Online | Corporate Borders

Speaker: Professor Tendayi Achiume (Stanford University)

Chair: Dr Mark Dsouza

About the lecture

Most legal theory treats border governance as a function of nation-state sovereignty, and as primarily the domain of the state. Yet transnational corporations have a long, colonial history of making and using borders and race together as technologies of economic profit. Even in the present, corporate enterprise plays a material role in constituting the meaning and application of national borders, and corporations profit immensely from forms of jurisdictional arbitrage made possible by legal categories, including racialized and racializing legal categories. The border is, in some meaningful but not totalizing sense, for and by the corporation, and “corporate borders” are racial borders. This lecture will highlight some of the legal regimes that institutionalize corporate racial borders, and reflect on their implications for border justice.

About the speaker

Professor E. Tendayi Achiume is an international legal scholar, focusing on international human rights law, international refugee law and international migration law. Her academic research explores the global governance of racism and xenophobia, and the legal and ethical implications of colonialism and other forms of empire for the governance of international migration. In recognition of the “exceptional creativity” and “promise for important future advance” of Achiume’s research in these areas, she was awarded a 2023 MacArthur Fellowship. She is an Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria; a Research Associate with the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand; and a Research Associate with the Refugee Studies Center at the University of Oxford. Professor Achiume is a former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, and was the first woman to serve in this role since its creation in 1993. For the 2024-2025 academic year she is a scholar in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

About Current Legal Problems

The Current Legal Problems (CLP) lecture series and annual volume was established over fifty five years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and is recognised as a major reference point for legal scholarship.

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