Corporate Borders: A Provocation

Globalization has evidently become a continuing trend in recent times with its advantages, limitations and crises attracting researches’ interest worldwide. One of the crucial challenges to be reflected in this paper seems to present itself in a two-fold manner. On the one hand, it should be described in terms of growing anti-globalization movement, which opposes transnational corporations advancing their claims over sovereignty, territory and borders of national states. On the other hand, it should be discussed in terms of increasing migration, which results from western neocolonial policy and forces states to build protective structures on their borders against crowds of migrants, i.e., to engage in wall-building. Consequently, much research in recent years has focused on two contradicting projects: preserving and defending of state borders and implementing the world without borders. Among earliest conceptions of the world without borders the communist project developed by K. Marx and F. Engels should be named. These German philosophers were first to introduce the idea of withering away of the state including its national borders when former social classes disappear and a new communist society will no longer require state and law. Different anarchist thinkers were advancing the communist idea throughout centuries: M. Stirner, P. J. Proudhon and M. Bakunin back in XIX and N. Chomsky, M. Bukchin and D. P. Barlow in the end of XX – early XXI. The anarchist project of the world without borders performs as an alternative for both communist and bourgeois models of the future world order, since it refuses to accept state power in all forms and manifestations. The second half of 20th century was the time of globalization wide-spreading, with transnational actors playing a significant role in social development, blurring sovereignty and borders of national states, so a neoliberal project of the world without borders was developed in that period. With all these circumstances taken into consideration, this paper compares three conceptual approaches to the world without borders: communist, anarchic and neoliberal, relying on research methods of conceptology and discourselogy.

