Papers by Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn
Frontiers in Blockchain, 2021
How can we understand the progressive, piecemeal emergence of global digital identity governance?... more How can we understand the progressive, piecemeal emergence of global digital identity governance? Examining the activities of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) - an intergovernmental organization at the center of global anti-money laundering and counter-the-financing of terrorism governance-this paper advances a two-fold argument. First, the FATF shapes how, where and who is involved in developing key standards of acceptability underpinning digital identity governance in blockchain activities. While not itself directly involved in the actual coding of blockchain protocols, the FATF influences the location and type of centralized modes of control over digital identity governance. Drawing on the notion of protocological control from media studies, we illustrate how centralized control emerging in global digital identity governance emanates from the global governance of financial flows long considered by international organizations like the FATF. Second, we suggest that governance...
Global Perspectives, 2021
This commentary identifies a key dilemma in immediate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: the per... more This commentary identifies a key dilemma in immediate responses to the COVID-19 pandemic: the persistent foregrounding of digital technologies as “silver-bullet” solutions to overcoming tensions between surveillance and privacy. It illustrates the pandemic techno-solutionist dilemma by pointing to global efforts to harness blockchain technologies for “squaring the circle” between privacy and surveillance. It then concludes that further investigating the persistence and possible inevitability of this dilemma requires overcoming solitudes both within international political economy and between international political economy and interdisciplines such as surveillance studies.
Global Policy, 2020
Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology-intensive. Yet, technol... more Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology-intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio-political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology-centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer-standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under-recognized ways. This article identifies three overlapping contexts within which technology-led efforts to address sustainability challenges are evolving, highlighting the growing roles of: (1) private actors; (2) experimentalism; and (3) informality. The confluence of these interconnected trends illuminates an important yet often under-recognized paradox: that the use of technology in multi-stakeholder initiatives tends to reduce rather than expand the set of actors, enhancing instead of reducing challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforcing rather than transforming existing forms of power relations. Without recognizing and attempting to address these limits, technology-led multi-stakeholder initiatives will remain less effective in addressing the complexity and uncertainty surrounding global sustainability governance. We provide pathways for interrogating the ways that novel technologies are being harnessed to address long-standing global sustainability issues in manners that foreground key ethical, social and political considerations and the contexts in which they are evolving.
Journal of International Relations and Development, 2020
An increasingly lamented consequence of re-regulatory efforts following the 2007/2008 global fina... more An increasingly lamented consequence of re-regulatory efforts following the 2007/2008 global financial crisis has been 'de-risking'-the growing disengagement by banks and other financial institutions with markets perceived as posing greater risks than justified by potential profits. As banks based in the Global North have moved to withdraw financial services from many emerging economies, de-risking has attracted attention for undermining financial inclusion and developmental efforts. Novel technologies are being harnessed to address this problem, including applications of blockchain, the digital ledgers of transactions originally underpinning cryptocurrencies. Contributing to IR theorising of legitimacy and re-risking, this article illustrates how technology-based de-risking efforts that seek to attend to the perceptions of foreign financiers can undermine the legitimacy of financial inclusion projects. Contrasting unfolding blockchain-based financial inclusion initiatives in two regions of small states in the Eastern Caribbean and Eastern Europe, our analysis stresses the need for greater local participation and clearer distribution of benefits from finance and technology (fintech) centred forms of digital development.
Technology and Agency in International Relations, 2019
This chapter outlines a novel approach for examining how, who, and where authority is exercised i... more This chapter outlines a novel approach for examining how, who, and where authority is exercised in global governance. Rather than an attribute, authority is re-framed as a dynamic process by drawing on notions of power and legitimation developed in constructivist literatures on identities and practices in sociology, IR as well as GPE. Post-structuralist insights are engaged along with interdisciplinary studies emphasising the importance of discourses in legitimating power both in finance specifically and in contemporary governance more generally. Professionals are finally identified as a “special” category of non-state actors exercising authority beyond the so-called public-private divide.
