Alfred Dubs Lecture: race, corporate “sovereigns” and corporate borders

Wed 15 May 2024

St John's College Old Divinity School

Most legal theory treats border governance as a function of nation-state sovereignty, and as primarily the domain of the state. Yet transnational corporations have a long, colonial history of making and using borders and race together as technologies of economic profit. Even in the present, corporate enterprise plays a material role in constituting the meaning and application of national borders, and corporations profit immensely from forms of jurisdictional arbitrage made possible by legal categories, including racialized and racializing legal categories. The border is, in some meaningful but not totalizing sense, for and by the corporation, and “corporate borders” are racial borders. This lecture will explore a legal conception of, what I provisionally term racial corporate borders. It will also ask what difference it make to engage with corporations as de facto sovereign or super-sovereigns as the baseline from which border justice is re-imagined. If the neocolonialism of borders, and the racial injustices embedded in these borders are significantly a corporate affair, what sort of reorientation is required in legal scholarship, advocacy and policymaking on the future of borders and migration governance?