also

oers a shield against the regulations of British law. The territorial construction of

this jurisdiction is of importance in this context as can be demonstrated in

comparison to the attempts to construct oshore on purely legal terms. There have

been eorts in the US during the 1980s to copy the oshore onto its own shore

simply by declaring some monetary deals to belong to a dierentiated set of rules.

But these oshore facilities, located geographically onshore, were suspected not to

oer sucient protection. Being part of a dierent jurisdictional territorial space

oers a trust of place that law itself does not achieve on its own (Hudson 1998, 23).

The enfolded quality of the inside/outside bifurcation is a crucial part of what

oshore is and where it is done (IMF 2007). It organizes certain kinds of distances


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and connectivity of money; it molds the type of relation that money is about. As the

most recent attempt to achieve an operational denition of oshore by the IMF

makes clear, it is exactly the relation between money and its context that is at stake in

oshore. The denition is relational itself as it designates oshore as a country or

jurisdiction that provides nancial services to nonresidents on a scale that is

incommensurate with the size and the nancing of its domestic economy (IMF 2007,

7). This denition points us towards the status of the money handled there: it is from

non-residents to non-residents, leading to an understanding of oshore that includes

the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom inter alia in one list

(IMF 2007, 15). In essence, oshore is thus about a modied relation between money

to a place: money is supposed only to ow through these sites, to be sent to and

recovered from non-residents, only acquiring a temporary and legal regulatory

presence oshore. As one fund manager explains, most customers do not understand

that the money never is literally there (Hudson 1996, 103). Oshore is a jurisdiction

that produces a distance between the money and its ocial domicile: it allows

modulating what moneys relation to space, to accountability, to obligation, to

visibility is about.

The distance that oshore constitutes to other jurisdictions does not only reside

in the formality of being subjected to a dierent set of laws. The regulatory space

itself is molded in a specic way: it grants money a specic anonymity through its

privacy or secrecy laws and thus institutes a distance from the sources that

money comes from. Switzerland is said to have invented this regulatory principle

that puts the condentiality between a banker and his client on par with the

relation between a patient and a doctor, while at the same time rendering it a crime

to convey information to a third party. Monetary privacy turns into a key issue

for constituting and contesting oshore (Palan 2003, 103; Donaghy 2002, 117).

Interestingly, the very specic privacy granted to money turns money into the

very anonymous medium that classical sociology assumed it to be in the rst

place: money becomes through such laws what it supposedly was all along

depersonalized and unmarked from any specic and restricted circulation (Zelizer

1989). While the relation of ownership is absolutely secured, the relations to where

money stems from, are loosened or hidden. The oshore nance industry proved

so successful at repackaging debt and diusing risk that no one could be quite sure

who owed what to whom (Sharman 2010, 2). It becomes almost impossible to

locate the money as part of a relation, such as income earned, gain accrued, or

revenue enforced.

While these relations of revenue and return are at the heart of why money ows

through the oshore-site after all it is about investments, gains, and keeping the

gain these whereabouts are invisible. Money gains uidity and is channeled

through the site of the oshore, regardless of where it comes from and where it goes

to and if it is a gain or a loss, an obligation, or the undoing of an obligation. What

oshore does and does not becomes visible if one takes into account that money

belongs to relations of payment, as Bill Maurer (2007; 2008, 171) suggested, meaning

that money belongs to a specic relation that determines obligations and returns.

Putting it dierently, and using Vivianne Zelizers (1989) phrase, one might say,

money is usually marked more than we expect. The oshore site makes it possible

through its jurisdictional set-up and the secrecy to undo this marking or negotiate

this marking. Money is channeled through a space that unmarks money from the

relations it comes from and where it goes through.


