Articles by Carola Westermeier
Review of International Political Economy
The European Central Bank (ECB) has entered the preparation phase for the potential issuance of a... more The European Central Bank (ECB) has entered the preparation phase for the potential issuance of a digital euro. The digital euro under consideration represents a retail central bank digital currency (CBDC), a digital representation of central bank money that is intended for use by the general public. This article foregrounds the digital euro as an infrastructure that furthers European security ambitions. It argues that the development of the digital euro is a materialization of European (in)security rationales that aim to secure pan-European financial transactions amid growing geopolitical tensions. It focuses on the development of the technology and analyses how central bankers' scenarios of the future manifest in the anticipated design and prototypes. While the provision of a financial infrastructure is the most decisive security-related implication of the digital euro, the introduction of a new form of public money is the decisive financial feature with potentially wide-ranging implications for banks. Although the ECB seeks to balance the interests of banks and other financial actors in the development of the digital euro, its plans are still met with criticism. Finally, the article argues that the ECB exerts itself more explicitly than before as a geopolitical actor in its own regard.
Anthropology Today, 2023
Central banks worldwide are developing, piloting and launching new central bank digital currencie... more Central banks worldwide are developing, piloting and launching new central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). As the hub for the central banking community, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) promotes a curiously botanical CBDC imaginary. From ‘money flowers’ to ‘tree trunks’ and a ‘strong canopy’, This helps to naturalize CBDC without clarifying its sociopolitical implications or envisioned monetary future, such as geopolitical tensions and financial fragmentation, new modes of financial interaction or the strengthened role of central banks. While omitting the paradoxes and ambivalences of CBDC, the imaginary of the BIS structures the enfolding discourses and allows the bank to function as a think tank for financial policy-making.
Follow the money' is currently the central principle of international financial security, althoug... more Follow the money' is currently the central principle of international financial security, although money itself is probably one of the most unlikely objects to make traceable. Two recent scandals around a security unit and the payment processor Wirecard show how existing systems of financial surveillance that seek to capture 'flows' of money for security purposes are either enabled or frustrated. While this current regime of financial surveillance adheres to demanding the free flow of money through financial infrastructures and various actors and intermediaries, new digital currencies build on a set type of ledger(s) in which money is stored as data. Hence, what we understand as money does not 'flow', but is rather updated. This change in the underlying infrastructure means that traceability does not need to be enacted; it is an intrinsic feature of digital currencies. With new central bank digital currencies (CBDC), the regime of financial security thus changes from the monitoring of financial flows and flagging of (potentially) illicit transactions towards the storage of financial data in (de)centralised ledgers. This form of transactional governance is engendered by shifting geopolitical agendas that increasingly rely on fractured instead of globalised financial infrastructures, thus making CBDCs themselves subject to security efforts.
International Studies Quarterly, 2022
Invisible and seemingly technical financial infrastructures have become the site of high geopolit... more Invisible and seemingly technical financial infrastructures have become the site of high geopolitics. Crucially, security sanctions are being leveraged through the global financial messaging network SWIFT. This article offers the term “infrastructural geopolitics” to draw attention to the ways in which hegemonic contestation and fracturing play out in and through payment infrastructures. Infrastructures are not passive sites to be used in the service of preexisting hegemonic power but can themselves route, block, challenge, or rework power in particular ways.
We focus on the new trade mechanism INSTEX as a lens on the global battle over financial payment infrastructures. How and why has hegemonic contestation taken the shape of, and is in turn shaped by, struggles over payment infrastructure? As a heuristic device to analyze the hegemonic politics of financial infrastructure, we propose three terms that capture the processual nature of infrastructural politics: sedimentation, resurfacing, and fracturing. We apply these to the emergence of the payment infrastructure INSTEX. We explain how hegemonic politics become hardwired in the technical and largely invisible SWIFT infrastructure, which supported postwar financial order and sedimented its uneven power relations. The process of political resurfacing captures the ways in which infrastructural dispositions come to the surface of political discussion again, after 9/11 and through the JCPOA process. In conclusion, the introduction of INSTEX has advanced the possibility of fracturing international payment routes, with multiple alternative infrastructures emerging.
