What is a financial frontier?

At Tingshua University, researchers convene at the China Financial Frontier Center to study global economic governance. 1 At the Federalist Society, a conservative legal and policy think-tank in the United States, researchers examine the PayDay loan industry and label it a financial frontier.2 The Collaborative for Frontier Finance, led by former Wall Street and World Bank employees, provides capital for businesses at 'frontier and emerging markets.' 3 What makes the concept of a financial frontier so capacious?And, how do scholars, practitioners, and the media mobilize this concept to speak of the proliferation of finance as a social form?This special issue attends to these questions by thinking laterally, from frontier to frontier, and across several continents and historical periods.Without settling on a restrictive definition, we approach the financial frontier as a set of tactics for raising and managing financial capital that result in forms of conversion, intensification, and proliferation.Conversion refers to how domains of social life previously not understood to be financial, become so.Intensification speaks to a qualitative shift in how established financial practices and institutions deepen their reach, expanding, or even reinventing their form.Proliferation denotes the quantitative growth of techniques, actors, and organizations that come to actively participate in finance (see also Tsing 2003, 5102).But there is more; Practitioners and social commentators recognize frontiers as distinct situations where something novel or at least unusual takes place in unprecedented, or unexpected, locations.For financial actorsincluding financial institutions, investors, lenders, borrowers, and the brokers that mediate financial transactionsthe frontier signals new opportunities beyond the strictures of historically existing sites of finance.For those on the ground, the frontier often pairs theft and dispossession with the excesses of accumulation; it holds together exhausted worlds and new hopes for autonomy and even freedom.The financial frontier is thus not a place but a conceptual orientation, a set of traveling processes, theories, and practices (Tsing 2003, 5101; Muniesa and Doganova 2020, 97).Instead of establishing where a frontier sits geographically, the papers in this collection take a different entry point by asking how devices, temporalities, scales, and bordering practices provide frontiers with their character and shape.They share a commitment to studying these processes in granular and grounded ways.Scholars and practitioners based in EuroAmerica have used the notion of a financial frontier to signal the expansion of finance into new areas of life and new geographic locations.By declaring a frontier, they performatively assert and propel frontier thinking forward (Cody 2020, 404), reinforcing a concept that is charged with what Ballestero (this issue) critiques as an 'expansive wavemodel' that takes financialization as the movement of financial practices and logics from a point of origin, presumably located in EuroAmerica and in classic financial institutions (e.g.financial markets, banks, investors and traders, etc.), to other parts of the world or other sectors of society

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