Circulating knowledge through disparate practices: the global pursuit of terrorist financing by Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs)

ABSTRACT

Standardization and harmonization are widely studied by scholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to understand how knowledge and things circulate across geographies, yet it often remains unclear what these terms exactly refer to. In dictionaries, they are generally defined as actions or processes aimed at achieving uniformity, similarity, or alignment. In STS literature, it is often assumed that when a practice is (un)successfully standardized or harmonized, the circulation of knowledge and things across distance and difference is made (im)possible. However, it is questionable whether the geographical circulation of things and knowledge is necessarily enabled by the uniformity of practices. When analyzing the global exchange of financial intelligence, a different picture emerges, whereby the coordination of security operations and the exchange of financial intelligence are actually enabled by disparate quantification practices. Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) – governmental organizations that globally exchange financial intelligence for combatting money laundering and terrorist financing – are geographically scattered and very different in nature, each constructing security threats such as terrorism or terrorist financing uniquely. Yet through their complex quantification practices, they make coordination possible while persisting in maintaining differences, without relying on an increasingly uniform and universal sameness of practices. For FIUs, quantification practices, even though differently practiced, generate a shared domain with its own transnational, depoliticized, and highly technical proxy grammar that makes it possible to work beyond and background otherwise incommensurable issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Standardization
• harmonization
• quantification practices
• circulating knowledge
• Financial Intelligence Units

Introduction

In 2017, the European law enforcement agency Europol released a report that caused quite a stir in the field of financial intelligence. The report, called ‘From Suspicion to Action,’ mapped and compared the different practices of Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) in the EU (Europol, 2017). FIUs are relatively new security organizations that analyze financial transactions in the context of combatting money laundering and terrorist financing. The report demonstrated that each FIU used a completely different approach to gathering, analyzing, and disseminating financial intelligence. In response to the report, however, the European FIUs drafted a statement in which they emphasized the importance of the lack of harmonization between FIUs (EU FIUs Platform, 2017, p. 3). The FIUs argued that they do not merely need to work across borders but that they also need to consider their differences and the unique national contexts in which they operate. This rejection of harmonization caused in turn another stir because harmonization of practices was considered key by Europol to achieve efficient international and global cooperation.

To follow suspicious financial transactions across borders and acquire information on security threats, FIUs need to cooperate with counterparts around the globe and exchange financial intelligence. They share intelligence and expertise through the Egmont Group, which is a platform characterized by enormous diversity. Its 174 members are based in countries with fundamentally different cultural, political, economic, and legal foundations, each with different and often conflicting interpretations of what human rights and privacy entail. Because members of the Egmont Group operate primarily in their own national environments, security issues such as terrorist financing come into existence uniquely in different places. Each FIU quantifies security issues in its own way, resulting in national data that are incomparable internationally. FIUs are exploring ways to overcome their differences, work together, and share the financial intelligence on which they all depend.

The conflict between Europol and the FIUs touches on a broader question about the role of standardization and harmonization in the circulation of knowledge between different actors and across geographies. While standardization and harmonization are widely studied by scholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS), it remains often unclear what these terms refer to. In dictionaries, standardization is either mentioned in passing as part of an explanation of another word, e.g. ‘standard,’ or it is discussed generically as ‘the action or process of standardizing something,’ whereby ‘standardize’ is defined as ‘cause to conform to a standard or uniform size, strength, form’ (Brown (eds), 1993, p. 3028). Harmonization, similarly, is generically described in the dictionary as ‘the action or process of bringing into harmony or agreement; reconciliation, standardization’ (Brown (eds), 1993, p. 1192). What these definitions share is that they (1) refer to an action or process, where (2) things are being made the same, uniform, or are reconciliated.

It is this notion of uniformity that is also often implicitly assumed in academic literature concerning processes of standardization, harmonization, and calibration, that this paper wishes to challenge. It particularly interrogates the assumption that these processes need to achieve some level of sameness in order to be able to circulate knowledge or things. It is often assumed that practices are (un)successfully standardized or harmonized and therefore make the circulation of things and knowledge (im)possible across distance and difference. However, this view neglects the role of the process itself. The process of coordination, collaborations, negotiations, and what Anna Tsing calls ‘friction’ (2005), brings a variety of actors together and in conversation. The main research question of this paper is: how do FIUs manage to work together with counterparts around the globe and share their financial intelligence, in spite of their very different quantification practices? How and why does terrorist financing and its quantification practices continue to play such a significant role in processes of global governance, and increasingly so, given the clear absence of uniform standards?

Using the circulation of financial intelligence between FIUs as an example, the paper suggests that knowledge can also be made to circulate through disparate practices. Not because these provide a future uniform and universal sameness, but because they construct an exclusive domain that is transnational, technocratic, depoliticized, and has its own highly technical proxy grammar. This domain makes coordination between geographically scattered actors possible, while persisting in maintaining differences. Quantification practices bring actors together, connect them, and provide words, concepts, ideas, technologies, methods, and aspirations, through which security actors can coordinate their operations and exchange the financial intelligence they need for their own national security operations.

This domain is not free of politics or without conflict. Rather, it enables actors to engage, encounter, or conflict with one another; to cooperate, collaborate, or negotiate; to work beyond and background otherwise incommensurable and insurmountable issues, such as the politically charged discussion of what terrorism or terrorist financing exactly is. The shared domain enables practitioners to quantify apples and pears that are differently politically charged and to generically and collectively discuss them as fruit, still differently understood. The paper shows that especially highly technological and technocratic quantification practices are suitable for such purposes due to their complexity, highly specific jargon, and often massive amounts of data and stacks of documents. Quantification practices provide expert exclusivity and authority to the domain, making it hard to understand and challenge by outsiders.

