ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the extraterritoriality as a useful starting point for thinking about world order. It describes the extraterritoriality as a focus of analysis through which to evaluate and understand recent trends in global governance. As an analytic lens, a focus on extraterritoriality entails attention to particular ways in which the international sphere is shaped by the national, domestic politics of certain states, especially powerful ones. Extraterritoriality represents not so much a transformation of political authority beyond the state as a conservative effort to retain territorially differentiated authority and to extend it through transnational political processes within the complex infrastructures of the global economy. The global governance of transnational bribery and corruption unfolds within an American-dominated regime of extraterritoriality. The extraterritorial lens thus accentuates the point that transnational politics ‘do not float freely’; they are grounded – socially, legally, politically, and economically – in specific national contexts.
