Ronen Palan
Biographic Data
| ID | 92879 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ronen Palan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ronen |
| FAMILY NAME | Palan |
| SIGNATURE | PALAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | City, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2773-5352 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 295 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1988 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Offshore finance as statecraft: Unpacking the strategic use of OFCs by Chinese capital
Nearly three-quarters of Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) is routed through offshore financial centers (OFCs), a proportion significantly higher than that observed for most Western multinationals. Offshore finance is typically understood as a mechanism of market escape and sovereignty erosion. This article offers an alternative interpretation. Drawing on corporate-level ownership reconstruction and interviews, and focusing on Chin…
Profit and Power: Arbitrage in the Era of the Multinational Corporation
Why are Multinational Corporations so powerful and elites so wealthy while still operating within nation-state rules? Profit and Power examines how firms engage in legal transgression, operating at the edges of legality to maximize profits. Offering a practical analysis of jurisdictional arbitrage, Ronen Palan exposes the hidden mechanisms behind corporate power in globalization and reveals how the rule-based transgressor elite emerged through st…
Voice, exit . . . arbitrage: The politics of the modern multinational firm
Multinational corporations (MNCs) are often seen as singular organizations, with a parent company controlling branches in other countries. But this is an abridged version of decentred corporate groups structured as clusters of separate legal entities in several jurisdictions held together by equity ties. The article argues that while the abridged version of the MNC matches those aspects of those organizations that are of interest to economists, i…
Global corporate structure of Chinese state-owned financial institutions through Hong Kong
Arbitrage spaces in the offshore world: Layering, 'fuses' and partitioning of the legal structure of modern firms
In this article, we discuss the way offshore financial centres are used by the multi-subsidiary, multi-jurisdictional group structure known as the 'multinational enterprise' to arbitrage between social geographies of political jurisdictions. We define arbitrage as the use of corporate legal entities located in diverse jurisdictions to arbitrate a third country's rules and regulations. Using a new method to categorize firm-level data from Van Dijk…
Systemic Unreason: A Psychic History of States and Corporations
The history of capitalism has long been told as a story of structural laws and behavioural axioms. In this essay, we sketch a general theory of order and change that instead foregrounds the path-shaping power of the fictive and the irrational. Our key claim is that any collective body is underwritten by psychological investment in a foundational delusion and that this cuts two ways. Visions of wholeness and narratives of closure are what bind ind…
Arbitrage power and the disappearing financialized firm
Modern corporations have increasingly been adopting a decentred, layered, and multi-jurisdictional form as a strategy of boundary manipulation known amongst tax lawyers and accountants as 'regulatory arbitrage'. The argument we put forward in this article is that the scholarly work that treats these strategies as mere tax avoidance practices has contributed to an underestimation and misrecognition of the way contemporary multinationals operate in…
Futurity, Offshore, and the International Political Economy of Crime
Capitalist economies consist of co-habiting economies, an economy of exchange of goods and services, or the “economy of the present.” This economy is dwarfed by an “economy of the future” that trades in anticipated future earnings and income streams. However profitable, the organized criminal world operates largely in the economy of the present and caught in the slow lanes of the modern economy. But as many criminal organizations are run by savvy…
The best of both worlds: Scale economies and discriminatory policies in London's global financial centre
From the early 1960s onwards London has managed to vie with New York for the top spot as an international financial centre. Ever since then, London has reigned as a leading global financial hub, despite not having behind it anything like the political or economic backing enjoyed by New York. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by building on Kindleberger’s classic analysis of financial centres as international hubs that arise due to econo…
Introduction: Legacies of empire
‘Empires and civilizations come and go’, or so it is generally assumed. But what actually happens when imperial powers decline? Do the institutions and logics of empire entirely disappear? A great deal of historical and archaeological evidence suggests that they do not, that they leave their mark on international structures and processes and on the institutions, cultures, politics and legal systems of the peoples who inhabit the territories of th…
Legacies of Empire: Imperial Roots of the Contemporary Global Order
