Hawala discourses and the war on terrorist finance

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the informal hawala money-transfer networks, which were made to take much of the blame for terrorist financing in the wake of the September 11 attacks, are not 'underground' banking systems but are connected to Western banking in a myriad of ways. I argue that negative stereotyping of hawala in press and policy discourses has implicitly constructed Western banking as the normal and legitimate space of international finance and has deflected calls for regulation of Western investment banking. I discuss how hawala is connected to the financial exclusion of migrant workers in the West. In the war on terrorist finance, discourses of hawala have led to the underestimation of the complexity of cutting off terrorist funding, while criminalising remittance networks.