The premise of this volume is that borders are shifting, and that as borders shift, rights and democratic legitimacy ought to shift with them. For good reasons, the focus of our discussion has been on sovereign states and their borders. However, sovereign borders do not exhaust the types of boundaries that shape and circumscribe human freedom. In this chapter, I discuss private economic geographies. Private geographies – home ownership, land monopolies for agribusiness and extraction, special jurisdictional zones for export and trade – often help funnel capital around the bottlenecks of state regulation, and they can act as a shield against the redistributive demands of democratic constituencies. In particular, I am interested in special economic zones (SEZs), which are “industrial areas governed by more liberal economic policies than those than apply to the rest of the country” (Levien, Reference Levien2013: 394). The expansion of these liberalized economic enclaves has bolstered the power of states by shoring up gross domestic product (GDP), job growth, and the wealth of key constituencies. Politicians point to the concentrated economic gains that accumulate in SEZs as proof of their commitment to the good of the people, and in so doing, bestow legitimacy on a set of political practices that remove land, wealth, and labor from the jurisdictional reach of democratic regulation. Private geographies are of special interest because they reveal how states and capital cooperate in monopolizing and bounding land, acting in ways that consolidate and increase each other’s power. In this sense, private borders and properties call into question the public–private divide and reveal how power over land is determined in the global age, often in ways that evade democratic control.

Any inquiry into shifting borders, therefore, must account for the shifting map of the private realm. This realm is shifting both domestically and globally. Attention to the way that power is deployed in private geographies can help us understand the fraying of the social contract described by Seyla Benhabib as she considers the consequences of economic globalization: “State jurisdiction and territoriality are uncoupled as new agents of jurisdiction in the form of multinational corporations (MNCs) emerge. In some cases, the state disburses its own jurisdiction to private agencies in order to escape the territorial control of popular legislators. The social contract is increasingly frayed” (Benhabib, Reference Benhabib2007: 28). This description of the interplay between the state and MNCs is apt. Current transformations in sovereignty do not dissolve the power of the territorial state, but instead rechannel it, often into the private realm. Therefore, instead of thinking about globalization in terms of de-territorialization (e.g., Shachar, Reference Shachar2020b), it makes more sense to think of it as a territorial reconfiguration, one which includes the “borders” of private enterprise.

Looking forward, then, it does not make sense to talk about globalization as bringing about a “post-territorial mode of political differentiation” (Fraser, Reference Fraser2009: 24). We are territorial creatures. Our global economy is a complex map of nodes and passageways, plantations, extraction sites, highways and rails, ports and seaways, markets, industrial parks, export processing zones (EPZs), trade zones, and SEZs. These networks of production and trade have always exceeded the bounds of the Westphalian territorial state, but they are territorial nonetheless (Benton, Reference Benton2009). Therefore, as we think about the ways that globalization detaches certain processes from the territorial state, we must also consider how and where these processes reattach to the land, for example through offshoring. A better grasp of private territorial reconfiguration will allow us to consider how (or whether) the power exercised in economic enclaves can be democratically legitimated.

This chapter wades into the complexities of the global economy by considering the special economic zone (SEZ) as a form of contemporary territoriality. SEZs appear in many forms: the industrial park, the free port, the export processing zone, and the liberalized planned city. How, exactly, does this jurisdictional innovation for market liberalization allow private citizens and corporations to amass power that evades the grasp of democratic constituencies? And what is it like to live and work in an SEZ? SEZs are not abstract processes; they are real places with real fences, workplaces, dormitories, and planned neighborhoods. Workers’ lives are sometimes entirely circumscribed within these zones; others enter only to labor. These shifting private geographies, and the way they are navigated by those who traverse them, may hold the key to legitimation crises that emerge when the complexity of the global supply chain obscures the exercise of power.

