ABSTRACT
In the face of contemporary global risks and transnational threats, the question about the extent and form of what constitutes the boundaries of our international and domestic societies have become more pressing than ever: Where does the international begin and where does it end, when, for example, the global war on terror also takes place at desktops at home? How fluid are these boundaries when risk models and algorithms used by private investors lead to global financial dynamics that can produce global financial instabilities? Likewise, what is there to do to with the still common claim that the nation state is the ‘primary’ actor in world politics in the face of a plethora of international, transnational and domestic non-governmental organizations, international organizations, multinational corporations or private military companies? Our contemporary world order is the product of the interplays between various actors, devices (e.g. lists, computers) and knowledge structures (such as economics or international law). This ‘complexity’ consists of various spaces (urban, regional, national, international, transnational, global etc.) and temporalities (think of the temporality in financial markets vis-à-vis the temporality of diplomacy) which makes it impossible to reduce this complexity to the confines of the state system. This implies that well-established categories with which we defined the boundaries of the nation state (e.g. public/private or national/international) hardly capture contemporary dynamics and the political dimension inscribed in them.
