Short Abstract

This panel looks at the roles of brokers operating within complex political, economic and social ecosystems. Brokers provides an entry point studying questions about the power and agency of these operating at the interstices of contemporary capitalism and development.

Description

Brokers and brokerage have become a structural feature of how states and markets function in today’s fragmenting world. Multiplying borders and growing conflict have created a growing demand and need for brokerage: States outsource violence to paramilitaries or ‘coercive brokers’; markets rely on financial and commodity brokers, to enable trade flows; extractive industries operate through infrastructural brokers who facilitate the conversion of nature into commodities and its movement from frontier to metropole; migrants put their lives in the hands of ‘human trafficking’ brokers who facilitate illegal journeys across international borders, whilst policy makers rely on violent intermediaries to police and counter these ‘irregular flows’; the business model of scam centres in South East Asia is built upon an army of highly skilled digital brokers. This panel places the spotlight on different kinds of brokers and forms of brokerage – including coercive, political, market, infrastructural, illicit, social/cultural, digital, financial -- operating at different scales and settings within complex political, economic and social ecosystems. The comparative study of brokers provides an entry point for asking questions about the power and agency of these often liminal figures operating at the interstices of contemporary capitalism and development. By bringing different methodological approaches including ethnographic, historical and network analyses into conversation with each other, the panel aims to reframe brokers as pivotal agents in making (and unmaking) development trajectories, not simply as liminal by-products of state weakness or market failure.

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