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The oshore site very much enhances moneys connectivity and anonymity

through the complex enfolding of inside/outside relations that it is about. The

imaginary of money as a pre-given ow does not account for how such global

territories partake in constituting this ow (Tellmann 2011). Instead of taking the

global ow of money as an analytical shortcut for understanding globalization, one

is better advised to look at how this imaginary takes part in constituting what it

describes. It is in this context instructive to take into view how the government of the

Cayman Islands looks at non-resident money. One might say that the governmental

agencies of the Cayman Islands treat money as such ow, insofar as they dispense

with rendering money visible in terms of the relations that it stems from. They do not

dierentiate according to the relations of income or gain that it enters into. While the

nancial institutions that are domiciled at the Cayman Islands are there precisely

because they use money as capital that is, for the pooling of investment funds, the

combination of dierent investors and cross-border investment, the making of new

breadths, depths, and amounts of investments and returns the Cayman Islands

frame money like a cash ow that runs through its pipes. Accordingly, no taxes on

salary or prot are due. As the Cayman Islands Government website states:

Following the abolition in 1985 of an annual head tax of CI$10 on all adult maleresidents up to 60 years, there are no direct taxes in the Cayman Islands. There is noincome tax, company or corporation tax, inheritance tax, capital gains or gift tax.(Cayman Islands Government 2011b)

The governmental revenue for the Cayman Islands comes instead from fees

mainly: from customs on imported goods, from fees for working permits, from fees

for company registration and licensing of banks and other nancial institutions, and

from stamp duty on property. Hence, for using the Cayman Islands as a conduit for

ones money and for employing those specialists and lawyers that handle this conduit

one pays a fee but no taxes on prot. Money is not looked at as belonging to certain

circuits of income, but treated as a pure and naked medium, like a ow of water.

Fees are due for using the pipes.

The oshore site for money is a construction that goes beyond the certainly

important issue of tax evasion. It raises much broader issues of how money is

constituted as a global ow, what kind of relation it is made to have, and which of

them are visible to whom. While money is easily understood to have the quality of

being de-territorialized and boundless just by itself, the foregoing discussion showed

that this quality is produced by the recombinatory possibilities opened up through

the oshore. Money is not everywhere the same. Its globality consists in a particular

marking and unmarking of circulations; it is entailed by the specic visibility and

invisibility of these relations. If oshore is the global economy (Maurer 2008, 160,

emphasis in original), this quality might precisely reside in the particular

recombination of ownership, liability, and visibility.

Offshore processing and legal connectivity

Just like money, law has been recently captured by the imaginary of globalism. This

is in many ways surprising, given that law has been traditionally linked to the

territory of the state and not to the image of the borderless world. According to the

Westphalian model, national laws validity ends where the next states legal order

claims its space. However, today a new form of global law is said to emerge,


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reaching beyond the connes of classical international law. Looking at the globe

through conceptual prisms such as transnational law (Zumbansen 2012) or global

constitutionalism (Peters 2009), dierent authors concur in the diagnosis of a

general trend towards legal de-territorialization. Human rights law is a case in point:

in sentencing crimes such as genocide or torture occurring anywhere on the globe,

courts apply principles such as ius cogens (i.e. that certain norms are binding on all

states) and erga omnes (i.e. that certain norms are owed to the entire world

community) to instantiate laws borderless scope (Sassen 2008; de Wet 2006).

Consequently, some legal scholars have fully abandoned the concept of territory in

order to delineate a global law without the state (Fischer-Lescano and Teubner

2004, 1008 f.). But even where territory is kept as a category, it is seen to be a

remainder of a fading world order, somehow continuing to play a legal role, but with

minor, diminished signicance (Raustiala 2006).

It is against this background of successive legal de-territorialization and universal

legal expansion that we would like to look at a specic case of oshore processing

that seems at rst sight very dierent from the case of nancial oshore: the zoning

strategies used for modulating the accessibility of basic rights for non-resident

subjects in search of protection. Our case for exploring this specic type of oshore is

the Australian immigration policy of the last decade. This policy had been adopted

after a series of maritime refugee incidents in 2001 most notably the case of the MV

Tampa, where 433 people rescued on the Norwegian container ship were blocked

from disembarking on Australian land (Crock 2003). At the heart of the package of

legislation that soon became known as the Pacic Strategy was the exemption of

coastal areas from the Australian onshore in order to facilitate oshore processing of

refugee claimants arriving by boat. In an amendment of the Migration Act 1958

Australia declared parts of its territory to be excised oshore places. These places

were legally split o from the migration zone as the Australian mainland was newly

called. According to section 5 of the Act, to enter Australia means in relation to a

person [. . . to] enter the migration zone. Conversely, to enter the excised places

would mean to enter a zone that is not Australia. But where is this zone instead?

