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Cultural Critique 65 (2007) 140-163

Underground Money
Marieke de Goede

Shortly after September 11, 2001, it became clear that the war on terrorist finance was to occupy a central place in the war on terror. The Terrorist Financing Executive Order enacted by George W. Bush on September 24, 2001, made it legally possible to pursue financial supporters of terrorism as terrorists. The Executive Order dramatically expanded the U.S. government's powers to indict those providing funds and infrastructural support to alleged terrorists, and to freeze and block assets. The order also published a blacklist of terrorist organizations and individuals whose assets were to be frozen globally. The order was heralded as "the first strike on the global terror network." In the accompanying press release, President Bush said: "We will starve the terrorists of funding, turn them against each other, rout them out of their safe hiding places, and bring them to justice."1

The executive order was a first step in what the U.S. government calls "the war on terrorist finance," which entails, among other measures, freezing assets, compiling blacklists, designing new financial regulation, pursuing informal money transmitters, and engaging in a global diplomatic offensive.2 In its imagination of terrorist finance as an underground sphere, the war on terrorist finance employs the "discourse of civilization versus barbarism" that, according to Jodi Dean and Paul Passavant, pervades politics since 9/11.3 For example, when the U.S. Treasury closed down a number of informal money transmitters in the name of fighting terrorist finance on November 7, 2001, President Bush stated, "The entry points to these networks may be a small storefront operation, but follow the network to its center, and you discover wealthy banks and sophisticated technology, all at the service of mass murderers. By shutting these networks down, we disrupt their murderous work." Bush continued, "We find an enemy who hides in caves in Afghanistan and in the shadows in our own society. It's an enemy who can only survive in darkness."4 [End Page 140]

This paper examines practices of governing in the war on terrorist finance and shows them to be dependent on articulations of an underground world of terrorist money and suspicious transactions on the one hand, and a legitimate global world of financial normality on the other. As such, the war on terrorist finance is part of the everyday "legitimation work" of globalization post-9/11, producing the world of legitimate global finance simultaneously with the world of the illegitimate underground. For Bill Maurer, Susan Bibler Coutin, and Barbara Yngvesson, globalization is not something that exists unproblematically but is a discursively produced phenomenon that performatively creates the categories it assumes to transcend (e.g., nations and sovereignty). They write:

scholarly debates about globalization . . . assume that there is a coherent field (of subjects, nations, and so forth) that "flows" of people, capital, and images threaten to destroy or to open up. And yet this field is inherently fractured and is always in jeopardy. It takes work to stitch it together, and abject figures such as the illegal alien or the money-laundering tax haven have a key ideological place in this process.5

They call the everyday work of producing the coherent worlds and subjectivities that belie globalization "the legitimation work of globalization," which "includes issuing and denying documents, sealing and opening records, regulating and criminalizing transactions, and repudiating and claiming countries and persons."6 Since 9/11, questions regarding the resurrection of borders in finance and security have dominated the media as well as academic literature, and legitimating globalization has taken on new urgency. To some extent, the processes that enable the continued legitimation of globalization work through inscriptions of the livable/legitimate/licit and the unlivable/illegitimate/illicit in the context of the war on terror.

While questioning the world of underground money as imaged by policymakers in the war on terrorist finance, this article also problematizes the coherent world of global finance as imagined not just by policymakers but also by academics writing on international finance and international political economy...

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