Research
My research lies at the intersections of economic sociology, political economy, and (critical) security studies
Find (more) publications on
Academia.edu
ResearchGate
google scholar
Full List of Publications here
Journal Articles
(Peer Reviewed)
The digital euro as a Materialization of (in)security, accepted for publication in Review of International Political Economy, preprint https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/x45eg
The money tree: Exploring central bank digital currency blockchain imaginaries. Anthropology Today, 39 (4) 2023, with Lana Swartz, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12827
From Flows Towards Updates. Security Regimes and Changing Technologies for Financial Surveillance. Review of International Studies, 49(4), pp. 615–636, doi: 10.1017/S0260210522000493
Infrastructural Geopolitics. International Studies Quarterly, 66(3) 2022, with Marieke de Goede, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqac033
Safe assemblages: Thinking infrastructures beyond circulation in the times of SARS-CoV2. Journal of International Relations and Development, 25(6) 2021, pp. 324–344, with Andreas Langenohl, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-021-00240-0
Money is Data – the Platformization of Financial Transactions.
Information, Communication & Society, 23(14) 2020, pp. 2047-2063, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1770833
Between Public and Private: The Co-production of Infrastructural Security. Politikon 35(5) 2020, pp. 62-80, with Amina Nolte, https://doi.org/10.1080/02589346.2020.1712831
Open Access here: Link UvADare
A Bank and a Think Tank? The Bank of International Settlements and the Introduction of Macroprudential Regulation. Policy and Society 37(2) 2018, pp. 170-187, https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2018.1450090
Journal Articles
(Editor reviewed)
After the boom: Finance and society studies in the 2020s and beyond. Joint Editorial for Finance and Society, 2022, 8(2): 93-109, with Amin Samman, Nina Boy, Nathan Coombs, Sandy Hager, Adam Hayes, Emily Rosamond, Leon Wansleben, https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.7761
Von globalisierter Vernetzung zu neuer Fragmentierung? Finanzinfrastrukturen als geopolitische Spannungs- und Kriegsfelder, in: Politikum 2/2022, pp. 14-21, https://doi.org/10.46499/2032.2373 Leseprobe
The value of transactions in the new data economy, in: Finance and Society, 6(2) 2020, pp. 157–162, https://doi.org/10.2218/finsoc.v6i2.5277
Political Security and Finance – A post-crisis and post-disciplinary Perspective, in: Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 42(2) 2019, pp. 105-122, https://doi.org/10.1007/s41358-019-00174-7
Click here for Open Access
Handbook Project on Global Financial Infrastructures
Together with Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn (Groningen) and Barbara Brandl (Frankfurt) I am editor of
The Cambridge Global Companion to Financial Infrastructure which is under contract with Cambridge University Press.
The volume brings together a group of more than 30 authors to describe and analyse financial infrastructures and their transformation from a multitude of scholarly perspectives from across the social sciences and humanities.
The full manuscript has been submitted and the volume is planned to be published in 2024.
Find the Table of Contents with some preprint links here
Find the pre-print version of the introduction here
Preprints of Chapters in press:
Roxana Ehlke, Tim Salzer, Carola Westermeier: Increasing State Capacity through Central Bank Digital Currencies. A comparative account of the digital yuan and digital ruble. Forthcoming in: Andreas Nölke, Johannes Petry (Eds.), State, Capitalism and Finance in Emerging Markets: Between subordination and statecraft, Bristol University Press. Preprint link: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2r78q
Carola Westermeier, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, Barbara Brandl: Infrastructural Gazing on Global Finance. Forthcoming in: Carola Westermeier, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, Barbara Brandl (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Financial Infrastructures, Cambridge University Press. Preprint link: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/mf79e
Chapters
[Financial Regulation as Innovation]
Finanzregulierung als Innovationsprozess. Die Entstehung von kryptografischen Wertpapieren, in: Florian Möslein, Sebastian Omlor (Eds.): Kryptoaktien, Mohr Siebeck 2024, with Lilith Dieterich and Barbara Brandl, https://doi.org/10.1628/978-3-16-163488-8 (Open Access)
[Connectivity and Infrastructural Imaginaries during COVID]
Das konnektive Zuhause und die Öffentlichkeit: Der Umgang mit der Pandemie im infrastrukturellen Imaginären, in: Kornelia Hahn, Andreas Langenohl (Eds.): Öffentliches Leben: Gesellschaftsdiagnose Covid-19, Springer Verlag 2023, with Andreas Langenohl.
