Circulating knowledge through disparate practices: the global pursuit of terrorist financing by Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs)

Abstract

ABSTRACT Standardization and harmonization are widely studied by scholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to understand how knowledge and things circulate across geographies, yet it often remains unclear what these terms exactly refer to. In dictionaries, they are generally defined as actions or processes aimed at achieving uniformity, similarity, or alignment. In STS literature, it is often assumed that when a practice is (un)successfully standardized or harmonized, the circulation of knowledge and things across distance and difference is made (im)possible. However, it is questionable whether the geographical circulation of things and knowledge is necessarily enabled by the uniformity of practices. When analyzing the global exchange of financial intelligence, a different picture emerges, whereby the coordination of security operations and the exchange of financial intelligence are actually enabled by disparate quantification practices. Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) – governmental organizations that globally exchange financial intelligence for combatting money laundering and terrorist financing – are geographically scattered and very different in nature, each constructing security threats such as terrorism or terrorist financing uniquely. Yet through their complex quantification practices, they make coordination possible while persisting in maintaining differences, without relying on an increasingly uniform and universal sameness of practices. For FIUs, quantification practices, even though differently practiced, generate a shared domain with its own transnational, depoliticized, and highly technical proxy grammar that makes it possible to work beyond and background otherwise incommensurable issues.