Nick Bernards
Biographic Data
| ID | 333981 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nick Bernards |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nick |
| FAMILY NAME | Bernards |
| SIGNATURE | BERNARDS N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Warwick |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4576-6555 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 287 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Antinomies of Green Fintech
This article examines the emergence of “green fintech,” a diverse subset of new financial technologies with expressly environmental aims. We suggest that an analysis of “green fintech” offers us a useful lens on the contradictions of green finance more generally. The paper looks at a range of examples, spanning processes of AI‐enabled investment screening, tokenization, and gamification, and draws recent debates about the Marxian category of “fic…
‘Some real stake in their country’: Racial financial statecraft and colonial capitalism in crisis
This paper examines continuities between the present-day ‘financialization of daily life’ and a longer history of colonial interventions. Efforts to cultivate responsible financial behaviors are often analyzed as reflecting recent trends of financialization. These kinds of analyses tend both to obscure the longer history of similar interventions, and to miss out the constitutive role of race in shaping them. In pointing to these longer continuiti…
Centring exploitation in global political economy
Exploitation, colonial capitalism, and the deep roots of climate vulnerability in West Africa
Repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance: Moralities, power, space
This article Introduces a theme issue on ‘Repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance’. The collection examines the spatial politics implicit in what we call the ‘technological turn’ in sustainability governance: the increasingly frequent resort to experiments with novel technologies to govern myriad sustainability challenges. This article introduces the articles in the collection and outlines three core themes addressed ac…
Where is finance in the financialization of development
This article analyses the growing emphasis on mobilizing private finance for development. Previous critiques have rightly highlighted the dangers of this turn, which empowers the extractive operations of financial capital at the expense of states and populations in the global south. This article calls for a more careful examination of what is driving this trend. Many previous analyses treat the turn to private finance as reflective of the interes…
Can Technology Democratize Finance
This essay reviews two recent books—Marion Laboure and Nicolas Deffrennes's Democratizing Finance and Eswar S. Prasad's The Future of Money —on financial technology (fintech) and the future of money. Both books present overviews of recent developments in fintech and assess the prospects of technological change to deliver a more accessible, equitable financial system—described in both cases as the “democratization of finance.” I raise two key conc…
From Multiple Deprivations to Exploitation: Politicizing the Multidimensional Poverty Index
OPHI and UNDP, Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022: Unpacking Deprivation Bundles to Reduce Multidimensional Poverty. Oxford and New York: Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and United Nations Development Programme, 2022. 39 pp. https://ophi.org.uk/global-mpi-report-2022/ Few questions are more fraught, or more consequential, than the number of people in the world who are poor, and whether that number is rising or falling. The…
States, Money and the Persistence of Colonial Financial Hierarchies in British West Africa
This article contributes to debates about the persistence of colonial hierarchies in global finance by examining the reproduction of key features of colonial monetary and financial systems through the end of formal colonialism in West Africa, with a focus on Ghana. The article draws together engagements with Marxian theories of money and of the colonial state, and an examination of a key period which has often not received sufficient direct atten…
Capturing Finance: Arbitrage and Social Domination
Colonial Financial Infrastructures and Kenya’s Uneven Fintech Boom
Kenya is a widely cited case for proponents of fintech for development. This article shows how Kenya’s fintech boom replicates patterns of uneven development inherited from the colonial era. In particular, fintech use is unevenly distributed between urban and rural areas, and heavily concentrated on Nairobi and Mombasa in particular. The article seeks to explain these patterns by situating them in relation to the spatiality and political economy …
Covid-19 and the International Political Economy of Risk and Resilience
This forum contribution highlights the confluence of two distinct trends in the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. On one hand, many of the worst socio-economic costs of the virus and control measures have been disproportionately borne by marginalized workers, primarily in the global south. Often these impacts have not overlapped with the public health costs of the virus itself. In this sense the pandemic has highlighted the ways that risks in …
The World Bank, Agricultural Credit, and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Global Development
This article examines the development of the World Bank’s agricultural credit programming between 1960 and 1990. I show how these projects constituted key sites where neoliberal development governance was initially articulated, negotiated, and contested. Agricultural credit was a key point of emphasis for the Bank during its ‘Assault on Poverty’ era in the 1970s. Agricultural programming in this era reflected a strong emphasis on agricultural dev…
Poverty finance and the durable contradictions of colonial capitalism: Placing ‘financial inclusion’ in the long run in Ghana
Child labour, cobalt and the London Metal Exchange: Fetish, fixing and the limits of financialization
This article considers the surprising, tentative, emergence of the London Metal Exchange as a quasi-labour regulator following persistent scandals over cobalt mined by child labour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It argues that this case offers us a useful window on the limits to financialization. The ‘financialization’ of cobalt here refers to the process by which cobalt has come to be traded as a speculative asset. Such processes…
Interrogating Technology‐led Experiments in Sustainability Governance
Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology‐intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio‐political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology‐centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer‐standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under…
Relative surplus populations and the crises of contemporary capitalism: Reviving, revisiting, recasting
Centring labour in financialization
This article draws on an engagement with Marx’s notes on money and finance to reconsider the relationships between labour, working classes, and financial accumulation. In recent years, these dynamics have often been understood through the lens of ‘financialization’ – referring to a trend towards the growing prominence of financial sector profits, logics, and power at the expense of productive activity. This lens has tended to produce analyses of …
The poverty of fintech? Psychometrics, credit infrastructures, and the limits of financialization
It is increasingly common to claim that innovative financial technologies (‘fintech’) will enable ever-wider access to credit. Previous critical accounts have often linked the development of fintech to processes of financialization. However, these arguments rarely take account of the uneven and highly limited character of ‘financial inclusion’ in practice. Drawing on engagements with science and technology studies and historical materialist polit…
Placing African labour in global capitalism: The politics of irregular work
This contribution to ROAPE ’s ongoing debate on ‘Capitalism in Africa’ highlights the politically contested relationships between irregular forms of work predominant in sub-Saharan Africa and global capitalism. Previous contributions to this debate have rightly pointed out that abstracted understandings of ‘capitalism’ assuming the ever-wider spread of proletarian labour are problematic in African contexts dominated by irregular forms of work. Th…
Latent’ surplus populations and colonial histories of drought, groundnuts, and finance in Senegal
Understanding technological change in global finance through infrastructures: Introduction to Review of International Political Economy Special Issue ‘The Changing Technological Infrastructures of Glo…
Amid escalating claims about the promises and perils of emergent financial technologies (fintech), critical investigation of the extent to which specific technological changes in global finance are truly 'disruptive' is sorely needed. Yet, IPE has engaged little with the growing focus on fintech in popular and regulatory debates, as well as in Social Studies of Finance (SSF). This article and accompanying special issue foreground 'infrastructures…
Tracing mutations of neoliberal development governance: Fintech', failure and the politics of marketization
This article interrogates recent policy pronouncements around the promotion of emerging financial technologies (fintech) as means of enabling financial inclusion. It is argued that situating this emergent 'turn to technology' in the context of a longer-running pattern of failed efforts to promote the development of financial markets for the poor in the Global South offers us a useful lens on the dynamics of neoliberalism. The article develops thi…
The Truncated Commercialization of Microinsurance and the Limits of Neoliberalism
Microinsurance - defined as low-cost insurance products targeting low-income populations - exemplifies key themes in contemporary neoliberalism, and has figured prominently in neoliberalism's turn to discourses such as 'risk management' and 'financial inclusion'. The development of commercial markets for microinsurance, however, has in practice been highly variable and often very limited. This article considers the implications of this process of…
The International Labour Organization and African trade unions: Tripartite fantasies and enduring struggles
This article examines the complex and contradictory history of interactions between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and trade unions in Africa from 1960 to the present. The paper focuses in particular on ILO efforts to deliver technical assistance to trade unions. I highlight the tensions raised by the mismatch between ILO’s adherence to a particular view of industrial unionism rooted in northern European experience, which I label the…
Understanding technological change in global finance through infrastructures: Introduction to Review of International Political Economy Special Issue ‘The Changing Technological Infrastructures of Glo…
Amid escalating claims about the promises and perils of emergent financial technologies (fintech), critical investigation of the extent to which specific technological changes in global finance are truly 'disruptive' is sorely needed. Yet, IPE has engaged little with the growing focus on fintech in popular and regulatory debates, as well as in Social Studies of Finance (SSF). This article and accompanying special issue foreground 'infrastructures…
The poverty of fintech? Psychometrics, credit infrastructures, and the limits of financialization
It is increasingly common to claim that innovative financial technologies (‘fintech’) will enable ever-wider access to credit. Previous critical accounts have often linked the development of fintech to processes of financialization. However, these arguments rarely take account of the uneven and highly limited character of ‘financial inclusion’ in practice. Drawing on engagements with science and technology studies and historical materialist polit…
Relative surplus populations and the crises of contemporary capitalism: Reviving, revisiting, recasting
Latent’ surplus populations and colonial histories of drought, groundnuts, and finance in Senegal
Poverty finance and the durable contradictions of colonial capitalism: Placing ‘financial inclusion’ in the long run in Ghana
Where is finance in the financialization of development
This article analyses the growing emphasis on mobilizing private finance for development. Previous critiques have rightly highlighted the dangers of this turn, which empowers the extractive operations of financial capital at the expense of states and populations in the global south. This article calls for a more careful examination of what is driving this trend. Many previous analyses treat the turn to private finance as reflective of the interes…
Colonial Financial Infrastructures and Kenya’s Uneven Fintech Boom
Kenya is a widely cited case for proponents of fintech for development. This article shows how Kenya’s fintech boom replicates patterns of uneven development inherited from the colonial era. In particular, fintech use is unevenly distributed between urban and rural areas, and heavily concentrated on Nairobi and Mombasa in particular. The article seeks to explain these patterns by situating them in relation to the spatiality and political economy …
Tracing mutations of neoliberal development governance: Fintech', failure and the politics of marketization
This article interrogates recent policy pronouncements around the promotion of emerging financial technologies (fintech) as means of enabling financial inclusion. It is argued that situating this emergent 'turn to technology' in the context of a longer-running pattern of failed efforts to promote the development of financial markets for the poor in the Global South offers us a useful lens on the dynamics of neoliberalism. The article develops thi…
Placing African labour in global capitalism: The politics of irregular work
This contribution to ROAPE ’s ongoing debate on ‘Capitalism in Africa’ highlights the politically contested relationships between irregular forms of work predominant in sub-Saharan Africa and global capitalism. Previous contributions to this debate have rightly pointed out that abstracted understandings of ‘capitalism’ assuming the ever-wider spread of proletarian labour are problematic in African contexts dominated by irregular forms of work. Th…
Child labour, cobalt and the London Metal Exchange: Fetish, fixing and the limits of financialization
This article considers the surprising, tentative, emergence of the London Metal Exchange as a quasi-labour regulator following persistent scandals over cobalt mined by child labour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It argues that this case offers us a useful window on the limits to financialization. The ‘financialization’ of cobalt here refers to the process by which cobalt has come to be traded as a speculative asset. Such processes…
The Truncated Commercialization of Microinsurance and the Limits of Neoliberalism
Microinsurance - defined as low-cost insurance products targeting low-income populations - exemplifies key themes in contemporary neoliberalism, and has figured prominently in neoliberalism's turn to discourses such as 'risk management' and 'financial inclusion'. The development of commercial markets for microinsurance, however, has in practice been highly variable and often very limited. This article considers the implications of this process of…
The World Bank, Agricultural Credit, and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Global Development
This article examines the development of the World Bank’s agricultural credit programming between 1960 and 1990. I show how these projects constituted key sites where neoliberal development governance was initially articulated, negotiated, and contested. Agricultural credit was a key point of emphasis for the Bank during its ‘Assault on Poverty’ era in the 1970s. Agricultural programming in this era reflected a strong emphasis on agricultural dev…
