The Anthropology of Special Economic Zones (Free Ports, Export Processing Zones, Tax Havens)

Abstract

Special economic zones (SEZs) are a key manifestation of neoliberal globalization. As of 2020, more than 150 nations operated more than 5,400 zones. The combined workforce of factories and service industries in bonded warehouses, export processing zones (EPZs), free trade zones (FTZs), science parks (SPs), regional development zones (RDZs), economic corridors (ECs), and other types of SEZs exceeds one hundred million. These figures include tax havens, offshore financial centers, and free ports. Neoliberal academics and researchers from international organizations say that this has been a long time coming, as the freedom offered in the zones was integral to being human and first implemented in free ports of the Roman Empire. Critical social scientists, among them many anthropologists, have instead identified the zones as products of a 1970s rupture from Keynesian welfarism and Fordist factory regimes to neoliberal globalization and post-Fordist flexible accumulation. Since the early 21st century, scholarship in anthropology has expanded this critical stance on worker exploitation in SEZs toward a historical analysis of SEZs as pacemakers of neoliberal manufacturing globalization since the 1940s. A second strand of ethnographies uses a postmodern lens to research the zones as regimes that produce neoliberal subjectivities and graduated sovereignty.

Sleights of Hand: Free Ports, Bordering, and the Racial Capitalist Roots of Economic Nationalist Strategies in the US and the UK

“…19 Neveling, who has written extensively about the global history of special economic zones, notes that the zones are often touted as 'engines of growth' by neoliberal regimes, disregarding 'the short-lived nature of SEZ booms and the damaging effects of deinustrialisation at the end of such booms ' (2020b: 191). Neveling (2021) agrees with those of us using racial capitalism as a lens for analysing FTZs that it can provide a useful perspective. 20 This history has been neither seamless nor advocated by just one political pole, as Wetherell (2016) illustrates.…”