Anthony Amicelle

Questioning security devices: Performativity, resistance, politics

Algorithms, biometrics and body scanners, computers and databases, infrastructures of various kinds, ranging from what is commonly referred to as ‘hi-tech’ to ‘low-tech’ items such as walls or paper files, have garnered increased attention in critical approaches to (in)security. This article introduces a special issue whose contributions aim to further these approaches by questioning the role and political effects of security devices. It proposes an analytics of devices to examine the configuration and reconfiguration of security practices by attending to the equipment or instrumentation that make these practices possible and temporally stabilize them. The aim here is not to advance devices as a new unit of analysis, but to open new forays in ongoing debates about security politics and practices, by asking different research questions and developing new research angles. We start by outlining what is at stake when thinking of and analysing security practices through devices, or shifting from the language of technology and ‘technologies of security’ to security devices. The remainder of the article then specifies how an analytics of devices involves a more varied vocabulary of performativity, on the one hand, and agency, on the other.

Towards a ‘new’ political anatomy of financial surveillance

This article examines dynamics of financial surveillance and risk-based regulation in the context of ongoing activities to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. Close analysis of the situation in the UK reveals entangled forms of co-regulation and ultimately co-production of surveillance that challenge ‘institutional boundaries’ of the state regarding policing and intelligence practices. It is argued that ongoing transformations in the anti-money laundering field reveal a dual movement that combines forms of indirect administration with a process of ‘neoliberal bureaucratization’. The article aims to show how current policies against ‘dirty money’ still paradoxically work on the basis of heterogeneous goals and misapprehensions between ‘professionals of security’ and ‘professionals of finance’.

FINANCIAL SURVEILLANCE: Who cares?

While critical academic studies on financial surveillance blossom, they hardly pay attention to the critical capability of those who are involved in the implementation of anti-money-laundering/countering terrorist financing (AML/CTF) policy. In this paper the authors attempt precisely this analysis of existing mobilizations which contest the everyday implementation of AML/CTF standards. Which practices are at stake? Who are the actors involved in denunciation? Which argumentation is used? What are the normative positions from which actors raise criticism? Are denunciations shared by a wider public or do they remain sector-specific? This paper brings together empirical results from research conducted separately by the two authors on, respectively, the gradual institutionalization of the role of banks in anti-money-laundering efforts in France and Switzerland and European measures against terrorist financing.

The cross-colonization of finance and security through lists: : Banking policing in the UK and India

Targeted financial sanctions regimes and regulations on ‘dirty money’ put banks on the front line in securing financial circulation. This is the context in which banking actors face the challenge of juggling with hundred of sanction, watch and regulatory lists. In light of that list mania for banking policing, list appears to have become the security device of choice in the everyday life of the financial industry across the world. Instead of reducing the complexity of security-finance dynamics to a zero-sum game (securitization of finance vs financialization of security), the article rather aims to question the critical role of lists in the cross-colonization of finance and security. Drawing on empirical research in the United Kingdom and India, the article adopts an ‘analytics of devices’ to think of and analyse banking policing practices through the instrumentation that makes these practices possible and stable over time. It argues that banking appropriation of security lists both (re)configures lists ‘social identity’ and banking actors’ power-relations in the fields of finance and security. Ultimately, the analytical focus on lists appropriation sheds new light on what securing circulation means in finance.

In Search of Transnational Financial Intelligence: Questioning Cooperation Between Financial Intelligence Units

Financial intelligence units are the critical national agencies at the core of the finance-security assemblage which deals with flows of illicit money, widely known as dirty money. Cooperation between these agencies is presented as ‘the cornerstone of the international efforts to counter money laundering/terrorist financing’. But how does the transnational sharing of financial intelligence operate in practice? The chapter looks at the range of devices, issues, and related difficulties involved in developing cooperation between financial intelligence units. The first section of this chapter sheds light on the communication channels that the financial intelligence units use and how they use them, at European and international level. The second section focuses on the main tensions in transnational financial intelligence.

Criminology in the face of flows: reflections on contemporary policing and security

ABSTRACT Much has been written about the governance of crime – indeed, this is the thread that has unified criminology. Yet, property crimes and attacks against individuals – traditionally at the core of the discipline – are plummeting in many societies. Meanwhile, harms and harm management emerge outside the narrowness of criminal justice definitions. Despite this, little criminological attention has been paid to the fact that the security of flows increasingly embodies concerns that are at the heart of contemporary policing practices. This introduction to this special issue takes stock of these changes and argues that to stay current and relevant, criminology must pay closer attention to these changing landscapes of harms and policing.