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.

The Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP) is a political mechanism that aims at ‘multilevel governance’ of state indebtedness in the European Union. As such, it has become the concern of research that asks how sovereignty becomes articulated in this process. This article approaches this question through the conceptualization of a modular notion of sovereignty elaborated through a discussion of work on the finance-security nexus. The article argues that existing accounts of the formation of sovereign power in relation to state debt can be combined into a notion of modular sovereignty when seen through the prism of critiques of contractualism that take issue with liberal notions of state sovereignty and credit security. This way, the indebted state becomes visible as the referent object of multiple, and potentially contradictory, invocations of sovereignty as exercised in the EDP. First, it figures as the seat of budget sovereignty, holding its social substrate liable for its debts while ignoring inequalities in that substrate. Second, it is appealed to, within a biopolitical rationality, as the sovereign guarantor of the financial wellbeing of its population. Third, it is seen as the executor of financial wisdom that is mobilized in struggles between different levels of financial governance in the EDP.

Scholarship on the finance-security nexus has typically been concerned with ‘first order’ phenomena, such as the interpenetration of the finance and security sectors. This article contributes to the debate by turning to an apparent epiphenomenon, namely The LEGO Movie, and using it to address some overlooked intersections between popular culture and the finance-security complex. The analysis first focuses on how finance and security are represented in the film, through the plot and the fictional company at the centre of the film's conflict, to its LEGO minifigure characters and the playsets featured therein. The focus then shifts to how the LEGO Group's business model informs the film in significant ways, from the plot's motivation and structure, and the mise-en-scène, to how the film was produced. My argument throughout is that a seemingly innocent or insignificant film in fact participates in the financialization and securitization of daily life through its very style and status as a cultural product. Key here is how The LEGO Movie does this in ways that confound possible critique through the use of irony and cute aesthetics, as well as through its own supposed triviality.

This essay was originally published in The Routledge Handbook of New Security Studies (Burgess, 2010), and has since become a key reference point in debates on the finance-security nexus. It is reproduced here as a starting point for the present forum, which aims to further advance efforts to conceptualise the relations between finance and security.

What is the contemporary relation between finance and security? This essay encourages further research into the securitization of finance by developing the notion of ‘finance/security/life’. A focus on the intersections of finance/security/life will be shown to prompt a broadened range of critical, cross-disciplinary concerns with the various ways in which financial markets are positioned as vital to securing wealth, welfare and wellbeing.

This essay points to some of the ways that militaries are focused on money and economics, and addresses what this means for understanding the entanglements of security and finance. We cannot think about security in the contemporary moment without also thinking about militaries and war, and it is only by addressing how military power engages money and finance that can we better understand how insecurity is enacted.

This forum contribution addresses two major themes in de Goede's original essay on ‘Financial security’: (1) the relationship between stable markets and the proverbial ‘security dilemma’; and (2) the development of new decision-technologies to address risk in the post-World War II period. Its argument is that the confluence of these two themes through rational choice theory represents a fundamental re-evaluation of the security dilemma and its relationship to the rule of law governing market relations, ushering in an era of perpetual physical and financial insecurity.

Securitization has a dual rationality that twins a financial sense to one of modern statecraft and national security. This forum contribution advocates a focus on material practices as a means of further exploring the entanglement of finance and security. In particular, it advances a notion of ‘chains of securitization’, arguing that such a concept provides researchers with a concrete way to analyze how ‘financial’ objects, such as derivatives, are assembled to generate (in)securities, as well as how ‘security’ objects, such as suspicious transactions, are assembled across public/private domains.

This forum contribution addresses the state of the art in the finance-security literature, identifying problems with the ‘financialisation of security’ and ‘securitisation of finance’ analytics, as well as a tendency to treat ‘money’ as a non-financial object in ways that fail to recognise money's own (financial) parameters of safety and security. In response, it calls for greater engagement with political and financial security, instead of merely (political) securitisation and financialisation.