The nation-state is a fairly recent historical phenomenon. Human history over the past two to four millennia has been dominated by empires, and the legacies of these empires continues to shape the contemporary world in ways that are not always recognised or fully understood. Much research and writing about European colonial empires has focused on relations between them and their colonies. This book examines the phenomenon of empire from a differe…
Security: Dialogue across Disciplines
Security is a vital subject of study in the twenty-first century and a central theme in many social science disciplines. This volume provides a comparative analysis of the ways in which the concept of security is theorized and studied across different disciplines. The book has two objectives: first, to explore the growing diversity of theories, paradigms, and methods developed to study security; and, second, to initiate a multidisciplinary dialog…
Futurity, Pro-cyclicality and Financial Crises
Nearly a century ago, one of the leading forefathers of the school of evolutionary economics, John R. Commons, coined the term ‘futurity’ to describe an epochal change in the late nineteenth-century advanced economies. Futurity refers to the reorientation of economies towards the future, and specifically to the fledgling practice of treating businesses as ‘going concerns’ and measuring its value in terms of their anticipated future profits. Curio…
The financial crisis and intangible value
The concept of 'finance' or the 'financial system' can be confusing. The assumption is that the financial system consists of related markets trading in a variety of financial instruments that are ultimately of a similar nature. In the late-19th century, however, financial assets have bifurcated into broadly two classes of property titles: incorporeal assets and intangible assets. This article argues that interrelations between the two classes of …
Wages of Sin: Crisis and the Libidinal Economy
The ‘global credit crunch’ is only the latest and most virulent among a series of financial crises stretching back to the 1970s and beyond. Yet, more than any of its predecessors, the current crisis is being presented in apocalyptical libidinal terms. Accounts of the crisis and its aftermath tend to be predicated on a sharp contrast drawn between prudent, conservative, risk averse, sober financial practice and a more exuberant, greedy, hedonistic…
The End of Liberal Finance? The Changing Paradigm of Global Financial Governance
Has the global credit crunch shifted the foundations of global financial architecture away from the philosophy of ‘neoliberalism’? In this article, we argue that the neoliberal project is most probably dead and buried, despite the apparent commitment, which we detail in this article, to the spirit of neoliberal thinking in economic thought. By analysing three constitutive elements of neoliberalism (its public, private and regulatory components) b…
Crime and the Global Political Economy
has gone global. Conventional explanations point to ways in which criminals have exploited technological innovations, deregulation, and free markets to triumph over state sovereignty. Crime and the Global Political Economy reveals a more complex reality. Taking as a point of departure the reality that state and societal actors are challenged by - and complicit in - the expansion of criminal activities on a global scale, the authors demonstrate th…
The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating: IPE in Light of the Crisis of 2007/8
Transnational theories of order and change: Heterodoxy in International Relations scholarship
In this article I argue that the very meaning of ‘inter-national relations’ is emerging as a focus of debate in International Relations, particularly among the critical traditions in the discipline. No longer seen as a mere study of peace and war, IR is viewed as a component of general pan-disciplinary theories or order and change. The international sphere is perceived, accordingly, no longer as a system in its own right, but rather as a gigantic…
The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, And Nomad Millionaires
Global Corporate Power
Exploring the diverse ways that corporations affect the practices and structures of the global political economy, this innovative work addresses three fundamental questions: How can the corporation be most usefully conceptualized within the field of IPE? Does global governance succeed in constraining the power of multinational corporations? To what extent has the movement for corporate social responsibility been fruitful? The authors' rich, detai…
The Imagined Economies of Globalization
This book critically introduces the main contemporary debates on globalization and demonstrates how conventional versions or narratives of globalization have served to shape policy responses at both state and corporate levels
Constructivism and globalisation: From units to encounters in international affairs
In this article I argue that there is a link between constructivism and globalisation, and it is a strong one. Constructivism evolved as part of a more general trend in international relations scholarship, a trend that has seen a shift from the study of the relationship between assumed fixed, given units, nation‐states, to the study of encounter between political entities. The study of the encounter, however, affects a subtle but significant chan…
The Imagined Economy: Mapping Transformations in the Contemporary State
Tax Havens and the Commercialization of State Sovereignty
