ABSTRACT
The concept of an offshore jurisdiction is inherently relative, context-based, and subjective, and there is no consensus definition at the level of either concepts or specific places. Offshore facilities are special rules for designated ‘foreign’ or ‘international’ activities, which are defined to be largely removed from the remit of domestic political contestation. It is this free-floating and autonomous legal geography of capital, in relation to the geography of underlying assets and activities, that defines offshore as a space. Offshore jurisdictions, and the offshore system more broadly, are defined by the paradoxes that surround this impulse to liberate law from politics within the state. The specialized political structures in which offshore jurisdictions are embedded are constituted at two levels: offshore facilities, and offshore states. The net effect of the offshore-mediated double movement tends to be the migration of authority to whatever level of national or supranational ‘onshore’ authority is capable of providing oversight and protection to the offshore arena.