Where does a person land who enters an excised place? And what does this place do

with the person entering it?

The two last-mentioned questions are, indeed, interconnected. The excision of

oshore places coincided with the creation of a distinct legal persona: the oshore

entry person who possessed limited rights in comparison to the regular onshore

claimant. Whereas people who reach the migration zone were still allowed to apply

for protection visa, unauthorized arrivals in the excised oshore places, sometimes

only a few kilometers away from the mainland, were subjected to a dierent legal

procedure. They could at best hope for the discretion of the Australian Minister for

Immigration and Citizenship for allowing them to enter and apply for a visa, but it

was not their unconditional right. Hence, the legally inferior status of the oshore

entry person became intimately tied to the territorial creation of a paradoxical not-

Australia, i.e. a place that is not exactly Australia but that, at the same time, does

not belong to any other country (Budz 2009, 23). In fact, the excised territories

entertain a rather vexed relation of inside/outside to the mainland. On the one hand,

the act of legal excision makes them appear to be clearly separated from Australia.

On the other hand, they remain tied to Australia not only because Australia used

its territorial jurisdiction to create these zones, but also because persons that nd

themselves in these territories were regarded as having trespassed onto Australian


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territory without being entitled to do so, that is, without a valid visa. For this reason

the Migration Act denes them in section 46A as unlawful non-citizens. This means

that people who enter one of the 4891 islands (The Senate 2002, 13) that have been

removed from the migration zone might be, in a certain sense, both physically

present in Australia and, at the same time, legally absent (Basaran 2008, 345).

The bifurcation between the paradoxical not-Australia and the main Australia

was deepened by complementary regulation that allowed for sending applicants for

asylum from the excised territories to a so-called declared country, where their

claims were processed. In other words, they were shifted to a dierent jurisdiction.

Australia signed a Memorandum of Understanding both with Nauru (not a

signatory to the UN Refugee Convention and, interestingly, also a very shady

nancial oshore place) and Papua New Guinea (a signatory, but subject to

signicant reservations) in order to establish processing facilities for the refugee

status determination. The oshore entry persons, thus, found themselves not simply

only outside of the Australian migration zone, but in a camp within the borders of a

former colony. While Australia provided nancial aid and police assistance to both

countries and Australian immigration ocials conducted the refugee status

determination, Australian law was not the basis of their procedures. Being in a

declared country, the UNHCR processing regime was said to be applied, while the

camps were run by the intergovernmental International Organization for Migration

(IOM), itself not part of the UN System (Penovic and Dastyari 2007, 35, 51). Being

o-the-shore from Australia, but not fully in another jurisdiction, the oshore entry

persons were simply treated as if they were located in an overseas refugee camp

(Basaran 2011, 97). This included, in particular, a lack of legal assistance and no

provisions for judicial review of rejected asylum claims. Finally, even a successful

refugee application did not entitle a claimant to settlement in Australia, with the

consequence that recognized refugees were kept for lengthy periods, in some extreme

cases for years, in detention.

With a new government coming into power in 2007, the detention centers on

Nauru and Papua New Guinea were closed down, and oshore processing has been

redirected to the excised territories. Since 2002 around $400 million had been spent

on building a high-tech detention facility on Christmas Island, which is run by the

private contractor Global Solution Ltd and holds a capacity between 800 and 1,200

people:

It has electric fences and microwave probes for detecting movement; there are camerasystems posted under eaves, on roofs and in every room; and the whole camp is linkedby CCTV to a remote control room in Canberra. The detainees [. . .] wear electronicidentication tags which identify them wherever they are in the center by locatorbeacons. (Grewcock 2008, 364)1

In 2008 the refugee status determination has been mainly transferred to the

excised territory of Christmas Island which is legally designed as a space in-between:

the determination process is supposed to be non-statutory but compliant with

Australias international legal obligations.

