Elements in International Law and Society – serie

This Element explores the colonial foundations and imperial design of offshore finance, arguing that tax havens are not anomalies but central to global capitalism. Centering the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, it shows how colonial legality and geopolitical subordination produced zones marked by a logic of inclusive exclusion, where secrecy, corporate power, and tax injustice are normalized. Drawing on TWAIL and law and political economy, the Element introduces the concepts of colonial state of exception and the corporate citizen as key legal formations of the colonial offshore economy. It examines how secrecy, financial services, and fintech enable corporations to externalize harm and evade accountability, and how tax reforms, like the OECD's Pillar Two and the UN Tax Convention, often reproduce colonial and racialized hierarchies. The Element concludes with a call to abolish the colonial offshore economy and to uplift grassroots movements across the Caribbean that demand transparency, sovereignty, and justice.

This Element explores the colonial foundations and imperial design of offshore finance, arguing that tax havens are not anomalies but central to global capitalism. Centering the Caribbean and Puerto Rico, it shows how colonial legality and geopolitical subordination produced zones marked by a logic of inclusive exclusion, where secrecy, corporate power, and tax injustice are normalized. Drawing on TWAIL and law and political economy, the Element introduces the concepts of colonial state of exception and the corporate citizen as key legal formations of the colonial offshore economy. It examines how secrecy, financial services, and fintech enable corporations to externalize harm and evade accountability, and how tax reforms, like the OECD's Pillar Two and the UN Tax Convention, often reproduce colonial and racialized hierarchies. The Element concludes with a call to abolish the colonial offshore economy and to uplift grassroots movements across the Caribbean that demand transparency, sovereignty, and justice.

Contemporary international human rights law increasingly obligates states to heighten their criminalization of certain human rights violations, including gendered, racialized, and homophobic violence. This Element uses prison and police abolitionist thought to challenge this trend. It focuses on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), arguing that the Court's reliance on punishment and policing threatens to undo earlier European approaches to criminal law and human rights that resonate with abolitionist thought. It also contends that the criminalization approach provides the Court with an alibi for not recognizing or attending to the deeply structural racialized, colonial, sexual, gendered, and homophobic violence in Europe, particularly but not only against Roma communities and Black and Muslim migrants. Encouraging human rights advocates and judges to take seriously prison and police abolition in Europe and elsewhere, the Element calls for the ECtHR to pave the way for an abolitionist-oriented turn among human rights courts.