Corporate Borders: A Provocation

1. Introduction

In the ethnography Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms, Maxim Bolt evocatively describes the borderlands between Zimbabwe and South Africa, specifically the border at South Africa’s northernmost point where the Limpopo River separates the two countries.^[1] The South African side of the border is populated by White-owned farms—tomato fields, cotton plantations, citrus orchards—amidst a rather dry, though not quite desert landscape that doubles as a graveyard for undocumented migrants unsuccessful in their attempts to make it from the Zimbabwean side to South Africa’s interior. Here, Black Zimbabwean farmworkers labour on White South African-owned farms growing oranges that ensure year-round availability in Europe. These farms are part of a transnational economy, and those who benefit from its existence include populations residing in European nations whose doors are firmly shut to groups such as the farmworkers essential to generating the benefit.^[2] The survival of these ‘border farms’ essentially depends ‘on sales in an international market economy’.^[3] And furthermore, murky legal status results in ‘a large, transient labour surplus’ that functions as ‘a malleable and cheap solution, with workers easily controlled because of their ’grey’ status’.^[4] Note that as a corporation, the farm relies on profit from forms of jurisdictional arbitrage made possible by legal categories such as immigration status. The border, through the differential economic, political, and legal jurisdictions it demarcates, is a critical technology without which this grey status would be impossible.

Bolt focuses on a scene in 2008 on one of the farms along this border, where recruitment of farmworkers for the harvest was in progress one early morning, and over which the White farm owner, his Black foremen, and team of workers presided. Also present on the farm were (1) a crowd of jobseekers—undocumented Black Zimbabweans who had received the details of the recruitment through the usual cross-border networks, and (2) South African soldiers who are typically stationed along the border and responsible for its enforcement. The foreman possessed a list of 210 names of those among the crowd whom the farm had selected for employment. Prior to these names being made public, the entire crowd of undocumented Zimbabweans was neither ‘illegal’ border jumpers^[5] nor lawfully present farmworkers. At this stage, the soldiers had no idea who fell into which category, and they even assisted in maintaining crowd order as this group eagerly awaited the reading of the list. After the foreman read out the list of names, however, ‘[t]he line between workers and border jumpers had been drawn [and] [t]hose left in the crowd were simply ’illegals’, incongruously arrayed in front of a South African military patrol’.^[6]

As these ‘illegals’ scattered and began to flee, having been effectively adjudicated as unlawfully present by the farm—a corporate commercial entity—the soldiers present gave chase, proceeding to underwrite what we should understand as the corporate articulation of the border. I propose that we might understand the transnational commercial corporation in this scene (the farm) as materializing and significantly shaping the meaning of the national border (South Africa’s border) and the international border (the interface between the South African polity and the wider international order of nation-states) at least for this group of Zimbabweans and others similarly situated. Even while the (lethal) force of border enforcement was ultimately wielded by state functionaries, it is the commercial farm that dictated the legitimate timing and target of that force. Lawful presence in this border region, in a meaningful part, depends upon private corporate employers, and the role of the army and the state is to enforce the border as determined and adjudicated by private farm owners.

Bolt’s ethnography further reveals that for Zimbabwean farmworkers, ‘their relationships, their plans for the future, and their very sense of personhood come to be defined in relation to their workforce membership’.^[7] There is a very real sense in which the farm as a corporate entity is the effective sovereign, or at the very least, wields the sort of authority that we associate with sovereign control and to which sovereign responsibility attaches. The scene above makes vivid the role that the border plays in facilitating corporate enterprise, but more pointedly for my purposes, it also makes vivid the fact that the border is not a static or fixed institution external to corporate enterprise. Instead, the corporation and its profit-making enterprise play a material role in constituting the meaning and application of the border. The border can be seen in this and other examples below, as—in some meaningful but not totalizing sense—for and by the corporation.

Scholarship and even political and policy discourse regarding migration and borders tend to focus on the migration of natural persons^[8] and (inter)national borders as the domain of the nation-state, conceived of as an expression of its sovereignty. In liberal theory in particular, nation-state borders are critical legal and political infrastructure of collective self-determination, bulwarks for democratic self-rule. As a counterpoint, at least since the nineteenth century, the migration of a certain sort of natural person has recursively been constructed as an arguably existential threat to liberal democratic self-rule, and nation-statehood more broadly.^[9] Even where critical scholarship has challenged this construction of migration, borders, and sovereignty, it has kept stable the focus on natural persons as migrants and nation-states as the primary vehicles of sovereignty.

I intend this Article as a provisional intellectual and political provocation to consider migration, borders, and sovereignty from a different vantage.^[10] A vantage that cognizes the transnational commercial corporation as a pivotal vector that warrants urgent analytical and normative attention in the theorization of migration, borders, and sovereignty—especially questions of sovereign domination and hierarchy that sit at the heart of debates regarding colonialism and related forms of imperialism.^[11]

This Article concerns the transnational commercial corporation—the corporation or corporate family that conducts commerce across (and through) borders.^[12] In law, a corporation ‘is an entity that is legally separate from its members, which enjoys its own personality and can hold rights and obligations in its own name’.^[13] I focus here on commercial corporations, but it is important to note that churches, universities, and other entities that are legally incorporated can and often do pursue their causes across and through borders, even if they are beyond my current scope. I similarly exclude from consideration for present purposes corporations that do not operate transnationally or are not part of a larger corporate family that uses the formalities of corporate law (and border institutions) to mask material transnational interconnection. My definition encompasses the single company incorporated in one jurisdiction but that ‘operate(s) and live(s) under the laws and customs of other counties as well’,^[14] and the multinational enterprise (MNE) defined as comprising of any companies ‘established in more than one country and so linked that they may be able to coordinate their operations in various ways’.^[15]

I introduce the concept of ‘corporate borders’ to track the ways transnational commercial corporations make and use international borders and border institutions such as citizenship and nationality to advance their interests. In the example above, a transnational commercial corporation articulates the border for the aspiring migrant farmworkers, wields the border to engage in profitable jurisdictional arbitrage, and operates in a quasi-sovereign mode for those subject to its jurisdiction (the farmworkers) and those whose will it effectuates (shareholders, directors, etc.). ‘Corporate borders’ connotes as-yet unaccounted for, material influence over borders and migration, influence rising to thresholds typically associated with sovereign control deemed exclusive to the nation-state. I want to be clear that important work already underscores, for example, the role of corporations in immigration detention, myriad forms of border enforcement such as airline carrier sanctions, and vast webs of surveillance technologies, highlighting the private dimensions of what is conventionally characterized as the domain of the state. I consider this work foundational for theorizing corporate borders, while also noting that existing literature stops short of theorizing the corporation as a distinct, worldmaking sovereign entity, whose status as such materially relies on borders and border institutions. I argue that corporate borders might serve as a crucial heuristic for better understanding and governing migration, borders, and sovereignty. As an analytic, it does not jettison the natural person and the nation-state,^[16] but rather brings the transnational commercial corporation into the foreground of ways of seeing, thinking, and knowing migration, borders, and sovereignty that traditionally and systematically limit this foreground to natural persons and nation-states.

I also introduce the term ‘corporate border imperialism’ to refer to how corporate borders and corporate bordering function as infrastructure or means of imperial domination.^[17] I am particularly interested in corporate borders as a crucial means through which the sovereignty of colonized peoples—including those who have gained formal independence from colonization—is fundamentally constrained. Anti-colonial leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah were well aware of the existential threat to Third World sovereignty posed by the transnational commercial corporation,^[18] and political theorists such as Norman Girvan lucidly cautioned of the entrenchment of ‘corporate imperialism’.^[19] Corporate border imperialism as a frame calls attention to how borders—by which I mean the legal and political institutions that demarcate nation-state bounds and membership, such as, geographic boundaries, citizenship, nationality, race, immigration status, and enforcement—are instrumental to materializing the existential threat of corporate (neo)colonial domination.

Comprehensive analytical and normative reckoning with migration, international borders, and nation-statehood requires attention to corporate borders and corporate border imperialism. This is the underlying motivation for my broader inquiry. But I am also interested in a more tentative hypothesis—the idea that implicating legal persons from imperial nation-states in debates on citizenship, nationality, and international borders that are most frontally rehearsed and theorized from the perspective of the movement of natural persons—especially those from the Third World—might reorient these debates in the service of more just outcomes. Everywhere—including in the Third World—the movement of natural persons (especially Third World natural persons) is pathologized as an essential root of border and even sovereign dysfunction. At the same time, foreign transnational commercial corporations are heralded as saviours representing the only serious path to ‘proper development’ for Third World or (post)colonial nation-states. What might it do to border and migration discourse to bring the ‘mobility’ and ‘migration’ of the transnational commercial corporation more fully into view, alongside the displacement of natural persons in the Third World and in the territories of Native and Indigenous peoples in the First World, that is widely induced by transnational commercial corporations?

As a first and decidedly broad strokes exploration, this Article proceeds as follows. Part 2 considers the question ‘What is a migrant?’ and Part 3 considers the question ‘What is the (inter)national border?’. In response, I centre the transnational commercial corporation, arguing that we might productively understand this entity as both a legal person that is a uniquely threatening sort of economic migrant—a colonial settler—as well as a vehicle for collective self-determination that regularly imposes its jurisdiction on Third World peoples (among others). It does so in part through its use of borders and border institutions, and its jurisdictional impositions induce displacement globally.^[20] I refer to the latter phenomenon as ‘corporate-induced displacement’. I consider how transnational commercial corporations historically, and in the present, delimit geographic and political boundaries and determine the jurisdictions within them, arguing that their facility with border institutions and resulting jurisdictional agility renders them a uniquely potent mechanism of colonial and related forms of imperial domination.

Finally—a mammoth caveat. Profound complexity attends migration, borders, and the forging of polities (colonial, post-colonial, or otherwise), and in order to make a first pass at rethinking the migrant, the border, and the state through the transnational commercial corporation, much of that complexity is shorn from this Article. For example, I posit in this Article certain archetypes of migrants, borders, the (post)colonial nation-state, and the transnational commercial corporation, constructed based on particular historical and contemporary cases. Even as I offer reasons for why these archetypes have salience beyond the cases that generate them, it is also the case that these archetypes are fundamentally partial in that they do not account for the full spectrum of actors and histories necessary for a complete account of migrants, borders, and statehood, even for the regions and periods from which my cases are drawn.^[21] I am especially mindful of the cost, and even the coloniality, for example, of theorizing borders, sovereignty, and so on in southern Africa on the basis of historical accounts and indeed, legal and political epistemes that largely exclude those of the diverse polities that all came to bear the collective identity of ‘African’.^[22]

Historian Admire Mseba cautions of a profound danger that attends constructing an understanding of land ownership in post-colonial southern Africa primarily through a colonial lens—one that privileges the structures and logics of domination it introduced, such as race, to the exclusion of other non-European regimes of social stratification that existed prior to and alongside colonialism and that entrenched inequalities on the basis of ‘gender, patriarchy, generation, class and ideas of belonging’.^[23] In the context of post-colonial land reform in Zimbabwe, for example, he argues that an incomplete framing of the problem as simply ‘a colonial, racialized problem’ has obscured the necessity of also attending to the ways that non-colonial ‘structures of power shaped patterns of access to resources, including land’.^[24] His caution applies more broadly and has pertinence for the study of migration, borders, and nation-states. Nonetheless, my priority in this Article is making sense of migration, borders, and nation-statehood as imbricated by European colonialism, and my analysis neglects the centuries of imperial migration, settlement, and statehood that predated the high imperialism and European projects of colonial settlement and extraction in nineteenth- and twentieth-century southern Africa. It also sets aside the non-colonial contemporaneous and overlapping political authorities, institutions, and relations that structured political community in the places I am concerned with in this Article. For these and other reasons, my conceptualizations and analyses are incomplete, although this incompleteness does not render them inutile so much as subject to refinement.