Centring labour in financialization
This article draws on an engagement with Marx’s notes on money and finance to reconsider the relationships between labour, working classes, and financial accumulation. In recent years, these dynamics have often been understood through the lens of ‘financialization’ – referring to a trend towards the growing prominence of financial sector profits, logics, and power at the expense of productive activity. This lens has tended to produce analyses of …
The International Labour Organization and African trade unions: Tripartite fantasies and enduring struggles
This article examines the complex and contradictory history of interactions between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and trade unions in Africa from 1960 to the present. The paper focuses in particular on ILO efforts to deliver technical assistance to trade unions. I highlight the tensions raised by the mismatch between ILO’s adherence to a particular view of industrial unionism rooted in northern European experience, which I label the…
The International Labour Organization and the ambivalent politics of financial inclusion in West Africa
This article examines the role of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in promoting ‘financial inclusion’ in West Africa. The role of the ILO in microfinance and financial inclusion has often been overlooked, in contrast to the role played by the World Bank, G20 and like institutions. The ILO is significant here because it suggests a number of ambiguities and important political dynamics that have gone overlooked in previous critical discu…
Repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance: Moralities, power, space
This article Introduces a theme issue on ‘Repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance’. The collection examines the spatial politics implicit in what we call the ‘technological turn’ in sustainability governance: the increasingly frequent resort to experiments with novel technologies to govern myriad sustainability challenges. This article introduces the articles in the collection and outlines three core themes addressed ac…
States, Money and the Persistence of Colonial Financial Hierarchies in British West Africa
This article contributes to debates about the persistence of colonial hierarchies in global finance by examining the reproduction of key features of colonial monetary and financial systems through the end of formal colonialism in West Africa, with a focus on Ghana. The article draws together engagements with Marxian theories of money and of the colonial state, and an examination of a key period which has often not received sufficient direct atten…
The global governance of informal economies: The International Labour Organization in East Africa
This article develops a Gramscian approach to the governance of ‘informal’ economies through a historical study of International Labour Organization (ILO) programmes in East Africa. Drawing on Gramsci’s conception of the ‘subaltern’, the article highlights the ways in which the articulation of ‘informality’ in policy documents is coloured by broader struggles over the political organisation of labour. The article develops this argument through tw…
The internationalization of labour politics in Africa
This article considers recent international labour standards initiatives in Africa in the context of structural adjustment and the globalization of production. It is argued that examining these initiatives calls for means of drawing bridges between African studies and critical approaches to international political economy. The paper seeks to draw such a bridge using Gramsci's concepts of crisis and passive revolution. Labour relations are increas…
Can Technology Democratize Finance
This essay reviews two recent books—Marion Laboure and Nicolas Deffrennes's Democratizing Finance and Eswar S. Prasad's The Future of Money —on financial technology (fintech) and the future of money. Both books present overviews of recent developments in fintech and assess the prospects of technological change to deliver a more accessible, equitable financial system—described in both cases as the “democratization of finance.” I raise two key conc…
The internationalization of labour politics in Africa
This article considers recent international labour standards initiatives in Africa in the context of structural adjustment and the globalization of production. It is argued that examining these initiatives calls for means of drawing bridges between African studies and critical approaches to international political economy. The paper seeks to draw such a bridge using Gramsci's concepts of crisis and passive revolution. Labour relations are increas…
The International Labour Organization and the ambivalent politics of financial inclusion in West Africa
This article examines the role of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in promoting ‘financial inclusion’ in West Africa. The role of the ILO in microfinance and financial inclusion has often been overlooked, in contrast to the role played by the World Bank, G20 and like institutions. The ILO is significant here because it suggests a number of ambiguities and important political dynamics that have gone overlooked in previous critical discu…
