Speculative Security

The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies

Marieke de Goede

Publication Year: 2012

Since the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001, finance and security have become joined in new ways to produce particular targets of state surveillance. In Speculative Security, Marieke de Goede describes how previously unscrutinized practices such as donations and remittances, especially across national borders, have been affected by security measures that include datamining, asset freezing, and transnational regulation. These “precrime” measures focus on transactions that are perfectly legal but are thought to hold a specific potential to support terrorism. The pursuit of suspect monies is not simply an issue of financial regulation, she shows, but a broad political, social, and even cultural phenomenon with profound effects on everyday life.

Speculative Security offers a range of examples that illustrate the types of security interventions employed today, including the extralegal targeting and breaking up of the al-Barakaat financial network that was accompanied by raids in the United States, asset freezes in Sweden, and the incarceration of a money remitter at Guantánamo Bay. De Goede develops the paradigm of “speculative security” as a way to understand the new fusing of finance and security, denoting the speculative nature of both the means and the ends of the war on terrorist financing.

Ultimately, de Goede reveals how the idea of creating “security” appeals to multiple imaginable—and unimaginable—futures in order to enable action in the present.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Abbreviations

Acknowledgments

This book has traveled a long way since its first insecure steps in
Newcastle in the wake of 9/11, when the pursuit of terrorist monies first
became a broad public and political concern. I became fascinated with
the emergence of new suspect financial spaces in the context of what
would be called “the war on terror.” ...

Introduction: The Politics of Terrorism Financing

In November 2008, a Texas Court declared a guilty verdict in the case
of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) and
five of its leaders for providing material support to Hamas in what
has been called “the government’s flagship terrorism-financing
case.”1 ...

1. Mediating Terrorist Money

In the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale, the “bad guy,” Albanian
mathematical genius and gambling addict Le Chiffre, is a terrorist
financier. Described as “a private banker to the world’s terrorists” by
fictional MI6 director M (played by Judi Dench), Le Chiffre embodies
pure evil not because he seeks world domination, ...

2. The Finance–Security Assemblage

In October 2006, then-UK
Chancellor Gordon Brown (later to become
prime minister) outlined his vision for the fight against terrorism in a
speech to Britain’s leading international affairs think tank, Chatham
House. Perhaps motivated by the need to distinguish this vision from
the violent and increasingly unpopular military intervention in Iraq, ...

3. Following the Money: Risk, Preemption, and the Mobile Norm

As we saw in chapter 2, in the wake of 9/11 financial data became
imbued with a special significance. Through the idea that money trails
do not lie, financial analysis came to hold the promise of unmediated
and direct access to the mapping of terrorist networks. ...

4. Cash and the Circuits of Transnational Kinship

Chapter 3 examined the processes of financial datamining taking place
within the financial industry to select and target suspicious transactions
among millions of records daily. We saw that such targeting
takes place on the basis of mobile criteria related to account histories,
professional profiles, lifestyle details, and geographical associations. ...

5. Zakat and the Securitization of Charitable Donation

This book started with a brief examination of the trial of the Holy
Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF), the biggest
Muslim faith-based
charity in the United States, which was listed and
destroyed in the wake of 9/11 and whose directors were convicted of
material support for Hamas and sentenced to substantial prison terms
in 2008. ...

6. Money and Modern Exile

In December 2006, members of the alleged Dutch terrorist group the
Hofstadgroep were put on the European Union’s terrorism sanction list
(or EU blacklist). The Hofstadgroep is the name given by the Dutch secret
services to a group of individuals—mostly
young Muslim men who
are second-generation
migrants but also a few women ...

Conclusion: Premediation and Contestation

This book has shown that the post-9/11 pursuit of terrorist monies
has fostered a finance–security assemblage that governs through preemption
and anticipation. Contrary to expectation, the objective of
counterterrorism financing is not to cut off money flows to (potential)
terrorists. ...

Notes

Index

About the Author

Marieke de Goede is professor of politics at the University of Amsterdam.
She is the author of Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance (Minnesota, 2005) and coeditor, with Louise Amoore, of Risk and the
War on Terror.

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