The ‘Blood Sugar' Value Chain as a Space for Critical Legal Analysis and Intervention

This paper utilizes the case of two sugar cane plantations in Koh Kong (Cambodia) to reflect on the interactions between the multiterritorial character of supply chain capitalism, exploitation and legal resistance. With a combination of legal institutionalism, critical geography and value chains analysis, the Article takes value chains as the exemplification of the global system of production and looks at the redistributive possibilities that derive from delocalization and outsourcing. In line with critical legal scholarship, legal structures are primarily conceived as expression of power that generate and allocate power and value throughout the chain: however, the notion of 'legal chokeholds' is introduced to discuss the multiplication of spaces of legal resistance that become visible when the 'global' nature of the supply chain capitalism is linked with the 'multiple legal territorialities' of the production networks.