Financializing security

Abstract

The logics of ‘finance’ and ‘security’ have been enmeshed within each other in complicated ways since at least the start of the 20th century. As fields deeply alive to the possibilities and dangers associated with risk and uncertainty, finance and security occupy overlapping but uneven fields of operation. This article examines one particular financial mechanism – political prediction markets – in order to trace out the tensions and intersections of finance and security in one particular site. Political prediction markets are designed to harness the predictive power of the market to address an inherently uncertain object – the weather, political events, terrorism, etc. A series of recent cases – most notoriously a proposal by the Pentagon to construct a ‘terrorism futures market’ – have sought to recast political prediction markets as a security practice and to enlist these markets in the ongoing ‘war on terror’. This article argues that these attempts at financializing security offer a particularly useful glimpse into one point of overlap between security and finance. As markets constructed to measure and manage uncertainty, experiments in security prediction markets foreclose political space not only as a ritual of securitization that places certain issues above or beyond political deliberation but also as a reinvocation of a conception of ‘finance’ as a somehow rational and technical domain. As the terrorism futures case reminds us, however, the rational ambitions associated with these two governmentalities of financialization and securitization can become corroded or can lose coherence in unpredictable ways. It is in the political tension that is generated through such corrosions that the future of these kinds of experiments in the financialization of security will ultimately be decided.