This chapter traces the dynamic authority of prominent actuaries such as David Li; leading financ... more This chapter traces the dynamic authority of prominent actuaries such as David Li; leading financial consulting firms like AT Kearney and Oliver Wyman; as well as the bulge-bracket legal groups Allen & Overy, Baker & MacKenzie, and Clifford Chance. The expert identities that long underpinned the pre-crisis authority of these advisories became deeply contested in the 2007–8 global financial crisis. Discontinuities in the discursive emphases of these professionals subsequently occurred as previously backgrounded macro-level ethical issues became explicitly stressed in the aftermath of the crisis. The agency exercised by leading advisories culminated in subtle attempts to re-legitimate professional power following contestations of authority in the traumatic crisis of 2007–8.
This chapter concludes that restoring both professional authority and the integrity of finance in... more This chapter concludes that restoring both professional authority and the integrity of finance in Anglo-American society depends crucially on the ideas and values underlying efforts to defend mammon. An overt stress on macro-level ethical issues is limited when liberal values and ideas continue to implicate professionals in ongoing volatilities. Tensions between financial professionals and the financial sector as a whole are likely to persist until more profound cognitive and normative changes integrate a wider range of alternative values and ideas. Besides summarising the central arguments of the book, this chapter elaborates avenues for future research on professional authority as well as on ethics in Anglo-American finance and other crisis-prone areas of contemporary activity.
Blockchains are decentralized databases of digital transactions undertaken and verified by quasi-... more Blockchains are decentralized databases of digital transactions undertaken and verified by quasi-anonymous users interacting in peer-to-peer networks. This chapter traces the agency exercised by this technology, as well as that of its human users in co-producing authority in global governance. Drawing on a Social Construction of Technology approach, the main argument advanced is that parallel forms of human and techno-agency have provided enabling conditions for extensions of liberal market governance modalities in the wake the 2007-8 global financial crisis. Highlighting dynamic relationships between authority, governance and technology, this chapter enhances IR understanding of patterns of agency at two registers of 'the international': the global economy, particularly global finance, and its governance, specifically in its Anglo-American financial heartland.
Global Perspectives, 2021
This introductory article outlines how Global Political Economy and the nuanced perspectives of s... more This introductory article outlines how Global Political Economy and the nuanced perspectives of scholars from this interdiscipline navigate claims about the origins and consequences of, as well as responses to, the COVID-19 pandemic. Emerging social scientific assessments have tended to understand the pandemic as either an entirely novel crisis (“everything has changed”) or one merely extending preexisting economic and political tensions (“nothing has changed”). Early analyses of political-economic aspects of the crisis assembled in this collection instead highlight both patterns of continuity and change—and the importance of situating changes within prepandemic continuities—that have emerged during the first year of the global pandemic. This introductory article brings together suggestions by and for Global Political Economy scholars, as well as social scientists more generally, for further researching key dynamics shaping the global political economy in the COVID-19 era as it keep...
The dynamic authority of prominent orthodox economists trained and based in the UK and USA are ex... more The dynamic authority of prominent orthodox economists trained and based in the UK and USA are examined in this chapter. Esoteric discourses known as economese that long underpinned the pre-crisis expert identities of these professionals became widely challenged in the 2007–8 global financial crisis. Discontinuities then occurred in the discursive emphases of leading “centrist” economists like Andrew Haldane, Raghuram Rajan, and Robert Shiller; leading “right-wing,” conservative economists Alan Greenspan, Gregory Mankiw, Kenneth Rogoff, and Robert Lucas Jr.; as well as more progressive, “left-wing” economists Joseph Stiglitz, Lawrence Summers, and Paul Krugman. The shift from neutral, value-free economese to explicitly moral economese stressed previously overlooked macro-level ethical issues and culminated in subtle yet overlooked attempts to re-legitimate the power of these professionals after the crisis.
In this interview, Tony Porter discusses conceptualizations of technologies and their usefulness ... more In this interview, Tony Porter discusses conceptualizations of technologies and their usefulness in understanding the development of international industries, systems of accountability, as well as in overcoming public-private and constructivist-rationalist dichotomies. The interview also discusses the incorporation of Actor–Network Theory in IR and IPE, as well as the governance roles of digital technologies such as Big Data and their associated algorithms.
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Papers by Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn