Eilert Sundt lecture 2008

The World's Third Spaces: Neither Global nor National

Professor Saskia Sassen,
Department of Sociology,
University of Columbia, USA

Date: Wednesday 12. November 2008
Time: 15.15
Location: University of Oslo,
Eilert Sundt building, Auditorium 1


We are seeing the formation of new, often highly specialized, assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights that used to be fully encompassed by the nation-state, but today exit the institutional though not the geographic settings of the nation-state. Yet this does not make them global. They are neither national nor global. There are hundreds of such assemblages. They range in content from economic processes to human rights struggles. They cover the full political spectrum. Global cities, active border zones with complex social ecologies, translocal activist networks focused on very local issues – these are all complex assemblages that are neither global nor national.

A familiar example of such an assemblage, though usually not conceived of this way, is the implementation of WTO law in the national legal systems of all member countries, which means that for very specific questions (not all questions) WTO law overrides the law of a country. A less familiar type of assemblage is the novel multi-sited crossborder jurisdictions that can be made by citizens using national law in national courts to sue both national and foreign multinational firms for abuses of workers rights in their off-shore operations – thereby creating multi-sited global jurisdictions.

One of the critical issues that such an analysis brings to the fore is the extent to which globalization takes place inside the national and hence the fact that citizens can use national systems to engage in global politics. This leads to concepts of governance and democracy that are quite different from notions that we need a world state to handle our global era.

This is based on the author’s new book Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2006), now out in Swedish with Atlas publishers. Her book A Sociology of Globalization (Norton 2007) will be published in Norwegian by Pax in 2008.

The lecture is public and open to all.

 

Saskia Sassen is the Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her new books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2006) and A Sociology of Globalization (W.W. Norton 2007). Other recent books are the 3rd. fully updated Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2006), the edited Deciphering the Global (Routledge 2007), and the co-edited Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order (Princeton University Press 2005).

She has just completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement with a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers) [ http://www.eolss.net ]. The Global City came out in a new fully updated edition in 2001. Her books are translated into sixteen languages. She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies. She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and chaired the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). Her comments have appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, OpenDemocracy.net, Vanguardia, Clarin, the Financial Times, among others.