I begin with a review of the direct precedent for SEZs, which is the export processing zone, or EPZ. I then detail the development of SEZs in China, Africa, and India. I pay particular attention to Shenzhen, China, a planned SEZ-turned-city that morphed from a fishing village to a megalopolis of 12 million within a generation. I conclude by drawing out a number of theoretical insights about private territories. These enclaves are economic spaces of exception, or better yet spaces of exploitation, and they are governed by their own shadowy set of private–public liberal economic norms. Because of their nature as enclaves, they are also largely invisible to the outside world, which has its own repercussions for democratic legitimacy. Finally, SEZs and other forms of economic enclave reveal the logic of public–private cooperation in the monopolization of land in the global age. To conclude, I suggest that the only way to reign in illegitimate private geographies is through overlapping, nonsovereign forms of jurisdiction.

1 Spaces of Exception between the Public and Private

Before I dive into the details of EPZs and SEZs, it will be helpful to review some of the theoretical tools I am using to analyze these phenomena. My focus will be on geographical-legal enclaves that are designed to protect economic activities, and to shield these activities so that they can be carried out without the burdens of state regulation. Where these enclaves are subject to special jurisdictions designed to shield owners from the law of the land, it is possible to think of them as economic spaces of exception. I use this term with caution, as it draws on Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) theory of the “state of exception,” which I do not endorse in its entirety. Agamben draws his theory from Carl Schmitt’s controversial declaration that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (Schmitt, [1922] 1985: 5). The state of exception, for Schmitt, is a situation in which the law has reached its limit, and the sovereign must rise above it (or suspend it) and take the matter into his own hands. For the many critics of Schmitt, this Hobbesian move to place the sovereign above the law is merely a justification for the abuse of power. I accept this critique. Yet I find Agamben’s elaboration of Schmitt useful because it acknowledges the capacity of unrestrained sovereigns to extend their spatial power beyond constitutional and jurisdictional limits. Offshore military detention sites such as Guantanamo Bay are the prime example of a space of exception. In these spaces, the sovereign disappears its delegation of untrammeled domination from public view, thus shielding citizens from knowledge of constitutional and jurisdictional breaches.

An economic space of exception, as I am formulating it here, operates differently from a military detention site because its purpose is to protect private economic power. These spaces emerge from public–private cooperation in shielding economic activities from the law of the land. In economic spaces of exception – such as the EPZ or an SEZ, though we could also include here contemporary land grabs or ante-bellum American plantations – the law of the land is suspended in favor of the law of the enclave (see Jurkevics, Reference Jurkevics2021). The law of the EPZ, for example, is usually a combination of policy set by the investor, host government incentives, and trade agreements. In this sense, it is neither public nor completely private. Importantly, one of the main activities that economic spaces of exception hide is exploitation of workers. Special jurisdictional rules allow corporations to underpay and overwork their employees, who often also carry the burden of dangerous or inhumane working conditions. EPZs and SEZs, then, are not only economic spaces of exception, but also often spaces of exploitation.

Private-public cooperation in removing jurisdictions from the law of the land is a phenomenon that deserves more attention because it overruns important distinctions in legal and political theory, and so can appear perplexing if we try to use traditional categories to understand what is going on. For example, in Chapter 7, “The Materiality of Territory,” Nishin Nathwani illuminates the long-standing distinction in Roman law, later taken up by early modern European theorists, between dominium and imperium rights. Traditionally, the former is a proprietarian right to own and dispose of objects and land privately according to one’s natural right. The latter is the public right to rule over either persons or territory, and is intimately tied to the notion of jurisdiction. I do not deny the importance of this distinction, but in the public–private partnerships I review here, it is often blurred beyond recognition. If states alienate their jurisdictional authorities to private actors, in what sense is imperium still functional? And if a private owner rules their property as quasisovereign, protected by jurisdictional shields, then in what sense is dominium really different from imperium? The concern thrown to light in this chapter is that the blurring of these rights is a significant problem for democratic legitimacy in the global age.

