Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft
Professor of architecture at Yale University, Keller Easterling is the author of ‘Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space’. The linked text that can be found in the book, summarizes the history of Zones: ‘the Free Trade Zone, Foreign Trade Zone, Special Economic Zone, Export Processing Zone, or any of the dozens of variants’. As she explains:
‘The zone is exempt from civil law and government control; it is not considered part of the territory of the home state and therefore cannot collect tariffs or duties on imported goods. In such instances, the host state usually creates a legal entity that is the zone authority, a parastate proxy with the power to negotiate with businesses and foreign governments.’
In effect, the zone creates it own infrastructure which allows it to act on its own terms with networks of zones in other global locales. The text goes someway in explaining how big business has been allowed to grow so big since the Second World War, and how a troubling amount of power over both labour and natural resources has fallen into the hands of corporations.
Contributed by CharlotteLinton on 19/02/2017