The following section will start by connecting this argument to the STS literature, broadly understood, on standardization, harmonization, and calibration. It will draw out the rich contributions of this body of literature, yet point as well to the general tendency to understand uniformity of practices as key to circulate knowledge. Following a short methodological note, the paper moves on to two empirical sections. The first section details the varied quantification practices of FIUs by zooming in on how terrorist financing is differently constructed in each FIU jurisdiction, resulting in incomparable numbers and statistics. The second empirical section shows how these disparate practices are not preventing or hindering transnational cooperation between FIUs, but how they generate a shared security domain through which FIUs can engage with one another and coordinate their operations.

Standardization ≠ uniformity

The field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a rich history of studying the geographical dissemination of knowledge and things through the harmonization, standardization, or calibration of practices (see, e.g. Porter, 1996; Desrosières, 1998; Latour, 1999, 2007; Bowker and Star, 2000). This literature emphasizes the often invisible power of standards (Star, 1990), the significance of the routinization of practices (Desrosières, 1998), the ‘universalization’ of metrology standards (Latour, 2007, p. 229), the harmonization of practices for governing political processes (Barry, 1993, p. 316), and the importance of calibrating instruments to facilitate the travel of numbers (Porter, 1996), among other aspects. While this body of literature has provided valuable insights, it shares the implicit assumption that greater uniformity of practices – the more reconciliated, routinized, calibrated, universalized – facilitates the travel and circulation of things and knowledge across diverse geographical contexts and situated differences. The underlying assumption is that if standards or harmonized practices are not successfully made uniform, the circulation of knowledge may be disrupted, hampered, or rendered impossible. Drawing on the work of Annemarie Mol (2002) and Anna Tsing (2005), this theoretical framework develops an alternative viewpoint whereby not the extent of uniformization is assumed key to circulate knowledge, but the processes of coordination that bring terrorist financing into existence differently.

Standardization and harmonization

Classical STS studies have contributed to our understanding of how standardization and harmonization make the circulation of knowledge and things possible. Desrosières, for instance, studied the objectivity and reality of statistics by examining the routinized practices that support them (Desrosières, 1998, p. 9). He argued that statistics need to be ‘inscribed in routinized practices that, by providing a stable and widely accepted language to give voice to the debate, help to establish the reality of the picture described’ (Desrosières, 1998, p. 1). Once statistics are in place relatively similarly and accepted as a legitimate ‘voice,’ then they succeed in contributing to the production of the objectivity of reality. Porter (1996, p. 28), similarly, emphasized that for numbers to travel geographically, comparable specifications ‘must be put into effect at millions of diverse locations, by calibrating millions of instruments and millions of people to the same standard.’ He stated:

Since the rules for collecting and manipulating numbers are widely shared, they can easily be transported across oceans and continents and used to coordinate activities or settle disputes. … A highly disciplined discourse helps to produce knowledge independent of the particular people who make it. (Porter, 1996, p. ix)

A growing contemporary strand of STS literature focusing on infrastructures also draws attention to the fact that making knowledge transportable is not necessarily an easy process, but in fact requires substantial effort. Scholarship at the intersection of STS and security has focused on the work required to enable knowledge to circulate through data infrastructures (Bernards and Campbell-Verduyn, 2019; Bellanova and Glouftsios, 2022), financial infrastructures (De Goede, 2021; De Goede and Westermeier, 2022), and critical and political infrastructures (Aradau, 2010; Opitz and Tellmann, 2015). In their study of algorithms in security governance, Bellanova and De Goede (2022, p. 106) set out to ‘unearth the hard work involved in making data points materialize, and making data transportable.’ The study of infrastructures is compelling because it pays attention not only to the materiality of circulating knowledge and objects but also to the often mundane moments and consequences when an infrastructure breaks down or needs repair and maintenance (Star, 1999; Denis and Pontille, 2019).

Furthermore, STS scholarship has pointed out that structured and standardized databases do not, in Porter’s (1996, p. ix) words, ‘produce knowledge independent of the particular people who make it.’ To understand how ‘data journeys,’ Leonelli (2016, p. 5) studies ‘the material, social, and institutional circumstances by which data are packaged and transported across research situations, so as to function as evidence for a variety of knowledge claims.’ Leonelli (2016, p. 20) demonstrates that data on model organisms are not independent but need to be structured in particular ways to accommodate and bring together different research traditions.

This approach to data is closely related to research on ‘boundary objects’ (2016, p. 20) as developed by Star and Griesemer (1989, p. 393), referring to objects that simultaneously facilitate local needs while also maintaining a ‘common identity across sites.’ What is interesting about Leonelli’s approach to data circulation, is that the boundary object is not geographically situated – for example, in a museum (Star and Griesemer, 1989) – but used to understand how data journey, how knowledge travels and is transported to other places in space. However, although accommodating a multiplicity of functions, the data remain uniform in Leonelli’s understanding. They remain ‘packaged’ (2016, p. 5).

The puzzle

Following this rich STS literature, knowledge on terrorist financing would supposedly travel across geographies if the ways in which it is brought into being were uniformed, routinized, or packaged. By employing similar practices of measuring, calculating, defining, and calibrating instruments, terrorist financing would be brought into existence relatively similarly in different places. Knowledge would circulate globally through shared techniques of producing statistics and numbers – through what Cakici, Ruppert, and Scheel (2020, p. 2) call ‘data practices’ such as ‘counting, calculating, cleaning, editing, extrapolating, ignoring, harmonizing’ (see also Scheel et al., 2019). Because terrorist financing would manifest relatively similarly in different locations, it would be possible for practitioners worldwide to engage with one another, coordinate their operations, and facilitate the circulation of financial intelligence across distances and differences.

However, this conceptual proposition cannot be observed in the practice of intelligence sharing between FIUs. As widely acknowledged by security practitioners themselves, terrorism and terrorist financing are constructed very differently, as these are not fixed, static concepts with clear characteristics (see, e.g. Sorel, 2003; Schmid, 2004). In practice, the threat of terrorism (or terrorist financing) is politically contested, poorly defined, and challenging to comprehend, as different countries define and perceive various countries, groups, or individuals as having terrorist characteristics.

As scholars in Critical Security Studies (CSS) have shown, security knowledge can govern uncertain futures and make exceptional security measures possible. De Goede (2020, p. 102) argues that terrorist financing constitutes a ‘problem space’ that ‘allows innovative modes of financial data-sharing.’ It enables what Glouftsios and Leese (2023, p. 126) term an ‘epistemic fusion’ among security practitioners. In this fusion, ‘intelligence comes into being through practices that pertain to cross-domain data frictions, the contextualisation of data-driven knowledge  … , and the adjustment of the intelligence produced to make it actionable on the ground’ (Glouftsios and Lease, 2023, p. 126). What makes the security issue of terrorist financing particularly interesting, therefore, is that knowledge of terrorist financing does circulate, but the very lack of uniformity of practices seems to be at the heart of global cooperation and intelligence exchange between FIUs.

An alternative approach to standardization and harmonization

To develop an alternative understanding of the role of standardization and harmonization in bridging distance and difference and facilitating the circulation of knowledge, this paper draws on the works of Annemarie Mol (2002) and Anna Tsing (2005), two scholars who are not often brought into this conversation. In my view, both Mol and Tsing move away from conventional qualitative social sciences that study ‘interpretations’ or ‘perspectives,’ as they do not assert that independent, detached, and static entities exist with inert qualities that can be interpreted or perceived (on perspectives, see also Pols, 2005). Mol (2002) refers to an object as multiple, and Tsing (2005, p. 1) refers to certain universals that people aspire to. Both Mol and Tsing study the world by examining how things manifest differently in practice, rather than categorizing or examining these as having an inert, fixed, demarcated and static shape.

Mol (2014, p. 1) argues that

there are not just many ways of knowing ‘an object,’ but rather many ways of practicing it. Each way of practicing stages  … a different version of ‘the’ object. Hence, it is not ‘an object,’ but more than one. An object multiple.

In her research on atherosclerosis in a Dutch hospital, Mol (2002) shows that the disease does not exist in a fixed or singular way, but through the entanglement of multiple and different enactments, by surgeons, pathologists, and patients. This ontological turn has inspired scholars from diverse fields to study the multiple nature of knowledge, in domains ranging from law (van Oorschot, 2020) and numbers (Holtrop, 2017), to security issues such as data protection (Bellanova, 2014). Mol (2002, p. 33) focuses on different ‘enactments’ and how these tie together and relate to one another. The word of co-ordination is crucial here because it emphasizes the co-efforts of ordering elements in practice. Mol writes that:

As soon as attention shifts to the co-existence of different realities (or logics, or modes of ordering) the question arises as to how these hang together. The term co-ordination is helpful here, since it does not evoke a single, overarching and coherent order in which everything fits just fine and friction-free like the bits and pieces of a mosaic or the components of a watch. Instead, the term co-ordination suggests continuing effort. Tensions live on and gaps must be bridged, hence the need for ‘co-ordination.’ (Mol, 2010, p. 264)

To understand the dissemination of financial intelligence about terrorist financing, this paper is interested in what happens when knowledge is not only multiple and decentered – without a clear essence or fixed state of being – but also geographically scattered across a plethora of more or less connected places. Using the notion of multiplicity, the paper explores how different versions of terrorist financing are brought into being and, more importantly, how these versions relate globally and are coordinated. When considering terrorist financing as something that is coordinated, the need for a singular, uniform sameness is not a precondition for making knowledge circulate. Actors need to be able to relate and engage with one another, not ‘friction-free’ (Mol, 2010, p. 264), but by making coordination possible that includes tensions and negotiations.

Following Tsing, furthermore, friction between different actors does not prevent or hinder cooperation but can be productive. Friction can make new arrangements of power possible. The ethnographic ‘study of global connections,’ according to Tsing,

… shows the grip of encounter: friction. A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. (2005, p. 5)

In her study of deforestation in Indonesia, Tsing explored how people encounter each other across ‘distance and difference’ (2005, p. 7), from forest dwellers, (Western) nature activists, Japanese trading companies, and Indonesian politicians. She zooms in on ‘zones of awkward engagement’ to observe the ‘productive friction of global connections’ (Tsing, 2005, pp. xi–3). It is in these particular instances of friction that global connections become most visible; but at these times, too, they are most vividly productive because the encounter is pertinent for making (new) arrangements possible. Tsing (2005, p. 5) argues that ‘as a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power.’

