ABSTRACT
In 2020, there were 70.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, 27.5 million of whom were displaced between 2009 and 2018 by armed conflicts. Poverty is rampant among them. Colombia's 50-plus-year conflict has accumulated at least 7.8 million Internally Displaced People (IDPs), and according to the most recent statistics, 80 percent live in poverty. In this chapter, I explore the space that conflict opens for the financialization of forcibly displaced people. The chronic poverty that IDPs and refugees experience is often explained by the complex processes of relocation and assimilation into new communities, especially when arriving in urban centres with few economic resources and social ties. This chapter refocuses to examine how IDPs become subjects of financialization of the poor, a process wherein financial capitalists target those desperate for cash and extend credit to them to profit from interest produced in endless cycles of debt. I explore this phenomenon ethnographically, drawing upon fieldwork conducted in Colombia. This study shows how, amid armed conflict and forced displacement, financial capitalism extracts from poor populations to their continued impoverishment. It also demonstrates how displacement and dispossession converge with urban marginality, poorly implemented aid programmes, and the circulation of illicit money as militarized credit for the poor. The chapter contributes to a critical understanding of the complexity of links between forced displacement and poverty and to understanding economies of financialization of the poor that are expanding across borders in Latin America.
