Professor Saskia Sassen is a  world-renowned scholar who teaches at Columbia University in New York. She became increasingly known in the social sciences since the early  1990s, after the publication of her book The Global City (Princeton  University Press, 1991), which introduced an urban and spatial perspective into the anti-capitalist critique to late-century market  models and the growing power of the digital economy.

In March 2017, KR editor Giulia Torino met Professor Sassen in  Cambridge, after a talk that she gave at the Department of Geography. On that occasion, Sassen touched upon three analytic concepts that she had  developed in her latest book Expulsions (Harvard University  Press/Belknap, 2014): the concept of ‘systemic edge’, the formation of ‘extreme territories’ under extractive capitalist forces, and the  ‘before method’ approach needed when change becomes foundational. Here, we publish the conversation that emerged from that initial encounter, beginning with Sassen’s early work and arriving at her most recent  research. The aim is to examine some of the crucial themes of our time  in the light of an academic positioning that explores emergent  conditions in an ‘age of extraction’. Conditions that might be best  captured in what Sassen likes to describe as the ‘zone before method’.

Giulia Torino:

Saskia, your work is widely known for  having introduced the conceptual category of the ‘global city’. You  were among the very first scholars in sociology to posit the  territorialisation of the highly digitised economic sectors that had  been emerging during the 1980s. By this I mean that you highlighted, at a  very early stage, how certain urban spaces, back then mainly centred in  Europe and North America, were acting as key nodes in global financial  networks. How did you get to the point of arguing that finance is ‘the  steam engine of our epoch’ and that we are in a financial age, rather  than in a digital or information age – as others claim?

Saskia Sassen:

‍When the discussion about  globalisation and digitisation came up in the 1980s the most common  notion was that, with digitisation, firms and all kinds of other actors  could go global and leave behind the material concentration of  facilities present in cities. The rapidly ascending notion was that  cities would become a bit obsolete, a bit unnecessary for advanced  economic sectors, good just for the poor and the modest middle classes.

And, in fact, most major cities in the 1960s and 1970 were poor –  London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, etc., were all broke. Middle class  residents were moving to suburbs, and so were traditional style  corporations, such as the large insurance companies and the headquarters  of car manufacturers.

I could not help coming up with an alternative interpretation:  something along the lines of digitisation requiring its own very  material conditions and, further, generating a speed up of operations  and diversifications which might bring back the advantages of proximity.

Further, it struck me that the acceleration of transactions enabled  by digitisation would make the management of economic operations more  complex. I saw this in the ascendance of finance — and the relative  decline or stagnation of conventional banking. The speed of transactions  and the possibility of doing this at a global scale meant not only more  speed but also a more networked economic system in that no single firm  could do everything in-house the way the old corporations used to. And  this meant a multiplication of highly specialised smaller firms  addressing the increasingly complex needs of large firms.

But each of these smaller firms can produce only some of what the big  firms and the financial system need. From there comes the rise of  complex networked specialised firms increasingly concentrated in major  cities. This also explains the physical concentration in major  cities of rapidly expanding and increasingly networked sectors engaging  in this provision. I called this an intermediation function,  and the global city is the most complex space for the production and  scale-up of that intermediation function. The irony was, thus, that  highly digitised complex operations actually benefitted from physical  concentration.

GT:

‍Is this intermediation function what made  possible the ‘resurgence’ of late twentieth-century metropolises,  turning them into global cities?

SS:

‍Exactly. In the period after WWII, economic  growth resided in the making of suburbs, large factories and transport  systems. Deregulation, privatisation, and globalisation in the 19802 and  1990s began to change the economic landscape.

It was this new intermediation function — that is the global  city — which began to bring wealth back into the cities. And did so in  an excessive way: eventually displacing the more modest middle classes  and working classes from their neighbourhoods to build luxury offices,  housing and shops.

In short, one key hypothesis I arrived at early on in my research on  the global city was that intermediation was an increasingly strategic  and systemically necessary function for the global economy that took off  in the 1980s and continues today.

GT:

In a lecture that you gave at the University of  Cambridge in March, you talked about extreme territories as the product  of processes of extraction, both material and immaterial: of natural  resources, labour force, identities, and so on. Indeed, some of these  considerations already emerged in 2014, in your book Expulsions. How does this extractive logic relate to the financial age that made possible the emergence of global cities?

