Global Customs Regimes and the Traffic in Sovereignty

Focusing on the character of national customs regimes, this paper argues that the anthropology of the state should investigate widely shared features of nationstates, not just distinctions among individual states or types of states. As governments are restructured because of the ascendance of supranational bodies, transnational commerce, and national security threats, customs policies around the world emerge as key sites for the production of new criteria of statehood and new forms of sovereignty. Necessary to the state, these standards are neither developed nor controlled by national governments but involve the interventions of two international institutions: the World Trade Organization and the less wellknown World Customs Organization. They are equally rooted in partnerships between governments and multinational capital via relations of subcontracting, outsourcing, and national branding. Closely tied to the advance of neoliberal economic agendas, these developments provide a cover for shifts in the expression and location of state power on a global scale.