Journal of International Relations and Development, 2021
The ongoing covid-19 pandemic has prompted discussions, both politically and analytically, that f... more The ongoing covid-19 pandemic has prompted discussions, both politically and analytically, that frame its security problematic as an infrastructural dilemma that unfolds between the public health-related need for interrupting the movement of people and calls to keep economic processes of production, distribution and consumption going. Moving beyond this diagnosis, we argue that infrastructural responses to the crisis in the European Union have resulted in the creation and invocation of economic and socio-material assemblages that are expected to steer societies through the crisis, which we term 'safe assemblages'. In empirical terms, we discuss the cases of the creation of economic emergency funds which we view as economic assemblages that guarantee payment connectivity for struggling businesses, and of the invocation of the 'home' as an assemblage that minimises contagion risks while maintaining social connectivity through digital means. In theoretical terms, we suggest expanding current theorisations of the role of circulation in security infrastructures, referring to Foucault, by a consideration of assemblages as a third component that mediates the relationship between circulation and its interruption.
Information, Communication & Society , 2020
Financial transactions are part of everyday life, yet banking has largely withstood the digital t... more Financial transactions are part of everyday life, yet banking has largely withstood the digital transformation within most European countries. Recently, there have been initiatives that merge the digital and the financial sphere by integrating the transactions that run through established financial infrastructures into digital platforms. Large data-driven companies hereby seek access to financial transactions and try to embed payments within their platforms. This contribution discusses differing models of how tech-driven companies gain access to financial infrastructures, and how recently introduced policies engender these processes. Within Europe and the United Kingdom, banks that operate through financial infrastructures and hold most transactional data are now required by regulators to provide access to their customers' accounts. The platformization of financial transactions is thus not purely a technical question, but it also is a remarkable example of how politically enforced changes in the materiality of data lead to reconfigurations with broader economic and social consequences. It results in the transformation of money into a form of (transactional) data and shows how the value of money and data depends on the technological underpinnings that determine the capability of their circulation. In order to understand their valuation, we need to take the material assemblages that enable their distribution into account. ARTICLE HISTORY
Politikon , 2020
The paper proposes to use the concept of co-production to account for the mutual coproduction of ... more The paper proposes to use the concept of co-production to account for the mutual coproduction of private as well as public security actors and critical infrastructure. Through an exploration in the field of urban security provision, we aim to contribute to critical security studies by turning to the entanglements of public and private security actors in the process of securitising infrastructure. As the construction and provision of infrastructural security depends neither solely on public nor private actors but on their interaction, we propose the concept of co-production to account for these dynamics. Based on a focused ethnography, the paper mobilises material collected during a security conference in Israel,
in which the close connections between private and public security actors were forged and where infrastructure was at the heart of the security concerns.
Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft, 2019
A review article that brings together a multitude of perspectives of how finance and political se... more A review article that brings together a multitude of perspectives of how finance and political security interrelate in post-crisis financial governance
Policy and Society, 2018
The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is known to be the ‘bank of central banks’ and a conf... more The Bank of International Settlements (BIS) is known to be the ‘bank of central banks’ and a confidential place where central bankers meet to discuss policies. However, this contribution shows that it is also far more. Economic research and policy-making are closely connected within the BIS. Researchers and analysts provide knowledge for financial regulation and introduce new approaches to policy-makers who meet within the BIS-hosted bodies, such as the Basel Committee of Banking Supervision. The Monetary and Economic Department of the BIS operates like a think tank in the field of financial policy-making. This is exemplified by the introduction of macroprudential regulation, a new approach that originated within the BIS. By combining post-structural discourse theory with the concept of discourse coalition, this paper shows how macroprudential regulation became a frame of reference promising to maintain financial stability and how the BIS benefits from this.