The notions of coordination and the productive nature of friction shed a different light on the role of standardization practices to facilitate knowledge circulation. While many examples in the STS literature discuss instances where (un)successful circulation depends on (the lack of) uniformization – whether it involves the spread of numbers (Porter, 1996), data (Leonelli, 2016), statistics (Desrosières, 1998), or even hamburgers with (or without) onion (see for this famous example Star, 1990) – this paper applies an alternative approach. Rather than focusing on the outcomes of standardization, the process is assumed key for facilitating the circulation of knowledge. The quantification practices construct a shared domain that is transnational, technocratic, depoliticized, and has its own highly technical proxy grammar; providing words, concepts, instruments, documents, and methodologies that bring security actors into conversation, discussion, or collaboration – that they would otherwise not be able to have. Difference persists in this exclusive domain – in particular regarding politically charged issues such as the nature of terrorism – while coordination and the circulation of knowledge are made possible.

Methodological note

This article draws on qualitative research conducted between 2016 and 2020, including semi-structured interviews with practitioners from national FIUs and the European Commission, participant observation at practitioner conferences, and desk research. This multi-sited qualitative approach utilized actor-network theory (ANT) and its core assumptions of ‘localizing the global and distributing the local’ (Latour, 2007, p. 219; see also Marcus, 1995). The article relies on 11 semi-structured interviews with employees of different FIU departments, of which 8 were recorded and coded with the software Atlas.ti. For privacy and data management reasons, places and persons have been anonymized. Several quotes were translated into English, but the original language is not mentioned to avoid recognition of persons or institutions.

The first empirical section draws on annual reports from FIUs combined with semi-structured interviews, demonstrating how disparate quantification practices enable FIUs to construct terrorist financing uniquely and persuasively within their national jurisdiction. The second empirical section also draws on semi-structured interviews but combines these with international reports from FIUs and intergovernmental organizations such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). In this way, general information is supplemented by qualitative, in-depth research material.

Constructing terrorist financing

Figure 1 presents a graph from the Europol report ‘From Suspicion to Action’ (2017) discussed earlier, showing the number of terrorist financing reports that EU FIUs received from private reporting entities. It shows some striking differences. For instance, in 2014, Estonia (EE) processed 2321 terrorist financing reports. This was almost as many as all other FIUs combined, while its neighbor, Latvia (LV), processed zero reports that same year. In the UK, more reports were handled than in Germany (DE), France (FR), and Italy (IT) combined. This graph raises questions. Do these variations imply that within the EU, some countries are facing substantial terrorist threats, while others are not? Or do the numbers imply that some countries are more effective in detecting flows of terrorist funds, whereas others fail to do so? These questions are difficult to answer because the numbers do not provide any sensible comparative information about terrorist financing. This section will demonstrate that they are constructed differently by FIUs, who use disparate quantification practices to bring terrorist financing into existence uniquely within their national context. It will unpack how FIUs construct terrorist financing, to become familiar with the different quantification practices of FIUs needed for understanding how they enable coordination in the following section.

Figure 1. Terrorist finance in the EU in 2013–2014. Source: Europol (2017, p. 25).

Gathering inscription devices

To construct financial intelligence within their jurisdiction, an FIU relies on the reports it receives from private actors, such as banks and money transmitters. These reports provide information on the customer who made the transaction, the size and nature of the transaction – which can be as small as the purchase of a cup of coffee or as sizable as the purchase of a house – and the grounds on which the transaction is considered suspicious. These reports can be filed for different reasons: the sum of transferred money may exceed a given threshold, an automated ‘red flag’ may signal a suspicion, or there may be a subjective reason to suspect illicit economic behavior (see Amicelle, 2018; Bosma, 2019). Some countries give private actors the option of filing paper reports and submitting these by regular mail (EU FIUs Platform, 2016, p. 221), but most countries rely on online reporting. Similar to how a scientific ‘center of calculation’ relies on systematically gathered data that can be inscribed and made to circulate (Latour, 1987), these transaction reports, inscribed with intelligence, are a key instrument by which FIUs gather and disseminate knowledge on potentially illicit financial activities.

The nature of these reports differs substantially per FIU. They have different names and abbreviations: some FIUs call them ‘suspicious activity reports’ (SARs) or ‘suspicious transaction reports’ (STRs), or they might have names in the respective national languages, such as penningtvättsrapporter (Sweden) and activité déclarative (France) (see, for an overview, Lagerwaard, 2018). Figure 2 offers an impression of a transaction report in which a standardized template combines and stabilizes different types of information on ‘terrorist financing,’ including the tick box for this category.

Figure 2. Example of a suspicious transaction report from the International Centre for Asset Recovery e-course of the Basel Institute on Governance (2017).

The generic example in Figure 2 – derived from an e-learning course for FIU analysts that I completed – draws out an important observation: that the financial transactions are only one element of a terrorist financing report. In fact, the actual transactions – in this case, several transactions of US $1000 and $3000 – do not reveal or signify illicit activity. Different types of information are included in the report to assemble a persuasive construct of terrorist financing. The report combines information that practitioners refer to as ‘objective’ (e.g. date, address, and sum of suspicious money) and information referred to as ‘subjective’ (e.g. answers to qualitative questions on why the institution considers the transactions to be suspicious). The report functions as an ‘inscription device’ (Latour, 1987, pp. 64–68; De Vries, 2016, pp. 32–33); by combining various types of information on a single page or digital document, a ‘suspicious transaction report’ is created, which performs a stabilized understanding of that which materializes and can be known and circulated as terrorist financing.

