Cologne, 24-28 July, 2018

Session: Global finance, development, and the new peripheries

Organizers: Leigh Johnson (University of Oregon); Stefan Ouma (Goethe University-Frankfurt); Patrick Bigger (Lancaster University)

This session examines the significance of financial relations and transactions in spaces of the global South that have typically been figured as “marginal” to, if not altogether excluded from, the operations of global finance. As finance relentlessly seeks to identify further spatial fixes and revenue streams, this session will probe the particularities of integration. What assemblages and legacies – (post)colonial and otherwise – characterize these spaces? What are the regional coordinates of integration, and the concrete social, political and material landscapes it produces?

The optic of “peripheries” – with its roots in dependency theory – highlights the relations of power, subordination and exploitation produced through finance’s expansion and experimentation at its frontiers. As certain places are linked to global flows of capital, they can become peripheralized in new ways. Yet as some “financial innovation” originates in the South and travels to the global North (e.g. mobile money and microfinance) and the South more generally becomes a source of capital (e.g. sovereign wealth or pension funds), existing understandings of peripheralisation must be reexamined. How can the dependent and extraverted notions of development suggested by the term “periphery” be reworked to make a place for heterogeneous forms of economic self-fashioning? How might other concepts such as extraction, dispossession, value grabbing, disarticulations and expulsion help render intelligible the new peripheral operations of finance and the place-making projects that emerge from them?

We especially invite papers making conceptual advances using empirical cases on topics including but not limited to: financial inclusion and adverse incorporation; new sites of experimentation and product development; the financialisation of development; multiple frontiers of peripheral financialisation (e.g. land, agriculture, nature, housing, manufacturing, IT…); macroeconomic policies, links between micro and macro scale finance; relationships between global and “indigenous” financial practices, institutions, and discourses; rethinking the core(s) of global finance.

Abstract Submission:
If this is of interest, please submit your abstract by filling out the embedded form and selecting this session as your first choice at: https://www.gceg2018.com/nc/call-for-sessions-and-papers/submit-an-abstract.html by 15 February, 2018.
We aim to finalize the session(s) by 1 March, a bit ahead of the conference abstract deadline.
Any questions about the session may be directed to Patrick Bigger at p.bigger@lancaster.ac.uk.