Books by Carola Westermeier
Sicherheitsakteure. Epochenübergreifende Perspektiven zu Praxisformen und Versicherheitlichung, 2018
Welche Rolle spielen Akteure in Prozessen der Versicherheitlichung, und welche Konsequenzen resul... more Welche Rolle spielen Akteure in Prozessen der Versicherheitlichung, und welche Konsequenzen resultieren daraus? Der vorliegende Band untersucht ‚Sicherheitsakteure‘ in klassischen Bereichen der Sicherheitsforschung wie dem Militär und dem Rechtswesen, folgt jedoch ebenso einem erweiterten Sicherheitsverständnis. Dementsprechend werden das Wirken und Handeln von Akteuren in Bereichen der Ökonomie, der Diplomatie, den Medien und der Wissenschaft in Hinblick auf die Konstruktion von Sicherheit untersucht. Dabei werden insbesondere Prozesse der Versicherheitlichung in den Blick genommen, in denen ein Thema dramatisiert und zu einem ‚Sicherheitsproblem‘ wird. Konzeptionelle wie auch exemplarische Beiträge untersuchen die Gruppen der Gewaltakteure, Juristen, Verhandler und Experten. Dabei vereint der Band geschichtswissenschaftliche Beiträge, die vom Mittelalter bis in die Zeitgeschichte reichen, mit sozial- und politikwissenschaftlichen Perspektiven
Chapters by Carola Westermeier
Conceptualizing Power in Dynamics of Securitization, Andreas Langeohl, Regina Kreide (eds) , 2019
In this chapter, we seek to conceptualize power dynamics of securitization by bringing together d... more In this chapter, we seek to conceptualize power dynamics of securitization by bringing together discourse theory of hegemony (Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe) and the Copenhagen approach of securitization. Concretely, we show how 'financial stability' became an empty signifier in the post-crisis discourse on financial reform and how it gained a hegemonic claim.
Ausgehend von den Ansätzen der Versicherheitlichung, dement-
sprechend mit einem speziellen Fokus... more Ausgehend von den Ansätzen der Versicherheitlichung, dement-
sprechend mit einem speziellen Fokus auf die Konstruktion von Bedro-
hungsdiskursen, wird analysiert, welche Rolle Experten und ihre Expertise
in derart dramatisierten Diskursen spielen.
Transnational Expertise Internal Cohesion and External Recognition of Expert Groups, 2018
This edited volume is devoted to analysing transnational expertise, a topic that has received con... more This edited volume is devoted to analysing transnational expertise, a topic that has received considerable attention in the social sciences and history, especially in research on transnational professional networks and associations, epistemic communities and groups of practitioners. Yet more knowledge about transnational expertise is needed, given the growing importance of expertise in an ever more complex world in which interdependencies between different types of actors and organisations are increasing and in which these actors often have to cooperate to address transnational issues. While studies regarding the above-mentioned concepts have generally involved empirical cases of expertise in the context of transnational governance since the end of the Cold War, transnational expertise actually played an important role long before 1990. Therefore, this volume adopts an interdisciplinary approach that includes perspectives from history, sociology and political science.