2. What Is a Migrant?

In contemporary political discourse across our world—an international order of formally independent and equal nation-states—‘the migrant’ operates as, among other things, a potent political resource. The figure of the migrant has been strikingly galvanizing in liberal democratic politics across the globe, in some places serving as a highly effective tip of the spear for political projects to make or unmake political community at the nation-state and international levels.^[25] As such, interrogating the construction of the migrant that animates border debates may be crucial not only for the narrow issue of governing borders and migration, but also for reckoning with a crucial vector through which the principles and institutions of the international order are being reconfigured.

Where ‘the migrant’ is at the centre of political contestation and national reconfiguration, this figure is, of course, indexed to the specificities of the respective national projects. At the same time, I have argued elsewhere that the politically catalytic migrant is also a racial, religious, or ethnic ‘other’ indexed to something global—a transnational racial hierarchy that even in the present reproduces an ordering of people and places according to the ranking originated by European colonial domination.^[26] Across the international order, the archetype of the economic migrant capable (seemingly inherently) of posing an existential national threat is non-White and originates from the Third World.^[27]

Take the case of the United States of America (“United States”). A salient construction of migration in the United States, and in particular, across the country’s southern border with Mexico, is that this migration, and in particular the Third World migrants who engage in it pose an existential threat to the United States.^[28] They are portrayed and perceived as economically, politically, and culturally threatening the US sovereign right to collective self-determination, a danger they ostensibly pose by violating the borders and attendant rules the nation has set for membership and territorial presence. Immigration figured heavily in the national election discourse and campaigning that led to the re-election of President Donald Trump in 2025, and following his return to power, his administration has prioritized the public performance of an aggressive and even cruel immigration policy. While celebrated by some, it has been decried by others. But even as outcry has disavowed the flagrant and discriminatory violations of constitutional due process, and the weaponization of law and law enforcement, Trump’s most formidable political opponents—as captured by the platform of the Democratic Party—have themselves embraced an immigration common sense according to which the security and well-being of the United States faces a dangerous if not existential threat from migration at the southern border, a threat embodied by Third World migrants.^[29] In that country, and arguably globally, the integrity of border institutions—citizenship, nationality, permanent residence, etc.—is indexed seemingly exclusively to so-called economic migration of natural persons, which has come to engulf even forms of legally protected displacement.^[30] In other words, the health of the border and thus the nation is measured according to its impermeability to the ethno-racial-religious figure of the impoverished migrant (always a natural person), and this conception has achieved the status of a globally shared ‘common sense’.

A growing body of legal scholarship has sought to grapple with this figure of the Third World economic migrant as existential national threat, including from anti-colonial perspectives. This scholarship has productively destabilized the prior status quo in the legal and political theory of migration, arguing for approaches that account for empire—especially European colonialism and the ongoing reproduction of its legal, political, and normative infrastructure into the present—in migration doctrine, theory, and praxis.^[31] Some of this work has insightfully theorized the political economy of migration and borders, shedding crucial light on how capitalism articulates the governance of international borders and migration.^[32] I view this work as critical foundational work to which I seek to contribute closer attention to the transnational commercial corporation as a worldmaking (and world-unmaking) entity within this broader political economy. Whereas the transnational commercial corporation is largely a spectre in the relevant scholarship and debates on contested migration, I posit that the transnational commercial corporation is, amongst other things, a highly consequential migrant. Below, I propose that we cognize the transnational commercial corporation as a predatory migrant, one uniquely capable of eviscerating sovereignty, especially in the Third World, and one that has a proven track record of doing just that.

A. Corporation as Migrant-cum-Settler

A defining characteristic of the transnational commercial corporation is, of course, that it is a legal person.^[33] Corporations generally are characterized by fictive legal personhood,^[34] and as an institutional form, the corporation dates back to Medieval jurists, who revived and innovated the Roman legal concept of the universitas.^[35] In the Middle Ages, diverse entities could enjoy corporate status, including cities, monasteries, guilds, and universities, and by the seventeenth century, states began granting corporate concessions to commercial entities for overseas trading.^[36] But it was not until the nineteenth century that the corporate form was available for all business purposes,^[37]and henceforth ‘the corporation as a legal form was “privatized”’.^[38] Grietje Baars provides a helpful, Marxian genealogy of the legal concept of the corporation and how it has aided in constituting the commercial corporation in particular as a ‘structure of irresponsibility and a tool of imperialism’.^[39]

Corporations are creatures of municipal or domestic law, meaning their structure, governance, and overall terms of their existence will typically depend on their jurisdiction of incorporation.^[40] As a formal doctrinal matter, corporations formed under municipal or domestic law do not have international legal personality, in the sense that they are not traditional subjects of international law.^[41] But stating this formal position belies immense contestation regarding the meaning of international legal personality generally, as well as specifically with respect to commercial corporations. For this Article, I bracket meaningful engagement with the scholarship theorizing the corporation in international law, but note that viewing the corporation through borders and migration stands to enrich this scholarship, just as viewing borders and migration through the corporations is productive for migration and border studies.^[42] I constrain my ambitions here to conveying the need for this engagement.

Seen from the border, the corporation is a person that can either be a citizen and co-national—a legal person created through incorporation under the domestic law of the respective territorial nation-state. Or it can be a territorially present foreigner or non-national—a legal person incorporated under the domestic law of a different nation-state, but that effectively emigrates from its country of nationality, crossing the border to ‘seek a better life’, so to speak, elsewhere.^[43] In this sense, transnational commercial corporations can be understood as economic migrants, roaming the globe in search of the proverbial better life for their respective political communities, which include shareholders, directors, and the workforce employed to staff the corporation, all with varying degrees of control over its trajectory. Indeed, they are consummate economic migrants—capable of wielding border institutions such as citizenship and nationality far better than most natural persons could ever dream of doing. Consider the following example.

(i) Honduras Próspera Inc.

‘Look at this … Who wouldn’t want this?’ A media report attributes this quotation to Wilford Webster, who owns a hilltop home in Próspera on the Honduran island of Roatán. Webster’s words referred to the view from his home—waves breaking ‘over the turquoise waters that surround the reefs offshore’.^[44] Próspera is a for-profit city, founded in 2017 by a US company, Honduras Próspera Inc., which is incorporated in Delaware.^[45] This city is a foreign legal person and also constitutes the semi-autonomous jurisdiction of this U.S. legal person on Honduran national territory. The city, I argue, is a particular kind of migrant—a settler.

Próspera has about 2000 ‘residents and e-residents, many of whom have paid a fee for the option of living in Próspera or remotely incorporating a business there’.^[46] This private, for-profit city has its own government that seeks to attract foreign investors through low taxes and ‘light regulation’—they can choose from an à la carte menu of regulatory frameworks from thirty-six countries, or design their own.^[47] As a news report details, security in Próspera is provided by armed guards of a private firm, and disputes among its residents are adjudicated by the Próspera Arbitration Center—a limited liability company incorporated under Texas law, and staffed (at the time of writing) by three retired judges from Arizona, also in the United States.^[48]

Próspera has gained positive notoriety among investors for, among other things, its ‘experimental medical facilities, which run clinical trials unburdened by [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] standards’.^[49] Among its investors, is Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman, who had a chip with a Tesla key implanted in his hand, ‘was injected with a protein booster intended to make him ’stronger and faster”’, and ‘brushed his teeth with genetically modified bacteria purported to prevent cavities’, all while in Próspera.^[50] Próspera’s owners intend to develop it into, among other things, a hub for ‘high-skill remote work, medical tourism, and advanced energy projects’.^[51]

Sharing Roatán with Próspera is the community of Crawfish Rock—‘a few hundred people of mostly English-speaking Black Caribbean descent who live in raised, wood-slat homes on ancestral land’.^[52] Among their greatest concerns with Próspera is a provision of the legal framework on which Próspera is based, which establishes a process for the expropriation of land by the Honduran government on behalf of these zones.^[53] According to that framework, the Honduran government can require landowners to sell to a zone at fair market value.^[54] Some residents do not believe they can trust Próspera’s promises that it does not intend to expropriate additional land to expand its jurisdiction,^[55] and indeed according to a media report, residents’ fears have been stoked by actions such as Próspera posting on its website, ‘drawings of three stages of expansion that appeared to include the center of Crawfish Rock within its jurisdiction’.^[56] About 35 per cent of Honduran territory was eligible for this expropriation, territory on which high proportions of Indigenous and Afro-descendent populations live under tenuous land tenure arrangements.^[57] According to a 2017 report, ‘Nowhere are you more likely to be killed for standing up to companies that grab land and trash the environment than in Honduras’.^[58] The same report also documents that ‘tens of millions of aid dollars were directed to the police and military, both of which are heavily implicated in violence against land and environmental activists’, and that even through this era of anti-democratic repression, the USA was promoting investment in Honduras’ extractive industry.^[59]

How did Próspera come to be?^[60] A 2009 coup commenced a twelve-year period of government in Honduras characterized by violent, undemocratic turmoil to which the regime of Xiomara Castro, elected in 2021, has sought to respond. The legal framework that underlies Próspera was preceded by a related effort in 2011 by then-President Porfirio Lobo Sosa by decree, but this prior iteration was deemed unconstitutional by the Honduran Supreme Court for violating Honduran sovereignty.^[61] The Honduran Congress, then headed by Juan Orlando Hernández, responded by replacing those judges with new ones in support of these special economic zones. The reconstituted Supreme Court would go on to approve the necessary laws. In 2013, the Honduran government led by President Lobo Sosa established these special economic zones or Zonas de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico (ZEDEs). An international law firm describes the ZEDEs framework as intended ‘to attract and promote foreign investment’ in Honduras.^[62]

In 2022, the newly elected Honduran Congress voted to repeal the ZEDE legal framework. President Castro told the United Nations General Assembly that these and other reforms are about wresting Honduran sovereignty from undemocratic neoliberal clutches.^[63] Shortly thereafter, Próspera Honduras Inc. initiated a claim for nearly $10.8 billion for investment arbitration, a sum that largely represents future lost profit in light of the fact that its current investments fall far short of that figure.^[64] If Honduras loses, the robust mechanisms that exist to enforce resulting arbitral awards, some argue, may bankrupt the country.^[65] Próspera argues that on the basis of the Central American Free Trade Agreement—Dominican Republic (CAFTA-DR) signed between the United States and Honduras, and which includes a most favoured nation clause—and a treaty between Honduras and Kuwait that purportedly guarantees the legal status of ZEDEs for fifty years, it is entitled to business as usual at least until then.^[66] Próspera insists that Honduras honours legal stability agreements and international law, notwithstanding the fact that its rights originate in agreements and legal regimes concluded by an undemocratic dictatorial regime.

At the same time, Próspera’s lobbyists have been hard at work in Washington, DC, the federal capital of the United States, to build support for its case within the US Congress. They have had some success,^[67] and following meetings between Próspera’s representatives and representatives of then-President Biden administration’s consular mission in Honduras, the US Ambassador to Honduras ‘slammed’ the government for taking measures that threaten investment incentives.^[68] In the face of frustration that the Honduran government has not forced Próspera to halt operations pending the legal battles, the official in charge of the presidential commission to end ZEDEs remarked: ‘We are up against the greatest economic power in the world. Beyond the billionaires backing Próspera … you need to recognize that the United States government always protects two groups: Its soldiers and its business people’.^[69]

If an economic migrant crosses borders and thereby moves from one jurisdiction to another in search of a better life, a settler moves in order to appropriate, reconfigure, and, if necessary, forcibly impose a different jurisdiction upon the places and people of this new location, fundamentally altering or displacing their lifeways. The project of settling a colony is conventionally understood as a territorial project, one that involves the physical, spatial occupation of a territory. The corporate form can be seen as creating an embodied alter ego—a literal alternate bodily site or vehicle through which territorial occupation can be achieved without the physical presence of a foreign state sovereign. Honduras Próspera Inc. is, in this sense, a settler colonial corporation—a uniquely threatening type of migrant with an entire international legal regime (international investment law) devoted to its protection, and with built-in mechanisms for overriding national sovereignty.^[70] As a singularly threatening migrant that bears citizenship and nationality status and not only crosses international borders but actually delimits these borders as I highlight in Part 3, the transnational commercial corporation has profound implications for collective self-determination in the nation-state system.

