Money and Borders

Money and finance are often thought of as forming a uniform, frictionless global space. While events in the last decades have certainly showed how monetary and financial practices and events have consequences that span largely across the globe, such global reach of money and finance is far from evenly distributed. Rather, money flows and lumps unevenly across space, with the financial system connecting some places better than others, producing effects that are geoeconomic, sociocultural and material in nature. One productive way of opening the black-box of ‘global finance’ is by exploring money’s manifold entailments with space and borders. Borders is here meant writ large. It means of course the geopolitical borders of the sovereign state and jurisdictional territory, showing how global finance is rooted in the contemporary architecture of states and international relations. But it means also attending to how lines in this cartographical space of geopolitical borders are rearranged, stretched, inflected through cross-border networks of actors, notably financial institutions, concentrated in key places of international finance. In this chapter, we bring to broader academic debate on money and borders a reading where the ‘plumbing and wiring’ of international finance is seen as entailed with practices of ‘b/ordering’ that ‘dissolve’ borderlands and connect space as much as they produce margins, edges and fringes. Thinking money and finance in terms of borders and frontiers help us understanding how money and financial markets (notably, credit-debt relations) materialize differently on both sides of financial inclusion and exclusion lines, with implications for the bodies that inhabit them.