2 Export Processing Zones

In this section, I consider an important precedent for the contemporary SEZ, which is the EPZ. However, it is important to point out that economic enclaves have a long history prior to EPZs and SEZs. The cordoning off of land for special economic purposes, where life inside is vastly different from life without, is nothing new. Modern economies have emerged from a whole spate of segregated economic sites: colonial trade enclaves, plantations, mines, ports, workhouses, company towns, industrial parks, and, of course, the factory (Benton, Reference Benton2009; Guimarães Pinheiro, Reference Guimarães Pinheiro2019).

EPZs were pioneered as part of American economic policy in Latin America during the Cold War. Michael Levien explains, “EPZs evolved as a way to enable foreign companies to exploit cheap domestic labor in ‘third world’ countries by creating islands of political stability, good infrastructure and ‘favorable’ economic policies” (Levien, Reference Levien2013: 394). The World Bank defines EPZs as “fenced-in industrial estates specializing in manufacturing for exports that offer firms free trade conditions and a liberal regulatory environment” (Madani, Reference Madani2003: 5). The first EPZs were established in Latin America in the 1950s, and the strategy proliferated in response to structural adjustment programs in the 1980s. During this latter period, EPZs spread across Asia and Africa, where experimentation with the form gave rise to the SEZ.

Structural adjustment programs are an important part of this story. In the spirit of the Washington Consensus, EPZs were often initiated in small developing economies in order to secure International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank loans, and to establish trade with countries such as the US, and later, China. The embrace of EPZs was also a decisive move away from import-substitution policies that had prevailed in many Latin American economies before liberalization. EPZs allow small economies to capitalize on their competitive advantage in abundant unskilled labor, and can deliver a remedy for large-scale unemployment. EPZs are often considered success stories because they provide jobs, but these numbers obscure wage depression. As EPZs proliferate, corporations seeking the lowest possible wages can play zones off against each other in a wage race-to-the-bottom, resulting in what Raphael Kaplinsky calls “immiserizing employment growth” (Kaplinsky, Reference Kaplinsky1993: 1851). Additionally, exploitation and dangerous working conditions are widespread in these enclaves (Kaplinsky, Reference Kaplinsky1993: 1856–1857).

There are a number of striking aspects of EPZs in the context of this discussion. First, EPZs are an economic space of exception par excellence. The zones are granted special jurisdiction by host states, which “remove almost all vestiges of state intervention, including taxes … allow[ing] ‘free market’ determination of wages, thereby enabling firms to make use of the developing country’s prime resources: abundant (and hence relatively cheap) unskilled labor” (Kaplinsky, Reference Kaplinsky1993: 1851). The EPZ is a laissez-faire jurisdictional island within a state’s territory, where the applicability of laws protecting workers or the environment stops where the fence begins. The soft law that governs EPZs, moreover, is heavily dependent on the will of foreign trade partners. In Latin America, for example, EPZs were designed for exclusive trade with corporations in the US. The US uses bilateral agreements with such states to limit how much value can be added to products made in the EPZs, thus making sure that the labor remains unskilled. The US also enforces monopolistic rights to provide the raw materials that are processed in these sites. In this way, the EPZ becomes a satellite territory of the US economy, one which escapes US labor and environmental regulations as well as the laws of the host state. The host country, which relies on the EPZ to guarantee loans from the World Bank and IMF, becomes completely dependent on its overpowering trade partner. Any move that imperils these relationships, for example pushing back on wage depression, is avoided to secure loans.

Another striking aspect of the EPZ, which carries over into contemporary SEZs, is the lack of linkages with local economies. One conundrum economists have faced is the complete disconnection of the activities that take place in these enclaves with local economies. The materials processed in EPZs are not drawn from host states, nor are the products sold in host states. The only direct link to the local economy is the wages that are paid out to the workers. It is unsurprising, then, that EPZs have come under fire by citizens who were sold these projects by governments claiming that they would lift employment and bring wealth to the people. The wealth rarely makes it outside the border-fences of the zone (Kaplinsky, Reference Kaplinsky1993). It stays in the hands of the factory owners and managers who work directly with foreign investors.