I seek to explain the causes for the apparent commercialization of state sovereignty, and in particular the reasons for its association with tax havens. I argue that the conditions that gave rise to the commercial use of sovereignty as perfected by tax havens have little to do with surges in taxation and regulation in the postwar era. Instead, these conditions can be traced to jurists' and policymakers' attempts to resolve an inherent contradicti…
Tax Havens and the Commercialization of State Sovereignty
I seek to explain the causes for the apparent commercialization of state sovereignty, and in particular the reasons for its association with tax havens. I argue that the conditions that gave rise to the commercial use of sovereignty as perfected by tax havens have little to do with surges in taxation and regulation in the postwar era. Instead, these conditions can be traced to jurists' and policymakers' attempts to resolve an inherent contradicti…
The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, And Nomad Millionaires
Trying to Have Your Cake and Eating It: How and Why the State System Has Created Offshore
From modest beginnings in the wholesale financial market specializing in government debt, offshore has expanded rapidly, penetrating and then dominating an ever growing portion of international economic life. This article reflects on the relationship between offshore and the concept of state sovereignty. My argument is that far from escaping the state, offshore is intimately connected with the state system. The concepts of sovereignty and nationa…
The End of Liberal Finance? The Changing Paradigm of Global Financial Governance
Has the global credit crunch shifted the foundations of global financial architecture away from the philosophy of ‘neoliberalism’? In this article, we argue that the neoliberal project is most probably dead and buried, despite the apparent commitment, which we detail in this article, to the spirit of neoliberal thinking in economic thought. By analysing three constitutive elements of neoliberalism (its public, private and regulatory components) b…
Towards a non-rationalist international political economy
(2001). Towards a non-rationalist international political economy. Review of International Political Economy: Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 559-577
The Imagined Economy: Mapping Transformations in the Contemporary State
The Emergence of an Offshore Economy
A world of their making: An evaluation of the constructivist critique in International Relations
IR constructivism maintain that a proper understanding of the way subjects interact with the world and with each other alerts us to the fallacy of conventional IR theory. And yet, for a theory that is so obviously dependent upon a rigorous working of the relationship between social theory and its IR variant, it is curious that, with one or two exceptions, IR constructivists often advance incompatible theories. I argue that the confused manner by …
Are All Politics Domestic? Perspectives on the Integration of Comparative Politics and International Relations Theories
Futurity, Pro-cyclicality and Financial Crises
Nearly a century ago, one of the leading forefathers of the school of evolutionary economics, John R. Commons, coined the term ‘futurity’ to describe an epochal change in the late nineteenth-century advanced economies. Futurity refers to the reorientation of economies towards the future, and specifically to the fledgling practice of treating businesses as ‘going concerns’ and measuring its value in terms of their anticipated future profits. Curio…
The best of both worlds: Scale economies and discriminatory policies in London's global financial centre
From the early 1960s onwards London has managed to vie with New York for the top spot as an international financial centre. Ever since then, London has reigned as a leading global financial hub, despite not having behind it anything like the political or economic backing enjoyed by New York. This paper seeks to explain this phenomenon by building on Kindleberger’s classic analysis of financial centres as international hubs that arise due to econo…
The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating: IPE in Light of the Crisis of 2007/8
On the idealist origins of the realist theory of international relations
A theory, writes Anthony Wilden, like any other adaptive system, must have a survival value. It is impossible, he continues, ‘for a theory not to have a referent or a goal outside itself, since “pure truth” not only does not exist, it has no survival value whatsoever.’ Wilden's reference to the ‘external’ goal of a theory suggests that theories carry subliminal messages which exceed the strict boundary of their textual content. An effective techn…
The financial crisis and intangible value
The concept of 'finance' or the 'financial system' can be confusing. The assumption is that the financial system consists of related markets trading in a variety of financial instruments that are ultimately of a similar nature. In the late-19th century, however, financial assets have bifurcated into broadly two classes of property titles: incorporeal assets and intangible assets. This article argues that interrelations between the two classes of …
Wages of Sin: Crisis and the Libidinal Economy
The ‘global credit crunch’ is only the latest and most virulent among a series of financial crises stretching back to the 1970s and beyond. Yet, more than any of its predecessors, the current crisis is being presented in apocalyptical libidinal terms. Accounts of the crisis and its aftermath tend to be predicated on a sharp contrast drawn between prudent, conservative, risk averse, sober financial practice and a more exuberant, greedy, hedonistic…
