Journal article

Publication year: 2020

Pages: 4-23

Journal: Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies

Volume number: 47

Issue number: 1

ISSN: 0258-9346

eISSN: 1470-1014

DOI Link: https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2020.1712830

Publisher: Taylor and Francis Group

Abstract: 
Since the 1990s, financial markets have been labelled 'critical infrastructures,' putting them on par with other macro-functions deemed vital for the constitution and continuation of contemporary. This paper argues that, this discursive move signals a securitisation of finance that, together with an infrastructural imaginary of society, produces new articulations of and new claims to political sovereignty. The notion of 'infrastructure' is bound up with the historically northern understanding of political sovereignty and security as involving territorial integrity, full functionality of societally vital services, and the controlled mobilisation of persons, groups, objects, symbols, and value tokens. At the same time, the example of the securitisation of finance as critical infrastructure shows that such a claim to sovereignty is ready to accept an alleged 'own' logic of finance and its technologies of financial securitisation, which brought about the permeation of finance into virtually all economic sectors in the first place. Thus, the securitisation of finance as infrastructure articulates a version of sovereignty that shifts the securitising initiative back to the polity but at the same time responsibilises the polity for safeguarding, and indeed promoting, the peculiar dynamics of the societal sector thus securitised.

Harvard Citation style: Langenohl, A. (2020) Articulating Sovereignty within the Infrastructural Imagination: The Case of the Securitisation of Finance as 'Critical Infrastructure', Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies, 47(1), pp. 4-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2020.1712830

APA Citation style: Langenohl, A. (2020). Articulating Sovereignty within the Infrastructural Imagination: The Case of the Securitisation of Finance as 'Critical Infrastructure'. Politikon: South African Journal of Political Studies. 47(1), 4-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2020.1712830