| This new research programme analyses particular forms of globalisation-from-below: transnational practices that are considered acceptable (licit) by participants but are often illegal in a formal sense. The programme focuses on flows of poor people and goods across international borders in Asia movements that are not allowed by states but are not organised crime either. States declare these practices illegal and yet states themselves are often involved in them. The programme argues that methodologically the social sciences have been more adept at studying fixity than movement and it seeks to develop new tools to understand transnational movements, for which it takes a comparative perspective. Globalisation and transnationalism, although certainly not new phenomena, have become more prominent over the past few decades, resulting in worldwide movements of capital, goods and people. Most studies of these international flows have been framed in the conceptual and material context of the modern nation state. Consciously and unconsciously, most social science takes state territories as its natural units, and we are used to academic specialisations such as the sociology of India or the history of China. This research programme explores the limitations of seeing like a state. It adopts a perspective that privileges participants in international activities, leading us to different understandings of processes of transnational movement. It focuses especially on a theme that is rarely highlighted in the study of transnational practices: the interface of legality and illegality. In the absence of a global sovereign authority it is impossible to distinguish, in an objective and timeless way, between the illegal and the legal in flows of people and commodities that cross international borders. What passes for international crime is so closely intertwined with the domestic-legal that for analytical purposes criminal and not-criminal systems form a coherent whole, at times legal, at times illegal. Determining thresholds of distinction between the legal and illegal will always come, in other words, by appeal either to powerful state interests or international social mores rather than by an ability to know in some objective fashion where the dividing line between the two lies. |
