Remittances, development and financialisation beyond the Global North

Abstract

In the context of the global financial crisis and the crunch in development financing, remittances have become linked to the financial inclusion agenda in what has been termed as ‘financialization of remittances’ (FOR). This special issue brings together seven articles that analyze the socioculturally specific histories and the everyday manifestations of the FOR in the Caribbean, Central America, Colombia, Ghana, Mexico, Nepal and Senegal. The contributors engage in a transdisciplinary conversation, mobilizing insights from feminist, postcolonial, poststructural and political geography theories. They propose two majors shifts for financialisation analysis: towards an investigation beyond the global North and towards taking seriously failures, contradictions and contestations of financialisation processes. By doing so, the special issue contributes to financialization research in five major ways: to expose colonial legacies of remittances and their financialization; to challenge the supposedly neutral character of the FOR by revealing the caste, gendered and racialized power relations in financialization processes; to destabilizes the notion of the universal individual financial subject and show how multiple financial subjectivities are constituted in constellations; to document the complexities, ambiguities, contradictions and failures of financialization processes and the (everyday) contestations they face; and to show how remittances and their financialization are implicated in reconfiguring authorities, citizenship and social dynamics. The contributions propose relational understandings of financialization that conceptualize the co-constitution of economic, political and sociocultural dimensions of financialization across and beyond the North-South divide.