Colleagues at the CNRS/Paris Nanterre are inviting applications for a postdoc position in financialization and illicit economies.

The postdoctoral researcher will contribute to the DEBTCHAINS project, which investigates the financialization of capitalism through a transnational study of debt chains across legal and illegal markets. While there has been growing concern about the financialization of capitalism, it often neglects the extremely profitable informal, illegal, and illicit financial markets, which are increasingly connected to formal global finance. The 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. These chains are constructed by a multitude of concrete actors, such as lawyers, bankers, moneylenders, politicians, dealers, state officers and others.

 

DEBTCHAINS assume that the financialization of capital is socially grounded, embedded in practices, and embodied in various figures who build up those chains of debts (enforcers, guarantors, sureties, police, lawyers, moneylenders, bankers, politicians, etc.). At every stage of these chains, from microcredit to mafia organizations and sovereign and bank debts, actors mobilize institutional resources (bureaucracy, law, and regulation), politicians, social ties (family, caste, gender, friendship), moral norms (honor, reputation, fear), exchange of goods (from land, cows, gold, weapons, private digital data to state assets such as aircraft, ships, and satellites that might be seized by financiers to enforce public debt payment), violence (police, henchmen), or even bodies (rape, murder, sexual services) to guarantee the payment of a debt. Considering financialization through these actors makes debt chains a concrete tool for the study of financialization across licit and illicit markets.