● Final exam - 24h take at-home exam
● 4 questions, each 25% of the grade
Module I: Global Legal Pluralism
WEEK 1: The historical context of the globalization
of inclusion and exclusion
To do:
1 recorded lecture
1 text by Saskia Sassen
1 text by Peschard & Randeria
1 weekly assignment
Tutorial
Study Aid - very long
● Mentions:
○ Westphalian paradigm
○ Methodological nationalism and methodological globalism
○ Cosmopolitan and non-cosmopolitan globalisations
○ Three assemblages: (Sassen)
■ Territory
■ Authority
■ Rights
○ Denationalisation
○ The global assemblages of:
■ Territory
■ Authority
Lecture
Introductory remarks
● Example of Karnataka State Farmers
○ The group in India against GMO agricultural products
○ Problem with WTO
● Example of Cochabamba Battle for Water
○ Privatised water produced by American corporation
○ very expensive for poor people
, ● Example of Occupy Wall Street
○ Cheaper production
Summary of these examples
● Intense resistance to globalisation processes, including the emergence of global legal
orders
○ For example, WTO → economic concerns but it also correlates to legal norms
○ Global law order - an order that has or inspires to have jurisdiction that would be
applicable to all countries and people, but operates separately from international
law
● Rough and ready definition of global legal orders
● Resistance to the dynamic of globalisation → This dynamic is puzzling, embarrassing
and disturbing:
○ Puzzling: territorial borders are not the primary source of inclusion and exclusion
■ The state is primarily an organ
● But we think of a state as a territory with borders
■ However global law does not see the state as a territory.
○ Embarrassing: our theories about law have very little to say about boundaries
○ Disturbing: are inclusion and exclusion linked to the globalisation of capitalism?
Or is this a general feature of global law?
■ Global charter of human rights?
■ Prof believes that it is impossible to include without exclusion
● Not merely inclusion and exclusion
● Rather: (massive) exclusion because of inclusion
Three Assemblages
● Global inclusion and exclusion: the historical context
○ Anti-globalisation movements: Brexit, dutch immigration situation → resistance to
globalisation, back to the state
■ claim that we should go back to the nation state and get rid of
globalization
● Where are we coming from? (That we have both globalisation and anti-globalisation)
○ The ‘Westphalian paradigm’
■ The idea of peace treaties after a long period of war→ state sovereignty
emerged (independent externally)
● Internally - free to determine the internal process
● Methodological nationalism: → the nation-state has been approached to the lands of the
state
○ The state is the right way to think about law?:
■ In the legal doctrine
■ In legal and political theory
● Historicising the Westphalian paradigm
○ Community (for example the one in brazil), they have community but they do not
have the features as state
, ○ Disconnection between legal order and state
→ variety of approaches: post-national, trans-national, de-nationalisation (Saskia
Sassen), globalisation? (puzzling, embarrassing..)
Saskia Sassen and the sociology of globalisation
● She enters into details of what globalisation means → Her book: Assemblages of
Territory, Authority and Rights: TARs
○ Medieval, national, and global assemblages
○ Disaggregated into these elements to explore continuities and discontinuities in
the emergence of new social formations
○ She said: that regardless of the differences in law and politics between the
medieval times and the global times → all address territory, authority, and rights
■ Each one of them organisation is different
First assemblage: the medieval
● There were multiple systems of rule: (related but separated)
○ Feudal
○ Church
○ Empire
● Territory:
○ Each of the three systems of rule lacked territorial fixity and exclusivity
○ Overlapping jurisdictions
■ There were no clear boundaries where the church began, where the
feudal system began and ended, empire etc → unclear lines
○ Borders played no role in conceptualising rule
■ Role as person
○ No international public law as we know it today
● Authority:
○ Feudalism decentralised
■ Feudal lord
■ Role in each territory
○ Church and Empire centralising
■ ‘All roads lead to Rome’
○ The limited scope of authority to the rule
○ Authority is direct over people, not over territory
■ Co-existed
■ Ruled but limited scope
■ No territorial borders
● Even if left territory of feudal lord → the feudal authority remained
● The same with religion
● Rights (and obligations)
○ Limited reciprocity of rights and obligations
■ Right of protection from the feudal lord → he was obligated to protect
them against robbers and thieves
, ○ Rights related to status/class
○ No ‘universal’ claim to enact rights/ obligations
■ Different sources of law
■ Rome's obligations vis a vis religion but no economicic obligations
○ No citizenship as we know it
○ In short: legal pluralism
■ Systems of rule exercising authority, conflicts?
Second assemblage: the National
● The canonical definition of the state: the political organisation in which exclusive power
is exercised over all persons in the territory (Max Weber)
○ State:
■ States exercise monopoly?
■ Dispossessing individuals who owned weapons → centralised
● So cannot impose rights and obligations individually
○ Exclusive powers:
■ States defined foundries in a fixed manner and exclusive
■ State regulating all aspects of life (one system of rule that covers
religious, economic, political etc. matters)
○ Territory:
■ As soon as enter foreign territories, you have to obey those local rules
● Emergence of international public law as the law which regulated interstate relations
○ Boundaries between countries
■ Justified war? Who should be protected?
● Legal pluralism gives way to legal monism
○ One legal order was applied to one territory
→ The ‘Westphalian paradigm’
● Territory:
○ Borders become a central issue in thinking about jurisdiction
■ cartofography?
○ The central role of international public law in arbitrating between states
■ Dealing with conflicts that are not war
○ All other legal orders within state territories are either destroyed or subordinated
to state law
■ Lex mercatoria in medieval times → stamped out and replaced by
national law
● Authority:
○ An exclusive claim to authority to rule
■ Human rights only make sense when state authority decides everything
else?
○ Monopoly in the exercise of violence to assure compliance with authority
■ For example in the US, you can have a gun but for limited reasons but
only the state has the authority to punish someone
○ Centralisation both in ‘unitary’ and ‘federal’ states