As Foster and Pobjoy (2011, 58999) outline in their extensive analysis, the

oshore processing on Christmas Island constitutes a ghostly double of the

counterparts on the mainland. Law itself becomes thereby equivocal. To begin with,

neither the form of legal assistance available to oshore entry persons via the

Immigration Advice and Application Assistance Scheme (IAAAS) nor the form of


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review oered by the Refugee Status Assessment Review Panel (RSARP) meets the

standards established in the onshore system. Both the legal qualication and the

independence of the providers are highly questionable. For example, IAAAS agents

are not supposed to be lawyers, while reviewers do not necessarily hold a statuary

oce. Moreover, denite and non-ambiguous criteria for decision-making are

lacking. Immigration ocers and reviewers operate on the basis of draft Manuals

that claim to provide only guidance, but no enforceable rules. Hence, although they

refer to the Refugee Convention, UNHCR documents, the Australian Migration

Act, and Australian case law, the norms laid down in these documents are not

considered to be binding. Consequently, decision-making exhibits a highly

discretionary character. In fact, the decisions by immigration ocers and reviewers

ocially merely count as recommendations. For oshore entry persons being nally

able to apply for (not: to receive) protection visas, they depend on a retroactive act of

Ministerial discretion under section 46A of the Migration Act. This discretionary act

is considered to be non-compellable and non-reviewable. Thus, the creation of

oshore zones allow for normatively unrestrained and in this sense truly sovereign

decision-making.

One can clearly see from this brief reconstruction that Australian immigration

policy has relied upon a complex set of territorial operations of zoning during the

last decade. For understanding the production of excised territory one has rst to

acknowledge how this territory works within, between, and against existing

territorial frames (Elden 2009, xx; Vaughan-Williams 2008). One has to address,

just as in the case of nancial oshore centers, the complex layering of inside/

outside. The excised territory confuses the distinction between the modern world

order of territorial segments and its contemporary, mostly liberal counter-vision of a

de-territorialized new world order with disaggregating sovereignty (Slaughter

2004). Such a distinction leaves no space for conceptualizing the territorial folding

that turns the inside out but keeps it within its reach which is exactly the

topological twist performed by the oshore territory. Furthermore, what might seem

as an anomaly both within a Westphalian and a post-Westphalian frame could in

fact be a paradigmatic phenomenon of the present logics of territory that nd their

visible expression in the proliferation of dierent types of zones. As a space in-

between, oshore simultaneously constitutes and secures a zone of legal ambiguities

(Basaran 2011, 102). The territorial enclosure gives way to blurred responsibilities, a

lack of binding criteria, and discretionary powers that deny the protection of law to

the subject.

Just as the nancial oshore changes the type of relation that money enters into,

the territorial construction of the oshore zone for processing refugee claims is about

a changed and modulated relation of the subject to law. Usually, at least within the

liberal framework, the connection between subject and law is paradigmatically

enshrined in the possibility to appeal to a court and in the guarantee of due process.

Oshoring subjects to remote and dierential regulatory spaces challenges this

relation. The territorial strategy of oshoring diminishes the access to the circuits of

legal connectivity by both physical and legal means (Opitz 2012, 129). It restricts

access to rights through restricting the opportunities for articulating a legal claim. To

use a spatial metaphor, the territorial strategy distances the subject from the legal

centers. At the same time, it also executes a partition of the legal sphere. In allowing

for connections to administrative processes designed to comply with abridged forms

of refugee law, it disconnects at the same time from more substantial legal


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provisions. The global law is in this case a weakened and ambiguous execution

of global conventions, with extremely limited possibilities to hold this executive

accountable in practice. In the case of oshore processing, territory, thus, constitutes

a legal technology for modulating the relation between subjects and law in a deeply

restrictive manner. It results in producing a subject that is physically abducted,

exposed to an executive power that is only loosely bound by its legal obligations,

while the subject is lacking substantive means to appeal to a law that might hold

these powers accountable.