SS:

The economic system I described above was  always, in a way, extractive. Starting with what it took to make digital  technologies. Finance, I argue, took a very specific and distinctive  shape, one that also makes it extractive, and radically different from  traditional banking. What marks the specificity of our current period is  that we have extracted so many resources from our planet and pushed so  many people and whole communities off their land to do so, that this  extractive logic is now becoming highly visible. Elsewhere I have argued  that this extractive mode has also generated new types of migrations.  And it is not clear to me how this all ends, but it can’t be very good.

GT:

‍Recently I was reading an article in which you  were positing the importance of considering expulsion as an analytical  category, which adds something more to the well-established category of  exclusion, as it introduces the concept of ‘systemic edge’. What are the main differences between borders, peripheries, and systemic edges?

SS:

Very glad you picked up on this. In Expulsions  I develop an argument, partly methodological and partly conceptual,  that aims at identifying a radical rupture that goes well beyond what is  captured with more familiar categories such as inequality and social  exclusion. When that systemic edge is crossed, such conditions become  invisible to our ‘standard measures’. I see a multiplication of sharp  breaking points that can be thought of as systemic edges. Once crossed  you are in a different space; it is not simply a less agreeable or  liveable zone, as might be the spaces of social exclusion. It is far  more radical: you are out.

GT:

What do you mean exactly by ‘out’? Could you  elaborate on this condition of simultaneous expulsion and invisibility  that, as you argue, takes place once the systemic edge is crossed?

SS:

I argue that these systemic edges have the  effect of conceptually rendering invisible what is expelled, no matter  how material it might be. For instance, the very long term unemployed in  the US simply disappear from our statistics. This goes well beyond  social exclusion: they have been expelled from the system.  Something similar happens with ‘dead land’: once land cannot be used  anymore to extract natural resources it becomes invisible, even though  it has a very visible material condition. Several vectors are at play  here. One is the difference between expulsion and exclusion: the latter  takes place inside a system, and hence entails the possibility of  eventual incorporation. For instance, the eventual incorporation of the  Irish in the United States, who had long been seen as ‘different’. Or  the — albeit very partial — incorporation of ethnic groups like  Afro-Americans and Latinos in the US political system.

GT:

So, are expulsions peripheries?

SS:

Sort of. But, at least in one type of critical  analysis, the periphery is working for the centre of the power zone. I  do not think you have that with the expulsions that I am focused on. I  think expulsion is actually an act of profound conceptual discarding, of  eliminating. And I am persuaded we will see more and more of it in the  future. For instance, the massive land grabs in the ‘Global South’ by  all kinds of foreign governments and corporations: they are rendering  the people working their small plots of land completely irrelevant,  invisible, even a sort of nuisance to the larger corporate project of  using rural areas — for mining, for water grabs, for developing  plantation economies where before there were small land holders, etc.  Those expelled small holders, with their long-standing knowledge about  how to keep the land alive, become invisible, and reappear as slum  dwellers in large cities or as migrants in the ships of smugglers. Their  histories and their knowledge have been rendered invisible in this  passage.

GT:

Living at the systemic edge seems to take on  many forms. Including forms of financial invisibility. Yet, within a  financial ontology, I can see how this translates into a form of social —  even existential? — invisibility. According to this, would you say that  sanctuary cities, either de jure or de facto, are  extreme territories acting at the systemic edge? I am thinking, for  instance, of the responses on the part of some US cities and their  mayors to the travel ban imposed by Donald Trump. Or of those by some  European cities to the triggering of Article 50 by Theresa May, and to  the more general spread of anti-immigration sentiments throughout the  EU.

SS:

Yours is a great conceptual move — “sanctuary cities, either de jure or de facto,  are extreme territories acting at the systemic edge.” I had not thought  of this, but in a way, they are. What you are pointing to goes beyond  the people…You are invoking a space, and put that way, yes, the  sanctuary city is an invisible space. It becomes visible when  persecution hits the refugees inside the sanctuary city. Returning to  the more standard understanding, the sanctuary cities movement tends to  arise from a specific politics: the persecution of particular segments  of the population. Today in the US it is about irregular migrants and  Muslims, both of whom have been openly marked by the national government  as problematic, to put it mildly. Growing segments of these two  populations are at risk of becoming persecuted, and are already so in a  growing range of recent events in the US. At the same time, this is  further feeding a sort of counter-movement that began to emerge about  five years ago, what I like to think of as the ‘global street’.

At a more encompassing level I see an emergent configuration where  sanctuary cities will be put to extreme test, and take on new meanings.  This will happen as consequence of the escalating expulsions of millions  of people from their villages and rural areas throughout the world.

