Research Interests
- Security studies
- Global Finance, International Political Economy
- Sovereignty, sovereign debt, public credit
- History and theory of pledge, money, value, debt, collateral
- Financial security, safe assets
- Digital economy and cashless society
- Critical theory and post-structuralism, contemporary conditions of critique
My research is based at the intersection of security studies and international political economy, focusing in particular on conceptions of (in)security in global finance. This includes theories of money, debt, value and collateral, informed by a socio-political perspective that is grounded in the technicalities of modern finance.
My doctoral thesis The Security of Public Credit examined state power in the form of the credible sovereign, rather than the military state. Through four articles it analysed state security both in the narrow financial term of the 'safe asset' and more broadly as 'public credit', raising the question of how this economic imaginary of the state relates to the legal fiction of the state person.
Background
International networks:
Over the past 6 years I have pursued the developing research agenda of finance-security relations in different international settings: as organiser of the Research Council of Norway-funded workshop series 'Understanding financial security in an age of uncertainty' (2009-2011); as leader of a working group on money and credit in the COST Action 'System risk, financial crisis and credit' (2010-2014); as co-convenor of the EWIS workshops 'Security and finance: performativity, narrativity and uncertainty' in Izmir, Turkey (2014) and 'Living the 'new normal': Post-crisis politics of money, debt and time' in Tuebingen, Germany (2016); and as leader of the work package on 'Societal security of financial systems' of the FP7 Virtual Centre of Excellence on Societal Security (SOURCE) (2014-2017). This agenda is also a key focus of my visiting fellowship at the Collaborative Research Centre 'Dynamics of security: Types of securitisation in historical perspective' at the Universities of Giessen and Marburg 2016-2017.
Editing:
In 2016 I joined Nathan Coombs and Amin Samman as co-editor of Finance and Society.
Teaching:
I teach the following courses at the Research School on Peace and Conflict: Interconnections of Security and Finance; Contemporary critique: power, value(s), economy; Societal Security in Europe: A Reassessment