The first of its kind, the course presents the state-of-the-art of the finance-security literature and features guest lectures by some of the leading scholars in this emerging field. The lectures are organized around central concepts (such as 'sovereignty', 'collateral', 'securitisation', 'value' etc) that will be explored in terms of their cross-disciplinary reach and capital. The course will also offer opportunities to discuss own research. Finance and security are conventionally studied separately by the different disciplines of international political economy (IPE)/ modern finance and security studies/ international relations (IR). Nonetheless these have been shown to profess intimate interconnections, such as the instrumental use of finance in the dollar diplomacy of the early 20th century or the insecurity of financial speculation traditionally pointed out by IPE, contrary to the claims of modern finance (de Goede, 2010). If the finance-security relation here remains somewhat implicit, a growing cross-disciplinary literature has begun to explicitly reflect the manifold and complex connections between finance and security. Post-9/11 and post-financial crisis the merging of finance and security logics has been conceived either as a securitisation (in the Copenhagen sense of the term) of finance or as a financialisation of security. In addition, financial security carries a distinct meaning as pledge/ collateral and financial commodity that is at the root of the financial term of securitisation, making the question of the correspondence of political and financial security a key area of enquiry.
The course is co-funded by the SOURCE Societal Security Network.
