Corporate Borders: A Provocation

Scholarship and even political and policy discourse regarding migration and borders tend to focus on the migration of natural persons, and (inter)national borders as the domain of the nation-state, conceived of as an expression of the latter’s sovereignty. In liberal theory, nation-state borders are critical legal and political infrastructure of collective self-determination, bulwarks for democratic self-rule. This Article is a provocation to consider migration, borders, and sovereignty from a different vantage—one that centers the migration of transnational commercial corporations, and their capacity to constitute, govern and wield borders and migration to advance the will of their constituencies . I focus in particular on corporations as migrants that are uniquely threatening to democratic self-rule generally, and especially to the self-determination of (post)colonial nation-states.