![Corporate personality and economic nationalism in the postcolony](/files/styles/profile_image_2560x1440_/public/2024-07/Corporate%20personality%20and%20economic%20nationalism%20in%20the%20postcolony.png?h=d1cb525d&itok=prl9ZXoh)
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Phillipa Weeks Library, Level 4, Building 7, ANU College of Law
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Event description
Economic nationalism, in one form or another, has long been the primary threat to the mobility – and thus the power – of multi-national or global corporations. A central problematic for the global corporation is therefore how to manage various economic nationalisms, including the threat of tariff barriers, corporate tax regimes, and nationalisation. A crucial jurisdictional technique for managing this problematic is corporate personality, which allows a corporation to speak and act with legal effect. When the recognition of corporate personality travels, so too can the corporation.
In this paper, I explore how the technique of corporate personality has been deployed in postcolonial states to manage first anti-colonial, and then developmental (economic) nationalisms. In doing so, I argue that while juridical personality might be a legal fiction, it is not a ‘bare’ fiction, open to unlimited manipulation. Instead, it is a fiction around which meaning and material congeal – it is never only a corporation that speaks and acts, but a foreign corporation, or a high-technology corporation, etc. As I show by turning to postcolonial Indonesia, these congealed forms of corporate personality emerge in response to postcolonial law-making. Thus, corporate personality does not spread smoothly from Global North to South, but rather it is re-shaped, re-negotiated and re-invented in the colonial and postcolonial encounter.
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Speakers
Featured Speakers
![André Dao](/files/styles/event_people/public/2024-07/Speaker%20feature%20image%20%282%29_0.png?itok=XXZHGivM)
André Dao is a research fellow with the ARC Laureate Program on Global Corporations and International Law at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously a PhD candidate at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, also at the Melbourne Law School. His PhD research focused on the intersections between international human rights law and digital data technologies. He is also a creative writer of fiction and non-fiction.