Digital Currencies, Digital Finance and the Constitution of a New Financial Order

About the conference

The conference deals with emergent economic, political and legal phenomena in the field of finance. Therefore, it aims to raise questions and explore innovative connections rather than to give definite answers. It pursues four distinct goals.

First, it intends to generate awareness and facilitate a better understanding of the actors, phenomena and dynamics of the new financial order.

Second, it explores the economic, political and legal implications that follow from a data-driven financial world. The concept of the performativity of markets offers a great vantage point that can bring together a range of discussions spanning from the legal and political implications of technological change in financial intermediation to even larger questions of monetary governance.

Third, these debates will ideally constitute the basis of an edited volume that brings the proceedings of the conference to the attention of a greater public. Fourth, the conference aims to bring together internationally-renowned experts from different fields and disciplines so as to facilitate a discourse that breaks up traditional patterns of intellectual exchange. This is primarily reflected in the composition of the panels.

Click here to view the conference programme:

Download a summary of the conference proceedings: 

Why in Athens?

The conference will be organised in Athens, Greece. