Marieke de Goede, Speculative Security: The Politics of Pursuing Terrorist Monies, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2012, 274+xxxii pages, $25.00 paper, ISBN 9780816675906.

See Brett Cristophers' most recent contributions to Society & Space here: Follow the Thing: Money and Credit, Where Credit's Due. Response to “Follow the Thing: Credit”

See Marieke de Goede's most recent contributions to Society & Space here: Hawala Discourses and the War on Terrorist Finance, Precaution, Preemption: Arts and Technologies of the Actionable Future, The politics of security lists, and Risky Geographies: Aid and Enmity in Pakistan

Marieke de Goede has written an interesting and informative book about the practices and politics of the pursuit of monies with alleged terrorist connections, particularly insofar as this pursuit has been conducted in the years since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks of September 2001. She shows that since 2001, the “money trails” of suspected terrorist activity have become a key Western security issue; to thwart terrorism, it has increasingly been seen as essential to stem the flows of money that fund it.

The central object of examination in the book is what de Goede depicts as a “finance-security assemblage” (chapter 2) – the “transnational landscape of laws, institutions, treaties, and private initiatives that play a role in fighting terrorism financing” (page 28). In a series of case studies packed full with fascinating empirical detail, she examines the “rules, procedures and problematizations” (page xxx) through which this assemblage works. These analyses take in traditional banking (chapter 3), and the processes of data-mining employed to identify suspicious accounts and transactions (e.g. America’s high-profile Terrorist Finance Tracking Program); informal, often kinship-based transnational “hawala” money transfer channels (chapter 4), the investigation of which – such as, most notably, the organization of the Somali money transmitter al-Barakaat – de Goede takes to exemplify “the reach, contradictions, and exceptional spaces of the finance-security assemblage” (page 108); and charities (chapter 5), whose selective targeting, with Islamic charitable donation practices (zakat) unsurprisingly to the fore, de Goede sees as creating a distinction between “good” and “bad” charities and as leading ultimately to a restriction of free speech and cultural expression by narrowing down the “limits of the sayable.” The overall account offered in the book, meanwhile, is as alive to the power of representations of terrorist finance (chapter 1) as it is to the power of the material practices of asset freezing and black-listing (chapter 6).

Two dimensions of the “finance-security assemblage” are emphasized throughout the book. The first is that the security practices in question typically have a deeply pre-emptive or “anticipatory” logic: the aim is nearly always to disrupt possible future plots. The second dimension is more spatial than temporal. This is that “association” comes to be criminalized: the dominant notion of a networked terrorist threat gives licence to the targeting of people, organizations and spaces (charities, remittance networks, etc.) that are or could be associated with terrorist activity, at however distant a remove – the social-network-based “link analysis” employed by the US Treasury as part of the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program being a prime (and controversial) example of the criminalization of financial relationality.

For all the illuminating empirical detail in the book, however, this particular reader was left both frustrated and, to a degree, underwhelmed by de Goede’s arguments – that is to say, by the conceptual claims she constructs out of the empirical analysis.

The latter sense relates to the argument encapsulated in the book’s title, “speculative security.” De Goede makes the claim that the practices of pursuing terrorist monies are speculative in terms of both ends (they are ordinarily perceived as nonviolent, but can be seen to yield their own violences by fomenting a “particularly fragile and contestable state of security” (page xxi)) and means. Her main focus is the latter: on how the finance-security assemblage appeals to the possible futures that terrorist finance could enable, in order to legitimate immediate intervention. The present is governed and policed, in other words, through the imagination and mobilization of the future. Yet is this not what security practices – of any stripe – are invariably about? Is not security intrinsically about gauging perceived threats, estimating probabilities, and taking actions deemed likely – but which by their very nature are not guaranteed – to secure the future? Security practices, it seems to me, are thus inherently “speculative,” indeed by definition; and the notion of “speculative security” veers perhaps closer to tautology than value-adding insight as a result.

The sense of frustration emerging from my reading, meanwhile, relates to the book’s pivotal claim that “the objective of pursuing terrorist monies is to broaden the space and the time of security interventions” (page 191). By this, de Goede means, I think, that Western authorities pursue suspected terrorist monies in order to expand the temporal and spatial range of their techno-militaristic governmental apparatus – it allows them to police and to attempt to control more people, more organizations, more “spaces of everyday life,” and over a great timeframe. But my response to this claim would simply be: Always? Everywhere? Is the objective of the financial pursuit not sometimes, at least, simply to try to improve the security of societies perceived to be under threat (whatever the political defensibility of this particular, isolated agenda)? Perhaps this is a hopelessly naïve response – to imagine that, on occasion, the finance-security assemblage merely aims to do exactly what it says on the cover, so to speak. Yet a similar question arises in regard to de Goede’s discussion of resistance and contestation in the book’s conclusion. To be sure, there are all manner of very real and very important reasons to question and contest many of the practices and interventions that have been effected in the past decade in the name of “Western security,” financial practices and interventions among them. Unless I have misread it, however, de Goede’s account, notwithstanding her insistence that she is “not in search of one oppositional location or a coherent counter-point to the work of the assemblage” (page 204), seems to imply that resistance and contestation is always and everywhere a politically necessary or (again, simplistically) “good” thing, just as the assemblage of speculative security always and everywhere effects violences to which it does not admit (pages 190-197). In short, Speculative Security offers, on my reading, a largely singular interpretation of matters where perhaps more ambiguity and open-endedness might have been productively allowed for.

None of this, however, should take away from the huge amount of work that clearly went into researching the book, or the extremely insightful empirical case studies that it contains. For these, at the very least, the book warrants close reading.