What we might call the ‘settler colonial corporation’ has a breathtaking track record of imperial domination globally, and the example below highlights the centrality of migration, borders, and border institutions to this capacity for sovereign domination. Many colonial nation-states were founded by settler colonial corporations.^[71] I focus on the case of the founding of what is now Zimbabwe by the economic migrant-cum-settler, the British South Africa Company (‘the BSAC’)

(ii) The British South Africa Company

Before the colonial borders of Rhodesia—the first of the BSAC’s colonies in the region—there were frontier territories that separated the Ndebele nation from the territories to their south that had been settled by Europeans, primarily the Dutch descendant Boers, and the British. Until 1853, King Mzilikazi of the Ndebele had maintained tight control over European migration into his territory, being ‘well aware of the land hunger of the burghers of the Transvaal, [because] the high veld inhabited by the Ndebele was attractive country for herders and pastoralists’.^[72] That year, Mzilikazi signed a treaty with the Transvaal, according to which he would admit and protect European hunters and travellers on condition that they received his prior approval and only travelled on a prescribed route.^[73] This 1853 treaty opened for the first time the interior of Mashonaland to European hunters who slaughtered large numbers of elephants for their tusks, as well as other animals ‘for the exhilaration of the kill’.^[74] It also facilitated an ivory trade between the Europeans and the Ndebele and other peoples ‘into dependent relations with the European economy’.^[75] Initially, as described by historian John Galbraith, this economic dependence was unproblematic in that it was partial and based on relations of mutual respect and mutual interest.^[76] It was, in other words, compatible with Ndebele self-determination.

By the 1860s, however, the land of the Ndebele was being marketed to European prospectors and investors as ‘the Land of Ophir, studded with vast gold deposits barely exploited by ancient miners’.^[77] Promoters preached of abundant gold deposits on largely speculative and fantastical bases, not least because until his death in 1868, King Mzilikazi had strictly prohibited gold mining in any of the territories falling under his rule.^[78] His son, Lobengula, became king in 1870 and, for the first time, authorized mining concessions in Matabeleland, a region that had attracted much attention from European prospectors, many of whom formed companies to make their enterprise viable. So-called ‘mining fever’ was centred in the diamond mines of Kimberly in the 1870s and in the gold mines of Witwatersrand in the mid-1880s, which muted the rush to Matabeleland until the late 1880s.^[79] Prior, in 1876, King Lobengula had, at the request of the Cape Colony, agreed to send a contingent of Ndebele men to supply labour to the Kimberly diamond mines, and expressed no interest in the extension of British influence into his territory.^[80] And indeed, as late as 1880, the British Crown had no interest in further expansion of its empire north of the Limpopo River into the African interior.^[81] This disinterest was eventually tempered by concerns with Portuguese, German, or Boer imperial interest in Matabeleland and other territories to the north of the Limpopo. But ultimately, it was corporate enterprise that catalysed and enabled the colonization of the Ndebele, Shona, and other polities that came to be Rhodesia.

As John Galbraith puts it: ‘Long before the advent of [Cecil John] Rhodes the rulers of the Ndebele had become aware of the threat of European migration to the continuing independence of their state’.^[82] However, whereas the Ndebele had, for example, been able to manage the incursions of European hunters into Ndebele territory, ‘they could not withstand the goldrush’.^[83] Ultimately, their colonization was engineered by the British South Africa Company, headed by Cecil John Rhodes, for whom the country would eventually be officially named. Rhodes was a British immigrant—an economic migrant who settled in the colony of Natal as an act of self-actualization. He went on to make his quite substantial fortune in the diamond mines of Kimberly and the gold mines of the Witwatersrand.^[84] It was this fortune that he used to finance his company as the vehicle—or the person—that would settle Rhodesia.

Historical accounts paint a picture of a corporate scramble for Matabeleland and Mashonaland—a veritable influx of companies of European men ‘hunting’ for mining concessions.^[85] The commercial motivations of this enterprise were, of course, intertwined with political, social, and even racial commitments as exemplified by Rhodes himself.^[86] Alongside accumulating profit, Rhodes was a social Darwinist convicted of the biological and moral superiority of White Europeans over the peoples whom they encountered on the African continent and whom they racialized as African. In Rhodes’ own words:

Africa is still lying ready for us, it is our duty to take it. It is our duty to seize every opportunity of acquiring more territory and we should keep this one idea steadily before our eyes that more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.^[87]

The racial construction of Africans was an essential feature of and mechanism for the commercial colonization of Matabeleland and Mashonaland, as it was across the continent.^[88] More to the point, Rhodes’ worldmaking ambitions were ultimately operationalized through the vehicle of the settler colonial corporation, an entity whose success relied upon—among others—border institutions and the jurisdictional possibilities these institutions could realize.

The founding of the Rhodesias arguably hinged on the joint stock corporation. A recent manuscript by historian Philip Stern crystalizes the pivotal role of the joint stock corporation in shaping British colonialism ‘from its sixteenth-century origins through the era of decolonization’.^[89] It provided a distinctive form of collective finance that through shares or dividends allowed the pooling of resources even among strangers, which meant its survival was not contingent on personal resources of its leadership or solely on whether it generated profit. It also provided both the legal protections and political and philosophical attributions associated with the corporation, including that of fictive personhood.^[90] As Stern emphasizes, what set the joint stock corporation apart as a form of governance was centuries-long utility as a ‘powerful tool to theorize associational life’.^[91]

The ownership structure of the joint stock company made it such that ‘any given individual as a stockholder in multiple enterprises could in effect own a share of sovereignty in various places around the world without ever leaving home, producing a sort of portfolio colonialism that underwrote so much of British overseas expansion’.^[92] Of course, ‘any given individual’ must be qualified along multiple axes: gender, for example, and certainly race. The Ndebele and Shona people, colonized by the BSAC and ultimately displaced, could have hardly purchased shares in the vehicle of their colonial domination, or put differently, shares in their sovereignty. But Stern’s observation drives home the point that the colonial corporation internationalized colonial domination in a way that flies in the face of conventional accounts that attribute colonial responsibility solely to a single nation-state. The British Crown was indeed the formal colonial authority over Rhodesia. But the BSAC, which occupied, (mal)administered, and even owned large tracts of territory, was a multinational settler, funded and even directed by capitalists across different European nations, each owning a share of African sovereignty without ever leaving home. Consider, for example, that King Leopold of Belgian Congo’s horror and infamy was a shareholder of the British South Africa Company,^[93] and that Alfred Beit, who co-founded the BSAC with Rhodes, served on the first board and owned a significant stake in it, was a German national.^[94]

The settler colonial corporation also created a territorial anchor for extraterritorial sovereignty comprising natural and legal persons from across the European world.^[95] The European settler colonial corporation used legal personhood to transcend European imperial nation-state borders in order to delimit African national borders and jurisdictions, and impose its imperial jurisdiction over the peoples it bound within these borders.

The BSAC finally secured a Royal Charter from the British Crown in 1889. It did so on the basis of fraudulently obtained concessions, the most important of which it did not even own when the charter was granted. The process of securing the Royal Charter was a corporate competition, and one that involved a series of complex corporate transactions to reconfigure shareholding, to buy out specious concessions, to generate dubious speculative profits, such that by the time the BSAC secured its charter, this company was ‘a labyrinthine network of subsidiaries, partnerships, and concessionaries’.^[96] As a legal instrument, the charter ‘potentially allowed even the most specious and outrageous claims to territory or jurisdiction to be normalized, routinized and naturalized, protected by British law by a right that may arguably have been more sacrosanct than sovereign power: private property’.^[97] This was certainly the case with in Rhodesia, where claims to territory and jurisdiction in specious concessions, including those relied upon by the BSAC to dispossess the Shona and Ndebele, became private property rights enforced by the British Crown and eventually, as discussed in the next part, by the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Dispute.

My provocation here to view the corporation as a migrant, and a uniquely effective settler, of course, requires deeper theoretical development and must be brought into closer conversation with the detailed and illuminating theoretical work of scholars of the corporation such as Doreen Lustig, Grietje Baars, and Katarina Pistor. Baars, who is particularly concerned with the corporation as ‘the surplus-value-extracting motor of capitalism’, analyses the historical and legal construction of corporate personhood, demonstrating how that construction has come to identify the corporation as a political citizen, in ways that legitimate and entrench imperial corporate power.^[98] Similar work is necessary to recalibrate our understanding of corporations to account for the ways in which they are uniquely capable of engaging in predatory forms of border constitution and crossing, and jurisdictional engineering. The examples of settler colonial corporations I have relied upon are First World corporations, but it bears highlighting that this colonial technology is now globalized. In a 2023 deal, for example, Zimbabwe granted control over 20 per cent of its landmass to Blue Carbon LLC, a United Arab Emirates company.^[99]

To be clear, in arguing that the transnational commercial corporation is a predatory economic migrant—a colonial settler in fact, I am by no means conceding to the predatory framing that anti-immigrant advocates attribute to the natural persons who are typically vilified through the economic migrant moniker. I have argued elsewhere that the migration of many so-called economic migrants should be understood as resistance to colonial and imperial forms of domination, and more generally that the ethics of international migration must account for the past and present of this domination.^[100] In addition, to the extent that mass displacement and other forms of migration from the Third World destabilize political community in countries of origin, transit, and destination, I would argue that transnational commercial corporations are more to blame than the individuals who are forced to move. My claim is not that the migration of natural persons (from the Third World or otherwise) is always and everywhere a normative good to be defended. Rather, it is that the prevailing political and legal justifications for and approaches to governing this migration are fundamentally flawed and elide the role of corporations in generating border dysfunction and injustice, including through what I describe in the following section as ‘corporate-induced displacement’.

B. Corporate-Induced Displacement

Historically, transnational commercial corporations have been instrumental in inducing displacement. The story of transnational labour migration in southern Africa is, to a great extent, the story of mining and agricultural corporations and their reconfiguration of the region according to the dictates of their worldmaking enterprises.^[101] On the one hand, the labour needs of corporate-driven mining and agricultural colonial expansion, first and notably in the Kimberley diamond fields of the Cape Colony and then in the Witwatersrand gold fields, ‘induced’ a new and specific type of migration in the region.^[102] Colonial reconfiguration of native life was achieved through various means. These included fiscal policy such as the widely implemented ‘hut tax’ and the labour tax system deployed by Rhodes in his public official role as Cape Colony Prime Minister—a role he assumed the year after founding the BSAC, and which he held at the time of the BSAC’s founding of Rhodesia.^[103] These measures were intended to coerce Africans into wage labour.^[104] For many African societies, wage labour migration became a necessity as a result of colonial taxation, land dispossession, and demographic and ecological pressures.^[105] In Rhodesia, as mentioned above, the for-profit BSAC structured the colony for the pursuit of commercial mining and agricultural production.^[106] Concomitantly, ‘most policies the company administration implemented in the early years of colonial rule sought to create a reservoir of cheap labor’.^[107] Musoni also notes that it was only after the BSAC’s colonial transformation of Rhodesia and the polities it displaced that ‘wage-based migration became common among Zimbabweans’.^[108] The BSAC oversaw land dispossession from and forced relocation of Africans into native reserves, and Crown colonial officials collaborated in even the use of physical brutality to coerce Africans into wage labour.^[109] This thorough-going displacement of natives in Rhodesia by the BSAC, which included transnational wage labour migration is something I propose we conceptualize as ‘corporate-induced displacement’.^[110]

To explain what I mean by corporate-induced displacement, it is helpful to refer to how migration studies—including in law—have come to conceptualize ‘root causes’ of migration. Important literatures consider economic forces and considerations as central to explaining contemporary international migration. Indeed, the very classification of the majority of international migrants as labour migrants speaks to the salience of the economic.^[111] With the concept of corporate-induced displacement, I call attention to the transnational commercial corporation as a pivotal determinant or ‘root cause’ and a pivotal beneficiary within this complex matrix of economic forces and factors understood to be fundamental to shaping migration. I use ‘root cause’ in keeping with general meaning associated with the term in migration studies to refer to conflict, climate change, and even development as structures that create conditions of possibility for migration and limit the set of options that people have for how they live their lives, such that migration becomes the least detrimental option.

Corporations as ‘root cause’ render legible ‘corporate-induced displacement’, which I attribute to historical colonial corporations such as the BSAC, and contemporary corporations such as Próspera Honduras Inc. Important work documents and theorizes displacement induced by development and even by businesses.^[112] What I am proposing, building on this work, is the urgency of particular attention to the transnational commercial corporate form as a historical and contemporary vehicle of political and economic sovereignty, whose capacity to constitute and leverage borders and border institutions is pivotal to this displacement and warrants more theoretical engagement. Corporate-induced displacement, as a proposition, foregrounds the transnational commercial corporation as not merely an actor that influences migration and its governance—an insight variously captured across migration studies—but one that in non-trivial cases generates and determines both.^[113]

Within the global migration policy-making arena, transnational commercial corporations are constructed as beneficent—catalysts that are instrumental to Third World economic development, which it is argued will prevent or slow down contested Third World economic migration.^[114] In her illuminating study of the imbrication of trade as crystallized by special economic zones in the Global South, Jennifer Gordon notes that the goal of preventing the migration of Hondurans to the USA has been used as a reason to support the reproduction of the Próspera charter city model.^[115] Successive US administrations have signalled commitments to preventing Central American migration to that country, with the liberal strategy for addressing its ‘root causes’ most recently touting US corporate private sector investment as the means to do so.^[116] Yet US corporate intervention in (or migration to) the region has itself been a ‘root cause’ of Central American migration to the United States. Indeed the long history of US colonial corporations has been a defining feature of US imperial domination in the region, a continuing and genuine threat to the sovereignty of the peoples in the region.

3. What Is an (Inter)national Border?

Referring to ‘international borders’ typically conjures the conception of these borders primarily as static, coherent demarcations of the geographic boundaries of nation-states. Whereas geographic delimitation is an important function of international borders, reducing them to this function obscures their profound complexity, fluidity, and potency as composite legal and political institutions that both bound national jurisdictions and mediate interconnection among them.^[117] For the study of international law, and the international order more generally, it is instructive to approach borders as crucial imperial technology. In other words, international borders—the legal and political apparatus that bounds the nation-state and simultaneously mediates its relations with other nation-states—are means through which imperial domination is not only manifest but also effected.^[118]

Legally and politically, borders establish and demarcate the bounds of sovereign authority and jurisdiction. In international law, jurisdiction, among other things, refers to the sovereign authority of the state over persons, property, and events.^[119] Jurisdictional determinations can be a matter of life or death, and in a real sense, jurisdiction circumscribes the very terms on which we live our lives. The stakes are vividly captured by comparing the different experiences, possibilities, and constraints entailed by being a citizen of the USA, a citizen of Sudan, a citizen of Switzerland, or a stateless Palestinian. For the individual or the collective, international law tells us that national jurisdiction is the primary locus of sovereign expression and articulation. Borders bear a significant relationship to jurisdiction in the contemporary international order, and, as a result, have a significant relationship to the self-determination of individuals and collectives. Territoriality is the primary basis for national jurisdiction in international law, and territorial jurisdiction is delimited by the national borders of a state. The other main basis for sovereign jurisdiction is nationality—a legal and political construct also delimited by national borders, either the borders of one’s place of birth (jus soli) or the place of birth typically of one’s parents or grandparents (jus sanguinis) or some combination of the two.

As a result, borders determine jurisdiction in a material sense—and at least in principle—the sovereign authority to which one is subject, and relatedly, the civil and human rights to which one is entitled. Unsurprisingly, jurisdictional arbitrage through border externalization in particular—has been an ascendant mechanism for state evasion of sovereign responsibility for border and other forms of transnational injustice, a mechanism that has colonial precedents.^[120] Equally important is the role that jurisdiction plays in determining borders, as a matter of geography but also as legal and political institutions of national membership.^[121] It is the territorial jurisdiction of the nation-state that doctrinally anchors the right to exclude, and consequently the meaning of the border for the movement of people, typically distinguished in broader literature from the movement of goods and capital. Understanding international borders as legal and political institutions that determine and bind national membership, and that shape and govern interconnection among different jurisdictions, foregrounds their high-stakes terrain. It also speaks to the value and salience of borders and jurisdiction together as superior imperial technology.

In prior work, I have reconceptualized international borders as mechanisms of imperial, and specifically colonial domination—mechanisms of political and economic interconnection of peoples across space and time on structurally hierarchical terms. I have argued that contemporary international borders entrench colonial and related forms of imperial hierarchy, violate the collective self-determination of colonized peoples, and reproduce historic injustice on an ongoing basis.^[122] They are sites of colonial injustice, but they are also a forensic lens through which we can better understand the legal articulation of colonial injustice. In other words, borders offer detailed information about what colonial domination actually entails—the mechanisms through which this domination is operationalized and reproduced as a legal and political matter. Typically, however, interest in the imperial or colonial nature of borders has predominantly focused on nation-states as the authors of these borders and the migration they govern, and of border imperialism more generally. With a few important exceptions, the wider legal literature on international borders and migration has similarly and almost exclusively focused on nation-states, although important work considers the role of non-state actors in the private sector in shaping international migration regimes,^[123] and of capitalism in shaping borders.^[124]

Indeed, most legal and political theory treats border governance as a function of nation-state sovereignty and as primarily the domain of the state. This is hardly surprising for international lawyers, given that in international law—doctrinally and theoretically—borders and jurisdiction are the domain of sovereign authority, which resides in the nation-state. Ultimately, international lawyers and other theorists of (inter)national borders have insufficiently grappled with the constitutive historical and contemporary role of commercial corporations in determining national borders and migration governance regimes, and how these corporations engage in forms of border-making, jurisdictional engineering, and jurisdictional arbitrage that remain fundamental to colonial domination. There is important political and academic work that has focused on the transnational commercial corporation as an agent of colonial and neocolonial domination. That work on corporate imperialism holds insights for scholars of border justice but has itself not sufficiently attended to borders as pivotal infrastructure through which imperialism is operationalized. In this part, I offer some examples through which to begin to reconsider the international border as by and for the corporation, albeit to varying degrees.

A. Constituting the Border, Constituting the Jurisdiction

Commercial enterprise—and in particular, commercial corporate worldmaking—forged the political and economic DNA of southern Africa.^[125] As the eventual successor of the BSAC’s Southern Rhodesia, Zimbabwe’s borders, and indeed the territorial jurisdiction delimited by these borders, are in a non-trivial sense an accretion of the corporate commercial enterprise of White European men of multiple nationalities, as discussed above.^[126] Their Whiteness was not incidental. It was the basis and bounds of the transnational political community they tailored to pursue settler colonial domination.^[127] My claim is not intended to suggest a top-down, uncontested implementation of a pre-determined cartography designed by the BSAC, even though Rhodes’ imperial vision for the African continent entailed the acquisition of vast territories that included the region that became Rhodesia. The process of the Company’s colonization of Rhodesia was contingent, iterative, speculative, and contested in material ways by the Shona, the Ndebele, the British Crown, other companies, and other European empires vying for dominance and influence in the region. Notwithstanding all of the contingency, speculation, contestation, and resistance; however, it was the interests, vision, and capacity of the BSAC that ultimately carried the day in the establishment of the territorial boundaries of what would come to be called Rhodesia.^[128] And it was the interests and desires of the BSAC (and others acting for or through companies) in the land and the minerals they believed it contained that would force the new political identity of Rhodesian subjects on the Shona, Ndebele and other nations that lived on these lands. Having founded Rhodesia, the BSAC would go on to structure the country’s economy to prioritize its interests in the mineral wealth, which it negotiated with its interests in ensuring White immigration to secure the territory as a White settler colony.^[129] By 1899, large ‘speculative mining and land companies’ owned ‘9.3 million acres, out of the 15.3 million acres of land stolen from Africans by the BSAC and other settlers’.^[130]

As I discuss in more detail below, establishing Rhodesia as a territory whose title could be held by foreign corporations unencumbered by the sovereignty of native populations became a legacy that defines Zimbabwe in the present, in large part through private property and international borders. But here, I note that at its founding by the BSAC, important aspects of Rhodesia rendered it an entity we might conceive of as a political and economic prototype of sorts for the Special Economic Zone as embodied by Próspera. As noted, prior, Honduras itself has a long history of sovereign territorial subjection to foreign corporations, US corporations in particular. In the decade that the BSAC founded Rhodesia, the relatively newly independent Honduran republic granted major concessions to foreign companies as a path to so-called development such that by the early twentieth century, it was economically and politically dominated by these corporations.^[131] Banana production became central to the Honduran economy—an industry that was dominated by two US corporations—United Fruit and Standard Fruit. Banana companies held concessions for vast tracts of land, and by 1914, their exports accounted for 84 per cent of the national total. The political and economic domination of these foreign corporations was decidedly imperial, fundamentally subjecting Honduran sovereignty to these US corporations in the early to mid-twentieth century, hence the enduring moniker of the ‘Banana Republic’.^[132]

Corporate sovereignty—by which I mean, at least provisionally—the political and economic will of transnational commercial corporations and what we might think of as their ‘peoples’, has seemingly long been a constitutive feature of colonial and post-colonial nation-statehood. As such, the borders of colonial and post-colonial states may often have demarcated the territorial boundaries of foreign commercial assets rather than the sovereign jurisdiction of native peoples. This was arguably the case for Honduras and Rhodesia for significant periods of their history and may not be too far off the mark for the many post-colonial nation-states whose territories are subject to concessions on a comprehensive scale. A case like Próspera or that of SEZs more generally—which initially appear to be outliers—may be revealing and materially representative of core features of international borders, especially those connecting formerly colonized nation-states to imperial nation-states of different stripes, as I intimate above and below. Corporate borders are embedded in international borders, and for post-colonial nation-states, the concern is that corporate borders are a central mechanism through which nation-states such as Nigeria functionally operate as colonial corporations, the latter a powerful insight offered by Benjamin Maiangwa, Muhammad Suleiman, and Chigbo Anyaduba.^[133]

B. Governing Migration, Governing the Border

In addition to constituting borders and dominating the jurisdictions bounded by these borders, transnational commercial corporations have been instrumental to governing migration and borders. By way of illustration, I return to southern Africa in the nineteenth century. The Limpopo River, as mentioned in the Introduction, demarcates the contemporary border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. Historian Francis Musoni has detailed the transformation of the Limpopo River and its environs from a frontier zone to a ‘colonial boundary’^[134] whose political, spatial, and legal infrastructure remains in place in the contemporary border between Zimbabwe and South Africa.^[135]

African mobilities across jurisdictions or even through territories of overlapping jurisdictions, of course, predated European colonialism.^[136] As historians note, the Limpopo and broader regions that would eventually come under European colonial domination were long sites of political migrations associated with imperial expansion and contraction,^[137] each generating distinctive and overlapping trans-spatial political and economic relations and corresponding norms and institutions. For example, in the period before the colonial boundary, and indeed before the Union of South Africa and Rhodesia respectively as nation-states, there was the intra-polity mobility of the Venda across the Limpopo. As they engaged in this cross-Limpopo mobility, ‘the Venda did not think of themselves as intruders, foreigners, or even migrants because they regarded the region as unified geographically, socially, and politically’.^[138]

Musoni notes that even the mere fact of European colonial settlement was not itself what produced the colonial boundary from which the contemporary international border would eventually be derived. The Afrikaners who established the Transvaal colony in the region to the south of the Limpopo in the 1850s ‘viewed the Limpopo not as a marker of territorial limits of their state but as a river within a frontier zone’.^[139] Even when large-scale gold mining operations commenced in the Witwatersrand in the 1880s and induced transnational labour migration from regions of present-day Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, Tanzania, and elsewhere, the Transvaal initially showed no interest in regulating it.^[140]