Objective and subjective aspirations

In practice each FIU has its own, unique, national, fully or partially automated reporting system by which different types of information are combined. Practitioners themselves often distinguish between two strategies of generating financial intelligence: focused on emphasizing the earlier mentioned ‘objective’ or ‘subjective’ information. ‘Objective’ information consists of stabilized ‘factual’ information and is often processed by compiling large databases and using quantitative analysis methods. An example is the following reply I received from an FIU employee to my question on whether statistics on terrorist financing, such as those presented in Figure 1, are a reflection of the actual security practices of an FIU:

Not really, no. The number of [reports] reflects the type of obligation for reporting entities … If the grounds for suspicion which triggered the obligation are very general, very broad, then of course you will have a huge number of inputs by the reporting sector. … If you set a quantitative threshold, you may not even be in a situation of suspicion any more. You just have a very objective sort of obligation. And then the number of [reports] might be extremely high depending on how low you set the threshold. (FIU employee, 6 February 2020)

Note that this practitioner emphasizes a quantitative threshold above which a transaction automatically becomes suspicious. When this threshold is lowered, for example, from €10,000 to €5000, then private reporting entities have the obligation to classify and report more transactions to the FIU as suspicious. Similarly, if an FIU classifies all transactions involving a particular region as suspicious for terrorist financing, because, for example, it is close to the Syrian border and therefore warrants a ‘red flag’ (FIU employee, 14 June 2017), then the FIU receives more transactions related to terrorism due to this ‘objective’ obligation. With objectivity, then, practitioners do not refer to the arguments for classifying certain transactions as suspicious but to an objective criterion set, which can be integrated into the information-gathering process as a threshold or red flag and incorporated into an automated monitoring process that, without (subjective) human interference, automatically labels a transaction as suspicious.

The emphasis on the ‘subjective’ information, in contrast, is gathered via qualitative methods. For example, a written explanation may be provided of why a transaction is considered suspicious. Consider the following response from an FIU employee to my question about what practitioners understand as the ‘risk-based approach’:

An objective system [follows] the rules, and those rules are very easy to apply. In a subjective system, you have to rely to a large extent on fingerspitzengefühl. So what [this] FIU has always done … , is being very easy and cooperative towards the banks, and asking them to provide us with better and more information. … This has always been the philosophy. (FIU employee, 13 August 2019)

The ‘philosophy’ – or aspiration – of this FIU employee rests on fingerspitzengefühl, which can be roughly translated as tacit knowledge combined with gut instinct. An example is provided by the last question in Figure 2: ‘Why does the institution think the activity is suspicious?’ The answer to this question includes various elements: the countries of ‘Arabia,’ a carpet business, the customer’s anomalous transaction behavior, the suspicious buyer, the failure to present documentation, and the indirect link to a terrorist attack. All these elements intertwine and boil down to a persuasive, though subjective, construct of terrorist financing.

Generating numbers and statistics

In addition to these aspirations to generate intelligence through either a system of analysis that emphasizes subjective or objective information, there are other, often mundane features that bring terrorist financing into existence differently within an FIU jurisdiction. One obvious example is the national language in which the reporting entities submit their reports. In the EU alone, reports are written in 24 different languages that enable or constrain certain types of definitions and categorizations (EU FIUs Platform, 2016, p. 174).

A less visible but vital feature, furthermore, is the digital format of the report and the specific software used to send it down the national security chain. Each FIU standardizes its reports using a particular XML – eXtensible Markup Language – that translates the information from the human to the computer and vice versa. For example, the tick box option ‘category of suspicion’ (see Figure 2) ascribes a number to each of the illicit activities; for example, money laundering = 1, terrorist financing = 2, and check fraud = 3. Another FIU might follow a different order, for instance, in which terrorist financing = 1, check fraud = 2, and money laundering = 3. This difference, though seemingly trivial, technologically and materially constructs terrorist financing differently. Furthermore, to transfer these reports down the line of national security actors, FIUs make use of different software programs. Some use protected email systems, with the report provided as an MS Word or PDF file in an attachment, which has to be uploaded manually within the FIU (FIU employee, 17 January 2019). Others use various automatic standardized online programs, such as a customized version of GoAML, which is a software product of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

In sum, the varying numbers in Figure 1 are a result of the different objective or subjective aspirations and technological and material operations that construct terrorist financing within each jurisdiction – it is a ‘sociotechnical ensemble’ (Bijker, 1995, p. 12). An FIU that emphasizes the subjective strategy and pays more attention to lengthy descriptions of why a transaction is considered suspicious, would deliver fewer (but qualitatively better) reports. In contrast, an FIU that follows the objective strategy and automatically classifies certain transactions as suspicious due to a low threshold or red flags, would generate more reports of terrorist financing.

Europol concludes on the basis of the extremely high numbers of reports in Estonia (see Figure 1) that:

Estonia’s high figure is in fact misleading and does not indicate that Estonia is a hotbed for terrorist financing activities. In fact, the Estonian figure reflects the fact that the FIU automatically records transactions to and from certain jurisdictions as terrorist financing. (Europol, 2017, p. 24)

Estonia’s high numbers are a result of the automatic labeling of transactions to certain regions – for instance, where terrorist organizations are active – as suspicious, while other FIUs do not. Europol acknowledges that this does not imply that Estonia is a ‘hotbed’ for terrorist activity. Instead, the high numbers are in this case a consequence of automatic reporting – some FIUs count each suspicious transaction as one report, while others include dozens of transactions in a single report. This explains to a large extent the discrepant and incomparable data in Figure 1 and makes comparison between countries of counts of terrorist financing suspicions difficult, if not impossible.