3 Special Economic Zones

Contemporary SEZs emerged from experimentation with EPZs, applying the economic space of exception to a broader range of activities that can take place in an enclave. The World Bank defines SEZs as “demarcated geographic areas contained within a country’s national boundaries where the rules of business are different from those that prevail in the national territory … the zone is given a business environment that is intended to be more liberal from a policy perspective and more effective from an administrative perspective than that of the national territory” (Akinci & Farole, Reference Akinci, Farole, Akinci and Farole2011: 3).

The definition is vague because, as the authors admit, there are all sorts of contemporary experiments in liberalized economic zones, from traditional EPZs, to free ports and industrial parks, to cities such as Shenzhen, Singapore, and Dubai. What is essential for SEZs is that they procure exceptions from national and local law, implement liberal economic norms, and attract foreign direct investment from multinational corporations (MNCs) seeking cheap labor and tax breaks. Broadly speaking, SEZs are geographical experiments in the privatization of land for industry and economic liberalization.

The growth of SEZs globally over the last forty years has been explosive. According to the World Bank, the International Labour Organization’s database of SEZs reported 176 zones in 47 countries [in 1986]; by 2006, this number rose to 3,500 zones in 130 countries. SEZs now are estimated to account for more than US$200 billion in global exports and employ directly at least 40 million workers (Akinci & Farole, Reference Akinci, Farole, Akinci and Farole2011: 5). These numbers are from 2011. Since then SEZs have only expanded, though it is notable that many have also failed and been abandoned. Plots of half-cleared land, long since expropriated from peasants and farmers, sit unused and decrepit, a haunting reminder of overzealous land accumulation (Levien, Reference Levien2013: 388).

While traditional EPZs are public–private ventures, SEZs have become increasingly privatized, where the land itself is owned by an investor or MNC (Akinci & Farole, Reference Akinci, Farole, Akinci and Farole2011: 7). Therefore, SEZs must be put in the broader context of “neoliberalism” and the dynamic uncoupling of economic power from state control (Brown, Reference Brown2015; Honig, Reference Honig2017; McKean, Reference McKean2020). These enclaves are designed to evade democratic constituencies, and are purposefully insulated. Their geographical isolation and boundedness only reinforce their systematic legal untethering from sources of democratic legitimacy, such as state or local legislatures, or even the public sphere. SEZs are notoriously difficult to gain access to, if we are to believe the reporters who attempt entry (Merchant, Reference Merchant2017).

China has been the most enthusiastic implementer of SEZs, extending liberalized enclaves beyond industrial parks and ports to entire cities. SEZs have played a key role in China’s incredible success in developing a manufacturing export-based economy, and in the rise of the “Asian tigers” more generally (Akinci & Farole, Reference Akinci, Farole, Akinci and Farole2011). China uses SEZs to experiment with economic liberalization. The SEZ model has been applied to planned cities such as Shenzhen, which I explore later, and the policy architects behind Chinese SEZs have gradually moved to shift these zones offshore into Africa in order to consolidate other geopolitical gains along with economic ones.

The first African SEZ was established in 1971 in Mauritius, whose island position to the east of Madagascar situates it well as a free trade center linking Africa to South and Southeast Asia (Bräutigam & Xiaoyang, Reference Bräutigam and Xiaoyang2011: 29). However, the real boom in SEZs in Africa has come on the heels of China’s plan to internationalize its manufacturing power, starting in the early 2000s. By building SEZs, China has gained a foothold in Africa, which holds attractive resources and land for investors. Additionally, many African countries hold favorable international trade agreements that the Chinese can take advantage of when they funnel production through proxy states (Bräutigam & Xiaoyang, Reference Bräutigam and Xiaoyang2011: 37). Most of the zones in Africa are being developed by private companies, though they receive support from the Chinese government (e.g., diplomatic support, start-up funds, and loans). In return, the African host governments give standard SEZ packages to the investors: “tax holidays, and waivers on import tariffs for raw materials and inputs, along with restrictions on strike activity” (Bräutigam & Xiaoyang, Reference Bräutigam and Xiaoyang2011). African partners in host countries are expected to play a background role in supplying land and labor, and if they have a stake in the SEZ, it is generally under 20 percent (Bräutigam & Xiaoyang, Reference Bräutigam and Xiaoyang2011). There are also ongoing conflicts over the percentage of Chinese workers in these zones, which can be quite high (Bräutigam & Xiaoyang, Reference Bräutigam and Xiaoyang2011: 44–45). Where SEZs do not even relieve joblessness in their vicinity, their real purpose as an economic space of exception and exploitation becomes more obvious.

