Projets

DEBTCHAINS project explores the crafting of financialization of capitalism through a transnational and transcalar study of debt chains across licit and illicit markets. The growing concern about the financialization of capitalism has only focused on the tip of a financial iceberg. The submerged part is immense, and includes extremely profitable informal, illegal, and illicit financial markets, nowadays connecting to formal global finance. Today, the spread of financial, criminal, and political entanglements transcends State borders, established democracies, and lawful economies, and reaches into the core of legal and financial markets through activities such as extraction, consumption, and money laundering. Yet, systematic research on the links between finance in illegal economies, informal loans, microcredit, and Public Debt and formal banking systems are currently lacking. Exploring this invisible part of financialisation is crucial if we are to understand the contemporary dynamics of societies and social and economic inequalities.

DEBTCHAINS explores how financialization of capitalism, as a relational mode of economic accumulation, is sustained by chains of micro and macro debt which are shaped by and constitutive of flows of legalities and illegalities, of visibilities and invisibilities which both cross and segments markets, actors and financial practices. This project moves beyond abstract, disembodied, and technical approaches to financialization by turning it into a tangible object of empirical investigation through the prism of debt chains as constructed by a myriad of concrete actors. We consider that the financialization of capital is socially grounded, embedded in practices, and in various figures who build up those chains of debts. We will follow actors tied together by debts in three markets we already have a privileged access through our past research - one illegal product, cocaine between Brazil and France; two legal products (wood and pesticides) in India embedded within regional and global criminal political economies.

By exploring the transnational chains of debts ethnographically across the global South and the global North, by connecting the debt practices of working-class families and communities with those of global financial institutions, we will focus on three main processes which operate across the segmented chains of debts. 1/ assembling: how do protagonists assemble licit and illicit actors and institutions to shape their own conducive socio-political and moral environments for sustaining their activities? ; guaranteeing debts: how are articulated the pluri-legal and illegal methods of regulation, guarantees, and enforcement used by both private and public institutions and the individuals associated with them? ; Converting money and goods: how do actors manage visibility and invisibility, legalities and illegalities, anonymity and denunciations, secrecy and public display of fortunes to convert money and goods into varied tangible and intangible assets ?

The project draws on a performative combination of disciplines (anthropology, sociology, economics, and political sociology), skills and expertise by bringing together specialists both in banking and financial regulation and informal and criminal economies to investigate the everyday making of financialization and the ways it reframes inequalities under financial capitalism.