Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication

Abstract

Abstract Over the past decade or so, critics have been simultaneously fascinated and preoccupied by the rise of “electronic money.” For one, Benjamin Cohen ponders whether the multiplication of what he calls “non‐territorial monies,” monies made possible by the electronic revolution, represents a “direct threat to the traditional authority of states” (2006: 179), as the ability of private actors to use new technologies of accounting for and storing value directly challenges the monopoly over money historically enjoyed by the state. Anthropologist Keith Hart (2001), while not dismissive of the destabilizing challenge to state power posed by e‐money, stresses instead its emancipatory potential. Hart thinks that the communication revolution has radically changed the very nature of money: because it is increasingly created outside the purview and control of not just states, but corporations as well, electronic money can thus be “personalized,” turning from an external, alienating object to an expression of one's (credit) history, something over which, potentially, one can exercise some degree of control. Political scientist Eric Helleiner (2003) joins this discussion by cautioning against hasty pronouncements on the replacement of national currencies by e‐money. Yet, because he proposes a theory of money that locates its power in the reduction of transaction costs it makes possible, Helleiner is open to the possibility that new technologies will make private e‐currencies sustainable, widespread, and challenging to state authority.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.