What does the proliferation of Chinese SEZs in Africa mean in territorial terms? Put plainly, SEZs are geographical enclaves of quasiprivate Chinese territorial rule within African countries. Offshore SEZs are reminiscent of the colonial trade enclaves and extraction sites of the great European powers during the age of empire (Benton, Reference Benton2009). This is an old territorial strategy with a new name, an economic space of exception and private jurisdictional dead-zone immune to popular self-government in the host state. In this sense, the SEZ shares much with the privatization and foreignization of land that has taken place through the phenomenon of land grabbing, wherein huge swaths of land in Africa (among other places) have been transferred to private MNCs for agribusiness. African land is once again, as it has been so many times before, foreignized (Zoomers, Reference Zoomers2010).

The incredible success of Chinese SEZs has encouraged other large economies to get into the game, with sometimes disastrous results. In 2005, the Indian government passed the SEZ Act, which encourages private companies “to develop, maintain and effectively govern economic zones on a for-profit basis” (Levien, Reference Levien2013: 394). The Act has roused backlash for helping developers and investors expropriate land from farmers and raise rents.

The postcolonial history of economic enclaves in India can be traced back to Nehru’s nationalization of the steel industry, which saw the creation of company towns and early industrial parks (Levien, Reference Levien2013: 385). Between 1947 and 2004, the Indian government displaced an estimated 60 million people to make way for national development projects (Levien, Reference Levien2013: 403). The “regime of dispossession” (Levien, Reference Levien2013: 381) of this era was one of government expropriation of land for development. Manufacturing and infrastructure were the main goals of these projects. While not without conflict and pushback, these projects were nationalized and therefore had a more solid claim to bolster “the good of the people” than privatized SEZ projects. Since then, however, the global trend of privatization has entrenched itself in Indian policy.

Nationalized development projects set the stage for SEZs in India insofar as they taught the government how to expropriate land. But SEZs are a distinct animal. The SEZ Act lays out a policy wherein the investor must only prove that their activity on the land parcel will produce more GDP than the current activity, which is almost always farming. This is not hard to prove, especially if the investor builds housing on the SEZ. Rental housing on Indian SEZs generates far more wealth than other industrial activities, for example, tech centers, on the same lands. As one might imagine, investors are quick to see the terms of a great deal: The government expropriates and clears the land, provides infrastructure, and the investor comes in, builds apartments alongside some nominally industrial activity, and collects rents. SEZs have thus popped up on the outskirts of Indian cities, where housing needs are concentrated. As housing and land values increase – a broader global trend – SEZ owners accumulate ever more wealth, which they can use to invest in further land speculation (Levien, Reference Levien2013: 395). Thus in India, the SEZ has morphed from a jurisdictional tool that encourages production, export, and trade into a prime opportunity for rent-seeking (Levien, Reference Levien2013: 384). The Indian approach to SEZs since 2005 must be counted in the shift towards privatization and land speculation that has exploded since the 1980s (Byerlee et al., Reference Byerlee, Deininger, Lindsay, Norton, Selod and Stickler2011).

For Levien, “SEZs represent the shift to a regime of dispossession in which the state has become a mere land broker for capital, expropriating land for any private use … no matter how immaterial, speculative, or consumptive” (Levien, Reference Levien2013: 384). Unsurprisingly, land conflicts have intensified in India. The recent protests and uprisings of Indian farmers are a response to market liberalizations and reflect frustrations that have come to a head after a new wave of dispossessions. Increasingly, such policies are coming under fire because Indians can see these projects for what they are, namely, rent-seeking, unfair land monopolization, and real estate scams.

