Territories, flows, networks

As demonstrated in the introduction, ports are the liminal boundary between (global) flows and territories (Ng et al, 2014), as well as hubs of global trade networks. In this way, they are pillars of both the licit and illicit economy, as well as social spaces that are continuously transformed through multi-actor exchanges and interactions at the internal, local, national and international level (Ben-Yehoyada, 2017). It is against this background that this chapter sketches some important economic processes related to ports, mainly large cargo ones. It adopts an economic sociology approach (Granovetter, 2017), as opposed to a more conventional perspective on the so-called port economy, which mainly aims to present an atlas of the concrete economic activities taking place in ports and in the maritime world (see Talley, 2017). In this vein, the chapter pays attention to the multiple intersections emerging in port areas among economy, society and institutions. These intersections raise, for their part, several puzzles pertaining to micro coordination and regulation matters.

Briefly speaking, the economy can be traced back to three main dimensions: producing goods and services, trading such goods, and governing or regulating the markets where the goods are traded and exchanged (Varese, 2011; Shortland and Varese, 2016: 811). The concepts of governing and regulating are meant here both in a strict economic perspective – as the emergence from below of market exchange practices – and in a broad sociological perspective – as external institutions defining the rules of economic processes.

By definition, ports are involved in trading and thus in attempts undertaken by institutions to regulate complex economic processes. Accordingly, this chapter deals with these two dimensions, which are also foundational dimensions of a ‘political economy of port security’ approach. Here the concept of political economy is assumed in a broad sense as an interdisciplinary approach to define how governmental bodies, institutional frameworks, collective actors, an economic system (ie, the maritime economy embedded in large ports) and the social environment affect and influence each other, both at the local and the global scale. This approach has long been present in this field of study, but in a rather implicit way. It is, therefore, useful to frame it more clearly.