The promise of financial inclusion: finance as future in Palestine

Abstract

This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue ‘Palestinian Futures Anticipation, Imagination, Embodiments’, edited by Mikko Joronen, Helga Tawil-Souri, Merav Amir & Mark Griffiths. ABSTRACT Existing conceptualisations of financial inclusion must account for the promise of a better future that is an integral part of such processes. This argument is drawn from an analysis of elite-led financial inclusion processes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Financial inclusion names processes through which poorer people become enfolded in financial technologies, practices and markets. Such processes circulate globally, taking on different forms in different contexts. In the Palestinian context, financial inclusion must be understood in relation to ongoing Israeli settler-colonialism. In this context, elite-led financial inclusion processes only make sense if understood as acts through which institutions promise particular futures. The promises of financial inclusion supersede a number of other promises, particularly those tied to the Oslo Accords. Part of the power of the promissory stems from the fact that the institutions making them cannot be held accountable in the present for what is promised in the future. This paper stresses the importance of promissory not in relation to its future realisation, but rather as an illocutionary act that makes certain things possible in the present. In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, this is the endurance of financial institutions outside a statehood framing.