This analysis clearly demonstrates that the widespread metaphors of the legal

hole or the ban as well as the vocabulary of legal exceptionalism do not fully

capture the complexity of the territorial strategy (Johns 2005). First and foremost,

a lot of legal reasoning and legal expertise has owed into the construction of the

oshore territory. In this sense, oshore places are places not emptied of but

suused with law. Moreover, even though explicit strategies of judicial exemption

and territorial division are involved, these strategies of fragmentation do not

produce clear-cut boundaries. As Eyal Weizman (2007, 4) has remarked in a

dierent context, the territories of eective control currently become fragmented,

dynamic, and thus unchartable by conventional mapping techniques. At the same,

the elasticity and ambiguity of these spaces also allow for contestation. Australia,

to begin with, has never denied its international legal obligations. Unsurprisingly,

competing interpretations of international law and especially human rights law

have soon emerged, together with the competing evaluation of Australias state

practice as illegal (Doussa 2007). Furthermore, the relocation of the oshore

processing from third countries to excised territories has brought refugee status

determination closer to constitutional litigation. The struggles about these

territorial zones are on-going.2

In any case, territory itself plays an active role for how these contestations will

unfold. Territorial strategies rely on the remoteness and inaccessibility of the

location of these zones. Christmas Island is so small and secluded that it is certainly

out of sight. A 17-year-old boy from Afghanistan who has been detained on the

island puts it as follows: When we studied geography our teachers never showed us

Christmas Island [. . .] if we look at a world map, Christmas Island is hiding in the

map. Its so small (cited in Chambers 2011, 19). Geography itself oers a veil of

secrecy, since the territorial enclosure controls both people entering and people

leaving. Restraining access to law is coupled with restraining movements across

territorial borders (Brighenti 2010a). Hence, oshores are technologies to shield a

certain conguration of legal connectivity from the permanently on-going struggle

for law. How far the dream of a global cosmopolitan law will come true depends on

such struggles. But the global will never be about a law that exists beyond territory.

Instead, it revolves around the question about who will be able to achieve legal

presence and political voice in particular situations by particular means. If the

oshore is the global, then this quality might lie for both cases precisely in the

particular recombination of space, obligation, and visibility.

Conclusion the zone as a global form

Christmas Island and the Cayman Islands are both juridico-political zones that

disrupt the conventions of the Westphalian model of political territory. They are

jurisdictions of a specic sort. Trying to come to grips with the phenomenon of


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nancial oshore site, the IMF denes with surprising acuity such jurisdictions as a

territorial entity that is not a country or a state as commonly understood by

international law and practice but an overseas territory under the sovereignty of

another state (typically a former colony or dependency) or an enclave (2007, 4).

As such they deploy territoriality in a way that dees the mapping strategies of the

Westphalian world, without necessarily dissolving national space. They are post-

Westphalian, if one understands, as Wendy Brown has suggested, the prex post as

signaling a very particular condition of afterness in which what is past is not left

behind, but gives way to a present that nevertheless also breaks in some way with

this past (Brown 2010, 21). Zones exist in the interstices of this system and act as

laboratories for recalibrating what legal and monetary relations are about and how

they are tied to political space. Territory is in both cases a crucial political

technology, but its role shifts. Territoriality works in one case to weaken legal

protection and in the other case to strengthen it. The zone is in one case about

enhancing moneys uidity and recombinatory powers and in the other case

about undoing the possibilities of subjects to negotiate their legitimate modes of

movement.

Even though the oshore zones that we have compared are very dierent in their

eects and purpose, they both exhibit a structural analogy. The analysis presented

above has sought to lay bare such common structure. This commonality consists in

three dimensions: a complex enfolding of the inside with the outside, a bifurcation

between physical and legal presence, and a politics of visibility. In this conclusion, we

want to discuss these three dimensions in a comparative fashion. We want to clarify

in which ways we can talk about the oshore zone as a global form, meaning that

we have to specify both what its form is and in which sense it is global.