It is instead the BSAC’s corporate colonial enterprise that would ultimately transform the scale and normativity of cross-Limpopo mobility, introducing and thus centrally determining the phenomenon of ‘illegal’ migration in the Limpopo region, with consequences for what constitutes illegal migration between Zimbabwe and South Africa in the present.^[141]

Corporations induced displacement (including transnational wage labour migration) in southern Africa, but equally noteworthy is that they were the vanguard of the governance of this migration—another domain conventionally attributed to the modern nation-state. In Rhodesia, it was the tensions and frictions produced by competing corporate interests and the interplay between the BSAC’s desire to control the mobility of Africans within Rhodesia, and that of Africans attempting to travel to the Witwatersrand and other labour-seeking destinations to the south that initiated and shaped colonial migration governance, and in particular the terms of African mobility across the Limpopo River colonial boundary.^[142] Musoni details early migration and mobility governance ordinances promulgated by the BSAC-administered Southern Rhodesia that he compellingly argues, inter alia, established and introduced the distinction between legal and illegal migration at the Limpopo border.^[143]

South of the Limpopo, the Transvaal’s approach to African mobility and migration across that colonial boundary prior to the founding of the Union of South Africa was similarly driven by the demand for cheap migrant labour in the Witwatersrand mines. Competing corporate commercial interests led to conflict between the BSAC’s Southern Rhodesia and the Transvaal.^[144] The Transvaal Chamber of Mines, an association formed by the influential mining companies in 1887 would go on to create the Rand Native Labor Association in 1897, which eventually became the Witwatersrand Native Labor Association (WNLA) for the purposes of coordinating labour recruitment from designated regions of the continent.^[145] And the Rhodesia Chamber of Mines formed the Rhodesia Native Labor Bureau (RNLB), which performed a similar function.^[146] Together, WNLA and RNLB arguably had a constitutive influence in shaping the terms of transnational wage labour migration. I am positing that they governed migration in the region outside of, through, and even despite the colonial nation-states of which they formed a part, and that it was corporate interests, including (though not exclusively) through these two bodies, that articulated the border between Rhodesia and what became the Union of South Africa.

A genealogy that centres the transnational commercial corporation in creating and governing the dominant forms of international migration invites important reconsideration of fundamental institutions and regimes of migration governance that remain salient in the contemporary period. Legal, historical, and theoretical accounts of the foundations of modern migration governance look mostly to colonial and imperial states and their institutions, processes, and policies to make sense of the origins and logics of the regimes.^[147] Yet, prior to the emergence of the modern regime of nation-state-governed transnational migration, the forms of mobility and migration that dominate the contemporary global order were governed privately by merchants, corporations, brokers, and related commercial entrepreneurs. As the corporate form, and specifically the transnational commercial corporation, evolved to become a superlative institution for trans-territorial economic and political enterprise, it stands to reason that it played a legally and politically pivotal role in private migration governance. The work of historians of migration lends credence to this perspective.

In the nineteenth century, before the crystallization of the contemporary state-governed transnational migration governance regimes at the turn of the twentieth century, private commercial actors played a leading role in coordinating and effectively governing large-scale transnational labour migration. In addition, private commercial actors were often the first movers, with states intervening to regulate for the purposes of managing fallout generated by what I am describing as corporate-induced transnational labour migration.^[148] Temporary labour migration schemes in particular, first originated in Prussia and South Africa, the latter of which I have sketched above, where labour migration historian Cindy Hahamovitch notes they were ‘a creation of employers with the sanction and active support of state authorities’.^[149] In these important histories of temporary labour migration regimes, the transnational commercial corporation as a worldmaking political and economic actor with particular facility with borders and border institutions has yet to receive sufficient attention. In positing corporate borders and corporate border imperialism as I begin to do in this Article, my aim is to indicate the kind of attention we should be paying and why. In light of the strong influence of settler colonies in shaping modern migration governance globally,^[150] there is reason to pay close attention to the legal and political innovations that settler colonial corporations such as the BSAC relied upon to make and govern transnational labour migration.

To illustrate, I offer the example of the ‘pass’—a document issued by a public authority to regulate mobility and migration, perhaps most typically and infamously associated with the South African apartheid regime, whose regime of racial segregation relied on this technology to promote collective White self-determination through the domination of Africans. The pass was a form of racial governance that achieved this governance through mobility control, tethering Black presence in spaces designated as White to the value that could be extracted from Africans as labourers, as carers, and so on, on conditions set by the Apartheid government. As a technology of racial governance—and specifically, the conditioning of Black mobility, presence, and agency on White economic and social needs and desires, the pass originated in Kimberley in the context of the diamond rush to serve the interests of White miners.^[151] The regulation that introduced the pass made no mention of race, ‘but in its application and intention the legislation was clearly discriminatory’^[152]—a familiar scenario that haunts the instruments of contemporary mobility and migration governance, such as the visa.^[153] The prosperity and success of Kimberely’s diamond mines hinged on corporations,^[154] and the pass was arguably crucial corporate border infrastructure.

Pass systems eventually proliferated across southern Africa, and the BSAC in the 1890s would introduce regulations governing African mobility that were influenced by the pass systems that were developed in South Africa’s mining towns.^[155] Passes were, as just mentioned, critical corporate border infrastructure. To the extent—and arguably it is a great extent—that contemporary visas governing so-called guest workers and other temporary labour migrants echo the terms of the ‘pass’ as critical contemporary corporate border infrastructure, there is a legal and political genealogy that demands closer legal and political theoretical attention. Theorizing—whether normative or analytical—of such visas, which focuses on the nation-state as the exclusive or primary author or innovator in dictating its terms, is insufficient. A functional genealogy linking the pass to the visa,^[156] and centering transnational commercial corporations as technological authors, is an essential piece of the puzzle.

C. Wielding the Border: Corporate ‘Sovereigns’, Corporate ‘Citizens’

Transnational commercial corporations are also capable of wielding international borders—putting these borders to use to advance their interests, and doing so in ways that elevate these interests, especially above the sovereignty of formerly colonized nation-states. Corporate jurisdiction supplants Third World sovereign jurisdiction, and this is achieved in part through the way that transnational commercial corporations are capable of wielding the border and its core institutions—citizenship and nationality. Through a careful leveraging of citizenship, nationality, and the range of legal statuses that exist between being undocumented, temporarily/partially documented, and being permanently/comprehensively documented, corporations are capable of engaging in forms of sovereign domination that are virtually impossible for natural persons acting outside of the aegis of the corporate form. The legal construction of corporate personhood, including the way law and policy construct corporate nationality and citizenship, renders borders and border institutions an essential feature of corporate worldmaking. Transnational commercial corporations—through their use of borders and border institutions—become a powerful vector for undercutting democratic self-rule, realizing the anti-immigrant anxieties (‘foreigners are a threat to our democratic self-rule’) that consistently misattribute sovereign threat to foreign natural persons, especially from the Third World.

A pronounced form of corporations wielding borders as quasi-sovereigns is encapsulated in the Próspera example, which renders visible international investment law as pivotal to enabling corporate border imperialism. As described above, Próspera Honduras, as a US legal person with an investment in Honduras based on a legal framework of questionable democratic credentials, has triggered an investor–state dispute mechanism that entitles Próspera to a remedial framework conventionally reserved for nation-states and that affords a private actor a framework for overriding Honduran sovereignty.^[157] Próspera is one of more than 5400 special economic zones or jurisdictional enclaves around the world,^[158] and recent scholarship draws necessary attention to them as effectively worldmaking projects rather than as mere profit-making enterprises.^[159]

Anna Jurkevics approaches special economic zones as examples of ‘private economic geographies’ that ‘often help funnel capital around the bottlenecks of state regulation, and they can act as a shield against the redistributive demands of democratic constituencies’.^[160] According to Jurkevics, ‘SEZs are so thoroughly cordoned off from national territory—both jurisdictionally and sometimes literally—that they may as well be another country’.^[161] My point is that corporate jurisdiction is an exercise of political community, perhaps a multinational political community rather than anational political community. To the extent that SEZs operate through ‘private border’ technology, as Jurkevics highlights, my point is that such private borders—specifically corporate borders—are firmly embedded in and given their imperial or colonial teeth by international borders—the most fundamental of public institutions. Corporate jurisdiction uses the ostensible public—including border institutions—to secure its private domination over Third World sovereignty. Honduras Próspera Inc., as a political community, is rendered capable of realizing its interests in significant part through the borders and jurisdictions that constitute Honduras and the USA, respectively, and those borders and jurisdictions, I argue, themselves comprise corporate borders as core features of the nation-state. The ascendence of what Quinn Slobodian aptly terms ‘Silicon Valley colonialism’, in reference to zones such as Próspera is appropriately generating concern regarding the political and specifically imperial nature of corporate jurisdictional engineering.^[162] But my proposition is that as a result of what I am calling corporate borders, the imperial core of these special economic zones—both in normative terms (the worldmaking vision) and analytical terms (the legal and political concepts and doctrine that animate them)—may be a ubiquitous and underappreciated feature of all international borders, even though the density of this imperial core varies across time and place.

Consider a recent investor–state case involving present-day Zimbabwe that helps illustrate my point. By way of background, in 1980, when Zimbabwe gained independence from British colonial and settler rule, 6000 White commercial farmers owned 42 per cent of the country, secured through legal frameworks that on a racial basis dispossessed the Black majority of all but the most arid, infertile land.^[163] The legacy of the BSAC and the terms on which it founded Rhodesia were pronounced. By 2000, Zimbabwe’s agrarian economy was still dominated by White-owned farms. In the mid-2000s, the regime of then-President Robert Mugabe implemented the Fast-Track Land Reform Program (‘FTLRP’), which authorized the uncompensated, compulsory seizure of agricultural lands for redistribution.^[164] In 2015, an investment arbitration tribunal issued the von Pezold decision following claims brought by White foreign investors owning large commercial timber farms in Zimbabwe under bilateral investment treaties between Zimbabwe, and Germany and Switzerland, respectively.^[165] The timber farms at issue in this case were initially planted by the BSAC following the forcible displacement of native communities in the course of the colonial settlement.^[166] In an astounding decision, the tribunal found the Zimbabwean government’s attempt to redress the country’s legacy of racist land ownership to be a violation of the prohibition on racial discrimination.^[167]

In an insightful analysis of von Pezold, Ntina Tzouvala underscores how the tribunal’s reasoning entrenches the racial and temporal function of property rights in Zimbabwe, where, with the BSAC at the helm, private property rights were created to vest the economic interests of White settlers in land.^[168] Insofar as private property is a colonial relation,^[169] the international border is crucial to preserving the coloniality of this relation. In the case of Zimbabwe, the von Pezolds used private property rights in conjunction with the nationality and citizenship of their corporation to trigger German and Swiss treaties to insist that Zimbabweans be subject to the jurisdiction and sovereign vision of this foreign corporation.^[170] As Tzouvala notes, the tribunal insulated the litigants’ property title from government regulation intended to undo the racial foundations of this property and, in so doing, used international law to maintain colonial racial injustice as a contemporary feature of Zimbabwean’s relationship to their land.^[171] Among the remedies ordered by the tribunal was restitution of the litigants’ commercial farmland. Zimbabwe must return the land to a foreign corporation, land whose only cognized legal title to a great extent originated in the enterprise of a settler colonial corporation (the BSAC) at the turn of the nineteenth century. The von Pezold family has since sought enforcement of the ICSID arbitration award in the United States, and in November 2024, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled the award was enforceable in the United States, among other jurisdictions.