The development of the SEZ as a private, bordered territory is likely to have political consequences for many years to come. Even where democratic constituencies are successful in legislating redistributive economic policy, environmental protections, or labor protections, these policies cannot touch the SEZ. SEZs are so thoroughly cordoned off from national territory – both jurisdictionally and sometimes literally – that they may as well be another country. Some of these zones, such as the Foxconn manufacturing plants in Shenzhen, are carefully guarded to keep journalists and outsiders out.

What is to be done? Can democratic politics, as it is practiced today, breach the walls of the SEZ? Unfortunately, most of the examples to be found of improvement in conditions in SEZs have come on the heels of disaster and scandal. For example, in 2005, an explosion in a Chinese dynamite factory in Zambia – the result of unsafe labor conditions – killed fifty workers and precipitated reforms. The Zambian workers in the China Non Ferrous Metal Company mines were granted the right to unionize. But is scandal the only way to tame the SEZ? I come back to the question in the conclusion.

4 Shenzhen

In this section, we enter Shenzhen, an SEZ and planned city whose recent meteoric rise has already been thoroughly mythologized. Shenzhen grew from a mere fishing village into a megacity city of more than 12 million in only forty years. The legend is captured well in this nationalist propaganda song “The Story of Spring”:

The old man here is Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Mao and is “credited with having single-handedly pivoted China toward economic reforms” during his period of rule from 1976–1989 (Du, Reference Du2019: 1–2).

Shenzhen was established in 1979 as an SEZ. The location was chosen for its proximity to Hong Kong. The city opens out from China’s southern coast onto the South China Sea, with its concentrated shipping and trade routes. Shenzhen has been championed as a miracle of modern centralized state planning. It is an economically diverse city of hopeful workers, many of whom live in the varying conditions of intracity “urban villages.” Some of these villages are slums, but there are gradations in conditions that reflect one of Shenzhen’s aims: to pull the rural Chinese, who have migrated to the city en masse, out of poverty.

Inequality in Shenzhen is jarring. Baishizhou is the name of the poorest urban village, a slum of newly urbanized peasants, a place of mythic violence, the mob, and winding alleys. To its west is Shenzhen University and Technology Park. To the east of Baishizhou is the “Overseas Chinese Town” (OCT), a planned neighborhood filled with theme parks and luxury residences. Tourists can find everything they need in the OCT, which is separated from Baishizhou by guarded wall, tall enough to block the neighborhood entirely from the eyes of those on the other side. Du paints a striking picture of the separation of the OCT and the slum: “One portion of the separation wall that lines the Window of the World theme park is disguised by a landscaped hillside, on top of which stands a five-meter-tall statue of Christ the Redeemer with … arms open toward the theme park, while his back is turned to the masses of Baishizhou” (Du, Reference Du2019: 268).

The artificial world of the OCT is capped by the Portofino neighborhood in the north, a luxury gated community modeled on the Italian town. “The pastel-colored villas, high-end restaurants and bars, cobbled piazza, and medieval bell tower are all scattered around a natural spring-fed lagoon named Swan Lake” (Du, Reference Du2019: 268). The wall that separates “Portofino” from Baishizhou is covered in barbed wire.