Circulating knowledge

As a result of the particular legal, economic, and political environment of the national jurisdiction that every FIU must navigate, they bring terrorist financing into existence uniquely in their own national context: they have different aspirations concerning an objective or subjective approach, they apply different ways of categorizing, defining and labeling, and they use different languages, XML formats, and software systems – resulting in the incomparable statistics that can be observed in Figure 1. However, in spite of these different sociotechnical constructs, these quantification practices play an increasingly important role in the governance of global financial intelligence and are at the heart of enabling FIUs to circulate knowledge on security threats such as terrorist financing. This second empirical section will demonstrate how these disparate quantification practices generate a shared domain through which FIUs can relate to one another and coordinate their transnational operations. It will show how quantification practices are mobilized by intergovernmental organizations and recognized by practitioners as key to facilitate the global governance of financial intelligence and the exchange of intelligence, while differences persist.

Terrorist financing multiple

Terrorism, or terrorist financing, is a particularly resounding security threat that provides legitimacy and a sense of urgency not only for security practitioners but also for politicians and in popular media. Combatting terrorist financing is a driving force on the basis of which new and increased security measures are promoted and implemented (see, e.g. De Goede, 2012, 2020; Vlcek, 2012; Lagerwaard, 2020). To recapitulate De Goede (2020, p. 102), terrorist financing constitutes a ‘problem space’ that ‘allows innovative modes of financial data-sharing.’ Practitioners are very conscious of this problem space. During an interview in 2018, for instance, I raised the topic of the Islamic State (IS) with an FIU practitioner, who responded that this new security issue is ‘not about terrorism, but about how to share information better. One can use terrorism to get things moving’ (FIU employee, 5 March 2018). A former employee from another FIU that I interviewed, who used to be the head of a terrorism department, shared a similar perception:

If I’m being really honest about it, when I was head of [counter-terrorism] financing, I got everything I wanted really fast. When I was head of fraud or head of organized crime, we had to wait ages. But because you got the T-word involved, the terrorist word, stuff gets done, gets done fast. (Former head of FIU, 31 May 2018)

However, while the T-word does provide a sense of urgency to get things moving, this security threat is problematic once practitioners discuss what it exactly means. According to Sorel (2003, p. 365):

A substantial number of international conventions have been agreed which deal with various aspects of terrorism, but in all these conventions terrorism is defined in a way that is specific to the subject-matter of the particular convention. No universal definition of terrorism can thus be discerned from them. (See also Schmid, 2004)

Terrorist financing, to use Aristotelian vocabulary, does not have an essence, a given state in which it truly exists. Countries have different listings and classifications of other countries and organizations, such as Hamas, the FARC, or PKK. These classifications are politically charged, constantly negotiated and in general flux. Recapitulating Mol (2014, p. 1), ‘each way of practicing stages  … a different version of “the” object. Hence, it is not “an object,” but more than one. An object multiple.’ In this case, terrorist financing as an object is not only decentered without an essence but also geographically scattered around the globe. Terrorist financing is multiple, existing in the coordination between 174 FIUs who are deeply entangled because they rely on intelligence from counterparts to follow suspicious transactions across borders.

The need for quantification practices

It is in this politically charged and interdependent context that quantification practices such as the production of numbers and the generating of statistics provide an answer; not because they grant an universal and uniform understanding of what terrorism or terrorist financing is or how it can be made to exist, but because these provide a shared domain through which actors can engage with each other that renders their political stakes opaque and procures expert exclusivity and authority.

Especially intergovernmental organizations are important here, such as the earlier discussed Egmont Group through which FIUs exchange their intelligence. The 174 members commit in their Charter – which they must sign when becoming a member of the Egmont Group – that they will ‘foster the widest possible co-operation and exchange of information with other Egmont Group FIUs on the basis of reciprocity or mutual agreement’ (Egmont Group, 2019, p. 8). This commitment is striking given the controversial reputation of some of the members of the Egmont Group, for instance, Venezuela, Egypt, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, who after a period of suspension due to the civil war became an active member of the Egmont Group again in 2019 (see Lagerwaard and De Goede, 2023). The question of terrorism or terrorist financing and which persons or groups can be considered suspects, is therefore not only politically charged but also practically of influence when FIUs exchange intelligence. Especially because the Egmont members adhere differently to issues such as data handling and retention, privacy, and human rights.

Once an FIU exchanges their intelligence on a national subject, for instance from a country in the EU to one of the countries described above, then the intelligence feeds into another construct of terrorist financing – it translates in a way that might not be aspired by the FIU that shared the intelligence. It is in this conflicting context where the members depend on each other’s intelligence and promise in the Charter to exchange this, that quantification practices provide a solution. They enable FIUs to background and work beyond their unsurmountable political issues, to render them opaque.

