The Dream of Formality: Racialization Otherwise and International Economic Law

Abstract

This article explores the central role of formalization in the history and functioning of international economic law. International economic law, in constituting and managing a ‘modern’ world economy, has relied on what we call ‘the dream of formality’. This dream gives a sense of internal coherence and future totality to international economic law. It enables international economic law to claim awareness and progressive inclusion of socio-economic and legal relations outside the ‘formal’ modern economy while enabling a regime of differentiation of the so-called ‘surplus’—often racialized—population. In a world where ‘informality’ is the norm and ‘formality’ is the exception, formalization’s colonial origins have evolved into a fully-fledged regime of social management and value extraction. This regime has embedded itself in international labour law and human rights, as well as in areas of international economic law such as Aid for Trade and Global Value Chains. Building on contemporary debates on racial and post-colonial capitalism, we focus on Colombia’s informal economy to illustrate the elusiveness of the dream of formality, and how current exercises of othering underpin today’s practices of ‘racialization otherwise’. Our question, then, is: what would international economic law look like if it did not follow the dream of formality but instead embraced the challenge of sustaining life?

Research on Legal Supervision System for Economic Based on Big Data

“…While facilitating life and promoting economic development, this new thing has also given rise to a series of legal issues. A large number of enterprises enter the market, disorderly growth causes negative problems including waste of resources, environmental pollution, which may cause dissatisfaction among users and other stakeholders [3]. Whether the development of economic platforms needs to be supervised, how to supervise and regulate, how to reasonably deal with the problems between the supervision and innovation of economic platforms, and standardize the development of sharing economy to promote the development of market economy has become an urgent problem to be solved, therefore, the study of the legal system of market supervision of economic platforms has great significance at the level of theory and system construction [4].…”