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Abstract

Globalization and neoliberal ideology is an interconnected framework that irreversibly shapes the operations of contemporary state governance. In the scope of critical geopolitics, I use comparative research on Chile and the United States to reveal the unprecedented spatial conditions for international sovereignty imposed by multinational corporations and private-sector companies with key stakeholdership in democracies around the world. The definition of sovereignty is contextualized in the Western rationale for spatial belonging that compartmentalizes a public into protected subjects or suspected threats. Identifying the weaknesses inherent in political sovereignty by engaging with the research of critical geopoliticians Duncan Weaver and John Agnew, and surveillance studies scholar Simone Browne, I analyze the modern reconfiguration of state decision-making and its effects on public sovereignty. With focus on the United States’ and Chile’s processes of neoliberal transformation, I creatively recount my observations and reflections on two concentrated zones of sacrificed public sovereignty, Quintero-Punchaví, Chile and New Orleans, USA. I engage the physical constructions of space that I observed through surveillance, security, and management of public goods with their respective political-economic analyses. My aim in this research is to offer a critically discursive position that serves not to denounce economic privatization unequivocally but rather critique its encroachment upon the inherent vulnerabilities of established sovereign structures.

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