Markwart Herzog (Ed.), Frauenfußball in Deutschland. Anfänge – Verbote – Widerstände – Durchbruch, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2013
Frank Becker; Ralf Schäfer (Hrsg.): Die Spiele gehen weiter. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2014
Book Reviews by Carola Westermeier
Conference Presentations by Carola Westermeier
Beitrag zur Ad-Hoc-Gruppe »Welches Wissen nutzen Zentralbanken? Ökonomik und Finanzmarktregulieru... more Beitrag zur Ad-Hoc-Gruppe »Welches Wissen nutzen Zentralbanken? Ökonomik und Finanzmarktregulierung im Kontext der Krise«
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Articles by Carola Westermeier
We focus on the new trade mechanism INSTEX as a lens on the global battle over financial payment infrastructures. How and why has hegemonic contestation taken the shape of, and is in turn shaped by, struggles over payment infrastructure? As a heuristic device to analyze the hegemonic politics of financial infrastructure, we propose three terms that capture the processual nature of infrastructural politics: sedimentation, resurfacing, and fracturing. We apply these to the emergence of the payment infrastructure INSTEX. We explain how hegemonic politics become hardwired in the technical and largely invisible SWIFT infrastructure, which supported postwar financial order and sedimented its uneven power relations. The process of political resurfacing captures the ways in which infrastructural dispositions come to the surface of political discussion again, after 9/11 and through the JCPOA process. In conclusion, the introduction of INSTEX has advanced the possibility of fracturing international payment routes, with multiple alternative infrastructures emerging.
in which the close connections between private and public security actors were forged and where infrastructure was at the heart of the security concerns.
Books by Carola Westermeier
Chapters by Carola Westermeier
sprechend mit einem speziellen Fokus auf die Konstruktion von Bedro-
hungsdiskursen, wird analysiert, welche Rolle Experten und ihre Expertise
in derart dramatisierten Diskursen spielen.
Book Reviews by Carola Westermeier
Conference Presentations by Carola Westermeier
We focus on the new trade mechanism INSTEX as a lens on the global battle over financial payment infrastructures. How and why has hegemonic contestation taken the shape of, and is in turn shaped by, struggles over payment infrastructure? As a heuristic device to analyze the hegemonic politics of financial infrastructure, we propose three terms that capture the processual nature of infrastructural politics: sedimentation, resurfacing, and fracturing. We apply these to the emergence of the payment infrastructure INSTEX. We explain how hegemonic politics become hardwired in the technical and largely invisible SWIFT infrastructure, which supported postwar financial order and sedimented its uneven power relations. The process of political resurfacing captures the ways in which infrastructural dispositions come to the surface of political discussion again, after 9/11 and through the JCPOA process. In conclusion, the introduction of INSTEX has advanced the possibility of fracturing international payment routes, with multiple alternative infrastructures emerging.
in which the close connections between private and public security actors were forged and where infrastructure was at the heart of the security concerns.
sprechend mit einem speziellen Fokus auf die Konstruktion von Bedro-
hungsdiskursen, wird analysiert, welche Rolle Experten und ihre Expertise
in derart dramatisierten Diskursen spielen.
commented on economic and political developments in West-Germany during the 1980s and
how they were involved in political debates.
Generally, the 1980s are conceived to be a time of change towards conservatism and
neoliberalism. Whereas Thatcherism and Reaganomics are normally connected with
neoliberalism or monetarism, the German Conservative Party CDU always considered itself to
be in the tradition of Ludwig Erhard and his idea of a soziale Marktwirtschaft (social market
economy). Economic journalists of the FAZ which was founded after the war to be the
principal paper directed to German economic and political leaders also claimed to act
according to this tradition and to be ‘defenders’ of the German tradition of Ordoliberalism.
Many of them were disciples of prominent German economists and in their role as editors
gave economists like Friedrich Hayek or Herbert Giersch the possibility to express their views
in the popular newspaper.
When in 1982 Helmut Kohl became the German Chancellor, he stated to enhance a ‘geistigmoralische
Wende’ (intellectual and moral shift) against a presumably leftist zeitgeist which
ought to include conservative and liberal values. In the following years, the business section
of the FAZ supported decisively what they perceived to be liberal measures taken by the
Government and would strongly defend them against any opposition.
treffen die zivile Bevölkerung. Bereits vor Beginn der Invasion hatten sich die
westlichen Staaten darauf verständigt, dass eine Reaktion auf die russische
Aggression vor allem mittels wirtschaftlicher Sanktionen geschehen würde.
Sanktionen geschehen aber nicht im luftleeren Raum, sie greifen an konkreten
Punkten an, die Handel ermöglichen – oder eben verhindern.