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

Standardization and harmonization are widely studied byscholars of Science and Technology Studies (STS) tounderstand how knowledge and things circulate acrossgeographies, yet it often remains unclear what these termsexactly refer to. In dictionaries, they are generally defined asactions or processes aimed at achieving uniformity,similarity, or alignment. In STS literature, it is often assumedthat when a practice is (un)successfully standardized orharmonized, the circulation of knowledge and things acrossdistance and difference is made (im)possible. However, it isquestionable whether the geographical circulation of thingsand knowledge is necessarily enabled by the uniformity ofpractices. When analyzing the global exchange of financialintelligence, a different picture emerges, whereby thecoordination of security operations and the exchange offinancial intelligence are actually enabled by disparatequantification practices. Financial Intelligence Units (FIUs) –governmental organizations that globally exchange financialintelligence for combatting money laundering and terroristfinancing – are geographically scattered and very different innature, each constructing security threats such as terrorismor terrorist financing uniquely. Yet through their complexquantification practices, they make coordination possiblewhile persisting in maintaining differences, without relyingon an increasingly uniform and universal sameness ofpractices. For FIUs, quantification practices, even thoughdifferently practiced, generate a shared domain with its owntransnational, depoliticized, and highly technical proxygrammar that makes it possible to work beyond andbackground otherwise incommensurable issues.