The Hidden Globe

“I am, and will always be, a part of this world apart—a place defined by a certain placelessness.”

The Hidden Globe focuses on geographies that Abrahamian refers to as figuratively “placeless.” Here, she emphasizes her personal connection to these kinds of locations because of her experience growing up in Geneva. This framing sets the stage for the subjective, first-person opinions that Abrahamian evinces throughout the text.

“On one hand, Geneva’s composition epitomizes a familiar kind of internationalism: the tangible, imperfect, often lovely kind that brings people of the world together in one place at one time, in peace. But there is something else at work here—something you can’t see, but whose influence on the world around it is as potent as the globalism of flesh and blood. I call it the spectral economy: the distant, disparate, yet astonishingly lucrative transactions that happen not in Geneva, but from Geneva. The city is full of conduits, or entrepôts, for a capitalism that is run remotely. It functions less as a place where things happen than as a portal to other worlds. And it turns out there are many more places like it. This book is about these places.”

Abrahamian lays out the qualities that make up the geographies she describes as the “hidden globe.” Here and elsewhere in the text, Abrahamian uses vivid figurative language and metaphor to bring these places to life. For instance, she refers to the hidden globe as “the spectral economy,” a metaphor that emphasizes the obscure, barely glimpsed character of this purposefully concealed system; the comparison also evokes the historical antecedents of the hidden globe—the “specters” or ghosts of colonial pasts.

“The hidden globe is a kind of transfiguration of this map, an accretion of cracks and concessions, suspensions and abstractions, carve-outs and free zones, and other places without nationality in the conventional sense, stretching from the ocean floor to outer space. The hidden globe is a mercenary world order in which the power to make and shape law is bought, sold, hacked, reshaped, deterritorialized, reterritorialized, transplanted, and reimagined. It is state power catapulted beyond a state’s borders. It is also a state’s selective abdication of certain powers within its remit: enclaves filled not by lawlessness but by different, weirder laws.”

Abrahamian uses poetic language to depict the Differing Modes of State Sovereignty that constitute the hidden globe: The long list of active verbs that portray law as a body that is violently assaulted and otherwise deranged relies on the rhetorical technique of personification. Abrahamian describes