Arbitrage spaces in the offshore world: Layering, 'fuses' and partitioning of the legal structure of modern firms
In this article, we discuss the way offshore financial centres are used by the multi-subsidiary, multi-jurisdictional group structure known as the 'multinational enterprise' to arbitrage between social geographies of political jurisdictions. We define arbitrage as the use of corporate legal entities located in diverse jurisdictions to arbitrate a third country's rules and regulations. Using a new method to categorize firm-level data from Van Dijk…
Constructivism and globalisation: From units to encounters in international affairs
In this article I argue that there is a link between constructivism and globalisation, and it is a strong one. Constructivism evolved as part of a more general trend in international relations scholarship, a trend that has seen a shift from the study of the relationship between assumed fixed, given units, nation‐states, to the study of encounter between political entities. The study of the encounter, however, affects a subtle but significant chan…
Transnational theories of order and change: Heterodoxy in International Relations scholarship
In this article I argue that the very meaning of ‘inter-national relations’ is emerging as a focus of debate in International Relations, particularly among the critical traditions in the discipline. No longer seen as a mere study of peace and war, IR is viewed as a component of general pan-disciplinary theories or order and change. The international sphere is perceived, accordingly, no longer as a system in its own right, but rather as a gigantic…
Luring buffaloes and the game of industrial subsidies: A critique of national competitive policies in the era of the competition state
(1998). Luring buffaloes and the game of industrial subsidies: A critique of national competitive policies in the era of the competition state. Global Society: Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 323-341
Arbitrage power and the disappearing financialized firm
Modern corporations have increasingly been adopting a decentred, layered, and multi-jurisdictional form as a strategy of boundary manipulation known amongst tax lawyers and accountants as 'regulatory arbitrage'. The argument we put forward in this article is that the scholarly work that treats these strategies as mere tax avoidance practices has contributed to an underestimation and misrecognition of the way contemporary multinationals operate in…
A Non-Euclidean International Relations
V. The European miracle of capital accumulation
On the idealist origins of the realist theory of international relations
A theory, writes Anthony Wilden, like any other adaptive system, must have a survival value. It is impossible, he continues, ‘for a theory not to have a referent or a goal outside itself, since “pure truth” not only does not exist, it has no survival value whatsoever.’ Wilden's reference to the ‘external’ goal of a theory suggests that theories carry subliminal messages which exceed the strict boundary of their textual content. An effective techn…
Transcending the State-Global Divide: A Neostructuralist Agenda in International Relations
Part 1: States and Regions in the Face of the Global Capitalist Crisis, A. Lipietz State and Society in International Relations, R. Palan. Part 2: World Economic Interpretation of European Politics, A. Gunder Frank The Reich Resurrected? - Continuity and Order in German Expansion, K. Van der Pijl The International Origins of South Korea's Export Orientation, B. Gills Swedish Social-Democracy and the World Market, L. Wilde The Infrastructure of th…
Transcending the State-Global Divide: A Neostructuralist Agenda in International Relations
Are All Politics Domestic? Perspectives on the Integration of Comparative Politics and International Relations Theories
Luring buffaloes and the game of industrial subsidies: A critique of national competitive policies in the era of the competition state
(1998). Luring buffaloes and the game of industrial subsidies: A critique of national competitive policies in the era of the competition state. Global Society: Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 323-341
The Emergence of an Offshore Economy
Trying to Have Your Cake and Eating It: How and Why the State System Has Created Offshore
From modest beginnings in the wholesale financial market specializing in government debt, offshore has expanded rapidly, penetrating and then dominating an ever growing portion of international economic life. This article reflects on the relationship between offshore and the concept of state sovereignty. My argument is that far from escaping the state, offshore is intimately connected with the state system. The concepts of sovereignty and nationa…
The Imagined Economy: Mapping Transformations in the Contemporary State
A world of their making: An evaluation of the constructivist critique in International Relations
IR constructivism maintain that a proper understanding of the way subjects interact with the world and with each other alerts us to the fallacy of conventional IR theory. And yet, for a theory that is so obviously dependent upon a rigorous working of the relationship between social theory and its IR variant, it is curious that, with one or two exceptions, IR constructivists often advance incompatible theories. I argue that the confused manner by …
