Wakeful Geographies, Wakeful Bodies:Day and Nighttime Rhythms of Indebted Life and Capitalist Enclosure in Cambodia

For a discipline so oriented around the study of wakeful geographies, the lack of direct conceptual engagement with the notion of wakefulness - a cognitive state in which the mind is conscious of, and responsive to, the external world - is all-the-more remarkable. In this paper we advance geography by probing and revealing the links that exist between wakefulness and indebted life under capitalism. We show how villagers in rural Cambodia experience wakefulness in their day and night-time lives through a punitive alertness to, and excessive rumination on, the pressures and challenges they face to repay microfinance debts on time. Capitalist debt demands a keen alertness and submission to the clock-time of repayment obligations, and with this fosters a hyper-alertness to debt that works to the consequential exclusion of sleep. The paper evidences the enforced isorhythmic alignment between the demands of creditors and the bodies and minds of borrowers, thus demonstrating the importance of thinking about the debt relation through the heuristic tool of rhythm. This claim is evidenced further through the arrhythmic (discordant) impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the intensifying climate crisis which are further undermining borrowers’ hopes for debt-free lives. Ultimately, the mixed-method interview and photographic data presented in the paper demonstrates the significance of the 24/7 nature of debt and broader trend towards diurnal expansionism. Both are leading to the physical, emotional, and existential enclosure of bodies and homes habituated into the rhythms and impetuses of capitalism

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

In this paper, we question the promotion of financial inclusion, and microfinance specifically, as a means to achieve 'Decent Work' (DW) under the International Labor Organization's (ILO) programme. Drawing upon original research findings from two types of internal migrants in Cambodia, we make a twin contention: first, that excessive levels of microfinance borrowing by garment workers are part-outcome of the failings of the DW programme to engender 'decent enough work', and second, that microfinance borrowing is actually eroding rather than contributing to the prospect of decent work for debt-bonded brickmakers in the country. The data presented on two of the largest sectors contributing to Cambodia's growth in recent decades, enable the paper to show how microfinance and labour precarity are intertwined through the over-indebtedness of workers in both cases. The paper ultimately looks to caution the ILO on its current promotion of financial inclusion and microfinance in particular, stressing the need for significant sectoral reforms before this form of credit can be considered to align with the core principles of the DW programme

Depleted by Debt: “Green” Microfinance, Over-Indebtedness, and Social Reproduction in Climate-Vulnerable Cambodia

The operations of microfinance are exalted in mainstream development thinking as a key means of supporting smallholder farmers facing growing crises of agricultural productivity in the context of daily, ongoing, and often slow-onset climate disasters. Microfinance products and services are claimed to enhance coping and adaptative capacity by facilitating both risk recovery and reduction. Challenging the status quo, this paper brings together original and mixed-method data collected between 2020 and 2022 in Cambodia to critically examine the “green finance” agenda by highlighting the ways in which microfinance contributes to reproducing and exacerbating climate precarity and harm for many. We evidence how credit-taking can lead to more dangerous and individualised efforts to cope with, and adapt to, existing conditions at home, often at the cost of emotional and bodily depletion. By doing so, we contribute to answering calls for connecting literatures and thinking on social reproduction, depletion, and climate change adaptation

Trapped in the service of debt. How the burdens of repayment are fuelling the health poverty trap in rural Cambodia

Over-indebtedness is fuelling, not alleviating, the health poverty trap in Cambodia. It is associated with increased short-term health sacrifices made to repay debt, and physical, mental, and social suffering that is endured in the longer term

Depleted by debt: ‘green’ microfinance, over-indebtedness, and social reproduction in climate-vulnerable Cambodia

The operations of microfinance are exalted in mainstream development thinking as a key means of supporting smallholder farmers facing growing crises of agricultural productivity in the context of daily, ongoing, and often slow-onset climate disasters. Enhancing coping and adaptative capacity, the provision of microfinance products and services would facilitate adaptation by facilitating both risk recovery and reduction. Bringing together original and mixed-method data collected between 2020-2022 in Cambodia, this paper critically examines this ‘green microfinance’ narrative by highlighting the ways in which microfinance contributes to reproducing and exacerbating climate precarity and harm for many. We evidence how credit-taking can lead to more dangerous and individualised efforts to cope with, and adapt to, existing conditions at home, often at the cost of emotional and bodily depletion. By doing so, we contribute to answering calls for connecting the literatures on social reproduction, depletion, and climate change adaptation

Microfinance, over-indebtedness and climate adaptation: new evidence from rural Cambodia

Microfinance loans are leading to an over-indebtedness emergency that undermines borrowers’ long-term coping and adaptive capacity in a changing climate

Contesting new ‘development frontiers’: The uneven financial incorporation of remittance flows and households in Senegal and Ghana.

PhD ThesisThis research engages with a global migration-development agenda that aims to leverage remittances for development by incorporating remittance flows and households into global financial circuits. Previous analyses of what I call the ‘remittances-financial inclusion nexus’ have proved vital in deconstructing the assumptions behind, and shedding light on, the negative impacts of initiatives that aim to construct and expand financial markets on the back of remittances. However, what is striking in most of this critical literature is the ways in which financialisation is treated as an explanation in and of itself, which fails to account for the efforts and controversies that lie behind such market-led development projects. Moreover, surprisingly little is said about the extent to which attempts to incorporate remittance flows into global finance may actually be possible, and how and why these may be accepted and/or resisted by members of remittance households in home countries. In response, this research develops a geographies of remittance marketisation analytical framework, which allows for an exploration of the grounded ways in which remittance markets are constructed, the extent to which remittance flows and households can be (re)configured and incorporated into global finance, and why such processes are always fragile, contested and in need of constant renegotiations. This thesis is based on 10 months of fieldwork undertaken in Dakar and Thiès (Senegal) and Accra and Tamale (Ghana), which generated 188 semi-structured and ethnographic interviews with institutional and private sector actors and remittance recipients, as well as in-field observations and document analysis. The research finds that the construction, stabilisation and expansion of remittance markets are not natural nor uncontested processes. Remittances do not have an inherent financial worth that can be easily unlocked and transformed into new development finance. Building markets that enable remittance money transfers to be tapped into by state and private sector actors requires extensive financial, material, technological, legal, and discursive constructions and, importantly, behavioural engineering. Furthermore, the thesis demonstrates that remittance and other related financial practices and behaviours cannot simply be ‘nudged’, even providing the right behavioral stimuli, information and incentives, but rather rest upon relational and collective, albeit sometimes unequal, decision-making processes between migrant(s), receiver(s), and main recipient(s), as well as other people situated down the ‘remittance distribution chain’. The extent to which remittances can be integrated into financial circuits and put to use in the manner advocated by proponents of the remittances-financial inclusion agenda is mediated by a wide range of factors, including the dynamics of everyday economic realities, gendered power dynamics and norms, inter-women hierarchies, kinship relations and household context. The research also shows that processes of financial subject formation constitute practical 4 accomplishments that are always contested, uncertain and in the making. It advances the understanding of members of remittance households as ‘reluctant’ and ‘dissenting’ subjects of remittance marketisation as well as subjects that ‘deny’ marketisation through discourses and acts of refusal. Overall, this thesis contributes a nuanced theoretical and empirical understanding of uneven geographies of financial incorporation in the Global South. This is significant for policy makers who propose and advance a remittances-financial inclusion agenda as it identifies the risks, contradictions and limits of such marketising projects

The color of money at the financial frontier

This article takes up recent calls to further problematize race in international political economy by focusing on money at the frontier of global finance. We draw upon the Black radical tradition’s theoretical formulations of racial capitalism, which we bring into dialogue with conceptualizations of money and finance as developed within the critique of political economy. Money is the most supreme and abstract incarnation of wealth and class power, yet it is also suffused with racial and colonial logics of differentiation. To explore this tension, we offer a relational-comparison of two sites of frontier finance, namely cross-border investment and digital financial inclusion in developing countries. We trace the mechanisms through which race affects the operations of money and finance across these two sites. We argue that racialized difference is mobilized and reproduced at three key moments in the construction of investibility at the financial frontier: (1) the re/making of a development ‘problem’; (2) the construction of racialized ideal-typical financial subjects; and (3) processes of risk valuation and the legitimation of surveillance, discipline, and extraction. This allows us to characterize the color of money at the financial frontier as a particularly potent and violent combination of the abstractive powers of race and money

3-dimensional particulate flow modelling using a viscous penalty combined with a stable projection scheme

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