The Spectacular Mundane Forensics, Financial Compliance and the Promise of Algorithmic Rule
Résumé
n 2014, as Colombia’s criminal justice system prepared for a potential peace agreement between the government and the country’s oldest guerrilla group – the FARC, an expert forensic report commissioned by the country’s attorney general became the focus of intense public scrutiny. The report, written by a local think tank, claimed to have established patterns of FARC crimes committed in the context of the country’s protracted counterinsurgent war based on data analytics and algorithmic pattern recognition. While the public scandal ended by discrediting the report’s findings, it revealed how a legal imaginary regarding the potential of algorithmic knowledge to radically transform crime detection had taken hold in the context of postwar accountability debates. At the same time, yet another less spectacular algorithmic rationality was prompting a sweeping transformation of the country’s regulatory apparatus: the government’s efforts to secure OECD accession in the midst of peacemaking had prompted an expansive recalibration of its regulatory apparatus driven by the imperatives of financial compliance.
Drawing from this dual conjuncture of spectacular and mundane algorithmic promises, this chapter shows how two interrelated processes of algorithmic rule were unfolding in the shadow of Colombia’s political transition. First, the alignment of forensics with data-driven financial compliance; and second, the enshrinement of financial risk-management as a regulatory principle. Tacking between forensic uses of data in the context of national political transition and global governance practices of financial compliance, the chapter explores how algorithmic rationalities deployed through different legal and regulatory scales are transforming the nature of normative operations.