Navigating in/visible global and national legal regimes in rural U.S. communities

Abstract (English)

This paper presents an ethnographic example of legal pluralism at work. For over two decades and continuing into the present, the presenter has been investigating the jurisdictional ambiguity experienced in very rural areas of the southeastern U.S. in which local workers, neighbors and governments try to navigate the overlapping legal landscapes associated with Foreign Trade Zones in their communities (cf. Orenstein 2011, Kingsolver 2021). Those zones are declared by United States Customs and Border Protection to be extraterritorial spaces within the United States (cf. Sassen 2013). Inside the zones, cell phones must be surrendered and passports must be used to enter the extraterritorial space, usually controlled by a transnational manufacturing corporation (for example, an automobile or shoe manufacturer). These FTZs are intentionally constructed in inland, very rural agricultural communities in which local governments are unaccustomed to dealing with transnational legal regimes most often associated with port cities like Charleston, South Carolina. Since plural legal jurisdictions apply to the same space, local actors are often confused about which ones apply within the FTZs and the presenter will offer ethnographic examples in which the transnational corporate entities operating in the FTZs exploit that ambiguity by, for example, claiming that local, state and federal labor laws do not apply within the rural Foreign Trade Zones (which is not the case). This ethnographic work is relevant in this global moment because even as the U.S. administration is turning again to economic nationalist rhetoric (cf. Kingsolver, et al. 2022), the research lens of legal pluralism demonstrates the inextricably global entanglement of jurisdictions navigated by local communities and the challenge of making public decisions that benefit their residents. One rural Kentucky community’s volatile engagement with current policy regimes related to electric car battery production in an FTZ under construction will be used to illustrate this jurisdictional ambiguity and its effects on different local stakeholders.