Corporate Borders: A Provocation

Abstract 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.