When: 5 August, 1:00-2:30 pm
Where: Room 341, Social Sciences Building (A02), University of Sydney
Speaker: Dr Ilias Alami
International Political Economy (IPE) as a discipline increasingly acknowledges the significance of racial oppression and inequalities. Yet these are often seen as separate from, or coinciding with, financial hierarchies and power structures. There is some understanding that race may shape how finance works, but this does not factor into what IPE scholars call the structural power of finance. By contrast, we suggest that hierarchies of race and finance may be more intimate, integral, and co-constitutive than this position suggests. We call this conceptual hypothesis ‘raced finance.’ Raced finance encourages us to ask: how, exactly, is finance ‘raced,’ and why is this the case? With what consequences for our understandings of race, finance, and capitalism? After offering a conceptual definition, we map out historical and contemporary arguments on raced finance in IPE and beyond, across three thematic categories: (1) Race, empire, and primitive accumulation via financial means; (2) Raced global monetary orders; (3) Financial risks and racialized anxieties. We then further develop our raced finance analytic as a frame for the special issue and future IPE research. We submit that raced finance can be productively grasped in terms of three constitutive tensions: inclusion/exclusion, totalization/ differentiation, and stabilization/destabilization. The combination of these three dialectical tensions is what makes raced finance such a potent force. We conclude by offering reflections on teaching race and finance in IPE. Giving due attention to race in the IPE of finance may require rethinking pedagogical priorities, shifting empirical angles, adopting new geographical foci, mobilizing new theories, and reconstructing periodizations.
Dr Ilias Alami is an Assistant Professor in the Political Economy of Development in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining Cambridge, he held research and teaching positions at Uppsala University, Maastricht University, and Manchester University. He also held visiting positions at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Sao Paulo, the University of Johannesburg, and Sciences Po Paris. He holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Manchester. He is the author of Money Power and Financial Capital in Emerging Markets: Facing the Liquidity Tsunami (Routledge, 2019) and (with Adam Dixon) The Spectre of State Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2024).
The set image is Crédit mobilier français from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Agence Rol, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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