Joshua Barkan

Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North

As climate change makes the Arctic a region of key political interest, so questions of sovereignty are once more drawing international attention. The promise of new sources of mineral wealth and energy, and of new transportation routes, has seen countries expand their sovereignty claims. Increasingly, interested parties from both within and beyond the region, including states, indigenous groups, corporate organizations, and NGOs and are pursuing their visions for the Arctic. What form of political organization should prevail? Contesting the Arctic provides a map of potential governance options for the Arctic and addresses and evaluates the ways in which Arctic stakeholders throughout the region are seeking to pursue them.

Use Beyond Value: Giorgio Agamben and a Critique of Capitalism

Interest in Giorgio Agambens work is related to concerns about law in the aftermath of September 11 and the global war on terror. This article redirects the critical engagement with Agamben by exploring his relevance for understanding the politics of inclusion and abandonment in capitalist economies. Taking accounts of abandonment in the global economy as a provocation, I offer a rereading of Agamben that makes visible the specificity of capitalism as a mode for establishing and transgressing the border between proper and abandoned lives. Such a reading is already operative in Agambens work, specifically in his engagement with Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord and his assertion that the exception has become the norm in spectacular societies. Recognizing this relationship requires qualification of Agambens claim of an originary link between sovereign power and bare life, and allows us to reconsider the usefulness of his thought for a critique of political economy.

Roberto Esposito’s Political Biology and Corporate Forms of Life

Roberto Esposito has suggested a fracture structures the concept of “the person” that is related to the convergence of biology and law in Western thought. He also suggests that Nazism’s rendering of this intersection is instructive for understanding the biopolitics of liberal globalization. This essay expands Esposito’s argument by considering corporate personhood. I suggest that while the dynamics of personalism and depersonalization are central to corporate power, Nazi political biology is not particularly useful for understanding its origins or development. Instead, I draw attention to the spatiality of the legal concepts grounding capitalism, including the corporate person.

Justice: An Epistolary Essay

This exchange of letters considers the relationship between geography and different formulations of justice. On one hand, social movements have made visible the particular geographies of racialized, gendered, and class-based injustice. For this reason, the discipline of geography can be useful for social justice activists making justice claims. On the other hand, the public and private institutions to which justice claims are addressed often treat justice as a stable “thing” that can be achieved through protocols and procedures. Moreover, these institutionalized approaches to justice often limit justice claims, at times even enabling the unjust actions that initiated struggles for justice in the first place. Inasmuch as geographic knowledge is incorporated into this disciplining of justice, it, too, potentially limits social struggles. By considering this tension, we highlight the tremendous need for justice and the poverty of our institutionalized responses to that need.

LIBERAL GOVERNMENT AND THE CORPORATE PERSON

This article focuses on corporate personhood, the controversial argument, advanced particularly in the United States, that corporations are persons within the scope of the law and are therefore endowed with rights. Though often examined as a causal factor in the development of modern corporate power, in this article I argue that corporate personhood is more useful as a tool for understanding the problematic of liberalism and the transformations associated with the definition of persons under the liberal rule of law. To explain why, I focus on debates about corporate personhood in prominent legal and philosophical texts from the turn of the twentieth century. Highlighting the contingent production of ideas about corporate personhood, I show the ways that writers within the U.S. context rethought corporate personhood, which was traditionally a discourse about sovereign power, in terms of liberal rights as a way of promoting economic forms of government. By focusing on the problematic, we see the ways that corporate capitalism was never simply a set of economic relations, but also a way of organizing, ordering and intervening in life.