Bruno Wueest's Politics of Economic Liberalization is a timely contribution to the literature on comparative political economy and policy discourse. Employing an array of statistical techniques to analyze statements made by various political actors in six West European countries, Wueest sheds new and welcome light on old debates concerning policy convergence and divergence, institutional complementarities and comparative advantage, political polarization, access and representation. Most importantly, Wueest's methodological contribution can scarcely be understated, as quantitative discourse analysis has begun to push the frontiers of social science, blurring the lines between qualitative and quantitative methods (see also Leifeld 2013; Muller 2015). Wueest's objective is to inductively reveal how discourses on economic liberalization play out as the policy process unfolds in Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Drawing on Schmidt's (2008) work on discursive institutionalism, Wueest analyzes covariation in the discourse by country, action arena and actor type. Specifically, the research is concerned with explaining variance across “four discursive actions”, in each of three stages of the policy process, with respect to access and functionality. The four discursive actions are described by Wueest as going public, position taking, valence attribution, and framing. The three stages of the policy process are identified as input, output and janus-faced, the latter of which I understand to mean throughput. Access refers to the diversity of actors engaged in the policy discourse at different stages of the policy process, while functionality refers to whether the discourse is coordinative (i.e., concerned with negotiation and deliberation) or communicative (i.e., concerned with information dissemination and legitimization). The research is based primarily on core sentence annotation (CSA) of statements published in major newspapers between 2004 and 2006, although important findings concerning convergence and polarization are derived from electoral campaign statements made during the 1970-2000 period. The CSA method involves human coding of text-based statements across a number of dimensions, the most consequential of which are valence polarity and dominant frames. Validity is promoted by way of intercoder reliability checks. Scores are then subjected to a variety of statistical tests, from factor analysis to k-means clustering, wherein the independent variables represent country, actor type, action arena and stage of the policy process. The book generates three major findings. The first major finding is that, while there is a discernable “pro-market mainstream” to the discourse in Western Europe, it is not hegemonic. Rather, as Thelen (2014) has observed, “varieties of liberalization” are unfolding in Western Europe. Importantly, Wueest finds that the pro-market agenda factor loads on two dimensions — domestic liberalization and international liberalization — the latter of which is prioritized and pursued most forcefully, mainly by EU actors, national executives and global players, all of whom also make frequent use of interventionist frames under the auspices of market regulation (p. 103). The suggestion is that the pro-market mainstream is not primarily driven by free market ideology, but instead technical ideas and arguments regarding how markets ought to be regulated. Yet, Wueest's analysis of policy positions and mobilization efforts during electoral campaigns in the 1970-2000 period also reveals increasing polarization between the political extremes. Finer grained analysis into extreme position-taking using data from 2004-2006 turns up a second major finding concerning heterogeneous motives of populist constituencies: namely, that the discursive thread uniting opposition to the pro-market mainstream is tenuous at best (see also Rooduijn 2018). Consistent with Varieties of Capitalism and other institutionalist perspectives, the third major finding is that accessibility and functionality of the discourse varies according to institutional constraints and opportunities (cf. Hall and Soskice 2001). In Wueest's words, “heterogeneous coalition settings” across countries cause the pro-market mainstream to be “differently integrated into the public spheres of the single countries” (p. 104). Consequently, the discourse in France's state-dominated political economy is most antithetical to the pro-market mainstream. Meanwhile, the significance of “oppositional coalitions” (e.g., the traditional left, protectionist right, “third way” social democrats) varies across countries along with political representation. In this way, Wueest's analysis affirms the conventional wisdom that policy discourse is more accessible, more conflict-laden and more coordinative in institutionally-dense systems. Inversely, policy discourse is more exclusive, less conflictual, and more communicative in institutionally-lean systems (cf. Lijphart 2012; Tsebelis 2002). Although Wueest's study is a significant contribution to political economy scholarship, more could be made of synergies between the study's findings and the current state of the art. Is Wueest's contribution in or out of alignment with power resources theory, punctuated equilibrium theory, state theory and actor-centred institutionalism? I am inclined to view Wueest's contribution as conciliatory, bringing together what are often considered to be divergent perspectives. For instance, Sum and Jessop (2013: 61) argue that actor-centred institutionalism scores high relative to other popular perspectives on political economy, but they also note that actor-centred institutionalism does not take adequate stock of discourse. If quantitative discourse analysis is the missing link preventing the articulation of a unified and testable theory of political economy, this is big news that warrants discussion. Along similar lines, one of the most nagging problems for social scientists hitherto is that preferences and their ideational antecedents are difficult to operationalize and, thus, difficult to measure and observe. Wueest has made considerable progress by advancing a systematic and replicable approach to analyzing policy discourse. However, many of the concepts employed by Wueest — such as going public, position taking, framing and valence attribution — can and should be married with concepts germane to the agenda-setting literature: viz., mobilization, dimensionality, rhetoric and heresthetics (Baumgartner and Jones 2015). There is no reason why these literatures should stand separately despite analyzing the same phenomena. It's time they be integrated. For the sake of cumulative theory building and the advancement of knowledge, it is important that future research builds upon and challenges Wueest's work. The next step in the research programme is replication and extension of Wueest's analysis using a variety supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques, which are quickly coming online. There is no doubt that quantitative discourse analysis will proliferate in coming years. Students of political economy can thus look forward to further systematic research on ideas and discourse surrounding economic liberalization in Western Europe and beyond. In many respects, Wueest's work has merely scratched the surface of what will hopefully be a lengthy research programme and scholarly debate — and one that will make ample use of a full suite of analytical tools rapidly becoming available to social scientists.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the main argument of the book, which focuses on the mobility and communication of human individuals across nation-state borders. To describe this subject as concisely as possible, the book draws on the notion of transnational human activity (THA) as an umbrella term for transnational human mobility (THM) and transnational human communication (THC). THM denotes activity in which national borders are crossed physically by the individuals involved, while THC refers to activity in which information is sent across national borders by the individuals involved. An important component of the book is the study of how the transnational world has evolved over time, looking at periods of up to five decades, from 1960 to 2010. The chapter then defines the terms region, regionalism, and integration, to clarify what is meant by them in the context of this book.