The International Labour Organization and African trade unions: Tripartite fantasies and enduring struggles
This article examines the complex and contradictory history of interactions between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and trade unions in Africa from 1960 to the present. The paper focuses in particular on ILO efforts to deliver technical assistance to trade unions. I highlight the tensions raised by the mismatch between ILO’s adherence to a particular view of industrial unionism rooted in northern European experience, which I label the…
The global governance of informal economies: The International Labour Organization in East Africa
This article develops a Gramscian approach to the governance of ‘informal’ economies through a historical study of International Labour Organization (ILO) programmes in East Africa. Drawing on Gramsci’s conception of the ‘subaltern’, the article highlights the ways in which the articulation of ‘informality’ in policy documents is coloured by broader struggles over the political organisation of labour. The article develops this argument through tw…
The Global Politics of Forced Labour
This article examines the politics of governing forced labour. It develops and applies an approach drawing on Marx’s conception of the historical formation of ‘free’ labour in the process of ‘primitive accumulation’ and Gramsci’s conception of the ‘relations of force’. Viewed through this lens, rather than representing discrete ontological categories, the boundary between ‘free’ and ‘forced’ labour is repositioned as largely a contested and ambiv…
The Truncated Commercialization of Microinsurance and the Limits of Neoliberalism
Microinsurance - defined as low-cost insurance products targeting low-income populations - exemplifies key themes in contemporary neoliberalism, and has figured prominently in neoliberalism's turn to discourses such as 'risk management' and 'financial inclusion'. The development of commercial markets for microinsurance, however, has in practice been highly variable and often very limited. This article considers the implications of this process of…
Centring labour in financialization
This article draws on an engagement with Marx’s notes on money and finance to reconsider the relationships between labour, working classes, and financial accumulation. In recent years, these dynamics have often been understood through the lens of ‘financialization’ – referring to a trend towards the growing prominence of financial sector profits, logics, and power at the expense of productive activity. This lens has tended to produce analyses of …
The poverty of fintech? Psychometrics, credit infrastructures, and the limits of financialization
It is increasingly common to claim that innovative financial technologies (‘fintech’) will enable ever-wider access to credit. Previous critical accounts have often linked the development of fintech to processes of financialization. However, these arguments rarely take account of the uneven and highly limited character of ‘financial inclusion’ in practice. Drawing on engagements with science and technology studies and historical materialist polit…
Placing African labour in global capitalism: The politics of irregular work
This contribution to ROAPE ’s ongoing debate on ‘Capitalism in Africa’ highlights the politically contested relationships between irregular forms of work predominant in sub-Saharan Africa and global capitalism. Previous contributions to this debate have rightly pointed out that abstracted understandings of ‘capitalism’ assuming the ever-wider spread of proletarian labour are problematic in African contexts dominated by irregular forms of work. Th…
Latent’ surplus populations and colonial histories of drought, groundnuts, and finance in Senegal
Understanding technological change in global finance through infrastructures: Introduction to Review of International Political Economy Special Issue ‘The Changing Technological Infrastructures of Glo…
Amid escalating claims about the promises and perils of emergent financial technologies (fintech), critical investigation of the extent to which specific technological changes in global finance are truly 'disruptive' is sorely needed. Yet, IPE has engaged little with the growing focus on fintech in popular and regulatory debates, as well as in Social Studies of Finance (SSF). This article and accompanying special issue foreground 'infrastructures…
Tracing mutations of neoliberal development governance: Fintech', failure and the politics of marketization
This article interrogates recent policy pronouncements around the promotion of emerging financial technologies (fintech) as means of enabling financial inclusion. It is argued that situating this emergent 'turn to technology' in the context of a longer-running pattern of failed efforts to promote the development of financial markets for the poor in the Global South offers us a useful lens on the dynamics of neoliberalism. The article develops thi…
Interrogating Technology‐led Experiments in Sustainability Governance
Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology‐intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio‐political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology‐centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer‐standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under…
