Digital Finance and Statehood in the Periphery: Lessons from Post-Socialist

The rise of digital finance poses profound challenges and opportunities for statehood, governance, and development, particularly in peripheral economies. This workshop examines how digital financial infrastructures intersect with monetary dependence, financialized economy, and neoliberal state.
Drawing on empirical evidence from a recent study “Crypto currencies and development mode in flux: unfolding bitcoin mining in Georgia,” this workshop offers insights into the state - crypto cooperation, as well as reconfiguration of the state power. The Georgian case demonstrates how crypto mining operates as a form of digital extractivism, which is facilitated by the state through deregulation, preferential tax policies, and access to cheap energy. Rather than producing broad developmental gains, this model reinforces existing inequalities, exacerbates environmental issues and generates limited positive spillovers for local communities or national development.
The workshop invites a critical examination of:

• How digital finance reshapes the political economy of peripheral states.
• Whether crypto currencies enhance or undermine state capacity and policy autonomy
• The social, environmental, and distributional consequences of the crypto-related activities

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Host or Publisher Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies