In an era of escalating global debt, questions around how to address indebtedness have become increasingly more salient and urgent. Traditional debates over debt relief have largely been framed in economic terms. But as the global community confronts overlapping crises — from ruptures in international security to stark health disparities and a climate emergency that recognizes no borders — calls are growing for wealthier nations to acknowledge not only economic interests but also moral responsibility toward the world’s poor. Some advocates propose that debt forgiveness, especially when framed as a form of non-reciprocal giving, offers one path toward fulfilling this obligation. Yet as sovereign and personal wealth increasingly blur in many parts of the world, new questions arise: Who owns sovereign debt? Who has the power to forgive it? And who should be the beneficiary of that forgiveness?

This Global Dialogue brings together scholars from different disciplines to examine these and related issues: What is financial capitalism’s relationship to speculation and futurity, to uncertainty and risk? What is the discursive function of “emergency” in the making and resolution of financial futures? In what ways has colonialism created and exacerbated conditions of global economic inequality and how do historical patterns of indebtedness inform today’s fiscal entanglements? And is debt forgiveness a viable solution — ethically, economically, or politically — in a world shaped by inequality and interdependence? 

Please register here.

SPEAKERS
Hannah Appel, Associate Professor of Anthropology; Associate Director, UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality + Democracy
Jayati Ghosh, Professor of Economics, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Fabio Vighi, Professor of Critical Theory and Italian, Cardiff University

MODERATOR
Jisha Menon, Robert G. Freeman Professor of International Studies and Sakurako and William Fisher Family Director of the Stanford Global Studies Division, Stanford University 

BIOGRAPHIES

Hannah Appel is an economic anthropologist interested in transnational capitalism and finance; finance, debt and debtors’ unions; the African continent’s place in global capitalism; the economic imagination; anti-capitalist and abolitionist social movements. Her research and teaching interests are guided by the economic imagination. What does it mean to understand racial capitalism ethnographically, and to work actively to undo it?

Her first book, The Licit Life of Capitalism, is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. She is at work on a second ethnographic project—Pan African Capital: Finance, Banking, and Economic Self-Fashioning—continuing her inquiry into the licit life of capitalism, and the displacement of how and from where we think about global capitalism and the imperial power of the U.S. dollar. Pan African Capital is a multi-sited project based on ethnographic work with transnational, African-owned banks and financial institutions on the continent.

Hannah is also a co-founder and organizer with the Debt Collective. The Debt Collective works to build debtors unions through an emancipatory activation of household debt under finance capitalism: What if mass indebtedness is not simply a liability, but also a potential collective asset or leverage point in the fight to enact the new and radical economic forms we need? Hannah brings her organizing and scholarly work together under the auspices of the Future of Finance at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. You can read more about this in her co-authored work Can’t Pay Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition.

Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for 35 years, and is currently professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. She has authored and/or edited 21 books and 230 scholarly articles. She also writes regularly for popular media, including newspapers, journals and blogs.

Prizes received include the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Research Prize for 2011; the 2023 Galbraith award of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, "in recognition of breakthrough discoveries in economics and outstanding contributions to humanity through leadership, research and service" and the International Economics Association Fellow Award for 2023 for “outstanding work and  excellence in economic research, research-driven popular writing, and economic policymaking.” She has advised governments in India and other countries and consulted for various international organizations. From 2002 to 2021, she was the Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates (www.networkideas.org). She has been a member of several international boards and commissions, including the UN High-Level Advisory Board on Economic and Social Affairs, the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, the UN Secretary General’s High-Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism, the Club of Rome, the Jubilee Debt Commission created by Pope Francis, and the Extraordinary Committee of Experts on Inequality constituted by President Cyril Ramaphosa for the South African G20 Presidency.  

Fabio Vighi is professor of critical theory and Italian at Cardiff University, UK. His recent work includes the following books: Emergency Capitalism (Sublation Press, 2024); Unworkable. Delusions of an Imploding Civilisation (SUNY Press, 2022); and Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism (Bloomsbury 2015, with Heiko Feldner).