Liberals have long been committed to two axiomatic claims about freedom: that the exercise of control within one’s private space epitomizes individual liberty, and that each person must be free to define and pursue the good life for themselves. Together, these claims form a conception of freedom as autonomy (from the Greek Auto-Nomos, giving law to oneself), conceptualized as a personal space in which each can act according to one’s own view of the good, free from external constraint. Liberal theories of justice have embraced such claims about autonomy, defining justice in terms that recognize sovereignty within one’s personal space and protect individuality. John Rawls’s primary goods, 1 Ronald Dworkin’s resources, 2 and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach 3 all focus on instrumental goods within a metric of egalitarian justice, allowing individuals full control over their personal spaces of autonomy while maintaining the bases for interpersonal comparison that distributive justice requires. This spatial conception of liberty has dominated liberal thought at least since J. S. Mill’s observation that “the only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to attain it.” 4 Here, Mill not only defines individual liberty in terms of autonomy, but he also specifies its limits: each of us should be free to pursue our own ideas about the good within our own space, bounded only by the space of others, where our acts infringe upon their autonomy. 5 If this autonomous space is to play the role that Mill and other liberals have long assumed, it must be sufficiently large to allow for a wide range of actions and choices, allowing each to express their individuality without encountering the limits that Mill mentions and the constraints on action that they entail. If almost everything that I do impedes others from pursuing the good in their way—harming them directly, limiting their opportunities, or otherwise infringing upon their space—then my personal space becomes vanishingly small, and my liberty but a trivial abstraction. This spatial conception of freedom is challenged by analyses emerging from the ecological crisis, which offer competing accounts of personal space with quite different implications for the exercise of individual autonomy. 6 Given ecological limits, aggregate ecological space 7 (i.e., life-supporting natural resource-based goods and services, conceived in spatial terms) is finite and threatened by current patterns of over-appropriation, yielding imperatives to fairly allocate that space among various claimants, present and future. Uninhibited autonomy, as construed above, is not sustainable, justifying significant limits on both personal space and

This edited collection forms part of a broader, ongoing, research project, ‘The Policing European Metropolises Project’ (‘PEMP’). The Project has its origins in a network of researchers interested in the significance of sub-national policing for understanding processes of convergence and divergence in policing across Europe. The Project commenced in 2013 and reported the findings of its first phase (‘PEMP_1’) in a special issue of the European Journal of Policing Studies (Ponsaers, Edwards et al., 2014). The initial aim of the project was to address the question: ‘To what extent is a local police still present in European metropolises and how is this reality linked with other actors in the security field?’ (Ponsaers, Edwards et al., 2014: 4). This question was defined in relation to current debates in policy discourse and social science about the relationship of sub-national, specifically metropolitan, policing to developments in the European ‘internal security field’ (Bigo & Guild, 2005). This includes developments in supra-national policing policy, including the European Union’s objective of creating a Union-wide ‘Area of Freedom, Security and Justice’ (AFSJ), transnational policing arrangements, such as the Schengen Agreement, and the continued importance of national policing strategies given the variegated historical experiences of European countries, for example those in transition from former Soviet regimes in Eastern and Central Europe or Latin countries in transition from former dictatorship. In questioning any continued ‘local reality’ of policing, the Project seeks to distinguish itself from theories of convergence in European policing as a consequence of, for example, ‘Europeanisation’ (Bigo & Guild, 2005), ‘securitisation’ (Waever, 1995; Hallsworth & Lea, 2011), ‘responsibilisation’ (Garland, 2001), ‘neo-liberalisation’ (Wacquant, 2001) the formation of a ‘transnational state’ (Bowling & Sheptycki, 2012) or the promotion of ‘plural policing’ (Jones & Newburn, 2006). Rather, the Project acknowledges these ‘tendencies’ but seeks to identify their uneven impact and the adaptation of local policing to alleged master narratives of policing change. In turn, this interest in divergence has been stimulated by arguments about the particular importance of metropolises in the constitution of ‘global’ security threats and policing responses. These arguments reflect wider debates in social science about ‘glocalisation’ or the idea that, as a consequence of the greater mobility of capital, labour, goods and services across national borders, it is powerful metropolises or, in the argot of public policy, ‘city-regions’, that become a key focus of comparative social research. They become the principal centres of power through which globalisation is accomplished as they project their political, economic and cultural powers onto other, less powerful, localities, circumventing if not subordinating nation state authorities. This is akin to the concept of an evolving ‘world urban system’ (King, 1997) in which national states represent only one centre of authority within other circuits of power (Clegg, 1989; Edwards et al, this volume). In these terms, certain metropolises become the key nodal points (Castells, 1996) or ‘command centres’ (Sassen, 2001) in more networked and globally integrated social relations whilst other metropolises have to adapt to these forces with minimal protection from national authorities. In a further development of this argument it is suggested that national governing programmes are often subordinated to, and increasingly oriented around, the interests of powerful city-regions (Scott, 2012). A key implication of these broader debates is a need for comparative research capable of understanding the role of metropolitan authorities in driving policing change and whether this role enables a greater diversity in policing policies, generating opportunities for comparing and contrasting rival approaches and their outcomes, or whether the involvement of metropolitan authorities in transnational networks creates tendencies toward policy convergence (Pollitt, 2001). An important corollary of this research aim is to identify the political agency and discretion available to metropolises to define and accomplish their own policing agendas and to question what the role of social science can be in constituting such agendas. However, in pursuing these research aims, it is necessary to address major challenges of translation in cross-cultural analysis: linguistic, conceptual and disciplinary. These challenges can be elaborated through reference to developments in policy and social scientific discourse about public policing in Europe.

