Counter-Terrorism Financing Assemblages After 9/11

Counter-Terrorism Finance has produced a complex landscape of regulation, fostering new public/private cooperation and significantly shaking up banking compliance practices. The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the regulatory assemblage and main tensions relating to Counter-Terrorism Financing (CTF) in the post-9/11 era. The chapter starts with a discussion of the security logics of CTF after 2001. It argues that CTF efforts in the most recent 15 years distinguish themselves through a number of elements that set them apart from the longer tradition of anti-money laundering. Specifically, it argues that the pursuit of terrorism financing as a crime is best understood as closely related to the politics of preemption. Second, the chapter gives an overview of the complex regulatory landscape of CTF in the transatlantic context. CTF regulation is best understood as a regulatory assemblage where (policy) goals are not always clearly aligned, and where a number of important tensions and contradictions are at play. The third section of the chapter develops a more specific focus on banking practice, as a key but often overlooked site where CTF is given shape and meaning. Recent developments have led to the problem of derisking, where entire client groups are excluded from the banking sector.