A NEW GEOGRAPHY
OF POWER?

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The formal political system today faces a new geography of power. Globalization and the new technologies have con-
tributed to the shrinking of state authority and the explosion of a whole series of new actors engaged in governance activ-
ities. The current phase of the world economy is characterised by significant discontinuities with the preceding periods
and radically new arrangements. This becomes particularly evident in the impact of globalization on the geography of eco-
nomic activity and on the organisation of political power. There is an incipient unbundling of the exclusive authority aver
its territory we have long associated with the nation-state.

The most strategic instantiations of this unbundling are probably a) the global city, which operates as a partly de-nation-
alized zone for economic, political and cultural activities, and b) the Internet as a space for civil society that escapes all
conventional jurisdictions and is also incipiently de-nationalized. At a lower order of complexity, the transnational corpo-
ration and global markets in finance can also be seen as such instantiations through their cross-border activities and the
new semi-private transnational legal regimes which frame these activities. The privatizing of public power and the rise of
new actors.

Briefly, the major dynamics leading to these new conditions are the following. Privatisation and deregulation —two key
features of economic globalization-- have shifted power away from public bureaucracies and onto the world of private cor-
porations and markets. Shrinking state functions linked to social welfare broadly understood have relocated a growing
fange of responsibilities in this domain onto civil society. The weakening of international public law and the strengthen-
ing of market forces in the international system have produced growing inequalities in the socio-economic situation of
people worldwide and a diminished will and fewer resources in the formal political system to address these. A growing
number of international and non governmental organisations have stepped in. Finally, the enormous growth of the Internet
represents an expanding zone where most established jurisdictions (i.e. various state authorities) are neutralised.

in my reading, the impact of globalization on state authority or sovereignty has been significant in creating operational and
conceptual openings for other actors and subjects (See Sassen 1997). At the limit this means that the state is no longer
the only site for sovereignty and the normativity that comes with it, and further, that the state is no longer the exclusive
subject for international law and the only actor in international relations. Other actors, from NGOs and minority populations
to supranational organisations, are increasingly emerging as subjects of international law and actors in international re-
lations. The growth of the Internet keeps strengthening the options of non-state actors (both good and bad!).

The ascendance of a large variety of non-state actors in the international arena signals the expansion of an international
civil society. This is clearly a contested space, particularly when we consider the logic of the capital market --profitabili-
ty at all costs-- against that of the human rights regime. But it does represent a space where other actors can gain visibil-
ity as individuals and as collective actors, and come out of the invisibility of aggregate membership in a nation-state ex-
clusively represented by the sovereign.

A DE-NATIONALIZING OF POLITICS?

There are two strategic dynamics | am isolating here: a) the formation of conceptual (including rhetorical) and operational
openings for actors other than the national state in cross-border political dynamics, particularly the new global corporate
actors, NGOS, and those collectivities whose experience of membership has not been subsumed fully under nationhood in

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