This article traces the contours of an inconspicuous kind of state power in the form of sovereign safety. This power is articulated, more precisely, in a combination of four elements: the historical term of public credit, the liquid government bond, the risk-free asset of financial textbooks and the safe-haven function assumed by the bond market in times of uncertainty. All of these involve a peculiar translation from sovereign debt as the most risky asset to sovereign creditworthiness, circulating unsecured. If critical security studies has largely limited itself to a critique of the relatively recent sense of political state security, this article explores the relevance of a far older financial sense of 'security' and 'securitization' for contemporary studies of security. So far, the Foucault-inspired finance-security literature has emphasized the risk calculus as a principal mechanism in 'securing circulation'. This article argues that sovereign safety constitutes an important overlooked factor in securing circulation in two ways: As the main form of collateral for financial transactions, its capacity to secure derives from being considered secure itself. As an epistemic variable, it constitutes the bedrock of modern finance theory. Moreover, rather than neatly complementary to the liberal security dispositif, sovereign safety can to some extent be said to represent the very object of the Foucaultian divesture of power.

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This forum contribution addresses the state of the art in the finance-security literature, identifying problems with the ‘financialisation of security’ and ‘securitisation of finance’ analytics, as well as a tendency to treat ‘money’ as a non-financial object in ways that fail to recognise money’s own (financial) parameters of safety and security. In response, it calls for greater engagement with political and financial security, instead of merely (political) securitisation and financialisation.

When, seven years ago, Marieke de Goede first drew attention to the historical and conceptual entanglements between the logics of finance and security, and to the artificial – yet meaningful – divide between the two in modernity, this was not merely a call for a new research programme. Attempting to hold together these two objects of disciplinary enquiry, and becoming aware of the tendency to collapse one into the other inherent to International Political Economy (IPE) or International Relations (IR) analytics, was also a much needed exercise of disciplinary critique, consistent with interrogating divides between the economic and the social, the financial and cultural. In other words, more than just a new object or field of empirical and theoretical research, the finance-security nexus was proposed as a device for critically and genealogically thinking through distinct disciplinary approaches to economy, futurity and populations. To that end, this special issue proposes to take stock of the multiple ways in which the finance-security nexus has been deployed as such a device of (post)disciplinary critique.

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