Import work recognizes the extractive continuities that connect ‘the seventeenth-century plantation, the eighteenth-century plantation, the nineteenth-century mine, and the contemporary special economic zone’.^[172] Scholars of borders might pay closer attention to the legal and political border infrastructure that undergirds this continuity, with particular attention to corporations understood as effective sovereign vehicles with great facility at wielding this infrastructure.^[173]

4. Conclusion

In this Article, I have posited that fundamental facets of international borders are corporate borders—border regimes and institutions materially authored and shaped by transnational commercial corporations in ways that cannot be accounted for by treating corporations as private actors to whom states sometimes (properly or improperly) delegate sovereign functions. A closer look at the relationship between transnational commercial corporations on the one hand, and borders and migration on the other, suggests that these corporations are capable of constituting, governing, and wielding migration and (inter)national borders, and of engaging in predatory forms of migration, including colonial settlement. I have sought to highlight how corporations can operate as sovereign vehicles, leveraging borders and border institutions to impose their own jurisdictions—jurisdictions that are distinct even from those of the nation-states that ostensibly create and govern these corporations.

To reiterate, my aim is not to jettison the fundamental role of the nation-state and its public authority in determining migration, borders, and statehood. Rather, attending to the transnational commercial corporation as a distinct political institution and vehicle of sovereign expression is necessary for discerning aspects of borders and migration that are obscured by a myopic focus on the nation-state or the natural person, for that matter. Furthermore, attention to what I termed corporate borders advances our understanding of the nation-state itself as a profound imbrication of the public and the private. Rendering corporate borders legible, I have argued, opens up new ways of understanding the stakes of migration and borders, and the border institutions such as citizenship and nationality that operate at once as sutures of political community and bludgeons of imperial domination.

Thinking across a spectrum that connects corporate jurisdictions such as Próspera to more traditionally understood (post)colonial nation-state borders and jurisdiction, such as Rhodesia and subsequently Zimbabwe, invites closer analytic attention to how some nation-states approximate these more formal corporate jurisdictions. It also invites attention to how some nation-states structurally and functionally approximate commercial assets rather than vehicles of collective self-determination for (formerly) colonized peoples, and how borders and border institutions play an important role in making this so. Indeed, borders are a lens through which the continuum of archetypes that extends from the fully sovereign nation-state on the one end, to the fully corporate commercial jurisdiction on the other, can be productively examined.

I have also introduced corporate borders as pivotal imperial and specifically colonial infrastructure, which connotes territorialized control. The corporation generally, and corporate borders as an analytic specifically, invite revisitation of what dimensions of the post-colonial are actually ‘post’ in any meaningful sense, and what remains simply colonial.^[174] As greater scholarly attention considers the predatory proclivities of corporate power, I have sought to call attention to migration, borders, and border institutions as sites and means of corporate domination over colonized or formerly colonized peoples. At the same time, as debate proceeds regarding the meaning of border justice, including the persisting operation of borders as structures through which colonial injustice is reproduced, attention to corporate borders and corporate border imperialism is essential. Wider demands for reparations for colonial injustice, and for decolonization of the global order, too, are implicated by corporate borders and corporate border imperialism, both of which illuminate the colonial worldmaking capabilities of the transnational commercial corporation. I offer the examples and reflections above to make the case for the importance of theories of corporate borders and corporate border imperialism, respectively, and as precursors to fulsome analytical and normative elaboration of both.