To illustrate the role of quantification practices, we turn to another intergovernmental organization, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which is responsible for the global governance of financial intelligence. The FATF sets the global recommendations for financial intelligence – often also referred to as global standards – that are leading for countries, private companies, and FIUs. These recommendations are enforced by authoritative mutual evaluations, which can result in the listing of countries on a grey or black list with consequences for their access to financial capital markets (Nance, 2018). The 33th recommendation of the FATF deals explicitly with the production of numbers and statistics, reading that:

33. Statistics

Countries should maintain comprehensive statistics on matters relevant to the effectiveness and efficiency of their AML/CFT [anti-money laundering/counter-terrorist financing] systems. This should include statistics on the STRs received and disseminated; on money laundering and terrorist financing investigations, assistance or other international requests for cooperation. (FATF, 2022, pp. 25–26)

This recommendation by the FATF is considered a vital component for governing global financial intelligence, as evidenced by the fact that, in 2015, the FATF published an 80-page guidance document for FIUs on the topic. This important document deals solely with AML/CFT-related data and statistics, and includes sections stipulating how FIUs should operationalize processes of ‘collecting, compiling and presenting AML/CFT data and statistics’ and how they should think about ‘analysing AML/CFT data and statistics’ (FATF, 2015, p. 3). Each year, FIUs publish annual reports that present and explain their numbers of suspicious reports, money laundering reports, and terrorist financing reports (these were compiled by Europol in Figure 1).

This shared domain is recognized by practitioners to render the exchange of global financial intelligence into a governable space. As Barry (1993, p. 316) has noted regarding harmonization in the EU, technological processes can be ‘directed at establishing  … space as a governable entity’ (see, on the role of numbers in global governance, also Rose, 1991; Hansen and Porter, 2012; Mügge, 2020; Rocha de Siqueira, 2017). In its 80-page report on data and statistics, the FATF – while recognizing the incomparability of FIU data (FATF, 2015, p. 10) – pushes for the enforcement of quantification practices and the 33rd recommendation because it is assumed to facilitate global governance and the coordination of FIU operations. For instance, the FATF writes that:

High-quality AML/CFT statistics can bring several important benefits beyond supporting effectiveness assessments. For example, statistics are a key input for national risk assessments, allowing national authorities to measure threats more accurately and allocate resources accordingly … . Consistent and comprehensive statistics also provide the FATF and other bodies with a more robust quantitative basis for work on global surveillance of the financial system. (FATF, 2015, p. 7)

These quantification practices provide the means and authority enabling actors to develop a shared domain through which to coordinate their operations and circulate knowledge, while the incommensurable issue of the nature of terrorism persists. Practitioners are well aware of the different ways in which terrorist financing is constructed, yet for the FATF these simultaneously provide a ‘robust quantitative basis for work on global surveillance of the financial system’ (FATF, 2015, p. 7). The quantification practices provide a specifically constructed transnational domain including aspirations, words, protocols, documents, techniques, technologies, and other often technocratic and technical practices that give body, shape, and legitimacy to transnational intelligence exchange. These practices do not have to be uniform to facilitate the circulation of things and knowledge, but they need to be able to bring actors into conversation, to facilitate debate, collaboration, negotiation, and discussion – they need to bring practitioners to the table and foster coordination.

Circulating knowledge

The following quote offers a mundane yet clear demonstration of when disparate quantification practices make the circulation of knowledge possible. The quote derives from an annual FIU report, from FIU-the Netherlands, but can be found in many varieties in other reports from other FIUs, the FATF, or the Egmont Group:

The fight against terrorist financing must extend across borders and, to this end, FIU-the Netherlands exchanges requests for information (RFIs) with fellow FIUs. In 2019, a total of 50 requests were received from FIUs relating to terrorist financing. In 2019, FIU-the Netherlands sent 34 requests for information to FIUs relating to terrorist financing. (FIU-the Netherlands, 2020, p. 46)

The quote shows that terrorist financing provides sufficient legitimacy to circulate knowledge between FIUs, in spite of the different constructs out there. With 50 requests received and 34 requests sent, a plethora of different constructs of terrorist financing are coordinated here. The incommensurable differences persist and instead the technocratic and technical grammar provides legitimacy by procuring expert exclusiveness and authority that is hard to understand or challenge by an outsider. For instance, it remains unclear what – potentially politically charged – intelligence has exactly been shared or received by FIU-the Netherlands. The content that assembled the suspicion of terrorist financing remains unclear, as well as which 50 FIUs requested the intelligence and what their understandings of privacy and human rights are. It also remains unclear what intelligence is exactly circulated – only names, or also bank account information or other open or closed police sources? Because these exchanges are publicly brought down to numbers and statistics, they background politically charged elements and depoliticize the circulation of intelligence.

This does not mean that there are no tensions in this domain, that politics is absent, or that all FIUs have similar stakes. That politics is still a part of this domain shows, for instance, from the debate between Europol and the European FIUs discussed in the opening of the paper. But the debate takes place through a proxy grammar. In response to Europol, the European FIUs argued that a lack of harmonization enables them to do justice to the national contexts in which they operate. They argued that:

It is in fact not possible to come to a meaningful comparison across countries of quantities of STRs [reports,] as the nature, scope and content of such [reports] are profoundly different. These differences derive from a lack of harmonization in EU provisions on the matter, allow a great degree of flexibility across jurisdictions and are at the basis of national peculiarities that have to be individually considered before being able to come to a sensible judgment on effectiveness. (EU FIUs Platform, 2017, p. 3)

The global governance of financial intelligence exchange does not run smoothly or without conflict, this quote shows, but the nature and substance of these debates are reduced proxies. FIUs translate their political differences, such as defining terrorism and understanding the effects of these definitions on privacy and human rights concerns, into technical and technocratic questions, such as how to quantify numbers, present statistics, and determine thresholds or red flags. Political issues are reformulated to what extent the methods and techniques are possible to be implemented in a national context or to whether quantification practices allow FIUs ‘a great degree of flexibility across jurisdictions’ (EU FIUs Platform, 2017, p. 3).

