Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies

by Marieke de Goede

Since the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, finance and security have become joined in new ways to produce particular targets of state surveillance. In Speculative Security , Marieke de Goede describes how previously unscrutinized practices such as donations and remittances, especially across national borders, have been affected by security measures that include datamining, asset freezing, and transnational regulation. These “precrime” measures focus on transactions that are perfectly legal but are thought to hold a specific potential to support terrorism. The pursuit of suspect monies is not simply an issue of financial regulation, she shows, but a broad political, social, and even cultural phenomenon with profound effects on everyday life. Speculative Security offers a range of examples that illustrate the types of security interventions employed today, including the extralegal targeting and breaking up of the al-Barakaat financial network that was accompanied by raids in the United States, asset freezes in Sweden, and the incarceration of a money remitter at Guantánamo Bay. De Goede develops the paradigm of “speculative security” as a way to understand the new fusing of finance and security, denoting the speculative nature of both the means and the ends of the war on terrorist financing. Ultimately, de Goede reveals how the idea of creating “security” appeals to multiple imaginable—and unimaginable—futures in order to enable action in the present.

328 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Lukáš · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent book everyone with at least a bit of political sensibility should read. In short, not only that it would show, using a number of extremely well-researched cases, that the agenda of targeting 'terrorist' monies is a kind of a dangerous hoax, unlike scholars and authors who would stay there, de Goede's research takes this very 'hoaxness' seriously as something which can tell both about the pre-emptive turns in security thinking and as well about the politics of regulating finance (think Foucault's governmentality and the urge to separate 'good' from 'bad' circulation). What de Goede calls 'speculative security' concerns both means and ends here, as she suggests, not only do we witness a demarcation of zones for politics beyond the usual ('securitization' in the sense of IR literature) but also for commodification of assets and attempts to 'make visible' what was deemed clandestine before ('securitization' in the economic sense). As de Goede demonstrates, both sides of the Atlantic, even despite a number of differences, seem to be, on many accounts rather similar than different in terms of practices (in particular of blacklisting organizations, where the very act of blacklisting is a form of presumption of guilt, where even if it is impossible to prove 'terrorist' affiliations, one of the cases seems to reek of an example of two organizations, where one gets freed of charges, but remains blacklisted because it deals with another blacklisted one, which also was not proved of terrorist financing, but remains blacklisted, because it deals with a blacklisted organization (the first one)).
Although I have been rather avoiding the work and references to Jane Bennett's 'new materialism' of 'assemblages' (both human and non-human) for a while, I also can't but endorse much of the theoretical work de Goede has been able to carry out, and on many accounts, some of her readings of Foucault, Agamben and others seem to be as correct as one can get. And as well, even that I disagree with some bits here and there, including some of the points in the conclusion, speculating on how resistance can be mobilized and formed, overall I can't but recommend this book.