1. Maxim Bolt, Zimbabwe’s Migrants and South Africa’s Border Farms: The Roots of Impermanence (Wits University Press 2016). My description of this scene in this Introduction relies on his account. ↑
2. See, eg, E. Tendayi Achiume, ‘Racial Borders’ (2022) 110 Geo LJ 445. ↑
3. Bolt (n 1) 23. ↑
4. Ibid24. ↑
5. See Francis Musoni, Border Jumping and Migration Control in South Africa (Indiana UP 2020) (offering an analytical conceptualization of ‘border jumping’). ↑
6. Bolt (n 1) 3. ↑
7. Ibid 8. See also ibid 26-29. On ‘farmer sovereignty’ see ibid Chapter 3. ↑
8. Western legal doctrine distinguishes natural persons (human beings) from legal persons, the latter being artificial or juristic persons. It is important to underscore that natural personhood is itself a legal construction, and that natural persons have legal personality. For a discussion of the varied constructions and terminology regarding personhood in Western legal traditions—which are in many respects foundational for modern international law—see Visa A. J. Kurki, A Theory of Personhood (OUP 2019). ↑
9. See, for example, David Cook-Martín and David FitzGerald, ‘Liberalism and the Limits of Inclusion: Race and Immigration Law in the Americas,’ 1850–2000, (2010) 41 J Interdisc Hist 7. ↑
10. This Article forms part of a much larger project to interrogate the questions and claims introduced here, but which cannot be exhaustively addressed due to space constraints. ↑
11. The question of reparations for European colonialism and the Transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans, for example, is the subject of growing global attention, as discussed by a number of scholars in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of International Law. See especially Antony Anghie, ‘The Injustices of Reparations’, (2025) AJIL (forthcoming) (discussing corporations and reparations in international law). ↑
12. The most recent draft of the proposed UN treaty ‘to regulate, in international human rights law, the activities of transnational corporations and other business enterprises’ defines business activity as being of a ‘transnational character’ when: ‘(a) It is undertaken in more than one jurisdiction or State; or (b) It is undertaken in one State but a significant part of its preparation, planning, direction, control, design, processing, manufacturing, storage or distribution, takes place through any business relationship in another State or jurisdiction; or (c) It is undertaken in one State but has significant effect in another State or jurisdiction’. UN Human Rights Council, ‘Updated Draft Legally Binding Instrument to Regulate, in International Human Rights Law, the Activities of Transnational Corporations and Other Business Enterprises’ https:// www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/igwg- transcorp/session9/igwg-9th-updated-draft-lbi-clean.pdf accessed 02 Sep 2025. It is in this sense that I mean transnational commerce. ↑
13. Peter T. Muchlinski, ‘Corporations in International Law’ in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (OUP 2014) https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/9780199231690/law-9780199231690-e1513 accessed 02 Sep 2025. ↑
14. Peter T. Muchlinski, Multinational Enterprises and the Law (OUP 2021) 5 (citations omitted). ↑
15. OECD, Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct (OECD Publishing 2023). ↑
16. I take the corporation as antecedent to and constitutive of the modern nation-state, as well as often serving as the vehicle through which public authority pursues goals or interests better served by the Teflon shield afforded by the corporate form and the private domain. As Phillip Stern notes, the corporate theory that would ultimately give particular life to the colonial corporation—the joint stock company—was also central to the conceptualization of ‘the transcendent sovereignty at the core of the modern state’. Philip J Stern, Empire, Incorporated (Harvard UP 2023) 5 (internal references omitted). ↑
17. For an inspiring reckoning with border imperialism, see Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (AK Press 2013). ↑
18. Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism(Thomas Nelson & Sons 1965).I used the term ‘Third World’ to refer to non-European peoples colonized by Europeans from the seventeenth century onwards in keeping with its usage within the broader tradition of Third World Approaches to International Law. I have argued the analytical significance of this term in the context of migration elsewhere, E. Tendayi Achiume, ‘Migration as Decolonization’ (2019) 71 Stan L Rev 1509, notwithstanding charges of its anachronism and offensiveness, charges that others have addressed. See, for example, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, ‘Locating the Third World in Cultural Geography’ (1998–1999) Third World Legal Studies 1. ↑
19. Norman Girvan defined corporate imperialism as ‘a system of international capitalism that has two basic characteristics’. First, fundamental power in this world system is held by the owners and managers of capital, who exercise this power over other groups and institutions in order to appropriate surpluses and accumulate further capital. These other groups—governmental bureaucracies, workers, peasants, the unemployed—are to a greater or lesser degree dominated, dependent, exploited, and underdeveloped. The second crucial feature is that these relationships are institutionalized within the framework of large, integrated, transnational corporations. Norman Girvan, Corporate Imperialism: Conflict and Expropriation (Monthly Review Press 1976) 11–12.See also, Grietje Baars, The Corporation, Law, and Capitalism (Haymarket 2020) (providing a recent legal elaboration of corporate imperialism). ↑
20. On the conceptual, ethical, and political difference it might make to reorient academic inquiry from ‘forced migration’ to ‘displacement’, see David Owen, ‘From Forced Migration to Displacement?’ (2024) 43 Refugee Survey Quarterly 272. ↑
21. For a helpful account, for example, of the myriad logics and contestations that determined boundaries and borders in Africa alongside colonial corporations, see, for example, Musoni (n 5) 9–11; and on the role of African polities in shaping and in some cases embracing colonial boundaries see Paul Nugent, ‘Arbitrary Lines and the People’s Minds: A Dissenting View on Colonial Boundaries in West Africa’ in Paul Nugent and A I Asiwaju (eds), African Boundaries: Barriers, Conduits and Opportunities (Pinter 1998). ↑
22. See Joel Modiri, ‘Azanian Political Thought and the Undoing of South African Knowledges’ (2021) 68 Theoria: A Journal of Social & Political Theory 42, 43. ↑
23. Admire Mseba, ‘Notes from the Icehouse: Inequalities in the Land: Colonial Legacies and the Quest for Land Equity in Zimbabwe’ (2024) 17 Global Environment 172,174. ↑
24. Ibid 176. ↑
25. On the role of anti-immigrant politics in the rise of authoritarianism in the United States, for example, see Nicholas De Genova, ’From Border War to Civil War: the Despotism of the Border and Full-Spectrum Authoritarianism’ [2025] Citizenship Studies 1. On the figure of the migrant, and multiple figures of the migrant, respectively, see Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press 2015), and Ulla D. Berg, Figures of Deportation (Duke University Press, forthcoming 2026). ↑
26. Achiume, ‘Racial Borders’ (n 2); On race and racism as transnational structures through which colonial injustice is reproduced see E. Tendayi Achiume, ‘Race, Reparations and International Law’ (2025) 119 AJIL 397; On the reproduction of historical injustice see Alasia Nuti, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress (CUP 2019). ↑
27. This is not to say that individuals or people racialized as White or originating from imperial nation-states are never constructed or perceived as threats. Rather, my claim is that such migrants are not the global archetype for the migrant as existential threat. ↑
28. The differential reception of Central American and Ukrainian displacement at the US/Mexico border is an illustrative case in point. See This American Life, ‘How the Other Side Leaves’ (NPR, 21 May 2022) https://www.thisamericanlife.org/770/my-lying-eyes/act-two-11 accessed 02 Sep 2025. ↑
29. See, for example, Rebecca Santana, ‘Where Trump and Harris Stand on Immigration and Border Security’ AP Sept. 28, 2024. ↑
30. Andrew I. Schoenholtz, Jaya Ramji-Nogales and Philip G. Schrag, The End of Asylum (Georgetown UP 2021). ↑
31. See, for example, Achiume, ‘Migration as Decolonization’ (n 18); Tayyab Mahmud, ‘Colonial Cartographies, Postcolonial Borders, and Enduring Failures of International Law: The Unending Wars Along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier’ (2010) 36 Brooklyn Journal of International Law 1; Chantal Thomas, ‘What Does the Emerging International Law of Migration Mean for Sovereignty?’ (2013) 14 Melb J Intl L 392; Karin de Vries and Thomas Spijkerboer, ‘Race and the Regulation of International Migration: The Ongoing Impact of Colonialism in the Case Law of the European Court of Human Rights’ (2021) 39 Netherlands Quarterly on Human Rights 291. ↑
32. See, for example, Tayyab Mahmud, ‘Cheaper than a Slave: Indentured Labor, Colonialism, and Capitalism’ (2010) 34 Whittier L Rev 215; Chantal Thomas, ‘Undocumented Migrant Workers in a Fragmented International Order, (2010) 25 Maryland J Intl L 187; Tayyab Mahmud, ’Precarious Existence and Capitalism: A Permanent State of Exception’ (2015) 44 Sw L Rev 699; Chantal Thomas, ‘Migration and International Economic Assymetry’ in Alvaro Santos, Chantal Thomas, and David Trubek, World Trade and International Investment Law Reimagined: A Progressive Agenda for Inclusive Globalization (Anthem Press 2019); Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism and the Rise of Racist Nationalism (Haymarket 2021). ↑
33. For recent illuminating analysis of the corporation in international law, see Baars (n 19); Doreen Lustig, Veiled Power: International Law and the Private Corporation 1886-1981 (OUP 2020); Katharina Pistor, The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton UP 2019); and Melissa J Durkee (ed) States, Firms and Their Legal Fictions (CUP 2024). ↑
34. But see Muchlinski, ‘Corporations in International Law’ (n 13) (‘Under company law, the corporate form is a device for the raising and administration of capital required for the investment that the corporation has been set up to undertake. It is not, therefore, analogous to a ’person’ as some theories mistakenly assert.’). ↑
35. Rutger Claassen, ‘Political Theories of the Business Corporation’ (2023) 18 Philosophy Compass 1. For insightful accounts of the intellectual and political histories of the corporate form, see Baars (n 19); Joshua Barkan, Corporate Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press 2013); David A. Ciepley, ‘Beyond Public and Private: Toward a Political Theory of the Corporation’ (2013) 107 American Political Science Review 13. ↑
36. Claassen (n 35). ↑
37. See, for example, Margaret M. Blair, ‘Locking in Capital: What Corporate Law Achieved for Business Organizers in the Nineteenth Century’ (2003) 51 UCLA L Rev 149. ↑
38. Claassen (n 35). ↑
39. Baars (n 19) 31–132. ↑
40. For a helpful comparative study of the company law across jurisdictions, see Reiner Kraakman and others, The Anatomy of Corporate Law: A Comparative and Functional Approach (OUP 2017). ↑
41. Muchlinski, ‘Corporations in International Law’ (n 13) provides a brief but helpful overview of the respective debates, and more detailed positions are canvassed in, for example, Jose E. Alvarez, ‘Are Corporations Subjects of International Law?’ (2011) 9 Santa Clara J Intl L 1; Julian Arato, ‘Corporations as Lawmakers’ (2015) 56 Harv J Intl L 229; Roland Portmann, Legal Personality and International Law (CUP 2010). ↑
42. For example, Julian Arato has argued that the law of corporate nationality plays a material role in conferring international lawmaking capacity (traditionally the domain of nation-states) on corporations in the context of international investment law. Arato (n 41). Situating these insights alongside doctrinal and theoretical work focused on the nationality and mobility of human persons would likely enrich our understanding of nationality as a border institution more generally. ↑
43. As a matter of doctrine, determining the nationality of a corporation can be complicated. Muchlinski, ‘Corporations in International Law’ (n 13). Under international law, a corporation acquires nationality on terms dictated by municipal law, as nationality is a matter that falls within the domestic jurisdiction of nation-states. Oliver Dörr, ‘Nationality’ in Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (OUP 2019) (citing the International Court of Justice’s Barcelona Traction Case and providing an overview of the nationality of legal persons in international law). However, under customary international law, the nationality of a legal person, such as a commercial corporation, for the purposes of attributing that corporation to a nation-state on the international plane, is by reference to its nation-state of incorporation. Muchlinski (n 13). To this criterion (nation-state of incorporation), some understand international law to include the requirement that the ‘seat’ of the corporation—its headquarters and so on—be located in the country of incorporation. See, for example, Dörr. ↑
44. Jeff Ernst, ‘“Go Home”: Honduran Islanders Fight Against Crypto Colonialists’ The Guardian (London, 5 July2022)  https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/05/honduras-land-rights-fight-crypto-colonialists accessed 02 Sep 2025. ↑
45. Honduras Próspera Inc and others v Republic of Honduras (ICSID Case No ARB/23/2) para 71. ↑
46. Rachel Corbett, ‘The For-Profit City That Might Come Crashing Down’, The New York Times (New York, 28 August 2024). ↑
47. Ibid. ↑
48. Ibid; Honduras Próspera (n 45) 1. Próspera’s charter provides for the creation of its own ‘security entities, including police, criminal investigation bodies, intelligence services, criminal prosecution, and penitentiary system’ under its exclusive control and establishes arbitration through a default arbitration provider as the forum and means of adjudicating ‘all causes of action involving Próspera ZEDE, its officers, agents and instrumentalities, or otherwise arising within Próspera ZEDE.’ Honduras Próspera (n 45) para 74. ↑
49. Corbett (n 46). ↑
50. Ibid. ↑
51. Honduras Próspera Inc, ’Notice of Intent to Submit Claims to Arbitration Pursuant to Article 10.16 of the CAFTA-DR’ (16 September 2022). ↑
52. Ernst (n 44). ↑
53. Nicholas Kunetz and Katie Surma, ‘A Lawsuit from Backers of a ’Startup City’ Could Bankrupt Honduras’ Wired(28September 2024). See Ley Orgánica de las Zonas de Empleo y Desarrollo Económico (ZEDE) [Organic Law of Economic Development and Employment (ZEDE)] (Decreto No. 120-2013) ch V, art 28, published in La Gaceta, Diario Oficial [L.G.], 6 September 2013 (Hond). ↑
54. ZEDE Law (n 53) ch V, art 28. ↑
55. Ibid. ↑
56. Ernst (n 44). ↑
57. United Nations, ‘Las ZEDE Podarían Suponer Serios Riesgos Para La Garantía De Los Derechos Humanos Por Parte Del Estado de Honduras’ (Honduras Press Release, 8 June2021). ↑
58. Global Witness, ‘Honduras: The Deadliest Country in the World for Environmental Activism’ (31 January 2017) https://globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/land-and-environmental-defenders/honduras-deadliest-country-world-environmental-activism/ accessed 02 Sep 2025. ↑
59. Ibid. ↑
60. Quinn Slobodian details Próspera’s intellectual and political origins, offering it as a prototype of ‘Silicon Valley Colonialism’. Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism (Metropolitan Books 2023). ↑
61. Guillaume Long, ‘How a Start-Up Utopia Became a Nightmare for Honduras’ Foreign Policy (24 January 2024). ↑
62. Clifford Chance, ‘Congress of Honduras Approves Repeal of Special Economic Zones (“ZEDES”) Which May Lead to Investor-State Disputes’ (May 2022). ↑
63. Xiomara Castro Sarmiento, ‘Statement to the 77th session of the UN General Assembly’ (20 September 2022) https://gadebate.un.org/sites/default/files/gastatements/77/hn_es.pdf accessed 02 September 2025. ↑
64. Long (n 61). ↑
65. According to ICSID, in the Fiscal Year 2025, 57% of ICSID awards upheld investors’ claim in part or in full. ICSID, ‘ICSID Releases Caseload Statistics for the 2025 Fiscal Year, With Expanded Data Insights’ Aug. 27 2025. https:// icsid.worldbank.org/news-and-events/news-releases/icsid-releases- caseload-statistics-2025-fiscal-year-expanded- data#:~:text=Over%20the%20history%20of%20ICSID,50%25%20of%20the%20amount%20claimed.&text=ICSID%20continues%20to%20see%20broader,is%20available%20for%20download%20here.&text=Published%20every%20six%20months%20in,in%20international%20investment%20dispute%20settlement. As another commentator notes, ‘The cases are heard by ad-hoc tribunals of arbitrators who are generally corporate lawyers. There is no precedent and no appeal.’ Kunetz and Surma (n 53). ↑