Life and urban form in Shenzhen follow the dictates of capitalist growth, indeed only exist for those dictates. When an SEZ is diffused into a megacity, the separation of labor and capital take the shape of the city. Neighborhoods are bordered. The wealthy are never to see those whose hands produce. The constraints of class are written purposefully into the city map, where what used to be outer SEZ walls penetrate the city in varied forms of segregation. The playgrounds of the global elite sit happily on top of the slums, where the only thing they appear to share is the polluted air of a manufacturing city. Is this any different from other centers of global capital: New York, London, Singapore, Shanghai? In many ways, the answer is yes. Those cities were not planned like Shenzhen. There is nevertheless an uncanny convergent evolution of global cities, where the unplanned cities are becoming increasingly hierarchical, spatially segregated playgrounds of the super-rich, while the planned city of Shenzhen labors to imitate that world, and at the same time makes it possible. London is not a manufacturing city; it needs no walls to keep workers out of its rich neighborhoods. It has, however, subtly pushed its underclass further and further to the periphery with each new wave of rent-increases, increases that follow the logic of global speculative markets.

The composition of Shenzhen is strange because while the whole city is an SEZ, governed by liberalized economic norms, there are also industrial parks and manufacturing campuses within the city that have the fenced-off characteristics of traditional EPZs. Shenzhen is a city of SEZs-within-SEZs, of private borders within private jurisdictions. The most famous industrial park in Shenzhen is Foxconn City, where major tech companies such as Apple produce devices. The iPhone is still produced today at the Longhua complex in Foxconn City. It was this place that gained international attention for a wave of worker suicides in 2009–2010. The haunting image of workers hurling themselves off the top of dormitories in Foxconn City has lingered in the global consciousness and sparked interest from journalists, who have worked hard to breach the increasingly secure complex. To use the concepts I introduced earlier, Foxconn City is a space of exploitation within a space of exception.

In the words of a journalist who was able to make his way into Longhua, “it’s a fairly aggressively shitty place to spend long days … Longhua [feels] like the dull middle of a dystopian novel, where the dread sustains but the plot doesn’t” (Merchant, Reference Merchant2017). In 2010 alone, there were at least eighteen suicide attempts and fourteen confirmed successes. Many others had to be talked down from roofs. In response, “Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou, had large nets installed outside many of the buildings to catch falling bodies. The company hired counsellors and workers were made to sign pledges stating they would not attempt to kill themselves” (Merchant, Reference Merchant2017). For the estimated quarter of the workers who live in the dormitories onsite, the legacy of the suicides is to be found in the “cage-like fences built out over the roof and the windows” (Merchant, Reference Merchant2017) of their living quarters.

Attempts at PR control from Foxconn and Apple seemed to miss the point. They argued that Foxconn work conditions are on a par with other manufacturers in China, and that the suicide rate at their factories is not actually higher than the population at large (Merchant, Reference Merchant2017). But the image of these striking deaths, of their frantic flights and suicide notes detailing their unlivable lives, of the net that now turns desperate escapes into circus acts – these images cannot be unpainted by statistics about the generality of unbearable lives in manufacturing economies. The Foxconn suicides are a jolt; they reveal the depth of life and death that makes up our supply chains, keeping our iPhones in our pockets to provide all of our on-demand digital needs.

In a dark turn, the attention paid by the international press to the 2010 suicides has sparked a new strategy for workers:

Once again, I ask, is scandal the only way to achieve reform within an SEZ?

In the Shenzhen model, the sharply fenced-off world of the SEZ is diffused into the fabric of a city designed to meet the needs of production. The zone becomes much more complex than a single fenced-in site, though it contains those fences as well. The city is divided and proliferated into overlapping bordered enclaves: manufacturing spaces with their special jurisdictions, workers dormitories, urban villages and slums, high-end gated communities, themes parks, luxury hotels, and the business district. Each space serves a function in the Shenzhen model, and each space is heavily insulated from the others so that people only see the spaces relevant to their status. The stratifications and internal borders of the city make the structure of the SEZ largely invisible to those who live and work in it, because it simply becomes the fabric of their lives.

Conclusion

We are living in a moment of democratic backsliding. Ours is an age of legitimation crisis, in which citizens wade perilously through untrustworthy information to figure out how power is deployed over their lives. But if we do not even know where power resides – and when I say where, I mean it literally – then we cannot govern ourselves. It is for this reason that I think it is important to incorporate the study of private geographies into scholarship about territoriality. Borders and boundaries contour our lives, mobility, and freedoms. The salient borders that we encounter are not all public, and for many people across the globe, especially laborers, private borders may be the most salient ones in their lives. In this chapter, I have argued that the invisibility and insularity of economic enclaves such as SEZs make them difficult to govern. These private territories must be brought into the light so that everyday workers and citizens can demand legitimation of the activities that go on within.

