Conceptualising state financialisation: from the core to the periphery

Abstract

This article puts forward a narrow definition of state financialisation as a mode of governance whereby the state engineers and re-purposes financial tools and markets as instruments of statecraft in such a way that they bestow the financial sector increased infrastructural power. This is taken as a unifying and operational definition that seeks to bring together extant work and motivate more focused research on the transformations occurring within the state at various scales and policy domains. And it is informed by the differentiated positions countries occupy within the world economy that determine the particular subordinate forms that governance through financial markets takes.