Zoe Liebeskind

LSJ 425. Winter 2015

Globalization and Deterritorialization through Saskia Sassen and Arjun Appadurai

Authors Saskia Sassen and Arjun Appadurai both describe a world that is quickly moving
away from a condition where national sovereignty, territory, and citizenship, linked as one,
determine obvious delineations between each distinct Nation-State. Rather, as each author
argues, globalization has and continues to shift our world structure, separating the marriage of
nation and state and blurring lines of sovereignty across physical territory.
Sassen supports the idea of the shifting structure by finding evidence in the
interconnected fingers of a modern day city. Telecommunication advances, born from the
information era, established a huge market space into which multi-million dollar trade operations
exploded. The opening of these global industries, made possible by the technology of modernity,
does not operate completely outside of the States authority and bounds. The leg-work of these
industries still must operate within a territorial zone to serve as some actual physical base.
Global cities, as defined by Sassen, are the bustling city centers and business districts that
support the highly profitable international trade (Sassen 206). This international business sector,
anchored by financial and business centers, have simultaneously created a parallel political
geography (210). This parallel space is what is left open for new capital, perhaps a pull factor
in the movement of people. Within a traditional Nation-State model, a bustling city pulling in
new capital would likely stimulate the surrounding area through trickledown economics, as a city
and its State would have highly integrated economies. This is not, however, necessarily the case

for the transnational economy. A booming international business may support a number of
highly paid top tiered business and finance employees while positions traditionally occupied by
marginalized members of society are not also feeling the boost. Thus, the citys movement away
from full integration into the national economy widens the gap between the wealthy and the poor
(209).
This widening gap is noteworthy in that it marks deregulation, an important component
of global cities, which Sassen adds, also plays a role in partly denationalizing national territory
(214). The global city then, is doing more than just challenging a Nation-States sovereignty over
its economy, but also forcing the said Nation State to react to the impacts of such
denationalization. It is then key to remember Sassens focus on being place-bound; the global
city might work in an international financial market space but this is expressed within the place
of the city. In this sense, the global city is clearing space that the State perhaps would not have
normally created, for newcomers arriving and claiming capital. As migrants fall into these
spaces, creating a new community on foreign territory, space is also created for those who
traditionally are excluded by the Nation-State boundaries, such as refugees. In sum,
globalization has given way to an economy that emphasizes the city, not the nation that has the
effect of widening the gap between income-earning potentialities. Simultaneously this creates
spaces of denationalization and opportunities for the traditionally dispossessed. States then, are
forced to deal with the influx of migrants and refugees that come into these spaces, responding
only as sovereign State would, through new forms of law. The Nation-State must continue to
assert these laws if it hopes to hold its grasp on sovereignty within its territorial lines.
The global city then, a place that supports the interconnected economic structure that
defies traditional Nation-State bounds, reflects an exchange of culture, people and ethnicity that

also must defy these traditional bounds. Sassen argues that with the globalization of economic
activity, we have to understand the changing and shifting cultures and peoples as being de- and
reterritorialized rather than through the language of immigration that is leftover from a
distinct Nation-State orientation the world (216). This is the understanding that movement of
people is directly related to (if not caused by) this new economically and thus socially integrated
world, as shown by the above discussion of denationalization spearheaded at the rise of the
global city. Immigrant implies a distinctly individualized crossing of borders; leaving the
borders of one State and entering through a legal process of gaining citizenship and making a
new permanent home elsewhere. Likewise refugee is a word that implies the rejected or
expulsion from ones home territory, again referencing the explicit physical borders of State
territory and rights of citizenship, both elements of the traditional Nation-State explanation of the
world. The exchange of people and culture that has moved with greater fluidity within the
denationalized spaces and openings for capital. Thus, as the State reacts to these exchanges to
deal with the changing population, Sassen might argue that even the term refugee, is an unfair
label. The power shifts that create the conditions producing the refugee are implicitly related
to the denationalization. The openings in such global cities and subsequent reterritorialization
imply that a refugee is actually just another moving within the economic web produced by
globalization.
Arjun Appadurai directly builds upon Sassens argument. Sassen discusses the ways in
which we are in effect, beginning to function in a post Nation-State world but that we continue to
treat these processes and movements of people such as we are still living in the divisive and
strictly territorial Nation-State system. Arjun Appadurai, while choosing to select slightly
different threads of examples, ultimately picks up where Sassen leaves off, continuing on to

claim that we need to think ourselves beyond the nation (Appadurai 337). He looks closely at
territory, arguing that it is no longer a delineation of sovereignty.
A strong demonstration of this point, are in what he calls mobile sovereignties, or the
ways in which a State can maintain sovereignty over those not residing within its traditional
marked boundaries or territory. The obvious example of this mentioned by Appadurai, are the
Non-Resident Indian category which grants economic rights to Indians living abroad but who
also reproducing Hindu identities for themselves (338). At first, the idea of the refugee fitting
under the sovereignty of a physically distant home-State seems contradictory. By nature, a
refugee is a non-citizen leaving their country of origin because their own government could not
or would not protect them, which hardly affords for any positive economic relation with their
former government. However, following Appadurais discussion into the topic of cartographies,
the refugee is maneuvered into his framework.
New cartographies that are built around allegiances of translocal affiliations.
Appadurai uses the example of the Sikh national identity idealized in the form of Khalistan,
which actually covers and crosses over multiple traditional maps from India to Canada.
Appadurai writes that these new cartographies are unique in that they do not require bound
territories, but instead rely upon maps of allegiance and a politics of non-exclusive, territorial
copresence (343). This is where refugees fit into the larger context of our worlds movement
toward a post Nation-State. Refugees are exactly the population that would find the new
community and sense of nation within Appadurais cartography, as they are the individuals cast
away from, and excluded from the Nation-State whose territory was where they once claimed
citizenship. We see a growing number of displaced persons accumulating in various, noncohesive territories, while still sharing a National connection. Yet, the fact that we still call a

large number of these people refugees, signifies a recognition that they have been cast out
from their home land and not by choice, excluded from the citizenship to the State they once
belonged. Again, this is the miss-match represented by Sassens claims that we are using
outdated Nation-State methods of thinking and labeling against the backdrop of a quickly
shifting world.
Sassen and Appadurai both argue that we are moving away from the traditional NationState model. In the last decade, our world has seen a huge growth in the number of refugees that
States now handle. Sassen and Appadurais arguments work in tangent, explaining how the
production of refugees might be explained by the elements of globalization that create
interconnected communities and blurring of State lines. Refugees are simply another part of a
shifting economic and financial landscape that is no longer linked to Nation-State territory, but
instead follows city to city industry. While the use of refugee language implies that we are still in
a Nation-State era, the large number of these suddenly stateless peoples reflect the
reterritorialization that has fallen into the spaces left by denationalization. The conflict between
States asserting their territorial sovereignty through laws that reinforce the Nation-State
sovereign principle against the reterritorialization (production of refugees) is sure to continue
to create conflict until we can reconcile these two ideas.