Money-laundering in Southeast Asia: liberalism and governmentality at work

This article discusses the diffusion of a regulatory system against money-laundering in Southeast Asia. To this end, the article reconstructs how the Financial Action Task Force has securitised the issue of money-laundering into a global problem requiring a global solution and how this has spread to developing nations. The article seeks to demonstrate how these international norms and practices spread and are transformed into national law within Southeast Asia. The article further shows that these transformations reflect an increasing level of multilateral cooperation within the region and that this phenomena can be better understood as the articulation of a global expression of governmentality where a set of strategies and policing techniques emerges to effect control.