Description
This paper elaborates the concept of ‘imperial debt formations’ as political-economic-moral infrastructures of power that organise world politics, not only in a relational sense but a temporal sense. Put straightforwardly, as argued by Di Muzio and Robbins, relations of debt always have a temporal implication and the condition of indebtedness itself can be understood as a form of colonising the future, because it constrains future activity through forward promises of repayment (and more). If we understand empires as not simply machines of extraction, but machines for organising relations of debt and obligation across not only space but time, then we have a better understanding of their relevance to contemporary global ordering practices and emergent counter-formations originating in the Global South. This paper explores how formations of (post)imperial indebtedness organise power relations, and in particular the possible futures of postcolonial states and global order itself.
