Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the varied impact of globalization on different kinds of people in different places across the world, in terms of a shift from the regulation/enhancement of "geopolitical spaces" to the enhancement/regulation of "geoeconomic seams".

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the varied impact of globalization on different kinds of people in different places across the world. The two main organizing themes have to do with 1) the tension between capital and population and 2) the tension between the tools used for regulation and the shifting processes for the securing of profit. The modification I try to address is a move from the regulation/enhancement of “geopolitical spaces” – the most obvious being the nation-state – to the enhancement/regulation of “geoeconomic seams” – financial flows, commodity chains, migrant patterns.

As capital has spread its wings in recent years the relationship between territorial spaces and geoeconomic chains has been radically modified. One key element of this is the fact that the logic of capital has become dominated by the logic of finance. A key dialectic that arises from this logic is that between the “augmenting” of flows and their “channeling” to direct profits toward capital on the one hand and the problems that arise with attempts to find new tools that combine the securing of territory with the securitization of flows.

So the ethnographic issue raised by the framework I am proposing here is that of the changing ways in which scales are articulated as the enhancement/regulation pair works itself out across a vast assemblage of phenomena from financial flows, to production chains, to sites of labour and livelihood, to movements of people.