This article analyses European Union policy discourses on climate change from the point of view of constructions of identity. Articulated in a variety of policy-related genres, the EU rhetoric on climate change is approached as example of the Union’s international discourse, which, contrary to other areas of EU policy-making, relies strongly on discursive frameworks of international and global politics of climate change. As the article shows, the EU’s peculiar international – or even global – leadership in tackling the climate change is constructed in an ambivalent and highly heterogeneous discourse that runs along several vectors. While it on the one hand follows the more recent, inward-looking constructions of Europe known from the EU policy and political discourses of the 1990s and 2000s, it also revives some of the older discursive logics of international competition known from the earlier stages of the European integration. In the analysis, the article draws on the methodological apparatus of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) in Critical Discourse Studies. Furthering the DHA studies of EU policy and political discourses, the article emphasises the viability of the discourse-historical methodology applied in the combined analysis of EU identity and policy discourses.

This chapter examines how international students have been consistently excluded in the UK from research and policy discussions about inequality in academic attainment among students from different social backgrounds; and how international students are culturally framed out of the picture of attainment related concerns, portrayed as members of a global academic elite, or as inevitably struggling foreigners. The chapter considers the arguments of those who are working to push UK universities to “construct” the international-home student attainment gap: first, through monitoring and measuring the gap; second, through naming and framing the gap; and third, through taking concrete measures to narrow the gap. The chapter concludes by addressing some of the challenges and dilemmas that arise as some UK universities begin trying to address the problem of a student attainment gap across nation state borders.

This chapter is concerned with theories and methodologies of critical discourse analysis and their contribution to climate change, environmental and health policy research in the European Union. The purpose of the chapter is to explore how the link between climate change, environment and health, perhaps some of the most urgent and crucial issues of today’s public space, is linguistically and discursively articulated in public policy discourse from a corpus-assisted critical discourse analytical perspective. Indeed, climate and environmental policy-making is “deeply and inevitably political” (Remling 2018: 478). By providing an overview of the nexus between climate change, environment and health in the public space, it will focus on an empirical case study of EU policy and its communication over the last decade. In this we move from the assumption that policy analysis “includes but extends beyond laws and legislation” (Bacchi 2009; 2016), covering not only binding documents (e.g. directives, regulations, recommendations, (also in the form of Green and White Papers) but also the bulk of text and talk that constitute institutional communication, which has acquired increasing importance in reinforcing linkages between institutions and citizens (Bee 2010; Cap and Okulska 2013).

In recent years, border studies have emerged as a new set of theoretical approaches to the intertwined issues of nationalism, national borders, and citizenship. This work has largely emphasized the challenges that Chicana/o and Latina/o cultures of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands pose to notions of belonging to one culturally homogeneous nation, which corresponds to the outlines of the nation-state. While border studies originally emerged from analyses of a particular geographic place (the U.S. Southwest), notions of border crossings and border identities have more recently come to be identified with members of a Latina/o diaspora that transcends the United States and Latin American nation-states. Thus, border studies’ grounding in a specific place has given way to a sense of belonging that is no longer tied to place of residence and to which political limitations like nation-state borders are becoming less and less meaningful.

