On Monday 11 September from 12:00-13:00 in room 4.78, Matthew Hoye will present an early draft of a big grant proposal on Remittance, Paradigms, and Extreme Cases.

Since 2001, remittances have transformed from global political economic marginalia to one-third of international financial flows. Contemporary debates on remittances remain grounded in debates from the early 2000s, foremostly development, democratization, and terrorism financing. NEWREMIT’s foundational conceit is that remittances embody a new geopolitical phenomenon of the highest order and that the conceptual, theoretical, and analytical tools of the early 2000s are paradigmatically inapt. NEWREMIT proposes the bluest of “blue skies” research: paradigm creation. It aims to forge new conceptual rudiments, cast them into a useful analytical framework, test, refine, and clarify through new qualitative empirical investigations, and then theorize the new geopolitics of remittances. At its heart are four (most likely) case studies addressing four crucial themes: (i) Nigerian and digitalization; (ii) Lebanon, central banks, and the transnationalization of “moral hazards”; (iii) Afghanistan and the transnationalization of famine politics; (iv) Ukraine and security from below. Each picks out a vast transformation in the realpolitics (if that’s even the right term) of remittances that the usual IR paradigms and their “middle-level” derivatives cannot capture. Philosophically, this project is inspired by an eclectic scholarship on the periphery of various literatures (de Waal in famine studies, Clemens in economics, de Haas in migration, Mbembe in political theory, Bratman in Philosophy, and many others), all of whom address similar paradigmatic concerns while forging new ways of approach their topics. Strikingly and auspiciously, though entirely discrete, they share deep analytical affinities. NEWREMIT will pillage these literatures, exploit the extreme case studies, and reset the study of remittances. 

Please email us at gtgc@leidenuniv.nl if you wish to have lunch provided.

Zoom connection

https://universiteitleiden.zoom.us/j/61882596051?pwd=cFo2OGRLaWVqcDBCSW1LTFFKVTE3UT09 

Meeting ID: 618 8259 6051 / Passcode: B5^#CkPL