The key factor here lies in particular modes of economic development:  the rapid expansion of massive plantation agriculture, mining, and the  escalation of both desertification and floods. One overwhelming result  is a massive loss of habitat for millions of people. Consequently, large  cities and their vast slums become one of the last places where those  millions can flee.

GT:  

‍On your line of thought, I wonder if we could  even consider these big cities of the Global South, with their almost  incessant production and re-production of shantytowns and highly  segregated social spaces largely derived from rural-to-urban migrations,  as some form of sanctuary cities. Yet, the condition that these  migrants generally encounter in the ‘sanctuary’ urban realities that  they flee to is not exactly an ideal ultimate hope…Which is, then, this  ‘new meaning’ that you mentioned in relation to sanctuary cities and  migrations?

SS:

Aha — you are right, there is a resonance here  with my argument that our big cities are the last spaces where the  expelled from rural areas can find a place to ‘put their bodies down’  and, also, to develop a sub-economy — as in immigrant neighbourhoods,  for example. Yet I would still not call this a sanctuary function. I  think of it more as a function of the fact that our big cities are  spaces that cannot be fully controlled by governments or the powerful  actors that might rule a city.

A sanctuary city requires an active participation by insiders. And  that is beautiful. What I am speaking about is more like a frontier  zone, which I define as a zone where actors from different worlds have  an encounter for which there are no established rules of engagement. In  our colonial past, the frontier was at the edges of empire, and we basically slaughtered those we encountered. Today most land is privately  owned and/or controlled. The only real frontier where such encounters  can happen lies in our big cities, that cannot be fully controlled.

GT:  

What is, then, the role played by land grabs in these world-wide processes of human expulsion and forced migration?

SS:  

Let me answer through one example. I have  examined two very serious situations in two very different parts of the  world — Myanmar and Honduras — where land grabs are a key issue  explaining violence and persecution, although the typical explanation  tends to overlook this.

One of them is the case of the Rohingya persecution in Myanmar, which  has most commonly been constructed in terms of a religious and ethnic  persecution only. What I argue, instead, is that since 2012, land grabs  began to play an important role in this latest phase of the centuries  old persecution of the Rohingya. In Myanmar, the military have been  grabbing land from smallholders with no compensation since the 1990s,  threatening the lives of those who tried to resist. Since 2012, the  military have begun to sell or give away land to foreign corporations  for mining, agriculture, water exploitation, and so on. Land grabs have  now finally also reached in the rather remote areas where much of the  Rohingya population is concentrated. All this played an important role  in the persecution of Rohingya people, Most recently, and first, the  government formally allocated over 1,268,077 hectares (3,100,000 acres)  in the Rohingya’s area of Myanmar for corporate rural development. This  has opened the whole region, well beyond the formal figures. Yes,  religion is an issue, but the rising expulsion format has to do with  corporate development and many of the diverse Buddhist minorities are  among the major losers of their land.

GT:

As we approach a conclusion, I would like to  draw on the conceptual categories that you introduced, and that we have  been discussing so far, in order to mention a project you are currently  working on: the ‘Before Method’ approach. During your talk in Cambridge  last March, you argued for the need to ‘de-theorise’ well-established  categories both inside and outside of academic research, in order to be  able to ‘re-theorise’ in more meaningful ways. What does it mean to  locate ourselves ‘before method’, when analysing extreme processes of  natural and human extraction?

SS:  

Ah, happy to hear this question. The diverse  extreme conditions we have been discussing is what led me to begin to  develop a conceptual and research zone, which I called ‘Before  Method’. As you know there are well-known books called ‘After  Method’. It gave me a special pleasure to wind up with Before Method —  but I mean it literally: this is not a play of words with those earlier  authors on After Method. Not at all. One way of positioning this effort  is that the current global age that took off in the 1980s has unsettled  many of the major social, economic, and political categories through  which we explain the preceding Keynesian era in the West. My concern is  particularly with the social sciences — economy, polity, society,  justice, inequality, state, globalisation, and immigration. These are  all powerful categories that explain much about the realities they  represent. However, those realities have also mutated. A first move in  research, therefore, is to posit that we need to discover what these  major categories veil or obscure about our epoch, precisely because they  are powerful. In my own work, I have sought to show that the national  and the global are powerful categories that hide as much as they reveal  about our current epoch, and so does their mutual  exclusivity. A second key move shall then be to cut across the knowledge  silos we have generated in over fifty or more years of research in the  social sciences.