Description
This paper engages with a global migration-development agenda that aims to leverage remittances for development by incorporating remittance flows and households into global financial circuits. Previous analyses of what I call the ‘remittances-financial inclusion nexus’ have proved vital in deconstructing the assumptions behind, and shedding light on, the negative impacts of initiatives that aim to construct and expand financial markets on the back of remittances. However, surprisingly little is said about the extent to which attempts to incorporate remittance flows into global finance may actually be possible, and how and why these may be accepted and/or resisted by members of remittance households in home countries. Drawing upon research with remittance recipients in Senegal and Ghana, this paper explores whether and how remittance flows as well as the financial behaviours, practices and arrangements of members of remittance households can actually be re-directed, transformed, nudged or even ‘datafied’. Building upon the geographies of marketisation approach and conceptualisation of financial subject formation as practical accomplishments that are always ambiguous, uncertain and in the making, this paper advances the understanding of remittance recipients as ‘reluctant’ and ‘dissenting’ subjects of remittance marketisation as well as subjects that ‘deny’ marketisation through individual and collective acts of refusals. They are “quasi-subjects” of remittance marketisation, constantly negotiating dis/entanglement processes at the borders of competing networks and regimes of value. By paying attention to these overt and covert processes of contestation, I shed light not only on those members of remittance households that still cannot enter formal (digital) finance but also those that could but don’t as well as those that did but don’t anymore.
