This article examines the introduction of Jamaica’s central bank digital currency (CBDC), Jamaica Digital Exchange (JAM-DEX), to show how monetary innovation is embedded in questions of sovereignty, class, race, and religion. Drawing on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kingston (2022–2024), it adopts a pragmatist anthropology of money and mobilizes three cultural lenses – institutional, infrastructural, and affective – to analyze how CBDCs are lived, interpreted, and contested in everyday life. The institutional lens reveals a struggle over monetary sovereignty that is continually undermined by the CBDC’s dependence on private, largely foreign-owned financial intermediaries for its circulation. The infrastructural lens shows how financial innovation can reproduce the racialized and classed hierarchies rooted in Jamaica’s colonial banking history. The affective lens shows how moral imaginaries, ranging from eschatological fears of the ‘Mark of the Beast’ to crypto-libertarian critiques of surveillance, shape public engagement with the CBDC. The article employs the metaphor of haunting to show how unresolved histories of racial capitalism re-emerge through JAM-DEX, producing a disjointed temporality in which digital futures arrive prematurely. The persistence of these financial ghosts reinforces the claim that CBDCs should be studied within their social, historical, and affective contexts.

Although donating to private charitable organizations has been studied extensively, donating to local governments remains little examined. We advance this literature by applying Bekkers and Wiepking’s prominent theoretical framework of charitable giving drivers. Using nationally representative data from about 9,000 Vietnamese citizens, we test the relevance of some of these drivers in explaining the willingness to donate to local governments for road improvements. Our results largely corroborate previous findings about the roles of awareness of need (perceived issue importance), costs (the requested donation amount), and efficacy (trust in government). We also find support for the roles of altruism (the desire to help fellow citizens) and solicitation (the government’s ask)––two drivers whose application to local government donations was unexplored. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Labor history has for a long time struggled with so-called “informal” labor, which is situated outside of regularised labor relations, but is widespread in many regions of the globe. The essay reviews five recent books from different fields on transport and labor in Africa, which explore the question of informality, everyday labor, labor organisation, and the infrastructure and technology of mobility. It develops an approach to informal labor that emphasizes historicity and a dialectical model between the stability of the transport infrastructure and the precarity of the workers that uphold it.

Tech innovations have the potential to disrupt traditional banking by unbundling banking, money, and payments; however, their impact on the cross-border payments system (CBPS) – which still relies on correspondent banking (CoBanking) networks – remains uncertain. This uncertainty is compounded by the literature’s tendency to distinguish between cash clearing and credit and to focus on the latter. Challenging this distinction, the article offers a historical perspective on the role of credit in CoBanking and international payments. It reveals the deep-rooted importance of credit in the CBPS and highlights correspondent banks’ role in providing it. But deep-rooted does not mean static. Indeed, changes in bank-intermediated trade finance practices during and after WWI reshaped the London-based CoBanking network. Furthermore, cash clearing and credit operations remained remarkably congruent until at least the 1980s, as reflected in banks’ internal organisation, reporting, and contemporaries’ descriptions of the payment system. The article argues that adopting a definition of payment systems that integrates both cash clearing and credit is essential to understanding the history of CoBanking and how it supports the CBPS. It suggests that relying on tech firms to provide the elastic payments infrastructure the economy requires could equate to jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Vietnam’s foreign policy – centred on multilateralisation, diversification, and international integration – has transformed the country’s economic fortunes and elevated its international standing. Throughout the Doi Moi era, Vietnam has cultivated a strong network of bilateral and multilateral frameworks to further its economic aspirations and protect its national sovereignty. It has leveraged astute diplomacy to navigate challenges and seize opportunities. Since the Thirteenth National Party Congress, which set a goal for Vietnam to become a developed nation by 2045, these challenges have become increasingly pronounced. Protectionism, great-power politics, an undermining of the rules-based order, ever-present tensions in the South China Sea, as well as pandemic- and war-related disruptions to supply chains, have complicated Vietnam’s quest for national security and its effort to ensure peace and stability in pursuit of its economic targets. Amidst such a fraught environment, strategic autonomy has become a buzzword among smaller states that seek to maintain the benefits of interdependence while actively alleviating the risks associated with heightened geopolitical tensions and dependent relationships. Scholars of Vietnamese foreign policy likewise argue that Vietnam’s foreign policy seeks to bolster its strategic autonomy. However, little effort has been made to clarify what exactly this entails. The present study defines the concept in the Vietnamese context by asking, “Where and how does Vietnam seek to strengthen its strategic autonomy?” It argues that Vietnam’s pursuit rests on three core components, which it examines through Vietnam’s responses to US–China rivalry, the Russia–Ukraine war, and the country’s evolving approach to infrastructure development, energy security, and foreign direct investment.

