THE INSUBORDINATE FINANCE RESEARCH PROJECT // ABOUT

Euro-American cities have long served as the command-and-control centers of ‘global finance’. They have determined the unequal access to credit and often harsh conditions of debt repayment for people, businesses, and states across the world. This has maintained colonial inequalities that many scholars now characterize as ‘international financial subordination’. Yet in recent years, an increasing number of officials, citizens, and professionals have been experimenting with potential alternatives to this subordination. Since the turn of the new millennium, financial centers located in cities across Asia, Africa, and Latin America have expanded dramatically in number, complexity, and size. Boosters of these centers claim that they can counter the exclusion, extraction, and domination that has long characterized (neo)colonial financial relations with Euro-America. At the heart of these alternatives is a younger generation of financial professionals seeking to create new networks, innovate new devices, and envision new futures for their economies. To take stock of these novel trends, the Insubordinate Finance Research Project is conducting ethnographic analyses of financial sector deepening in cities across the postcolonial world. What are the moral and political forms of this deepening? And what are their financial effects? The project’s aim is simple yet ambitious: to upend how we think about global finance.