ABSTRACT
The paper begins by offering a conceptual framework – the idea of ‘regulatory landscapes’ – for thinking about globalisation, sovereignty and boundaries in the contemporary international political economy. Two moments of geo-regulatory change are described before the paper explains how extra-territorial jurisdictional disputes arise. Processes of globalisation lead to geo-political conflicts as regulatory authorities seek to extend their rules beyond their borders. The paper then turns to consider how such jurisdictional disputes are dealt with, and argues that rather than simply celebrating the dismantling of boundaries and the sharing of spaces in a supposedly postmodern world we ought to pay more attention to the institutional mechanisms through which border disputes and competing jurisdictional claims are managed. It is through the development of such mechanisms that spaces and rule-making authority can be shared. ‘With global flows of capital and the internationalisation of production, we live in a world in which the complexity of spatial relations is more obvious than the simple legalistic maps of state sovereignty’. (R.B.J. Walker, Inside/Outside: International Relations as Political Theory [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993] p.46).
