The financialization of remittances: governing through emotions

Abstract

In the context of the global financial crisis, remittances have become linked to the global financial inclusion agenda in a phenomenon called the 'financialization of remittances' (FOR). This article conceptualizes the FOR as a dispositif to analyze how heterogeneous ways of linking remittances to finance form an ensemble that governs things and people and legitimizes particular policy interventions. We combine the concept of the dispositif with insights from the literature on emotions to analyze how the FOR governs through an emotional regime to constitute particular objects and subjects-such as the 'remittance market' and the 'remittance family'. Through this emotional regime, the FOR establishes particular narratives regarding migration, remittances, and transnational families to embed remittances in the global financial architecture; and normalizes practices of turning transnational families into financial customers and entrepreneurs, and entrenching financial logics into their lives. Yet, emotions are also mobilized to subvert and resist the FOR and its emotional regime. More broadly, our analysis suggests that analyzing emotional governance is crucial to better understand financialization processes and expose their (fragile) nature and limits.

Remittance-scapes: The contested geographies of remittance management

“…Such perspectives on remittances – as collective practices embedded in specific economic, social and cultural contexts – are essential to understand some of the challenges faced by states and development and private sector organisations to formalise them (Boccagni, 2010; Zapata, 2018). Yet, there is a relative dearth of studies investigating how in turn emotions have been used by the remittance industry and international community to nudge remittance practices and flows (although see Kunz, 2015; Kunz et al, 2020; Trotz and Mullings, 2013). Cultural economy approaches through discourse and visual analyses could be used to further understand how practices of remittance sending and receiving are intertwined with ideas of the heteronormative family, love and care as well as territory, citizenship, sovereignty and identity, and how these are spatially and socially brought about by, among others, state, financial and commercial institutions in the attempts to formalise and marketise them.…”

The financialization of remittances and the individualization of development: A new power geometry of global development

“…Furthermore, and apart from some exceptions (see e.g. Hudson, 2008; Kunz, et al, forthcoming), the topic of remittances plays a minor role in analysis of financialization.…”

“…Development then becomes an individualized matter because individuals—senders and recipients of remittances—are held accountable and, moreover, hold themselves accountable for future well-being and development (Kunz, 2011). Remittance senders and receivers are increasingly understood as financial subjects who have access to global financial markets and who are responsible for development processes (Hernandez and Coutin, 2006; Schwittay, 2011; Zapata, 2013; Kunz el al., forthcoming).…”

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

“…“If we ask the workers, they don’t know because their parents are the people who borrow the money”, 5 one leader explained. “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).…”