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"This book comprehensively explores the messy and contested relationship between everyday practices of remittance sending and receiving, processes of market making, and operations of micro- and global finance. The book critically investigates a global migration-development agenda that aims to harness remittances for development by incorporating remittance flows and households into global financial circuits. The book develops a multidisciplinary perspective and combines insights from economic, development, and financial geography as well as international political economy and economic anthropology. It sets out a geographies of remittance marketisation approach to investigate the intricate and grounded ways in which remittance markets are constructed, the extent to which remittance flows and households can be (re)configured and incorporated into global finance, and why such processes are always fragile, contested, and in need of constant renegotiation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork research, the book provides an in-depth critical interrogation of the policies and initiatives that underpin remittance marketisation in Senegal, Ghana, and beyond. This volume will be especially useful to those researching and working in the areas of international development, contemporary geographies of finance and market making, and migration and remittances. It should also prove of interest to policymakers, practitioners, and activists concerned with the relation between migration, remittances, and finance in the Global South"--

This article takes up recent calls to further problematize race in international political economy by focusing on money at the frontier of global finance. We draw upon the Black radical tradition's theoretical formulations of racial capitalism, which we bring into dialogue with conceptualizations of money and finance as developed within the critique of political economy. Money is the most supreme and abstract incarnation of wealth and class power, yet it is also suffused with racial and colonial logics of differentiation. To explore this tension, we offer a relational-comparison of two sites of frontier finance, namely cross-border investment and digital financial inclusion in developing countries. We trace the mechanisms through which race affects the operations of money and finance across these two sites. We argue that racialized difference is mobilized and reproduced at three key moments in the construction of investibility at the financial frontier: (1) the re/making of a development 'problem'; (2) the construction of racialized ideal-typical financial subjects; and (3) processes of risk valuation and the legitimation of surveillance, discipline, and extraction. This allows us to characterize the color of money at the financial frontier as a particularly potent and violent combination of the abstractive powers of race and money.

AbstractIn this paper, we question the promotion of financial inclusion, and microfinance specifically, as a means to achieve 'Decent Work' (DW) under the International Labor Organization's (ILO) programme. Drawing upon original research findings from two types of internal migrants in Cambodia, we make a twin contention: first, that excessive levels of microfinance borrowing by garment workers are part-outcome of the failings of the DW programme to engender 'decent enough work', and second, that microfinance borrowing is actually eroding rather than contributing to the prospect of decent work for debt-bonded brickmakers in the country. The data presented on two of the largest sectors contributing to Cambodia's growth in recent decades, enable the paper to show how microfinance and labour precarity are intertwined through the over-indebtedness of workers in both cases. The paper ultimately looks to caution the ILO on its current promotion of financial inclusion and microfinance in particular, stressing the need for significant sectoral reforms before this form of credit can be considered to align with the core principles of the DW programme.

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the impact of the COVID‐19 pandemic on microfinance borrowers in Tamil Nadu, India. Through an examination of the social and financial infrastructures underpinning inclusive finance, the article demonstrates how the COVID‐19 pandemic exposes the limits and exclusionary tendencies of the for‐profit financial inclusion industry. The unequalizing breakdown of financial inclusion infrastructures during the pandemic prioritizes future revenue extraction over current livelihood needs, throwing hard‐hit borrowers back on hierarchical informal financial and social infrastructures to cope with COVID‐19‐induced risk. Tracing the experiences of poor microfinance borrowers in Tamil Nadu, this article examines how COVID‐19 is reshaping inclusive financial infrastructures in ways that reveal the dynamics of exclusion at the heart of financial inclusion.