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Short abstract:

This paper will examine financial intelligence and regulation as border infrastructures, with particular emphasis on how financial intelligence and surveillance is deployed to target historical exchange communities in disputed frontiers.

Long abstract:

Informal credit has historically formed an important basis for capital and commodity circulation in the markets of South Asia, comprising promissory payments settled according to vernacular timelines and practices. These systems are also regarded with acute suspicion outside their networks of circulation. In Indian-administered Kashmir, where I conducted research, this suspicion acquires another layer due to associations of informal credit with putatively illegal hawala transactions, viewed by the state as channels for ‘black money’ that fund anti-state protests and militant activities from across the border. After 9/11 there was a global "crackdown" on informal financial networks with the establishment of international financial intelligence and surveillance watchdogs, such as the supranational Financial Action Task Force that outlined and enforced global anti-money laundering directives. In my paper, I examine the entanglements between global financial intelligence, national counterinsurgency programs, and everyday trade and exchange in disputed borderlands to show how financial intelligence and regulation is used by states to enforce spatio-political rather than financial boundaries. Drawing on the rhetoric around financialization, "hawala scandals" and the experience of traders working amid political violence in Kashmir, I show how the seemingly innocuous language of financialization becomes a technique of territorialization - criminalizing historical exchange networks and "integrating" them within the putative borders of the nation-state.