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When finance met security: Back to the War on Drugs and the problem of dirty money

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Anthony Amicelle
Anthony Amicelle*
Affiliation:
University of Montreal, Canada
*
Corresponding author: Anthony Amicelle, Department of Criminology, Université de Montréal, Pavillon Lionel-Groulx, 3150, Rue JeanBrillant, Montréal (QC) H3T 1N8, Canada. Email: anthony.amicelle@umontreal.ca
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Abstract

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When and how did the laundering of ‘dirty’ money become an object of public concern, debate, and ultimately policy at the intersection of finance and security? This article sheds light on the social construction of money laundering as a public problem in the context of the U.S. War on Drugs during the 1970s and 1980s. By doing so, the article also stresses the heuristic value of questioning the finance-security nexus through an analytics of public problems. Its aims are to: (1) avoid interdisciplinary debates around the finance-security nexus becoming trapped in a zero-sum game between the ‘securitization of finance’ and the ‘financialization of security’; and (2) understand better the emergence, re-configuration, and internal tensions of social spaces at the interface of finance and security.

Keywords

Dirty moneyfinancepublic problemsecurityWar on Drugs
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 3 , Issue 2: Finance and security , 2017 , pp. 106 - 123
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2017

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