Saskia Sassen

Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global: Elements for a Theorization

he multiple processes that constitute economic globalization inhabit and shape specific structurations of the economic, the political, the cultural, and the subjective. Among the most vital of their effects is the production of new spatialities and temporalities. These belong to both the global and the national, if only to each in part. This “in part” is an especially important qualification, as in my reading the global is itself partial, albeit strategic. The global does not (yet) fully encompass the lived experience of actors or the domain of institutional orders and cultural formations; it persists as a partial condition. This, however, should not suggest that the global and the national are discrete conditions that mutually exclude each other. To the contrary, they significantly overlap and interact in ways that distinguish our contemporary moment. These overlaps and interactions have consequences for the work of theorization and research. Much of social science has operated with the assumption of the nation-state as a container, representing a unified spatiotemporality. Much of history, however, has failed to confirm this assumption. Modern nationstates themselves never achieved spatiotemporal unity, and the global restructurings of today threaten to erode the usefulness of this proposition for what is an expanding arena of sociological reality. The spatiotemporality of the national, upon closer inspection, reveals itself to be composed of multiple spa

Towards a Sociology of Information Technology

There is a strong tendency in the social sciences to understand and conceptualize the new information technologies in terms of their technical properties and to construct the relation to the sociological world as one of applications and impacts. Less work has gone into developing analytic categories that allow us to capture the complex imbrications of technology and society. This article addresses two particular aspects of this challenge through two organizing efforts. First, understanding the place of these new technologies from a sociological perspective requires avoiding a purely technological interpretation and recognizing the embeddedness and the variable outcomes of these technologies for different social orders. These technologies can indeed be constitutive of new social dynamics, but they can also be derivative or merely reproduce older conditions. Second, such an effort will, in turn, call for categories that capture what are now often conceived of as contradictory, or mutually exclusive, attributes. The article examines these two aspects by focusing on three analytic issues for sociology: the embeddedness of the new technologies, the complex interactions between the digital and the material world, and the mediating cultures that organize the relation between these technologies and users.

Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims

The global economy materializes in a worldwide grid of strategic places, from export-producing zones to major international business and financial centers. We can think of this global grid as constituting a new economic geography of centrality, one that cuts across national boundaries and across the old North-South divide. It signals the emergence of a parallel political geography of power, a transnational space for the formation of new claims by global capital. This new economic geography of centrality partly reproduces existing inequalities but also is the outcome of a dynamic specific to current types of economic growth. It assumes many forms and operates in many terrains, from the distribution of telecommunications facilities to the structure of the economy and of employment.

Globalization or denationalization

RIPE is delighted to publish the annual lecture which marks the 10th anniversary of the journal. The annual RIPE lecture series seeks to highlight the work of a scholar who has made a significant contribution to the field of international political economy. Saskia Sassen, distinguished Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, and Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, presented the lecture in the Department of Geography at Durham University on 14 March 2002 (jointly sponsored by the Durham University Geographical Society). The paper introduces a novel discussion on the spatiality of globalization, leading to a challenging re-interpretation of meanings of the local and local struggles in a globalized political economy. Ash Amin

Locating cities on global circuits

This paper discusses the cities that have the resources which enable firms and markets to be global. It considers the new intensity and complexity of globally-connected systems of production, finance and management which may disperse production, yet need (relatively few) networks of cities to provide their organizational and management architecture. This produces new geographies and hierarchies of centrality - particular cities and regions that have key roles in globalization. Many such cities become far more closely linked to the global economy than to their regional or national economies - and this can have harsh consequences locally, pushing out firms and people that are not within the internationalized sector. The paper discusses why certain cities retain such importance, when production is so dispersed and when telecommunications and rapid transport systems have limited the advantages of spatial concentration. It also considers the dependence of global cities on each other; a crisis in one key centre often brings problems rather than opportunities for others.

The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics

The two foundational subjects for membership in the modern nationstate, the citizen and the alien, are undergoing significant changes in the current moment This becomes particularly evident in certain types of contexts foremost, among which are cities. These can be seen as productive spaces for informal or not-yet-formalized politics and subjects. In this examination of emergent possibilities, I first outline these changes vis-a-vis nationality and citizenship. Second, I dissect notions of national membership in order to create a set of tools for reconstructing citizenship analytically. In the third section, I delineate two key, incipient kinds of repositioned membership: unauthorized yet recognized subjects, and authorized yet unrecognized subjects. Fourth, I situate these repositionings within contemporary currents of citizenship theory. In the final section, I theorize the landscape of the global city as an especially salient site for the repositioning of citizenship in practice. At the scale of the city, and the particular urban space of the global city, there are dynamics that signal the possibilities for a politics of membership that is simultaneously localized and transnational.

