InsubordinateFINANCE · Insubordinate Finance? The postcolonial politics of financial centers in the Global South

Cities in the global North have served for centuries as the command-and-control centers of global finance. They have long determined the unequal access to credit and often harsh conditions of debt repayment for people, businesses, and states across the world. This control has maintained colonial power inequalities that many scholars now characterize as 'international financial subordination'. Yet in recent years, an increasing number of officials, citizens, and professionals across the Global South have mounted a surprising opposition to the Northern subordination of Southern finance. Since the turn of the new millennium, financial centers located in cities across the Global South have expanded dramatically in number, complexity, and size. These insubordinate financial centers claim to offer an alternative to the exclusion, extraction, and domination that has long characterized their (neo)colonial financial relations with the North. At the heart of this alternative is a new generation of Southern financial professionals seeking to create new networks, innovate new devices, and envision new futures for postcolonial economies. To take stock of these novel trends, InsubordinateFINANCE will examine the politics of financial sector deepening in 11 case study cities across Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. It will develop an innovative ‘provincializing finance approach’ that combines the insights of postcolonial theory, ethnography, and science and technology studies to answer a field-defining research question: Are Southern financial centers vectors of global financial subordination or do they offer independence from Northern financial dominance? Given the potential for a shift towards such an insubordinate finance to reconfigure global power relations and inequalities, it is important to asses where, how, to what extent, and with what effects this shift is taking place.This project's aim is simple yet ambitious: to upend how we think about global finance.