Project description
A closer look at Southern financial autonomy
For centuries, cities in the Global North have controlled global finance, enforcing harsh debt conditions and perpetuating colonial inequalities known as ‘international financial subordination’. Recently, this dominance faced challenges from the Global South, where new financial centres are emerging. These Southern hubs aim to offer alternatives to longstanding financial exploitation. In this context, the ERC-funded InsubordinateFINANCE project aims to explore financial deepening in cities across Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. By combining postcolonial theory and ethnographic insights, the project poses a critical question: Do these Southern centres perpetuate subordination, or can they free themselves from Northern control? Overall, the project seeks to deepen our understanding of global finance and the dynamics of power.
Objective
Cities in the global North have served for centuries as the command-and-control centers of global finance. They have long determined the unequal access to credit and often harsh conditions of debt repayment for people, businesses, and states across the world. This control has maintained colonial power inequalities that many scholars now characterize as 'international financial subordination'. Yet in recent years, an increasing number of officials, citizens, and professionals across the Global South have mounted a surprising opposition to the Northern subordination of Southern finance. Since the turn of the new millennium, financial centers located in cities across the Global South have expanded dramatically in number, complexity, and size. These insubordinate financial centers claim to offer an alternative to the exclusion, extraction, and domination that has long characterized their (neo)colonial financial relations with the North. At the heart of this alternative is a new generation of Southern financial professionals seeking to create new networks, innovate new devices, and envision new futures for postcolonial economies. To take stock of these novel trends, InsubordinateFINANCE will examine the politics of financial sector deepening in 11 case study cities across Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia. It will develop an innovative ‘provincializing finance approach’ that combines the insights of postcolonial theory, ethnography, and science and technology studies to answer a field-defining research question: Are Southern financial centers vectors of global financial subordination or do they offer independence from Northern financial dominance? Given the potential for a shift towards such an insubordinate finance to reconfigure global power relations and inequalities, it is important to asses where, how, to what extent, and with what effects this shift is taking place.
This project's aim is simple yet ambitious: to upend how we think about global finance.
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Keywords
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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13572 Marseille
France
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