Since the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, finance and security have become joined in new ways to produce particular targets of state surveillance. Marieke de Goede describes how previously unscrutinized practices such as donations and remittances have been affected by security measures, revealing how creating "security" appeals to multiple imaginable--and unimaginable--futures to enable action in the present
In: Political geography: an interdisciplinary journal for all students of political studies with an interest in the geographical and spatial aspects, Volume 39, p. 48-57
The London Coroner's Inquest into the deaths of July 7 2005 unequivocally rejected the notion that the security services could and should have been able to identify the 7/7 perpetrators as potential future terrorists before July 2005. These findings contest powerful post-9/11 security logics of preemption and anticipation that hold that security intervention is logical and desirable in the face of unknown and unspecified threats. This paper analyses the spatio-temporal work conducted in and through the Coroner's Inquest, with a specific focus on its preventability evidence. The Inquest provides a rich archive in which the potentialities for intervention and preemption, and concomitant questions of suspect spaces, are engaged, debated, accepted and rejected. This paper argues that the Inquest rendered '7/7' from a fast a familiar framing as anticipated catastrophe, into a 'matter of concern' in the sense discussed by Bruno Latour. The paper considers the ambiguous nature of the Inquest, and the way in which it both opened space for public debate and alternative conceptions of futurity; and closed down such space by accepting and normalising notions of networked threat. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]
Die Autorin betrachtet die gegenwärtige Finanzkrise aus einer breiteren historischen und kulturellen Perspektive und geht der Frage nach, wie das diskursive Feld der Krise strukturiert ist. Sie umreißt hierzu zunächst die Forschungsansätze einer poststrukturalistischen politischen Ökonomie, um anschließend zwei Argumente in Bezug auf die Politik der Krise zu entfalten: (1) Die politische Lösung der Finanzkrise hängt immer von einer besonderen Definition des Überschusses im System ab. Dieser Überschuss kann als ein Verhaltensmuster verstanden werden, das kein eigentlicher Bestandteil der Märkte ist, sondern eine bestimmte Grenzlinie von Normalität, Moralität oder Rationalität überschritten hat. (2) Die Definition des Überschusses im System ist immer ein politischer Prozess - nicht im Sinne eines Prozesses, der durch besondere und identifizierbare politische Interessen vorangetrieben wird, sondern politisch im Sinne von Kontingenz. Die Autorin wirft zur Erläuterung dieser Thesen einen kurzen Rückblick auf die Finanzgeschichte, um die Formen der kulturellen Repräsentation zu verdeutlichen, die den gegenwärtigen Überschuss in den Märkten hervorgebracht haben. (ICI)
This article offers a critical analysis of the anti-politics of terrorist finance, understood as the particularly depoliticized governing practices enabled in its name. The article conceptualizes 'terrorist finance' not as an unproblematic reality which has elicited a state response, but as a practice of government that works through a number of political or discursive moves. The article begins with an examination of the media battles over the names, numbers and definitions of terrorism finance. It then argues that the 'war on terrorist finance' is not so much about regulating global money flows as it is about governing practices of mediation and social affiliation.
Written by leading scholars in the field, this book offers the first comprehensive and critical investigation of the specific modes of risk calculation that are emerging in the so-called war on terror.
Invisible and seemingly technical financial infrastructures have become the site of high geopolitics. Crucially, security sanctions are being leveraged through the global financial messaging network SWIFT. This article offers the term "infrastructural geopolitics" to draw attention to the ways in which hegemonic contestation and fracturing play out in and through payment infrastructures. Infrastructures are not passive sites to be used in the service of preexisting hegemonic power but can themselves route, block, challenge, or rework power in particular ways. We focus on the new trade mechanism INSTEX as a lens on the global battle over financial payment infrastructures. How and why has hegemonic contestation taken the shape of, and is in turn shaped by, struggles over payment infrastructure? As a heuristic device to analyze the hegemonic politics of financial infrastructure, we propose three terms that capture the processual nature of infrastructural politics: sedimentation, resurfacing, and fracturing. We apply these to the emergence of the payment infrastructure INSTEX. We explain how hegemonic politics become hardwired in the technical and largely invisible SWIFT infrastructure, which supported postwar financial order and sedimented its uneven power relations. The process of political resurfacing captures the ways in which infrastructural dispositions come to the surface of political discussion again, after 9/11 and through the JCPOA process. In conclusion, the introduction of INSTEX has advanced the possibility of fracturing international payment routes, with multiple alternative infrastructures emerging.
