Non-Traditional Finance and the Infrastructural Imagination of Geoeconomic Hegemony: The Case of Russia’s War in Ukraine

Abstract

Abstract Against the background of the war waged by Russia against Ukraine, this paper addresses the role of non-traditional financial infrastructures in geopolitical struggles that are conducted by geoeconomic means. Non-traditional finance (in the following: NTF),1 like cryptocurrencies, crypto exchanges, and related services, promises to provide financial security—for instance, in terms of payments—outside of traditional financial infrastructures. NTF gains geopolitical significance in the wake of the US and EU-led financial sanctions against Russian institutions and individuals. The paper investigates this potentially new role of NTF through a theoretical and conceptual architecture that views hegemony, including geopolitical hegemony, from a social-theoretical standpoint: Hegemony is conceptualized as the result of “articulations”—that is, contingent interrelations encompassing both linkages and distinctions—between heterogeneous elements in which the respective role and function of those elements is re-defined through the articulation. With regard to the emerging role of NTF in geopolitical conflicts, the question is how political perceptions of geopolitical conflict and agency are iterated in terms of non-traditional financial infrastructures, and how, in turn, those infrastructures are articulated with respect to their political weight. The paper empirically analyzes the ways in which NTF agents and organizations have been addressed as geopolitical factors in the war confrontation between Russia and Ukraine by political institutions (focusing on the United States, the EU, Russia, and Ukraine), and how they understand their role themselves. Findings show that NTF, in spite of its rising prominence, use, and promise of autonomy, has effectively been articulated as an infrastructure whose concerns with financial and payment security must be subordinated to considerations of political security and international supremacy. In that articulation, Western, Russian, and Ukrainian governments significantly differ with respect to the ways they deploy an infrastructural imagination to define their interests and their views on NTF in the conflict.