open Democracy News Analysis - The world’s third spaces, Saskia Sassen - Comments

markyturner on "The world’s third spaces"

markyturner — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 03:28:36 +0000

This essay, to my mind, really is not clear about what it is saying.

It may be touching on something important, but would be far better served by plain English rather than obtuse gobbledygook - which often indicates a lack of meaning rather than any hidden depths.

Caroline Pearce on "The world’s third spaces"

Caroline Pearce — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 16:33:55 +0000

I would like to pick up a few points in response to the above reply by Daniel Miller, as I feel you slightly misconstrued Sassens point.

Firstly whether these third spaces are necessarily new. There is no doubt much evidence to suggest that third spaces have always existed in some form, yet it seems to me that Sassens is arguing that they have - in contemporary global society - a role and capacity for action which is relatively unprecedented. Moreover the role of the third space is gaining in significance.
Also the example you cite could be used to support Sassens arguement as an indicator of the beginning of the establishment of third spaces - for 1937 is well within what is considered 'modernity'. Not to mention that fact that the Algerian War could be seen as but one catalyst that provoked the move towards the construction and acceptibility of third spaces.

Secondly using the term 'third space' overcomes precisely those problems of speaking of the global and local by acknowledging that they do overlap and are not always easily distinguishable from one another. It also takes into account that there are organisations and individual actors that work not only through or within but above national boundaries. These when referred to as international or worse 'glo-cal' are misleading because it neglects the way in which these organisations are still bound by the nation-state but not as you say 'strictly reducible' to national control.

daniel_miller on "The world’s third spaces"

daniel_miller — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 12:03:30 +0000

The phenomenon which Sassen addresses here is clearly important. However, a couple of things should pause for thought.

First of all, it is by no means certain that these spaces are as novel as she suggests. Arguably, interstitial, semi-autonomous, non-state spaces have always existed within the seemingly coherent territories of national sovereignty. It is noteworthy that the 1937 film Pepe le Moko refers to the Casbah of Algiers precisely in this way (as indeed, Pontecorvo's more famous Battle of Algiers does too) and doubtless a multitude of other examples could be furnished as well.

Secondly, the term "third space" is arguably misleading, since the spheres of the national and the global are finally themselves overlapping, and not easily separable. More to the point, a factor which this denomination seems to me to elide is the issue of the ways in which contemporary military-industrial spheres of control are no longer precisely national either, if indeed they ever were. This is to say, the "other" of Hizbullah is neither Lebanon, nor indeed Israel, but rather the IDF - an intricately organized actor possessed of its own operational agency, which is not strictly reducible to a form of national control

The world’s third spaces, Saskia Sassen

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 13:47:52 +0000

A key yet much overlooked feature of the current period is the proliferation of partial, often highly specialised, global assemblages of bits of territory, authority and rights once firmly ensconced in national institutional frames. These assemblages cut across the binary of "national vs global" - this being the usual way of attempting to understand what is in fact genuinely new.

Saskia Sassen is professor in the department of sociology at Columbia University and at the London School of Economics. Her books include Losing Control? Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization (Columbia University Press, 1996), The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, 2001), and Territory, Authority, and Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton University Press 2006)

Also by Saskia Sassen in openDemocracy:

▪ "A universal harm: making criminals of migrants" (20 August 2003)

▪ "Fear and camouflage: the end of the liberal state?" (22 December 2005)

▪ "Free speech in the frontier-zone" (20 February 2006)

▪ "A state of decay" (2 May 2006)

▪ "Migration policy: from control to governance" (13 July 2006)

▪ "Globalisation, the state and the democratic deficit" (18 July 2007)

▪ "Lahore: urban space, niche repression" (21 November 2007)

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