Another theoretical issue that has emerged in this study is the entanglement of public and private forms of power when it comes to producing territoriality. Territorial innovations such as SEZs are the product of cooperation between public powers and private investors, who make mutually beneficial agreements over the heads of citizens. Often, these agreements are posed as projects that are for the good of the people. With the privatization of economic enclaves, which also increasingly follow the logic of speculative land markets, these claims are disingenuous. The truth is that the private transformation of land has long been entangled in advances of state power. For those of us concerned about the effects of this cooperation for democracy, we ought to be suspicious of laws that protect private venture from regulation, and we ought to be suspicious of special jurisdictions – these can be the first step in the foreignization of territory and the creation of jurisdictional dead-zones. Ultimately, sovereign states and private investors can cooperate on these ventures because they have a shared goal: monopolization of land. Investors want to “see like a state” so that they can extract as much labor and resources as possible from their ventures. Perhaps Marx goes too far when he accuses the state of being a steering committee of the bourgeoisie,(Marx & Engels, Reference Marx, Engels and Tucker1978: 475), but where SEZs are concerned, he hits the mark.

The cooperation of the state and private enterprise in monopolizing land and shielding it from democratic regulation is bolstered by jurisdictional tools such as SEZs that help the state create an economic space of exception. These spaces – and I’ve argued that EPZs, SEZs, plantations, and land grabs can become spaces of exception – create territorial gaps in which power and money can be pooled, and removed from the reach of democratic constituencies. SEZs are economic pressure-release-valves within the sovereign states system: They create space for states to move outside their borders without overtly undermining the international principles of sovereign territoriality and nonintervention. They also create opportunities to employ “floating populations” regarded by host states and investors as superfluous, to use Sibel Karadağ’s term from Chapter 12, “floating populations.” To fulfill these purposes, the innovators and governors of SEZs have developed norms unique to their use. It is, therefore, somewhat deceptive to call SEZs spaces of exception because they are brimming with law, treaties, contracts, and norms. They are excepted from national law, but they still follow a logic based on the principles of profit-maximization and economic liberalization. To paint these enclaves as spaces without law would be to mystify them. SEZs and other economic enclaves are full worlds of capitalist modernity. While exceptional in some ways, they also bring the contours of our global systems into sharp relief, and so could be characterized as a “constitutive exterior” (Derrida) of a sovereign states system committed to the principles of capitalist growth.

The only successful attempts to harness power within SEZs that I have mentioned in this chapter came on the heels of scandals – explosions in mines, mass worker suicides. But what should the democratic response to SEZs be? Ultimately, to handle these shifting lines of territorial power – both public and private alike – we must shift the lines of democracy. The spaces of power that determine our lives do not just correspond to the borders of the sovereign nation-state. They do not now, and they never have. We must acknowledge the fundamental pluralism of territorial powers. Moreover, we cannot always rely on the sovereign state to be the source of democracy, and so there must be more fora beyond the national stage for democratic decision-making, and these must correspond to the places where power is geographically broadcasted. Therefore, I believe it is time for democratic theorists to let go of our obsession with sovereignty and theorize democracy as a set of dispersed sites of inclusive political action in a configuration of overlapping, nonsovereign democracies (Jurkevics, Reference Jurkevics2019). Jurisdictions, for example regional organizations, that overlap with SEZs ought to support attempts at workplace democracy and unionization that emerge within these zones. As new privatizations of land reconfigure our global experiences of “home,” we must encourage the rooted democratic politics that emerge in resistance and response. The sites of democracy already exist. What they need is support and the sheen of legitimacy that theory is specially positioned to bestow upon them.