Financial Stability as Hegemony, in: Andreas Langenohl, Regina Kreide (Eds.): Conceptualizing Power in Dynamics of Securitization: Beyond State and International System, Nomos 2018, with Hannah Broecker, Access here
A Dilemma of Trust in Financialised Knowledge – Expertise on Financial Regulation following the Global Financial Crisis, in: Andrea Schneiker et al. (Eds.): Transnational Expertise, Nomos 2018.
Available on Academia.edu
Research Project
Money as Data
Project responsibility: Carola Westermeier
Researcher: Marek Jessen
Funded by the Centre Responsible Digitality (ZEVEDI)
Abstract: Every day, we use different means of digital payments. Whether payments are made by debit card, credit card or via app - all these payment methods have one feature in common: they leave traces. Transactions data is most valuable as it allows several conclusions to be drawn about personal life and actual behaviour. Data-driven platforms whose business model is based on the monetisation of data and payment service providers share an interest in the use of financial transaction data. Despite the sensitivity of transaction data, little is yet known about its commercial use. In particular, the question on which technologies enable which data usage has not yet been addressed.
This is the starting point of the ad-hoc project. It aims to provide an overview of the use of transaction data by different financial actors. Based on case studies, criteria for the responsible processing and usage of transaction data are to be developed. To this end, a classification scheme is being developed to show in a ‘data protection scoring’ what impact the various payment types have on data protection.
The question of how financial actors use transaction data is also closely linked to questions of regulation and has strong normative implications: In the course of a regulatory-induced market liberalisation, EU regulations have significantly facilitated access to transaction data and thus simplified market access for FinTechs and BigTechs. The project thus combines regulatory matters with the analysis of technological design and normative implications. With its analysis of how transaction data is currently used commercially, the project develops the basis for discussions on how transaction data could be used in the future.
Research Project
Financial Infrastructures and Geoeconomic Security
Collaborative Research Centre SFB/Transregio 139 ‘Dynamics of Security’ at the universities Giessen and Marburg
Team: Prof Andreas Langenohl, Dr. Carola Westermeier, Tim Salzer, Roxana Ehlke
Funding period: 2022-2025
The project investigates interdependencies between securing financial transactions and articulations of geopolitical security. It analyses currents projects and politics of that aim to secure financial transactions and those that aim to build alternatives to the current payment system wich is perceived to be US-dominated.
The project investigates technology-driven companies that offer financial transactions which are emerging in the European Union, China and Russia. These companies often interact with governments and other authorities to offer and expand their services. The project also inquires the role of central banks as providers and regulators of payment services. However, this ‘traditional’ position of central banks is challenged and central banks also find themselves cooperating with political institutions to maintain and expand their role in the field of payments.
These projects and politics need to be contextualized as part of broader geopolitical perceptions of (financial) security that problematize the US-hegemony within financial and payment systems.
Project on Tokenized Finance at Centre Responsible Digitality
I am member of the interdisciplinary project group on Tokenized Finance which is part of the Network Centre Responsible Digitality (ZEVEDI).
Togehter with Prof Barbara Brandl I am leading a project on the socio-political aspects of Tokenization on Finance.
See the Homepage of the Centre
Picture taken from the Homepage of the Centre Responsible Digitality
Summary for BISA
From follow the money towards infrastructural geopolitics: How financial technologies enable (changing) security regimes
For the British International Studies Association’s blog I discuss the key arguments from my Review of International Studies (RIS) article “From Flows Towards Updates. Security Regimes and Changing Technologies for Financial Surveillance”
Here is the summary
and here is the full article
Rise of the platforms
Big tech firms like Google, Facebook, Apple, Alibaba and Tencent want our payments data. Are we right to share it with them?
I discussed my recent paper Money is data – the platformization of financial transactions with Paul Amery of the New Money Review Podcast.
Here is the link to the podcast: https://blubrry.com/newmoneyreview/63079754/rise-of-the-platforms/
And here is the abstract of the paper with the DOI below:
Financial transactions are part of everyday life, yet banking has largely withstood the digital transformation within most European countries. Recently, there have been initiatives that merge the digital and the financial sphere by integrating the transactions that run through established financial infrastructures into digital platforms. Large data-driven companies hereby seek access to financial transactions and try to embed payments within their platforms. This contribution discusses differing models of how tech-driven companies gain access to financial infrastructures, and how recently introduced policies engender these processes. Within Europe and the United Kingdom, banks that operate through financial infrastructures and hold most transactional data are now required by regulators to provide access to their customers’ accounts. The platformization of financial transactions is thus not purely a technical question, but it also is a remarkable example of how politically enforced changes in the materiality of data lead to reconfigurations with broader economic and social consequences. It results in the transformation of money into a form of (transactional) data and shows how the value of money and data depends on the technological underpinnings that determine the capability of their circulation. In order to understand their valuation, we need to take the material assemblages that enable their distribution into account.
