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Border Crossings: Nafta, Regulatory Restructuring, And The Politics Of Place, Ruth Buchanan

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Professor Buchanan begins her paper by questioning whether

recent economic and political shifts towards notions of

"globalization" (e.g., the NAFTA) have failed to consider the

politics or economics of change in particular places. Her prime

example of a "place" where integration is illogically forced against

a background of differentiation is the U.S.-Mexico border region.

Through the scope of a "regulatory complex" (a complex of legal,

institutional, regulatory, and social orderings), she departs from the

common view of the NAFTA as a productive tool of North American

integration, and instead views the NAFTA as exacerbating

"differences between localities, industries, and labor …