It is striking to see that the operations of unmarking of money and unmarking of

bodies as rights holders are procedures that both rely on installing a discontinuity of

legal and physical presence.3 Palan (2003, 106) has noted for the case of economic

oshores that oshore starts with questioning the legal unity of the subject, hence

allowing the separation of physical presence and the dierential interpretation of

legal presence. But the meaning of this separation diers widely if we compare

nancial oshores with oshores for processing refugee claims. In the one case,

money is legally present in these places, but physically absent. Moneys legal

presence is clearly circumscribed and dened. The legal address, so to speak, of the

monetary account in the jurisdiction allows the relation of ownership to be secured

and clearly denes the courts and procedures of appeal. For subjects brought to the

oshore processing zone, the opposite holds true. They are physically present at the

oshore, forcefully brought there and bound by techniques of incarceration, while

their legal presence is far from unequivocal. If the term virtual applies, it does less

so to money with its clearly dened and protected legal oshore address than to the

oshore entry person who nds herself confronted with an ambiguous set of rules

and the inability to appeal properly to the courts or communicate with lawyers. The

subject is bound to space while unhinged from appealing to law in a guaranteed and

reliable way. While nancial oshores amplify the connectivity of money, asylum-

processing oshores stall legal connectivity. Splitting the legal and physical presence

can have opposite eects, depending on at which end one nds oneself.

Each of the oshore territories is dened by peculiar inside/outside relations. The

inside/outside relation between onshore and oshore is refracted. In the case of

oshore nance, it is remarkable that oshore places often emerge in former colonies


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and dependent territories. These are not completely independent and sovereign

states. The Cayman Islands bind their sovereign powers to make law to a long

tradition of common law of the British Empire. By undoing full sovereignty, the

restrictions of common law are enhanced. Territorial jurisdictions are here safe

havens of legal procedures, oering a place from where monetary connectivity can

safely be sought. The opposite is true for the subjects that nd themselves in the

territorial enclaves of oshore asylum procedures. They are captured in territorial

connes that also have a refracted relation to territorial sovereignty. But this

time such refracted relation does not enhance the guarantees of legal procedure; it

does not bind sovereign discretion. On the contrary, being outside of Australias

jurisdiction means here to be within the reach of executive power but outside of the

full domain of rights. In this territory that is neither inside nor outside of the

sovereign state, the law ceases to work as a means of guaranteeing protection,

oering anything but a safe haven to the subject in its reach.

As we have argued before, territory is more than a geographical and even more

than a juridical construct. The case of oshore zones makes that abundantly clear.

While being about both geography and legal technique, they are also prominently

tied to a modulation of visibility and invisibility. In the case of monetary oshores

the issue of visibility is of highest concern. It is part of constructing the boundaries of

this territory: the oshore is a truly protected zone, only insofar as the privacy of

monetary relations is guaranteed by a penal code and hence ensured against any

curiosity from the outside. It only fullls its functions in the circulation of money

because it links territory to such informational protection. Struggles to penetrate this

invisibility and protect it signal the importance of secrecy. Secrecy allows enhancing

moneys potentiality for disconnecting from the marked circulations it stems from. It

turns money into an anonymous medium that is unmarked and hence multiplies its

connectivity. Visibility implies traceability: it enables one to link money to the

circulations it stems from and is obliged to.

For the case of asylum-processing oshores, visibility and invisibility have a

similar eect but are dierently produced. Whereas the invisibility of money is

constituted by a legal code, the invisibility of the refugee as a legal subject is a by-

product of the geographical territory itself. Far away from the mainland on an island

that is not even on every map of the world, the geographical location of this territory

makes sure that those incarcerated are out of sight. Political strategies to undo such

invisibility usually consist in using social media to produce visibility that is otherwise

suppressed. However, the territorial distancing also complicates such political

counter-strategies (Bailey 2011). For money as for these subjects, the invisibility

undercuts the problematization of political accountability and responsibility. The

means and ways of executive power that are shielded from public scrutiny and legal

control have always been regarded as a threat to democracy. In this sense, the

oshore can be linked to the general rise of government secrecy that is tied to

making the global dimension within the state, as Saskia Sassen has argued (2006,

179).

