Contesting the financialisation of remittances: Repertoires of reluctance, refusal and dissent in Ghana and Senegal

Abstract

This article engages with a global migration-development agenda that aims to harness the development potential of remittances by incorporating remittance flows and households into global finance. Drawing upon 10 months of fieldwork research with remittance recipients in Ghana and Senegal, this paper shows that any attempts to financialise and channel remittances away from so-called ‘informal’ financial circuits face differentiated forms of contestation, namely reluctance, refusal, and dissent. To explain how and why variegated financial practices and subjectivities – that differ from the neoliberal self-disciplined subject – emerge and endure, the paper draws together analyses on everyday financialisation with discussions on the central role of ‘informal’ finance and the concept of relational value in processes of social reproduction and strategies of future-making. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of work that aims to decentre research on everyday financialisation beyond Anglo-American economies, and the Global North more generally.

The promise of financial inclusion: finance as future in Palestine

“…It is important to note that the role non-elite Palestinians play in co-constituting the emerging financial inclusion assemblage is beyond the scope of this paper, since further research is needed to examine how the promises of financial inclusion are received, reworked and/or refused by residents (c.f. Green et al 2012;Harker 2020;Guermond forthcoming).…”

Challenging the financial inclusion-decent work nexus: evidence from Cambodia’s over-indebted internal migrants

“…"But the children work in the factory to pay back the debt." The channelling of remittances into formal financial circuits through, for instance, the repayment of microfinance loans, has recently been located within broader processes of remittance marketisation and financialisation (Guermond, 2020;Datta, 2017;Kunz et al, 2020). These analyses have foregrounded the disciplinary role of a migration-development agenda which can push 'migrant workers and their families to dedicate an ever-increasing fraction of their wage remittances to the management of formal financial debts and assets to secure their future' (Datta and Guermond 2020: 331).…”

Remittance micro‐worlds and migrant infrastructure: Circulations, disruptions, and the movement of money

“…Developmental efforts to improve remittance infrastructures, and the concomitant forms of statistics and expertise deployed to propel this euphoria, exemplify how remittances are structurally prescribed and regulated. These structures are hierarchically established by large‐scale institutional and corporate forms of authority (Guermond, 2020a). Their detachment from the grounded practices through which money, goods, and services are transferred in and across multi‐scalar geographies largely disregards the multifarious remittance compositions that emerge to modify or subvert these prevalent structures.…”

“…For example, they challenge us to think beyond the financialised (migrant) subject, and towards distributed understandings of agency and power (Webber et al, 2020). It is in the “grey” zones (Yiftachel, 2009) or “edge territories” (Hall, 2021) that contested “remittance‐scapes” are forged, sustained, and disrupted (Guermond, 2020a).…”