This article deploys the term “migrant melodrama” to describe contemporary cultural production that trains a melodramatic imagination on migrants. It argues that migrant melodrama often reconfigures suffering as a necessary step in the progress toward inclusion and belonging. To interrogate this assumption, the article analyzes three prominent examples of migrant melodramas that feature children traveling north across national borders without adult caretakers: the 2006 journalistic narrative Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother, by Sonia Nazario; a 2009 HBO documentary film inspired by Nazario’s book, Which Way Home, directed by Rebecca Cammisa; and the 2007 fictional film Under the Same Moon, directed by Patricia Riggen. The article proposes that migrant melodrama plays a role in the commodification and circulation of undocumented migrant suffering in a global market, a phenomenon that the author terms “the political economy of suffering.” Performances of suffering can be exchanged in the political economy of suffering for any number of privileges, from a handout to a visa, and are linked to major international economic and political decisions, such as migration policies that regulate human mobility across nation-state borders. The political economy of suffering is a web of transactions in which performances of undocumented migrant suffering are exchanged in attempts to promote empathy, tolerance of mobility, and respect for migrant human rights. In different ways, all three of the works analyzed accept the underlying logic of the political economy of suffering.

This encyclopedia entry reviews the contributions of the Critical Legal Studies movement to the philosophy of law. Critical Legal Studies is most often associated with a controversial claim that all legal doctrine is necessarily indeterminate. This paper reveals that critical scholars have actually propounded two distinct and narrower claims. In the area of analytic jurisprudence, critical legal scholars have criticized liberal rights theory by stressing the economic and social interdependence of legal persons. They therefore argue that the liberal ideals of freedom to act without harming others, and freedom to transact with consenting others, are self-defeating. This “indeterminacy thesis” is a claim that classical liberalism’s aspiration to define spheres of liberty through a regime of rights is not formally realizable. The second claim concerns instrumentalist policy analysis. Critical legal scholars claim that legal standards requiring calculation of the effects of policies on the interests of actors necessarily involve the exercise of normative discretion. Such discretion is required in identifying and aggregating interests, ascribing causal responsibility, and measuring harm. Taken together, these two distinct claims ascribe indeterminacy to a great deal of legal doctrine, but they do not amount to categorical claim that all legal rules are necessarily indeterminate. There is not one “indeterminacy thesis,” but two.

City-regionalism as countervailing geopolitical processes: The evolution and dynamics of Yangtze River Delta region, China

This paper is the final chapter in an edited collection which will be published later in 2007 by Palgrave MacMillan as Governance, Citizens and Consumers: Agency and Resistance in Contemporary Politics (eds. Bevir and Trentmann). The book primarily focuses on processes of state restructuring and welfare state retrenchment taking place within the borders of the United Kingdom. It presents a series of arguments that advocate and illustrate an interpretive, social constructionist approach to governance. The approach has three facets: methodological, substantive and political. Methodologically, the book advocates that governance pay close attention to the bottom-up study of the processes by which individuals and groups make meaning in the course of collective life. Substantively, these interpretivist explorations of governance explore the reconfiguration of citizenship and consumption. Most chapters link post-positivist, social constructionist approaches to governance with left-oriented political agendas. This paper, as the concluding chapter, has three sections. Section One summarises the intellectual contributions of the preceding chapters and explores their salience in the context of global governance (i.e. when exploring processes of state restructuring and welfare state retrenchment that are constituted by activities and practices that extend beyond, or without particular reference to, national state borders). Section Two discusses existing scholarship that uses interpretive approaches to analyse the dynamics of global governance, from a range of different disciplines. Section Three argues that some of the main limitations of interpretive approaches to global governance can be mitigated by blending national-comparative with sectoral studies that trace the relationships between local practices, national-comparative traditions and global norms and structures in a particular policy area. The argument is illustrated by reference to research on access to water, stressing in particular the benefits of a socio-legal perspective.

Transnational turnout. Determinants of emigrant voting in home country elections

Technological and scientific developments in nowcasting over the last 10 years have opened up new opportunities in public safety, risk management, environ-mental protection, and the cost effectiveness of services provided by the public and private sector. Since weather phenomena do not “stop at national state bor-ders”, the development of a truly integrated nowcasting system (one that includes the whole chain from modeling to protective action) is best achieved through transnational collaboration. Until now, no such cooperation existed in Europe and nowcasting systems were, at best, developed by single institutions. Furthermore, there was a lack of strong links between the development of nowcasting applica-tions and the specific needs of the application side.