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- Convenors:
-
Gustav Kalm
(Sciences Po)
Horacio Ortiz (CNRS - Fudan University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- Lanyon Building, LAN/0G/074
- Sessions:
- Thursday 28 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel analyzes how global inequalities, states, territories and national identities become articulated in the everyday workings of foreign investment. The presentations analyze foreign investment looking at the contrasting perspectives of different involved parties.
Long Abstract:
This panel studies global hierarchies of monetary distribution through a critical analysis of the imaginaries of foreign investment. Investment itself is a multifaceted category that centrally relies on ideas of profit, dedication, and control. The anthropology of finance has studied multiple forms of investment—from short-term financial speculation to long-term plans for building infrastructures, production facilities and extractive operations. This panel focuses on the global character of these operations by questioning how the fact of crossing state territory sets foreign investment apart from other financial flows. Investors often seek to profit from territorially structured differences in the levels of disposable income, the cost of labour or the strength of fiscal and environmental regulations. Over the past decades, making countries attractive to foreign capital has also become one of the leading themes that is mobilized to justify a variety of state reforms from privatization to digitalization. As strong as the desire to attract foreign investment for economic growth may be, foreign investment flows can also be shunned as (neo)colonial domination or alien occupation. A host of intermediaries facilitate the liaisons across the murky waters that separate capital holders in one country from the place in another country where their money is used. In all the various guises, foreign investment solicits very different and often contradictory imaginaries. The presentations in this panel address questions pertaining to territorial difference, statehood and national identity through ethnographies of foreign investment from a great variety of observation points.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 28 July, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the different imaginaries that are evoked when a donor country seeks to become a major investor in the petroleum sector of a country that has extremely negative experiences from foreign investments in the extractive sector.
Paper long abstract:
Norway has a strong self-identity as a humanitarian actor and takes pride in being on the list of countries that donates approximately 1 percent of its GNI to official development aid. Tanzania has been one of Norway’s main partner countries for development cooperation since the 1960s, and both partners have described the relationship as close and friendly. While this relationship has been a door opener for Norwegian business, the investments were for many years relatively small scale. This changed in 2012, when the Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor (then Statoil) made enormous natural gas discoveries in the country. Equinor, a former national oil company, was partly privatised in 2001 (one third of the shares) and strives to establish an identity independent from the Norwegian state. The company plans to build a Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) plant in Southern Tanzania but has not yet been able to land a Host Government Agreement with the Tanzanian state. This is partly due to Tanzania’s negative experiences from foreign investment in its mining sector. This paper explores the different imaginaries of Equinor’s foreign investment in Tanzania: from the perspectives of Norwegian aid representatives (including Norway’s Oil for Development Programme), the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, Equinor’s Norwegian and Tanzanian staff, civil society actors and people in the affected areas. The paper draws on eight field visits to Tanzania over a period of seven years (2016-2022), as well as interviews and observations in Norway.
Paper short abstract:
Anticipation of Sovereign default have become an opportunity for private foereign investors to generate revenues through risk premiums or the possibility of legal proceedings. I propose a political sociology of Sovereign States as embedded in global financial and legal devices.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I will analyze how States are seen, observed and calculated through the prism of the foreign investment investor viewpoint that consider their failure and default positively, as some strategic portfolio opportunities. This proposal also takes the approach of studying the contribution of lawyers, alongside hedge fund portfolio managers, for whom the crises experienced by Sovereign States constitute a normal state of affairs and, above all, a source of structural profit, objectified in a portfolio of financial investments.
By mobilizing archival material tracing the genesis of the doctrine of limitation of sovereign immunity in the United States - which allows private funds to take legal action in the courts against foreign states - as well as interviews with investors, lawyers and bureaucrats who are at the source of this financial investment sub-sector, I analyze the construction of a specific foreign investment niche. I describe the role of bankers’ and creditors’ associations (the voices of the financial industry) in structuring and maintaining what is considered as the “general interest” of this emerging market. Finally, I discuss the public-private qualities of such investment configuration. These private actors could not exist without the support, direct and indirect, of technocracies, which themselves seize these private acts and evaluations as opportunities to perpetuate a moral and political “market order”. Caring about publicity, rule of law and justice for sovereigns or investors, private lawyers endorse, in their job, a specific definition of the “public good”.
Paper short abstract:
Rethinking the notion of friction, this paper proposes a translational anthropology of investment to better grasp the violent reproduction of difference along today’s logistical investment projects. The paper foregrounds repeated upsurges of violent unrest along the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the violent contradictions that have accompanied a series of foreign investment projects in Myanmar: the port, economic zone, pipelines, and transport projects of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC). Within China’s Belt and Road framework, the CMEC primarily moves oil and gas across Myanmar to southern China. Its array of zones and corridors has also seen repeated upsurges of violent unrest, from communal violence and mass atrocities to insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. These upheavals have deepened social differences along spatial, gendered, and racialized ethnic divides. Drawing on critical logistics scholarship, I ask whether “friction”—a concept developed to raise questions about the noncultural, nonsituated globalist scholarship of the 1990s—is adequate to the dramatic forms of violence that shadow large-scale logistics investments in an age of shifting imperial power. From China’s logistical frontiers to US logistics projects in the wake of the War on Terror, I suggest that a translational anthropology of investment, more closely attuned to the forceful reproduction of difference along flows of goods, capital, and labor, might better capture the turbulence of contemporary large-scale logistics investments. While “friction” reinscribes a diversified global ecumene, theorists of translation insist that navigating difference across space, languages, and political struggles entails acts of bordering that trouble normative global imaginaries. A translational anthropology of investment stands to foreground the violent reproduction of borders—the violent reproduction of difference—that logistics projects often present.
Paper short abstract:
Why do marabouts in Guinea and investment lawyers in Paris both sing praise to foreign investment projects? This presentation shows how both of them seek foreign investment as a tool for economic development, whilst simultaneously espousing radically different visions of what improvement entails.
Paper long abstract:
Throughout two years of ethnographic fieldwork on foreign investment regulation with lawyers in Paris and around the failed Simandou mining projects in Guinea, lawyers, bankers, state bureaucrats, international elite functionaries, local politicians, geologists, financial wizards and marabouts in a variety of locales all touted the virtues of attracting foreign investment. Yet, they held very different visions of what foreign investment was and what it was meant to do. In this presentation, I contrast the different “social imaginaries” (Taylor 2004) of foreign investment and its presumed social consequences. The presentation is based on my ethnographic fieldwork with Parisian investment arbitration and project finance lawyers, the Guinean investment promotion agency and rural inhabitants in the Simandou mountain chain. Concretely, how do these people talk about foreign investment? What is their imaginary of investment and how does it matter whether it is domestic or foreign? I show how lawyers and financial specialists often viewed foreign investment in a project mindset of tasks to be accomplished. At the Guinean Investment Promotion Agency and in the different investment promotion forums that I assisted, foreign investment was mostly seen as a fountain of cash that reacts to the calling of good projects. The rural inhabitants in the Simandou mountain chain did not use the term of “foreign investment” but talked about companies (sociétés) denoting big foreign firms that they saw as agents of modernization and industrialization. Most of all, I show how financial flows are structured through radically different moral economies of desire for economic betterment.