Marieke de Goede

Repoliticizing Financial Risk

This article aims to repoliticize modern financial risk management by offering a genealogical reading of its contested religious and cultural history. While identifying, calculating, and selling risk is at the heart of the modern financial markets, the normative commitments of modern financial risk management remain both hidden from view and politically unquestioned. The article argues that the commercialization of risk in finance should not be understood as a reaction to objectively existing danger, but as a profitable cultural process that rests upon gendered constructions of danger and security. The article examines the role of risk in the recent proposals for a new Capital Accord by the Basle Committee for Banking Supervision, and argues that the financial industry is reluctant to accept domains of incalculability in the new Accord.This article aims to repoliticize modern financial risk management by offering a genealogical reading of its contested religious and cultural history. While identifying, calculating, and selling risk is at the heart of the modern financial markets, the normative commitments of modern financial risk management remain both hidden from view and politically unquestioned. The article argues that the commercialization of risk in finance should not be understood as a reaction to objectively existing danger, but as a profitable cultural process that rests upon gendered constructions of danger and security. The article examines the role of risk in the recent proposals for a new Capital Accord by the Basle Committee for Banking Supervision, and argues that the financial industry is reluctant to accept domains of incalculability in the new Accord.

The Politics of Preemption and the War on Terror in Europe

In the midst of the war on terror and unilateral US security politics, many observers look to Europe for alternatives. It is argued that Europe is particularly opposed to preemptive security practice, and prefers instead to rely on the rule of law. This article examines the meaning of preemption in the war on terror, and analyses three aspects of European counter-terror policy. It becomes clear that, with respect to a number of policies that play a key role in preemptive security practice, including criminalizing terrorist support, data retention, and asset freezing, the European Union is world leader rather than reluctant follower. Instead of relying on images that position Europe as inherently critical of preemptive security, debate concerning the legitimacy and desirability of such practices must be actively fostered within European public space.In the midst of the war on terror and unilateral US security politics, many observers look to Europe for alternatives. It is argued that Europe is particularly opposed to preemptive security practice, and prefers instead to rely on the rule of law. This article examines the meaning of preemption in the war on terror, and analyses three aspects of European counter-terror policy. It becomes clear that, with respect to a number of policies that play a key role in preemptive security practice, including criminalizing terrorist support, data retention, and asset freezing, the European Union is world leader rather than reluctant follower. Instead of relying on images that position Europe as inherently critical of preemptive security, debate concerning the legitimacy and desirability of such practices must be actively fostered within European public space.

The SWIFT Affair and the Global Politics of European Security

This article examines the ‘SWIFT affair’, whereby United States security authorities acquired access to financial data of European citizens, and argues that it is a powerful lens through which to understand current shifts in European security governing. The affair demonstrates the institutional challenges produced by the deployment of private, commercial data for security, and analyzes the ad hoc innovations produced in European Union (EU) governing as a result. Furthermore, the SWIFT affair has allowed the EU to position itself in the global security landscape as a normative power that promotes the values of privacy and data protection. However, the development of a European Terrorism Financing Tracking System, coupled with the way in which the EU itself is keenly implementing risk�?based and data�?led internal security measures, means that critical attention to the EUs own security practices remains urgent.

The politics of security lists

The authors contributed equally to the paper The List, one of the most archaic means of written enumeration and classification, has made a forceful recurrence in the post-9/11 global security landscape. From terrorist sanctions lists and No-Fly lists to “kill-lists” for drone warfare; from the privately compiled lists of risky banking clients to the regulatory lists of untrustworthy or incompliant companies, the list seems to proliferate as a contemporary technology of security and regulation. How and why are lists becoming newly embedded in security practices? What work do lists perform as specific techniques of government and forms of normative ordering? And what consequences follow for how problems of legal accountability and political responsibility are currently understood and addressed? This paper frames security lists as inscription devices that are heterogeneous, unpredictable and productive in unforeseen ways. It draws attention to the ways they materialise the categories they purport to describe, and how they enact novel forms of knowledge, jurisdiction and targeting. We suggest that critiques could be strengthened by making visible and contesting the fragmented and diffuse conditions through which security lists are produced.

Introduction: The politics of the list

This articles introduces the special issue on ‘The Politics of the List.’ We observe that lists proliferate as a technique of governance across multiple domains, including health, security, and commerce. We argue that it is important to take seriously the form and technique of the list itself and engage the knowledge practices, governance effects and ways of ordering the world that the list format enables. In other words, the special issue seeks to ‘remain in the register of the list,’ to unpack its technological arrangements and juridical power. This introduction sets out the key themes of this special issue, through discussing, in turn, the list as a technology of knowledge, the list as a technique of law and governance, the lists complex relation to space and the relation between the list and the digital. We draw on these four elements to characterise what we call the politics of the list in an era of complexity.

DATA WARS BEYOND SURVEILLANCE

This article examines the Terrorism Financing Tracking Programme (TFTP), or ‘Swift affair,’ as exemplary of what have been called ‘Data Wars’ in this special issue. In the TFTP, access to data about global financial circulations was offered as a means to govern uncertain security futures. The article endeavours to open the ‘black box’ of the Swift programme, by showing how the Swift data were handled, accessed and analysed. We use the social science analogy of the black box as developed by Donald MacKenzie, but also because the datasets transferred from Swift to the US Treasury were in encrypted form, which literally came to be called a black box. In this paper, opening the black box has a dual meaning: both to reveal and reassemble the processes, procedures and analytical software tools of the TFTP, and to explicate a number of ethical, political and societal questions brought about by the programme. To open up the black box of this data war, then, is to push critique beyond the ‘righting of the wrongs’ (for example, to better protect data or to strengthen privacy), and to ask instead what such practices make of us and our world.

