Logistica e Stato nel presente globale. Sovranità, corridoi, confini

Only recently logistics has become an object of research for social sciences and political theory. As something more than a technical element, or something limited to specific productive functions, logistics is indeed increasingly understood as one of the vectors in the field of forces against which one can grasp the transformations of politics in the global era. Logistical processes are part of the changes in trans- portation, distribution and production that made globalization happen and allow contemporary capitalism to operate. But logistics is also a powerful logic behind processes of optimization and organization that impact on the space and time coor- dinates of contemporary politics. Logistics is thus an angle from which to discern elements of integration and logics that remain often excluded from the analysis on the transformations of sovereignty, of the state and of the border. This article uses the lenses of logistics to discuss the formation of new political spaces and eccentric institutional forms prompted by supply chain capitalism. The article introduces the concept of the politics of corridors as a way to name these spaces and forms and the way they have become shared across a number of actors across the globe. The article argues that the politics of corridors highlights the way in which logistical processes impact on the powers and capacities of state’ administration and have become shared priorities in contemporary politics. It then highlights the fact that this does not correspond to the emergence of an homogeneous world, but rather to the production of differences and hierarchies that reinscribe sovereignty, the state and the national border against the transnational background, and originate new manifestations of the border along different lines of clustering and differentiation. The article ends discussing the way in which the discourses on the return of the state and so called neo-sovereignism, while grasp the emergence of nationalist agen- das, overlook the way in which logistical processes transform the state, the global and their relation, rather than producing an opposition between the two, and how sovereignism and nationalism are also part of this transformation.