Flattening the international: producing financial intelligence through a platform

Abstract

This paper engages in ‘flat’ International Relations (IR). Inspired by Actor-Network Theory (ANT), it studies how geographically dispersed security actors produce shared understandings of financial intelligence on the EU-FIU Platform, a European Commission expert group. Studying the Platform enables empirical observation of how ‘the international’ is not a natural given nor a static analytical framework, but instead is actively made to exist in everyday practice, entailing numerous human and non-human actors. Engaging the Platform with a flat ontology allows the significance of materiality to be drawn out and key IR concerns such as power and governance to be readdressed. The paper examines the publicly accessible minutes of the EU-FIU Platform meetings and traces the development of the phrase ‘for intelligence purposes’, demonstrating both its interpretive flexibility, allowing actors to cooperate across heterogeneous understandings, and its flexible scalability, allowing actors to assign and navigate several scales concurrently.