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You might think you have a pretty good idea of the world map, but Atossa Araxia Abrahamian explains how special economic zones, tax havens and free ports are dividing the planet for the benefit of the highest bidders – and leaving millions of people in the lurch. a worse situation.
“The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World” (Riverhead Books) makes a complex financial and legal subject clear, exciting…and deeply troubling.
Read an excerpt below.
“The Hidden Globe” by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
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We tend to think of ourselves as citizens, or at least residents, of a nation.
After all, the lessons most of us learned in school included a map of the world divided by lines into countries. Every country, we learned, has a government; and each government reigns over its country, over its property and over its people. The idea of one land, one law, one people and one government is dominant, powerful and often accurate. It forms the basis of much national and international law.
The hidden globe is a kind of transfiguration of this map, an accumulation of cracks and concessions, suspensions and abstractions, exclusions and free zones, and other places without nationality in the conventional sense of the term, extending from the ocean floor to space. The Hidden Globe is a mercenary world order in which the power to create and shape law is bought, sold, hacked, reshaped, deterritorialized, reterritorialized, transplanted, and reinvented. This is state power catapulted beyond state borders. It is also the selective abdication by a state of certain powers within its jurisdiction: enclaves filled not with anarchy but with different and stranger laws.
The notion of loophole emerged in the 17th century to describe small vertical slits in a castle wall through which archers could shoot without risking exposure to the enemy. Its modern meaning has not changed much, only the archers are lawyers, consultants and accountants – and the fortress, the state itself.
The desire to make exceptions is not new: communities have always reserved places for purposes of contemplation, rituals and worship. The Celts called these “thin places”, where the distance between sky and earth was supposed to be shorter.
Today, our elsewhere and nowhere are no longer places of offering, but places of escape. They remind us of novelty of our world of independent and border states – a mold whose content only began to form after decolonization – and its vulnerability to more powerful forces.
Capitalists, always seeking profit, view liminal and offshore jurisdictions as boundaries. This book is as much about these modern pioneers as it is about their battlefields. But their regime is not a free regime with open borders. Although the existence of the hidden globe may seem to challenge the myth of the meaningful, unified nation, the nation is too sticky and politically expedient a concept to be completely eliminated. In fact, the hidden world can reinforce the most xenophobic and exclusive nationalism. And these policies are not just the domain of the political right. Whether Republican or Democratic, conservative or liberal, the regimes that support them aim to attract the right people and exclude the wrong ones.
By enabling nationalist immigration policies, the hidden world circumscribes the lives of the most deprived of their rights: detainees languish in offshore prisons in the Caribbean and the Pacific, poor workers process goods destined for export to duty-free industrial zones across the Global South. , sailors and asylum seekers stuck on ships that they cannot leave due to lack of papers. When a person cannot stay at home and is unwanted abroad, they may find themselves in a third space: neither here nor there. Seeing these spaces for what they are has changed the way I see the world, and I think it will change the way you see it too.
Excerpted from “The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Is Hacking the World” by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. Copyright © 2024 by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. All rights reserved. No part of this extract may be reproduced or reprinted without written permission of the publisher.
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