However, the very distribution of what is private and secret takes dierent forms.

For the case of money, the privacy of its whereabouts is granted, whereas non-

resident subjects are exposed to governmental scrutiny and the executive power is

not. Looking at this rather dierent use to which the construction of the zone is put,

this comparison nevertheless brings out the odd commonality of its form. Across all

dierences, there seems to be a tendency to assort secrecy and privacy in a way that


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shifts the role of law away from being an instrument of democratic protection and

contestation. The zone, it seems, is a modulator. It shifts accountability and

visibility, it re-arranges the relations between inside and outside, it organizes

monetary and legal dis/connectivity. It enhances or stalls the recombinatory powers

of money, it frames who can connect to legal protection, it changes the type of

relation that money and law have to political space. The zone is about relations and

the access to them: that between subjects and law, between money and marked

circulation, between executive power and democratic control, between spaces of

control and political contestation. Is the global anything but such modulation?

The zone, thus, belongs in specic ways to the forging of global connectivities. As

Jonathan Bach has noted, the zone is a liminal space insofar as it functions as key

node [ . . . in a] materially heterogeneous network a network that generates a

particular depiction of space emerging from an interaction between linear spaces and

network spaces (Bach 2011, 115). But how are we to understand this interaction? If

we frame this interaction in terms of global ows that are larger in scale than these

territorial hubs and that hit these spaces from the outside, one already deploys a

certain understanding of the global in terms of scale and uidity. While the

metaphors of uidity, ow, and oods sweeping the globe as a territorial unit are

conspicuously present when issues of globalization are discussed be it in terms of

nancial tsunamis, oods of immigrants, or the slippery nature of money in general

these metaphors should not unconsciously delimit the analytical imagination. The

comparative analysis of the zone as a specic territorial form allows us to go beyond

this globalist imaginary. The global might be less a scale larger than a territorial

space but consists of types of relations and recombinations of relations: who and

what is allowed to recombine and gain speed and uidity; what forms of

accountability are put into practice; and what types of enfolding between the inside

and the outside enhance or diminish the control of executive power all these aspects

are modulated in the zone, but the zone does not predetermine what kind of

modulation will take place.

Notes

1. For further details see also the entry on the website of the Global Detention Project:http://www.globaldetentionproject.org/countries/asia-pacic/australia/introduction.html.

2. By the end of 2010 the High Court rejected the view held by the government that oshoreprocessing on Christmas Island was non-statutory. The government reaction has beentwofold: On the one hand, it declared its intention to continue oshore processing onexcised territories, yet promised to introduce some procedural changes in compliance withthe courts decision. On the other hand, plans about a new regional solution resurfaced,this time including arrangements with Malaysia.

3. This phrase stems from one our anonymous reviewers. We found it so apt and beautifullyrendered that we allow ourselves to use it even though we can only acknowledge theauthor anonymously.

Notes on contributors

Sven Opitz (Dr.) is lecturer in sociology at the University of Hamburg. He teaches socialtheory with a focus on the linkages between classical sociologies and post-structuralistapproaches. In his research he investigates the intersections of law and security, combiningsystems theorys process ontology with de- and post-constructivist approaches. His currentresearch explores processes of norm generation in emergencies and logics of epidemiccontagion as a mode of connectivity. Recent publications include: An der Grenze des Rechts:Inklusion/Exklusion im Zeichen der Sicherheit (Velbruck 2012), and Government unlimited:


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The security dispositif of illiberal governmentality in Governmentality: Current Issues andFuture Challenges, ed. U. Brockling, S. Krasmann, and T. Lemke (Routledge 2011).

Ute Tellmann (PhD) is currently Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Hamburg. Sheteaches social theory and political theory with a focus on cultural economy and historicalepistemology. Her research addresses the cultural and political underpinnings of economicdiscourses, economic temporality, and collectivity. She is currently working on the question ofdebt and infrastructure as a hybrid economic connectivity. Most recent publications includeCatastrophic populations and the fear of the future: Malthus and the genealogy of liberaleconomy in Theory, Culture, Society (forthcoming).

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