Saskia Sassen

Professor of Sociology, Columbia University, New York (USA)
 

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University (www.saskiasassen.com). Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2008) and A Sociology of Globalization (W.W.Norton 2007). She is currently working on When Territory Exits Existing Frameworks (Under contract with Harvard University Press). Forthcoming is the 4th fully updated edition of Cities in a World Economy (Sage 2011). Recent edited books are Deciphering the Global: Its Spaces, Scales and Subjects (Routledge 2007), and Digital Formations: New Architectures for Global Order (Princeton University Press 2005). For UNESCO she organized a five-year project on sustainable human settlement with a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers). The Global City came out in a new fully updated edition in 2001. Her books are translated into twenty-one languages. She has received several honors and awards, most recently a doctor honoris causa from each Delft University (Netherlands), DePaul University (USA), and Université de Poitiers (France). She serves on several editorial boards and is an advisor to several international bodies.
She is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and chaired the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Newsweek International, among others, and contributes regularly to www.OpenDemocracy.net and www.HuffingtonPost.com.
NEW BORDERING CAPABILITIES VERSUS TRADITIONAL BORDERS, Saskia Sassen The argument I develop is that we need to problematize the proposition that national borders encase the “national” and that, hence, deregulating traditional borders entails a substantive shift to a “borderless world.” There is a multiplication of new kinds of specialized borderings that enclose spaces that do indeed cut across traditional borders, but they are bordered. These, I argue, are the borders of our current age: they cut across traditional borders but do not necessarily reduce the incidence of borders, even though they change the character and logics of bordering. This type of transversal bordering extends to a range of conditions that have been introduced in the sphere of law as a result of our greater recognition of ecological vulnerabilities: for instance, when we recognize the natural habitat of a threatened species, we are also recognizing types of borderings that cut across traditional borders. It also points to the fact that the “global” can no longer be confined to what is explicitly global in scale. Rather, global now includes practices and institutions that scale at subnational levels, that is, function in realms that have traditionally been confined to local levels in hierarchical national systems. Globally scaled processes often comprise multi-scalar practices and organizational forms. Critical to my argument is that the State plays an active role in this denationalizing, but this only becomes evident when we disaggregate “the” State and examine the work of particular parts of the State: particular agencies, particular court decisions, particular executive orders. It means that this denationalizing can coexist with traditional borders and with the ongoing role of the State in new global regimes.