A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation

Here I explore the possibility that capitalism is today undergoing the systemic equivalent to Marxs notion of primitive accumulation, only now as a deepening of advanced capitalism predicated on the destruction of more traditional forms of capitalism. I focus on two diverse instances which share a common systemic logic: expulsing people from more traditional capitalist encasements. One instance is that of countries devastated by an imposed debt and debt-servicing regime which took priority over all other state expenditures; at its most extreme, the ensuing devastation of traditional economies and traditional states has made the land more valuable to the global market than the people on it. The other instance, which I see as a systemic equivalent to the first, is the potential for global replication of the financial innovation that destroyed 15 million plus households in the US in two years, with many more to come; household destruction at this scale devastates whole areas of cities, and leaves vacant land. How this rapidly growing expanse of vacant land will be reincorporated into global capital circuits is not yet clear. I examine these two cases through a specific lens: the transformative processes that expand the base of current advanced capitalism, with particular attention to the assemblages of specific processes, institutions, and logics that enabled this systemic transformation. En este artículo exploro la posibilidad de que el capitalismo está pasando actualmente por el equivalente sistémico a la noción de Marx sobre la acumulación primitiva, sólo que ahora como un aumento al capitalismo avanzado predicado en la destrucción de más formas tradicionales de capitalismo. Me enfoco en dos casos diversos que comparten una lógica sistémica común: la expulsión de personas de un encajonamiento capitalista más tradicionalista. Una muestra es la de los países devastados por una deuda impuesta y un régimen de servicio de deuda que tomó prioridad sobre todos los demás gastos del estado; y en su máximo extremo, la consecuente devastación de las economías y de los estados tradicionales hizo que la tierra tuviera mayor valor en el mercado global, que la gente que vive en la misma. Otro problema, que yo veo como un equivalente sistémico al primero, es el potencial de una réplica de la innovación financiera que destruyó a más de 15 millones de hogares en E.E.U.U. en dos años y que seguirá afectando en el futuro; la destrucción de hogares a esta escala devasta áreas completas de ciudades y deja terrenos sin construir. No está claro qué tanto tomará la reincorporación de esta rápida expansión de terrenos sin construir, a los circuitos capitales globales. Examino estos dos casos a través de una lente específica: los procesos transformadores que expanden la base del capitalismo avanzado actual, con una atención particular al ensamble específico de procesos, instituciones y lógica que habilita esta transformación sistémica.

The Global City: Strategic Site, New Frontier

The master images in the currently dominant account of economic globalisation emphasize hypermobility, global communications and the neutralization of place and distance. There is a tendency to take the existence of a global economic system as a given, a function of the power of transnational corporations and global communications.

Local Actors in Global Politics

Globalization and the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have enabled a variety of local political actors to enter international arenas once exclusive to national states. Multiple types of claim-making and oppositional politics articulate these developments. Going global has been partly facilitated and conditioned by the infrastructure of the global economy, even as the latter is often the object of those oppositional politics. The article examines these issues through a focus on various political practices and the technologies used, the latter an important part of the analysis partly because they remain understudied and misunderstood in the social sciences. Of particular interest is the possibility that local, often resource-poor organizations and individuals can become part of global networks and struggles. Further, the possibility of global imaginaries has enabled even those who are geographically immobile to become part of global politics. A key question organizing this article concerns the ways in which such localized actors and struggles can be constitutive of new types of global politics and subjectivities. The argument is that local, including geographically immobile and resource-poor, actors can contribute to the formation of global domains or virtual public spheres and thereby to a type of local political subjectivity that needs to be distinguished from what we would usually consider local.

Territory and Territoriality in the Global Economy

This is part of a larger research project on governance and accountability in the global economy. What is the impact of economic globalization on the territorial jurisdiction, or more theoretically, the exclusive territoriality of the nation-state? This is the organizing question in the article; it is an effort to respond critically to two notions that underlie much of the current discussion about globalization. One is the zero-sum game: whatever the global economy gains, the national state loses and vice versa. The other is that if an event takes place in a national territory it is a national event, whether a business transaction or a judiciary decision. I argue that, on the contrary, national states have been deeply involved in the implementation of the global economic system producing the necessary legal encasements for this system; and, second, that a global transaction may well take place inside a national territory. My working hypothesis is that while globalization leaves national territory basically unaltered, it is having pronounced effects on the exclusive territoriality of the national state - that is, its effects are not on the boundaries of national territory as such but on the institutional encasements of that national territory.