Towards a non-rationalist international political economy
(2001). Towards a non-rationalist international political economy. Review of International Political Economy: Vol. 8, No. 4, pp. 559-577
Tax Havens and the Commercialization of State Sovereignty
I seek to explain the causes for the apparent commercialization of state sovereignty, and in particular the reasons for its association with tax havens. I argue that the conditions that gave rise to the commercial use of sovereignty as perfected by tax havens have little to do with surges in taxation and regulation in the postwar era. Instead, these conditions can be traced to jurists' and policymakers' attempts to resolve an inherent contradicti…
The Imagined Economy: Mapping Transformations in the Contemporary State
The Imagined Economies of Globalization
This book critically introduces the main contemporary debates on globalization and demonstrates how conventional versions or narratives of globalization have served to shape policy responses at both state and corporate levels
Constructivism and globalisation: From units to encounters in international affairs
In this article I argue that there is a link between constructivism and globalisation, and it is a strong one. Constructivism evolved as part of a more general trend in international relations scholarship, a trend that has seen a shift from the study of the relationship between assumed fixed, given units, nation‐states, to the study of encounter between political entities. The study of the encounter, however, affects a subtle but significant chan…
The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, And Nomad Millionaires
Global Corporate Power
Exploring the diverse ways that corporations affect the practices and structures of the global political economy, this innovative work addresses three fundamental questions: How can the corporation be most usefully conceptualized within the field of IPE? Does global governance succeed in constraining the power of multinational corporations? To what extent has the movement for corporate social responsibility been fruitful? The authors' rich, detai…
Transnational theories of order and change: Heterodoxy in International Relations scholarship
In this article I argue that the very meaning of ‘inter-national relations’ is emerging as a focus of debate in International Relations, particularly among the critical traditions in the discipline. No longer seen as a mere study of peace and war, IR is viewed as a component of general pan-disciplinary theories or order and change. The international sphere is perceived, accordingly, no longer as a system in its own right, but rather as a gigantic…
Crime and the Global Political Economy
has gone global. Conventional explanations point to ways in which criminals have exploited technological innovations, deregulation, and free markets to triumph over state sovereignty. Crime and the Global Political Economy reveals a more complex reality. Taking as a point of departure the reality that state and societal actors are challenged by - and complicit in - the expansion of criminal activities on a global scale, the authors demonstrate th…
The Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating: IPE in Light of the Crisis of 2007/8
The End of Liberal Finance? The Changing Paradigm of Global Financial Governance
Has the global credit crunch shifted the foundations of global financial architecture away from the philosophy of ‘neoliberalism’? In this article, we argue that the neoliberal project is most probably dead and buried, despite the apparent commitment, which we detail in this article, to the spirit of neoliberal thinking in economic thought. By analysing three constitutive elements of neoliberalism (its public, private and regulatory components) b…
Wages of Sin: Crisis and the Libidinal Economy
The ‘global credit crunch’ is only the latest and most virulent among a series of financial crises stretching back to the 1970s and beyond. Yet, more than any of its predecessors, the current crisis is being presented in apocalyptical libidinal terms. Accounts of the crisis and its aftermath tend to be predicated on a sharp contrast drawn between prudent, conservative, risk averse, sober financial practice and a more exuberant, greedy, hedonistic…
The financial crisis and intangible value
The concept of 'finance' or the 'financial system' can be confusing. The assumption is that the financial system consists of related markets trading in a variety of financial instruments that are ultimately of a similar nature. In the late-19th century, however, financial assets have bifurcated into broadly two classes of property titles: incorporeal assets and intangible assets. This article argues that interrelations between the two classes of …
Futurity, Pro-cyclicality and Financial Crises
Nearly a century ago, one of the leading forefathers of the school of evolutionary economics, John R. Commons, coined the term ‘futurity’ to describe an epochal change in the late nineteenth-century advanced economies. Futurity refers to the reorientation of economies towards the future, and specifically to the fledgling practice of treating businesses as ‘going concerns’ and measuring its value in terms of their anticipated future profits. Curio…
Economics (25 works) · Political science (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Law (17 works) · Politics (15 works) · Sociology (14 works) · Political economy (13 works) · Business (10 works) · Economic system (10 works) · Economy (9 works)