Raced Finance:The Color of Money at the Financial Frontier

This project aims to examine the racialized features and outcomes of global finance. While contemporary global development agendas continue to portray finance, credit, and entrepreneurship as key strategies for economic growth and poverty reduction, the social realities of these development-led priority areas surrounding racial inequality have been unexplored. We aim to bring together a group of early career scholars and senior researchers from different disciplines and theoretical backgrounds to investigate global financial governance in racial capitalism. The project therefore aims to scrutinize how the concrete practices, mechanisms, devices, logics, technologies, and imaginaries involved in the contemporary operations of money and finance are suffused with racial and colonial logics of differentiation. We call this the frontiers of finance and thus explore an interchange of state, finance, and other corporate actors who seek to transform, dominate, and (re)colonize physical and virtual spaces and the populations who exist therein. The immediate outcome of the project will be the organisation of two workshops and the submission of a Special Issue in Review of International Political Economy or Review of International Studies on the basis for long term collaboration and larger funding grant applications. In sum, our group and project aim to develop a self-reflexive and open political economy of money and finance sensitive to race and coloniality, one that grounds its understanding of the color of money at the financial frontier in capitalism’s ‘inherently racializing capacities’ (Virdee, 2019:9) on the one hand, and is adapted to tackle the racialized inequalities of our time on the other.