Remittances, development and financialisation beyond the Global North.

In the context of the global financial crisis and the crunch in development financing, remittances have become linked to the financial inclusion agenda in what has been termed as 'financialization of remittances' (FOR). This special issue brings together seven articles that analyze the socioculturally specific histories and the everyday manifestations of the FOR in the Caribbean, Central America, Colombia, Ghana, Mexico, Nepal and Senegal. The contributors engage in a transdisciplinary conversation, mobilizing insights from feminist, postcolonial, poststructural and political geography theories. They propose two majors shifts for financialisation analysis: towards an investigation beyond the global North and towards taking seriously failures, contradictions and contestations of financialisation processes. By doing so, the special issue contributes to financialization research in five major ways: to expose colonial legacies of remittances and their financialization; to challenge the supposedly neutral character of the FOR by revealing the caste, gendered and racialized power relations in financialization processes; to destabilizes the notion of the universal individual financial subject and show how multiple financial subjectivities are constituted in constellations; to document the complexities, ambiguities, contradictions and failures of financialization processes and the (everyday) contestations they face; and to show how remittances and their financialization are implicated in reconfiguring authorities, citizenship and social dynamics. The contributions propose relational understandings of financialization that conceptualize the co-constitution of economic, political and sociocultural dimensions of financialization across and beyond the North-South divide.

'Cambiando el chip': The gendered constellation of subjectivities of the financialisation of remittances in Mexico.

In the wake of the global financial crisis and a context of stagnating development aid, the international community now promotes linking remittances to finance as a development strategy, in what has been termed the 'financialisation of remittances' (FOR). This article analyses the ways in which the financialisation of remittance manifests in Mexico in gendered ways, and what this tells us about financialisation and financial subjectivation processes beyond the global North. We find that the financialisation of remittance represents a shift from earlier remittance-based development models whereby remittances become linked to financial inclusion and social welfare agendas and the focus is broadened beyond migrant income to diaspora wealth. Focusing on the governing arrangements of the financialisation of remittance, we propose the concept of 'constellation of subjectivities' in order to analyse the interrelated and interacting programmatic subjectivities through which the financialisation of remittance manifests in Mexico. Combining this conceptualisation with interdisciplinary feminist insights on financialisation, we analyse the various intersecting social dynamics that weave through such constellations. The analysis - based on document, interview and observation material - finds that the financialisation of remittance in Mexico creates and governs a gendered constellation of financial subjectivities with three dimensions: migrant men, remittance-receiving women and the constitutive outside of the non-transnational family. While most studies tend to focus on transnational families, we demonstrate that non-transnational families are an integral part of the financialisation of remittance. Our analysis destabilises the notion of the universal financial subject and highlights the importance of broadening our analysis of financialisation to constitutive outsides that often fall off the radar.