Space systems are becoming an ever more important part of international security capabilities and practices. However, problematic interpretations of the Space Age are taking root in practitioner and academic circles along the contours of three sequential Space Ages. This article develops an original critique of these periodisations by applying a large technical systems approach and empirical research. It emphasises the role of space system builders and the prevalence of paradoxes in analysing space infrastructure as a method for critiquing three claims over the sweeping waves of democratisation, commercialisation, and militarisation in outer space that the periodisations make. This article proposes an alternative periodisation of a singular Global Space Age from 1957 that advances the counter-arguments that: first, power remains concentrated to a handful of space system builders rather than democratised to the many; second, that the space economy still relies on the state rather than being transferred to the private sector; and third, that the claims of sanctuary in space today ignore the spectre of space warfare that has long stalked space infrastructure. The infrastructural Global Space Age framing is offered as a useful materialist foundation for building bridges between international security, infrastructural technologies, and space security scholarship.

What explains the contested conditions for migrant worker citizenship under socialism? Migration scholarship often elides socialist contexts, tracing migrant deservingness to the neoliberal rise of labor-based conditionality for legal status across Western states in the late twentieth century. However, a broader historiography suggests that socialist states, despite their institutional differences, conditioned migrant inclusion on labor performance throughout the twentieth century. To explain how this form of civic conditionality operated under socialism, this paper draws on the case of migrant “limit” worker management in Moscow from the early 1960s to 1987. Using archival materials, I show that state-owned enterprises operated as migration intermediaries, establishing and enforcing a labor-based conditionality for local citizenship even as the state pursued additional civic aims. I find that civic campaigns initiated in the early 1960s provided an ideological framework and material base for enterprises to govern migrant workers at their dormitories. Managers and officials at the dormitory redirected resources intended for social activism and cultural tutelage toward ensuring baseline productivity and compliance. Enterprise managers and union officials additionally substituted the material conditions at the dormitory for the assessments of individual migrants’ moral and productive status. This paper extends the literature on migrant deservingness to a socialist context, showing how conditionality for civic inclusion develops beyond the neoliberal shifts in contemporary citizenship.

We argue for consideration of deliberative democratic pathways to governing infrastructure systems to enable a planned reduction in economic activity. Given the dominant perspective is “infrastructure facilitates growth”, we first consider contemporary criticisms of growth. We critique the large-scale, complex infrastructures implied, and the forms of democratic governance envisaged. Such infrastructures drive forms of economic activity that advocates of degrowth demonstrate are incompatible with attempts to reduce resources consumed by contemporary economies and their emissions. We argue any deliberation on infrastructures must acknowledge they are not simply physical objects but rather bundles of relationships. With dominant economic relationships challenged by the view that infrastructures ought to be managed as commons we argue that the relational perspective sets the stage for deliberation over physical, social, and environmental infrastructure that escapes what are incorrectly assumed to be insurmountable path dependencies.

One of the most significant engineering accomplishments of Maya civilization is Sacbe 1, a raised road connecting the ancient urban centers of Yaxuna and Coba. Using new lidar data in concert with excavation, epigraphic inscriptions, and landscape reconnaissance, we show that settlement and an urban experience emanated westward from Coba along the sacbe. The leaders of Coba—in particular, an ambitious seventh-century queen—used the sacbe to expand the political and cultural influence of their dynasty into the center of the peninsula while securing territory and resources. Gaps in the sacbe, precise delineation of its many curves, and examination of features near these curves call to mind several possible intentions governing its construction and use. Sites located along the causeway did not present significant barriers to the expansion of Coba. Sacbe 1 represents a uniquely urban space that expanded urban social networks into a rural hinterland while advancing state interests for territory and influence.