Zhehang Zhang

How do transnational intermediaries shape border governance and the sovereignties that form around cross-border capital? This project conceptualizes governance as a jurisdictional assemblage: in liminal zones of uneven legality, markets are stabilized by alignments between state and intermediary ecologies. Extending economic and political sociology, I theorize assembling sovereignty as a meso-level outcome of interplay between relational-trust regimes and institutionalized intermediaries, developed through a comparative study on China’s southwest frontier. The analysis moves from ontology to measurement via four mechanisms: mediating infrastructures, brokerage ecologies, rule repertoires, and extraction/redistribution, linking them to rescaling and “border as method."