ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the formation of global, partly territorial, alignments that are unbundling national state territories and are beginning to incorporate what were once protections encased in border regimes. The multiple regimes that constitute the border as an institution can be grouped, on the one hand, into a formalized apparatus that is part of the interstate system and, on the other, into an as yet far less formalized array of novel types of bordering lying largely outside the framing of the interstate system. A critical and growing component of the broader field of forces within which states operate today is the proliferation of specialized types of private authority. Among the more strategic instantiations of incipient unbundling is probably the global city, which operates as a partly denationalized platform for global capital and, at the same time, is emerging as a key site concentrating an enormous mix of people from all over the world.
