Erin Lockwood
PhD Candidate, International Relations
Northwestern University
Research
Dissertation Description
My dissertation examines how the 2008 global financial crisis has altered the authoritative practices that the credit derivatives industry uses to operate and preserve their power and autonomy in the global financial system. Prior to the global financial crisis, credit derivatives trading was uniquely both immune from public regulation and seen as legitimate and even beneficial to the global economy. While we might expect the financial crisis to have changed regulators’ perceptions of derivatives, it is unclear to what extent this is the case. Even as derivatives regulation has shifted from the industry itself to public agencies, trading volumes remain high and many of the same actors have been involved in setting regulatory standards.
Recognizing the limitations of approaches that regards markets as theoretically separable from politics, my research uses an interpretive framework and takes as its object of inquiry the practices, such as risk modeling and collateralization, through which the authority of financial actors is constituted, reproduced, contested, and changed. Focusing on practices rather than regulatory outcomes allows me to capture continuities in market governance that are obscured by a framework of regulatory capture. To identify these practices, I draw on regulatory and industry documents, as well as interviews with regulators and financial actors.
My research draws on insights from economic sociology, academic finance, and political economy, while contributing to contemporary debates on the origins of the financial crisis, the role of finance in global politics, and the power of economic ideas and values. In its focus on the politics of private rule-making and on the powerful belief that derivatives serve public ends, my research challenges the dichotomy between the market as a would-be autonomous sphere, on the one hand, and external, political rules and standards, on the other, that has long characterized understandings of the relationship between state and market actors in both political economy and public policy.
"Neither Persuasion nor Force: Authoritative Practices in Global Governance"
This paper considers how Hannah Arendt’s conception of authority can be mobilized in analyses of global governance. For Arendt, authority is a right to rule that is backed neither by coercive force nor by persuasion. Many governing arrangements in world politics can be characterized in terms of Arendtian authority; they are neither extensively publicly justified nor backed by formal enforcement mechanisms. Instead, the right to govern derives from an actor’s position in a hierarchical relationship of expertise. However, studying authority presents a methodological challenge. In cases of both argumentation and coercion, the object of inquiry leaves a discursive and material record, but a right to rule that does not publicly justify or forcibly impose itself is more difficult to recognize. I argue that focusing on authoritative practices offers one solution to this methodological difficulty. Authoritative practices – those which, when competently performed, constitute an actor as having the right to act in politically consequential ways, without having to resort to force or argumentation – can be identified in moments of disruption and crisis. The paper concludes with an illustration of how the concept of authoritative practices can bring to light otherwise obscure relationships of power and governance in global financial politics.
"States as Non-Pirate Actors: A Conceptual History of Maritime Piracy"
This paper takes as its starting point the puzzling range of meanings maritime piracy has in contemporary discourse. Does it matter that when we hear “pirate” today we are as likely to think of Blackbeard as of the armed non-state actors operating in the Gulf of Aden? What forms of state and international action does the designation “pirate” make possible? In order to explain how “pirate” has come to mean both an illegal, armed non-state actor and a historically based popular culture hero, I draw upon histories of sovereignty and global order as well as methods of discourse analysis to construct a conceptual history of piracy. Based on an analysis of exemplary texts and events in the history of maritime piracy from the late 17th century to the present, I analyze how the meaning of “pirate” was contested and redefined in a series of key moments, serving as a constitutive other to systems of legitimate authority. I find that the practice of defining piracy has simultaneously helped mark the territorial and conceptual limits of state authority. This analysis is then used to explain the multiple meanings of “piracy” today and how they inform responses to contemporary maritime piracy.