66. Honduras Próspera (n 45) para 71. ↑
67. Long (n 61). ↑
68. Ibid. ↑
69. Kunetz and Surma (n 53). ↑
70. For an example of scholarship demonstrating this property of international investment law, see Ntina Tzouvala, ‘Full Protection and Security’ (2022) 25 J Intl Econ L 224. As Andrew Larkin shows, even the mere plans of transnational corporations have been adjudicated to prevail over national law in the context of international investment law. Andrew Larkin, ‘From Business Plans to International Rights’ (2026) Harv J Intl L (forthcoming). My future elaboration of corporate borders more generally will require deeper engagement with anti-colonial, pro-democratic legal critique of international investment law, see, for example, David Schneiderman, The Difficulty of Decolonizing Investment Law (CUP 2022), approaching investment law as a crucial component of the international law governing borders. ↑
71. Andrew Phillips and JC Sharman, Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World (Princeton UP 2020); Stern (n 16). ↑
72. John Galbraith, Crown and Charter: The Early Years of the British South Africa Company (University of California Press 1974) 30. ↑
73. Ibid. ↑
74. Ibid 31. ↑
75. Ibid. ↑
76. Ibid. ↑
77. Ibid. ↑
78. Ibid 32. ↑
79. For a detailed account of this period, see Ibid 48–86. ↑
80. Ibid 34. ↑
81. Ibid 35. ↑
82. Ibid 24. ↑
83. Ibid. ↑
84. Galbraith (n 72) 57–58; Stern (n 16) 284. ↑
85. For a description, see Galbraith (n 72). ↑
86. In his detailed history of the British South Africa Company, Galbraith notes that for the likes of Rhodes, ‘The destiny of Anglo-Saxons could not be realized by the agency of governments; the necessary force and fire must be provided by men eager to devote their lives, their energy, and their money to the mission.’ Galbraith (n 72) 16. ↑
87. Cecil John Rhodes, Confessions of Faith (1877) cited in Alois S Mlambo, A History of Zimbabwe (CUP 2014) 36. ↑
88. And as James Gathii has noted in the context of East African colonization, here, too, Africans were constructed as insufficiently sovereign for self-rule but were sufficiently sovereign to cede their peoples and territories to the White rule. James Thuo Gathii, ‘Imperialism, Colonialism and International Law’ (2007) 54 Buffalo Law Review 1013. Alongside the mobilization of stereotypes of the Shona and Ndebele held by Europeans were constructions of Africans that at once rendered them present on their land but inherently incapable of occupying or ‘developing’ it, which logically destined these lands for European ‘enterprise’ and colonization. Galbraith (n 72) 25. ↑
89. For an analysis of key features of the corporation that rendered it especially suitable for colonial enterprise, see Stern (n 16)263 (pooling and protecting capital);Ibid271 (institutional permanence). ↑
90. Stern (n 16) 1–15. ↑
91. Ibid 5. ↑
92. Ibid 8. ↑
93. Galbraith (n 72) 125. ↑
94. Galbraith (n 72). ↑
95. Stern provides the example of the North Borneo Company, on which nineteenth century colonial corporations were modelled, which before the end of its first decade, ‘about twenty joint-stock companies out of the Netherlands, Britain, Hong Kong, and Germany owned over forty percent of the seventy-eight plantation lots within the Company’s jurisdiction, representing some sixty-five percent of the nearly 700,000 acres under cultivation’. Stern (n 16) 271. ↑
96. Stern (n 16) 288. ↑
97. Ibid 9. ↑
98. Baars (n 19) 249, 343–380. ↑
99. Cyril Zenda, ‘Doubts Grow Over Who’ll Benefit From UAE Carbon Deal for Fifth of Zimbabwe’ African Arguments (31 October 2023). ↑
100. Achiume, ‘Migration as Decolonization’ (n 18). ↑
101. See, for example, Jonathan Crush, Alan Jeeves and David Yudelman, South Africa’s Labor Empire: A History of Black Migrancy to the Gold Mines (Westview Press 1991) 1. ↑
102. Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman (n 101); William H. Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867-1895 (Yale UP 1987); Robert Vicat Turrell, Capital and Labour on the Kimberley Diamond Fields 1871-1890 (CUP 1987) ch 5. ↑
103. On the history of colonial taxation in South Africa, see Thatshisiwe Ndlovu, ‘Fiscal Histories of Sub-Saharan Africa: the Case of South Africa’ (PARI Working Paper Series No 2, July 2017). ↑
104. Ibid 7. ↑
105. Crush, Jeeves and Yudelman (n 101) 15. ↑
106. Musoni (n 5) 23, Mlambo (n 87); Mseba (n 23) 2024. ↑
107. Musoni (n 5) 23. ↑
108. Ibid. ↑
109. Ibid 25. ↑
110. Full-throated conceptualization of ‘corporate-induced’ displacement is a task I take on elsewhere. ↑
111. IOM, ‘Labor Migration Statistics’ Migration Data Portal https://www.migrationdataportal.org/themes/labour-migration-statistics accessed 02 September 2025 (noting that in 2022, ‘66% of international migrants of working age were migrant workers’). ↑
112. See, for example, Romola Adeola and Frans Viljoen, ‘Climate Change, Development Projects and Internal Displacement in Africa’ (2018) 62 J of African L 335; Ricardo Vecellio Segate, ‘Persecution and Labor Migrations Due to Corporate “Environmental” Exploitation: Waiting for the UNHRC’s Binding Treaty on Transnational Business Activities?’ (2022) 18 Loy U Chi Intl L Rev 31; and Jalia Kangave, ‘A TWAIL Analysis of Foreign Investment and Development-Induced Displacement and Resettlement: Lessons From Uganda’s Bujagali Hydroelectric Project’ (2012–13) 44 Ottawa L Rev 213. ↑
113. Jennifer Gordon describes ‘corporate demand as the driving force behind the design of immigration regimes that deliver a steady supply of compliant workers’ globally. Jennifer Gordon, ‘In the Zone: Work at the Intersection of Trade and Migration’ (2022) 23 Theoretical Inquiries in Law 147, 177 (2022). ↑
114. See, for example, Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (adopted 19 December 2018) UNGA Res 73/195; Susan Fratze and Brian Salant, ‘Moving Beyond “Root Causes”: The Complicated Relationship Between Development and Migration’ (Migration Policy Institute Policy Brief, January 2018). ↑
115. Gordon (n 113). ↑
116. National Security Council, ‘U.S. Strategy for Addressing the Root Causes of Migration in Central America’ (July 2021). ↑
117. Important work captures the fluidity of borders, unsettling conceptions of the border as a fixed boundary. See, for example, Ayelet Shachar, The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility (Manchester UP 2020). ↑
118. See Achiume, ‘Migration as Decolonization’ (n 18). ↑
119. On jurisdiction in international law, see, for example, Cedric Ryngeart, Jurisdiction in International Law (OUP 2008) and BS Chimni, ‘The International Law of Jurisdiction: A TWAIL Perspective’ (2022) 35 LJIL 29. On jurisdiction and political community in particular, see Asha Kaushal, ‘The Politics of Jurisdiction’ (2015) 78(5) Modern Law Review 749, 762–63 (‘Whether jurisdiction is described as parcelling out of legal authority within territorial boundaries, defining membership and inclusion in the nation-state, or establishing the distribution of power inside the polis, it always implicates the archetype of political community’.). ↑
120. Ayten Gündoğdu, ‘From the Colony to the Border: The Lawful Lawlessness of Racial Violence’ in Seyla Benhabib and Ayelet Shachar (eds), Lawless Zones and Rightless Subjects (CUP 2025). ↑
121. As Asha Kaushal writes, ‘Territorial jurisdiction plays a key role in constituting national borders and shoring up the constitution of that national community … Territorial jurisdictions … enact the very idea of political identity and subjectivity.’ Kaushal (n 119) 769. See also E. Tendayi Achiume, ‘Race, Borders and Jurisdiction’ (2022) 82 Heidelberg Journal of International Law465. ↑
122. See Achiume, ‘Migration as Decolonization’ (n 18), Achiume, ‘Racial Borders’ (n 2). ↑
123. See, for example, Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen and Ninna Nyberg Sorensen (eds), The Migration Industry and the Commercialization of International Migration (Routledge2013).Commercial Corporations are, of course, only one type of actor among many involved in the private governance of migration. For an example mapping these other private actors, see Jennifer M. Chacón, ‘Privatized Immigration Enforcement’ (2017) 52 Harv CR-CL L Rev 1. ↑
124. See, for example, Mahmud (n 32) 2010; Thomas, ‘Undocumented Migrant Workers’ (n 32) 2010, Walia Border and Rule (n 32) 2021. ↑
125. See, for example, Worger(n 102)xii (noting that ‘the diamond industry, within a decade of its establishment, had laid the foundation for a single regional economy stretching from the Cape in the south to the Zambezi in the north and changing forever the relations between black and white, Boer and Briton, Africa and Europe’). ↑
126. I recall here as well, my opening caveat regarding how this is not a total account of the borders of the region, which were, of course, the product of complexity, including in the array of their authors. ↑
127. See, for example, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (CUP 2008). ↑
128. For a detailed account of the establishment of Rhodesia’s boundaries, to which the BSAC was instrumental, see Judy Best and LM Zinyama, ‘Evolution of the National Boundary of Zimbabwe’ (1985) 11 J Hist Geo 419. For a detailed account of how Rhodes and the BSAC settled Rhodesia, including materially influencing its bounds, see generally Galbraith (n 72). ↑
129. For a description of the BSAC’s vision of a mining-based economy, the legal and policy frameworks it developed to implement this vision, and how it navigated this interest as White settlers pushed for greater legal protections and incentives for farming, see Tapiwa Madimu, Enocent Msindo and Sandra Swart, ‘Farmer-Miner Contestations and the British South Africa Company in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1895-1923’ (2018) 44(5) Journal of Southern African Studies 793. See also Klas Rönnbäck and Kondwani Happy Ngoma, ‘Regulatory Capture in the British Empire: The British South Africa Company and the Redefinition of Property Rights in Southern Africa’ (2024) 66 Business History 1069. ↑
130. Madimu and others, ibid 6. ↑
131. See Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (2nd edn, W W Norton & Company 1993); Donald E. Shulz and Deborah S. Schulz, The United States, Honduras, and the Crisis in Central America (Routledge 1994) 20; Joseph Nevins, ‘Migration as Reparations’ in Reece Jones (ed), Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement (University of Georgia Press 2019) 129. ↑
132. For an account of the role of US ‘colonial corporations’ in Central America, see Jason Colby, The Business of Empire: United Fruit, Race, and U.S. Expansion in Central America (Cornell UP 2013). ↑
133. Benjamin Maiangwa and others, ‘The Nation as Corporation: British Colonialism and the Pitfalls of Postcolonial Nationhood in Nigeria’ (2018) 25(1) Peace and Conflict Studies, art 3. ↑
134. Musoni (n 5) 2. ↑
135. Musoni cautions against viewing this boundary ‘as simply a marker of territorial and political limits between two states’, instead invites us to engage it as ‘a socially constructed space where local and global forces converge to produce history’. Musoni (n 5) 4. ↑
136. See Alois Mlambo, ‘History of Zimbabwean Migration’ in Jonathan Crush and Daniel Tevera (eds), Zimbabwe’s Exodus: Crisis, Migration, Survival (SAMP 2010). ↑
137. Musoni (n 5) 23. ↑
138. Ibid 22. ↑
139. Ibid. ↑
140. The Transvaal was instead invested in regulating the emigration of Afrikaners from the Transvaal to the British settlements of Natal and the Cape Colony. Ibid 23. ↑
141. Ibid. ↑
142. See ibid 23–40. ↑
143. Musoni (n 5) 29. ↑
144. Ibid 30–31. ↑
145. Ibid 30 (also noting the WNLA became a ‘major political player in the politics of labor and mobility across the Zimbabwe-South Africa border and in Southern Africa more generally’). ↑
146. Ibid. ↑
147. The stellar and foundational works of Adam M McKeown and Radhika Mongia, for example, chart the emergence of modern migration governance, attentive to the forms of migration governance that preceded nation-state migration governance, but neither devotes analytical focus on the transnational commercial corporation. Adam M McKeown, Melancholy Order (Columbia UP 2008); Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire (Duke UP 2018). ↑
148. Cindy Hahamovitch, ‘Creating Perfect Immigrants: Guestworkers of the World in Historical Perspective’ (2010) 44 Labor History 69, 75–78. ↑
149. Ibid 77. See also Kristin Surak, ‘Guestworkers: A Taxonomy’ (2013) 84 New Left Review 84. ↑
150. See, for example, McKeown(n 147),Lake and Reynolds (n 127). ↑
151. Hahamovitch (n 148) 77. John M. Smalberger, ‘The Role of the Diamond-Mining Industry in the Development of the Pas-Law System in South Africa’ (1976) 9 International Journal of African Historical Studies 419. ↑
152. Ibid 433. ↑
153. See Achiume, ‘Racial Borders’ (n 2) at 446–76. ↑
154. See, for example, Worger (n 102); Turrell (n 102). ↑
155. Musoni (n 5) 24. ↑
156. For important work in this vein see Catherine Besteman, ‘Militarized Global Apartheid’ (2019) 60 Current Anthropology S26. ↑
157. Recall Arato’s critique of international investment law’s doctrine of corporate nationality as pivotal to how investors (relying on the corporate form) subvert the sovereign will of nation-states. See Arato (n 41). ↑
158. There are also about ‘three dozen charter cities’ specifically, in operation globally. Corbett (n 46). For a helpful brief description of the history of SEZs and their predecessor Export Processing Zones in Latin America, see Anna Jurkevics, ‘Private Borders, Hidden Territories’ in Seyla Benhabib and Ayelet Shachar (eds), Lawless Zones and Rightless Subjects(CUP 2025)196–98. ↑
159. Slobodian (n 60); Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, The Hidden Globe: How Wealth Hacks the World (Riverhead Books 2024). ↑
160. Jurkevics (n 157) 192. ↑
161. Ibid 201. ↑
162. Slobodian (n 60). ↑
163. Robin Palmer, ‘Land Reform in Zimbabwe, 1980-1990’ (1990) 89 African Affairs 163, 164–65. ↑
164. Constitution of Zimbabwe, Amendment (No 17) Act 2005, s 2. ↑
165. See Bernhard von Pezold and Others v. Republic of Zimbabwe (ICSID Case No. ARB/10/15, Award, 28 July 2015). ↑
166. Ciaran Cross, ‘“Whoever Owns the Land, the Natives Do Not”: In re Southern Rhodesia’ (Critical Legal Thinking, 26 July 2018). ↑
167. Von Pezold (n 164) para 657. For incisive analyses of this finding, see Ntina Tzouvala, ‘Invested in Whiteness: Zimbabwe, the von Pezold Arbitration, and the Question of Race in International Law’ (2022) 2 Journal of Law and Political Economy 226; and Tzouvala ‘Full Protection and Security’ (n 70). ↑
168. Tzouvala, ‘Invested in Whiteness’ (n 166) 234–36. ↑
169. See, for example, Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property (Duke UP 2018). ↑
170. In her analysis of the international investment law at the centre of the von Pezold case, Tzouvala makes the compelling case that this law effectively ‘dictates the creation and reproduction of state mechanisms that systematically subordinate, even violently, parts of their population to enable the protection of foreign investors from disruption and challenge.’ Tzouvala ‘Full Protection and Security’ (n 70) 227. ↑
171. Tzouvala ‘Invested in Whiteness’ (n 166) 234. ↑
172. Joshua Barkan, ‘On the Systemic and Historical Analysis of Concessionary Zones’ (2023) 35 Public Culture 431. ↑
173. Joshua Barkan’s work seeks to develop a genealogical approach to concession agreements, which he notes have created and governed the legal form of these extractive enclaves across centuries and geographies. He argues that ‘a genealogical approach to concessions can help explain the shifting positions of sovereignty, law, property, and government across social formations, highlighting the development of a unique legal form—neither simply public law nor private right—central to the creation and transformation of capitalist societies today.’ Barkan (n 171) 432. ↑
174. Norman Girvan, writing in the context of anti-colonial Third World attempts to forge a New International Order, for example, describes the resource-rich colonial Third World state as ‘limited to the provision of infrastructure for the benefit of the corporations, which was paid for ultimately by the population.’ Girvan (n 19) 6. This is a different theory of the colonial state than is most dominant in the international legal theory on nation-statehood. ↑