Relative surplus populations and the crises of contemporary capitalism: Reviving, revisiting, recasting
Covid-19 and the International Political Economy of Risk and Resilience
This forum contribution highlights the confluence of two distinct trends in the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. On one hand, many of the worst socio-economic costs of the virus and control measures have been disproportionately borne by marginalized workers, primarily in the global south. Often these impacts have not overlapped with the public health costs of the virus itself. In this sense the pandemic has highlighted the ways that risks in …
The World Bank, Agricultural Credit, and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Global Development
This article examines the development of the World Bank’s agricultural credit programming between 1960 and 1990. I show how these projects constituted key sites where neoliberal development governance was initially articulated, negotiated, and contested. Agricultural credit was a key point of emphasis for the Bank during its ‘Assault on Poverty’ era in the 1970s. Agricultural programming in this era reflected a strong emphasis on agricultural dev…
Poverty finance and the durable contradictions of colonial capitalism: Placing ‘financial inclusion’ in the long run in Ghana
Child labour, cobalt and the London Metal Exchange: Fetish, fixing and the limits of financialization
This article considers the surprising, tentative, emergence of the London Metal Exchange as a quasi-labour regulator following persistent scandals over cobalt mined by child labour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). It argues that this case offers us a useful window on the limits to financialization. The ‘financialization’ of cobalt here refers to the process by which cobalt has come to be traded as a speculative asset. Such processes…
Colonial Financial Infrastructures and Kenya’s Uneven Fintech Boom
Kenya is a widely cited case for proponents of fintech for development. This article shows how Kenya’s fintech boom replicates patterns of uneven development inherited from the colonial era. In particular, fintech use is unevenly distributed between urban and rural areas, and heavily concentrated on Nairobi and Mombasa in particular. The article seeks to explain these patterns by situating them in relation to the spatiality and political economy …
Where is finance in the financialization of development
This article analyses the growing emphasis on mobilizing private finance for development. Previous critiques have rightly highlighted the dangers of this turn, which empowers the extractive operations of financial capital at the expense of states and populations in the global south. This article calls for a more careful examination of what is driving this trend. Many previous analyses treat the turn to private finance as reflective of the interes…
Can Technology Democratize Finance
This essay reviews two recent books—Marion Laboure and Nicolas Deffrennes's Democratizing Finance and Eswar S. Prasad's The Future of Money —on financial technology (fintech) and the future of money. Both books present overviews of recent developments in fintech and assess the prospects of technological change to deliver a more accessible, equitable financial system—described in both cases as the “democratization of finance.” I raise two key conc…
From Multiple Deprivations to Exploitation: Politicizing the Multidimensional Poverty Index
OPHI and UNDP, Global Multidimensional Poverty Index 2022: Unpacking Deprivation Bundles to Reduce Multidimensional Poverty. Oxford and New York: Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative and United Nations Development Programme, 2022. 39 pp. https://ophi.org.uk/global-mpi-report-2022/ Few questions are more fraught, or more consequential, than the number of people in the world who are poor, and whether that number is rising or falling. The…
States, Money and the Persistence of Colonial Financial Hierarchies in British West Africa
This article contributes to debates about the persistence of colonial hierarchies in global finance by examining the reproduction of key features of colonial monetary and financial systems through the end of formal colonialism in West Africa, with a focus on Ghana. The article draws together engagements with Marxian theories of money and of the colonial state, and an examination of a key period which has often not received sufficient direct atten…
Capturing Finance: Arbitrage and Social Domination
Repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance: Moralities, power, space
This article Introduces a theme issue on ‘Repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance’. The collection examines the spatial politics implicit in what we call the ‘technological turn’ in sustainability governance: the increasingly frequent resort to experiments with novel technologies to govern myriad sustainability challenges. This article introduces the articles in the collection and outlines three core themes addressed ac…
Economics (25 works) · Political science (22 works) · Politics (18 works) · Political economy (17 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Market economy (10 works) · Capitalism (9 works)