Conclusion

In STS literature, standardization and harmonization are commonly assumed to enable the circulation of knowledge and things across distance and difference, when practices are made uniform, aligned, calibrated, or universalized. In this reading, knowledge on terrorist financing – financial intelligence – would circulate when the practices through which this is constructed would be sufficiently similar. Desrosières (1998) has argued regarding the rise of (international) statistics, that the practices that generate them need to be routinized in order to produce objective reality persuasively. Porter (1996, p. 28) has similarly proposed that for numbers to travel across oceans, certain specifications ‘must be put into effect at millions of diverse locations, by calibrating millions of instruments and millions of people to the same standard.’ Contemporary STS scholars, including at the intersection of security, have studied infrastructures and demonstrated the extensive work needed to achieve the circulation of knowledge (Bellanova and De Goede, 2022). To make data ‘journey,’ Leonelli (2016, p. 5) has shown that it has to be ‘packaged and transported across research situations, so as to function as evidence for a variety of knowledge claims.’ Although these readings are indispensable for understanding the mediation of technologies and the hard work involved in making knowledge circulate, they are not exhaustive.

This paper has analyzed how very different and geographically scattered security actors make the exchange of financial intelligence possible, given their particular ways of constructing security threats such as terrorist financing. Terrorist financing is a ‘sociotechnical ensemble’ (Bijker, 1995, p. 12), that is constructed uniquely in each FIU jurisdiction, involving particular aspirations concerning objective or subjective approaches, the use of different definitions, software programs, procedures and protocols, and different ways of counting, measuring, and labeling. Following STS literature, knowledge on terrorist financing would therefore not be able to circulate very far because the practices are not calibrated or aligned sufficiently; knowledge on terrorist financing would be trapped within the jurisdiction in which it is constructed, unable to translate from one place to another. And yet, FIUs manage to exchange financial intelligence with counterparts from around the globe.

An alternative perspective on how the standardization and harmonization of quantification practices makes the circulation of knowledge possible is one whereby not the extent of (un)successful uniformization, but the processes that bring an object into existence are placed center stage. When considering objects as being multiple, following Mol (2002, 2014), the analysis moves away from questions about interpretations of a singular, fixed and static object, that can be brought into existence in different places. Instead, the focus is redirected to how (quantification) practices enable actors to coordinate their operations. Mol (2002, p. 264) states that ‘as soon as attention shifts to the co-existence of different realities (or logics, or modes of ordering) the question arises as to how these hang together.’ Studying terrorist financing as an object that is multiple enables the analysis to decenter the object as a fixed and singular entity, and to observe instead how different versions of terrorist financing exist, how they relate, and how they enable coordination.

In a global context where terrorist financing is both a resounding security threat as well as politically charged, quantification practices offer a solution by providing a shared domain that brings security actors into conversation. It makes possible collaboration, negotiation, conflict; or, in the words of Tsing (2005, p. 5), it facilitates ‘friction’ that ‘as a metaphorical image,  … reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power.’ This domain is transnational, technocratic, depoliticized and has its own proxy grammar procuring authority and expert exclusivity that is hard to challenge by outsiders. Studying the productive friction involved in making knowledge circulate, differs from studying the extent of uniformization of practices because the process is an ongoing, messy, dynamic, and unpredictable affair. There is no (un)successful extent to which standardization makes the circulation of knowledge (im)possible, but rather a process where the continuous coordination and productive friction enable FIUs to make financial intelligence exchange possible.

The paper focused on the politically contested security issue of terrorist financing, yet similar technocratic and technical quantification practices are deployed in other domains, also without achieving uniformity. For example, the technocratic aspects of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), that is highly political in nature (van Heijster, 2021), or the technocratic identification of migrants in the EU through the Country of Origin Information (COI) (van der Kist and Rosset, 2020), or the highly complex practices of surveilling airline travel through Passenger Name Records (PNR) (Bellanova and Duez, 2012; Glouftsios and Leese 2023, p. 126). These topics are politically charged domains where navigating through complex, technocratic, and highly technical practices is essential to observe how political stakes are not only inscribed in stabilized standards or infrastructures but also backgrounded in processes that are critical to uncover.

Acknowledgements

This paper has been shaped by generous feedback of reviewers and colleagues. It is greatly indebted to the anonymous reviewers and the editorial board of Science as Culture: your continuous constructive feedback has been of tremendous help! Special thanks as well to Rocco Bellanova, Esmé Bosma, and Marieke de Goede, who have all had the patience to read and comment on several drafts over the years. The research has been funded by the European Research Council (ERC) project FOLLOW: Following the Money from Transaction to Trial (grant agreement no. 682317).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme [grant number ERC-2015-CoG 682317].

Notes on contributors

Pieter Lagerwaard

Pieter Lagerwaard is lecturer at the interdisciplinary bachelor Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics (PPLE) of the University of Amsterdam (UvA). His work has been published in the Journal of Cultural Economy, Economy and Society, and Critical Studies on Security.