Carola Westermeier (2020) Money is data – the platformization of financial transactions, Information, Communication & Society, 23:14, 2047-2063, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1770833 Open Access
Co-Editor of an edited volume on security actors
(in German)
“Sicherheitsakteure. Epochenübergreifende Perspektiven zu Praxisformen und Versicherheitlichung”
PhD-Thesis (2018)
Political Security and Financial Stability following the Crisis.
Actors and Epistemologies of Financial Governance
The financial meltdown of 2007-2008 was widely expected to cause a fundamental rethinking of financial markets when greedy ‘banksters’ and excessive ‘gambling’ were conceived as threats to the public welfare. However, the reform process that followed was seen as disappointing and only preserving a neoliberal regime of government that has left the promise of enhancing human welfare and omniscient markets behind and instead accepts the inevitability of (financial) catastrophe.
Scrutinising this development marks the outset of my analysis. In combining discourse theory of hegemony with approaches of critical security studies, I investigate how political and financial actors within the financial reform discourse reacted to the crisis by enhancing their mandates of financial surveillance and developing further epistemologies of risk and uncertainty. Herein, I follow a double intention: on the one hand, to reconstruct empirically financial politics shifted towards protecting the infrastructural capabilities of financial markets. On the other hand, I seek to develop a conceptual approach to understand how political and financial positions co-evolved towards a new hegemony within financial governance. Both undertakings are closely entangled and bring to the fore how rendering the events as a financial crisis led to a narrowing of vision which brings into focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex constellation of events. Economic methodologies of quantification, valorisation and ‘defuturization’ are at the heart of the epistemologies in play and their prevalance among the leading institutitions limits a fundamental transformation.
In sum, the analysis provides an profound understandng of how a new hegemony evolved that accepts the financial system as being intrinsically crisis-laden and potentially disastrous for broader notions of welfare and social security. At the same time, this post-crisis consensus does not seek to change this characteristic of the financial system, but rather to foster the conditions that ease its failing.
Economic History and Sports and Gender
Chapters in German
Contributions that are based on my BA and MA theses.
Einige Beiträge, die teilweise auf Abschlussarbeiten meines Studiums beruhen
Werber über Wertewandel – Diskurse über Verbraucher und deren Verhalten, in: Bernhard Dietz; Jörg Neuheiser (Hrsg.): Wertewandel in Wirtschaft und Arbeitswelt? De Gruyter 2016. Link
Sportlerinnen in den Medien: Zwischen Mannweib und Modelkörper, in: Frank Becker; Ralf Schäfer (Eds.): Die Spiele gehen weiter. Campus 2014. Link
Von „Sport-Suffragetten“ und „Fußball mit Herz“ – Mediendarstellung des Frauenfußballs, 1970–1999, in: Silke Sinning et al. (Hrsg.): Frauen- und Mädchenfußball im Blickpunkt. Empirische Untersuchungen – Probleme und Visionen, LIT Verlag 2014. Link
Vom „widerlichen Fressen für Voyeure“ zum „Minderheitenprogramm“. Der bundesdeutsche Frauenfußball in Presse- und Selbstdarstellung, in: Markwart Herzog (Eds.): Frauenfußball in Deutschland. Anfänge – Verbote – Widerstände – Durchbruch, Kohlhammer 2013, S. 223-240. Link
Sports + Gender
Rezension zu Rinke, Stefan; Schiller, Kay (Hrsg.): The FIFA World Cup 1930–2010. Politics, Commerce, Spectacle and Identities, in: H-Soz-u-Kult, 10.07.2014.
https://www.hsozkult.de/review/id/reb-21447
"Die geschlechtsspezifische Konnotation ist wandelbar" Interview über Weiblichkeitsbilder im Sport. Online-Interview mit L.I.S.A (Wissenschaftsportal der Gerda-Henkel-Stiftung), 10/2015.
https://lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/die_geschlechtsspezifische_konnotation_ist_wandelbar?nav_id=5834