Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how divestment activists target work to channel financial activities away from what are seen as more destructive forms of capitalism. It considers what the potentials are for this form of emergent resistance to financialized capitalism and its limits.

Paper long abstract:

Financialization of the global economy has led to unprecedented forms of capitalist accumulation and new forms of dispossession. Given the expansion of financial capital into ever expanding domains of everyday life, it is increasingly contested. Movements like Occupy, which emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, have attempted to resist finance and powerful financial actors. Yet there are other resistance movements that challenge not financial markets themselves, but its forms of investment. These activists choose to participate in shaping financial flows rather than rejecting them. In particular, there has been a growing recognition of the role of finance and banking in sustaining, for instance, fossil fuel industries and their related impact on climate change.

Drawing on ethnographic research on global divestment activism, though predominantly situated in London, this paper examines how divestment activists target both the ubiquity of finance (e.g., in pension funds) and its dominance to re-channel financial activities away from what are seen as more destructive forms of capitalism, particularly in relation to climate change. Further, it attends to the way in which the spatial diffusion of finance makes it possible to target it from globally disparate spaces. FInally, it considers what the potentials are for this form of emergent resistance to financialized capitalism and the limits to working within the networks of finance.