Between Law and the Exception: 'The UN 1267 Ombudsperson as a Hybrid Model of Legal Expertise'

Security measures taken in the name of the ‘war on terror’ have frequently been understood to operate through a domain of exception, defined as an extra-legal space of intervention where normal rules of juridical protection and due process are suspended. Yet whilst most analyses of the exception are critically reliant on notions of legal threshold, they are largely dismissive of the potentially productive nature of legal contestation. This article inquires into the dynamic confrontation between law and exception in the context of the UN 1267 sanctions system, focusing on the Office of the Ombudsperson as an institutional experiment designed to remedy the fundamental rights deficiencies of the regime. Drawing on Agambens analysis of the exception as a ‘hybrid space’ and Dyzenhauss concept of the ‘legal grey hole’, our analysis of the Ombudsperson demonstrates the emergence of novel, hybrid procedures and evidentiary standards being deployed in the 1267 delisting process. First, we assess the Ombudspersons logics of decision-making and argue that their appeals to fairness hinge on the production of a temporal chasm that legitimizes the deployment of intelligence material in listing cases. Second, we show that the Ombudsperson is in the process of carving out novel evidential standards that are more attentive to notions of inference and speculation than conventional standards of proof. These standards serve to fortify the use of sanctions as a pre-emptive security measure and do not, in principle, appear to exclude material that may be obtained by torture.

Secrecy and security in transatlantic terrorism finance tracking

Abstract Access to and diffusion of information relating to the Terrorism Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP) has become a focal point for discussions about secrecy and democracy in the European Union. This paper analyses the dynamics of secrecy and publicity in the context of post-9/11 security programmes, in particular, the TFTP. Far from a binary between secrecy and transparency, the TFTP involves complex dynamics of knowledge, and strictly regulated information distribution. The purpose of the article is threefold. First, we contribute to debates on EU secrecy and democratic oversight, by advancing an understanding of secrecy as practice. Second, we document and discuss the longer trajectory of the contested secrecy and publicity of the TFTP, through examining three ‘secrecy controversies’. Third, we ask whether the logics of secrecy in the EU are being revised and challenged in the context of transatlantic security cooperation. The rationales of secrecy deployed in security practice hinge on particular notions of potential future harm that, we argue, are shifting in the face of current understandings of the terrorist threat.

Proscription’s Futures

ABSTRACTProscription of individuals and groups potentially linked to terrorism in the form of targeted sanctions have become increasingly controversial in recent years, especially in Europe. Initially considered the less violent alternative when countering terrorism, individual proscriptions have become contested for their impact on due process rights and democratic space. This paper focuses on a key aspect of proscription measures that goes relatively unnoticed: its discourses and practices of time and temporality. It analyses in some depth the rationalities of time evoked, debated, accepted, and rejected in two court cases on individual sanctions. It focuses on two elements at work in these cases: first, the relation between the precautionary and the punitive; second, the politics of establishing and examining terrorist intention. In this manner, it contributes to broader literatures on proscription in two ways. First, it advances the debate on security temporalities in general and the discussion of fut...ABSTRACT Proscription of individuals and groups potentially linked to terrorism in the form of targeted sanctions have become increasingly controversial in recent years, especially in Europe. Initially considered the less violent alternative when countering terrorism, individual proscriptions have become contested for their impact on due process rights and democratic space. This paper focuses on a key aspect of proscription measures that goes relatively unnoticed: its discourses and practices of time and temporality. It analyses in some depth the rationalities of time evoked, debated, accepted, and rejected in two court cases on individual sanctions. It focuses on two elements at work in these cases: first, the relation between the precautionary and the punitive; second, the politics of establishing and examining terrorist intention. In this manner, it contributes to broader literatures on proscription in two ways. First, it advances the debate on security temporalities in general and the discussion of future-oriented sanctions in particular, by focusing on recent cases and case-law. Second, the paper brings a focus on legal practice to proscription debates. The paper concludes that the juridical repertoire of establishing and assessing intentions is not just broadened but fundamentally altered in the current proscription regime.

Counter-Terrorism Financing Assemblages After 9/11

Counter-Terrorism Finance has produced a complex landscape of regulation, fostering new public/private cooperation and significantly shaking up banking compliance practices. The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the regulatory assemblage and main tensions relating to Counter-Terrorism Financing (CTF) in the post-9/11 era. The chapter starts with a discussion of the security logics of CTF after 2001. It argues that CTF efforts in the most recent 15 years distinguish themselves through a number of elements that set them apart from the longer tradition of anti-money laundering. Specifically, it argues that the pursuit of terrorism financing as a crime is best understood as closely related to the politics of preemption. Second, the chapter gives an overview of the complex regulatory landscape of CTF in the transatlantic context. CTF regulation is best understood as a regulatory assemblage where (policy) goals are not always clearly aligned, and where a number of important tensions and contradictions are at play. The third section of the chapter develops a more specific focus on banking practice, as a key but often overlooked site where CTF is given shape and meaning. Recent developments have led to the problem of derisking, where entire client groups are excluded from the banking sector.