ECONOMIC CORRIDORS. TRANSNATIONAL LAW AND THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE

This PhD concerns economic corridors (ECs), legally underpinned spatial development programs located along international trading routes. Its primary objective was to describe the legal dimension of ECs in Africa and Asia. Accordingly, the thesis mapped the regulatory instruments governing them (chapter 2) as well as the actors implicated in their governance (chapter 3). The result was a rich and variegated environment, typical of the law in transnational contexts. An additional objective was to chart the process by which the law came to matter to a seemingly non-legal political-economic practice (chapter 4). The thesis finds that the “corridor approach”—the combination of infrastructure interventions with policy, regulatory and institutional adjustments—was originally a World Bank’s technique to design transport sector projects targeting colonial export routes in Africa. However, it subsequently migrated outside the Bank’s institutional boundaries and circulated globally through technical assistance processes. Eventually, the corridor approach gained standing as a popular state and interstate practice consecrated through legal means. A central finding is that as ECs grew into sophisticated and multidimensional schemes, the need arose for legal organisation. The law, as an institution, served to hold the composite assemblage that ECs are together. As such, the thesis describes ECs as spaces produced by legal and institutional practices. Chapter 5 dwells on the inverse dynamic, i.e., whether ECs contribute to realising international law. With their infrastructural backbone, ECs serve as the material condition enabling the global flows that international law seeks to facilitate. At the same time, ECs help us realise (as in understand) the contemporary guise of international law. With their marked spatiality, they signal the multiplication of international law’s spaces beyond territories and challenge us to interrogate territorially-anchored categories such as territorial jurisdiction, domestic implementation and state borders. Moreover, their spatial and multidimensional nature prompted a reflection on the narrative that portrays international law as parcelled into a-spatial sectoral regimes. The thesis demonstrates that what is being realized in the space of ECs are multiple sectoral regimes. It shows how three regimes of international law – the international trade law on transit trade facilitation, international investment law and international sustainable development law – are practically adapted to the space of ECs in an unfinished transnational process involving multiple actors. The thesis concludes with brief remarks on the methodological value of studying international law from the “ground”, where international law is both ordinary and spatially realized. Methodologically, the thesis is empirically premised on a dataset of sources of law (including “soft” law) and information on numerous ECs in Africa and Asia. Moreover, it is theoretically informed by recent strands in socio-legal research, including legal geography and new materialism.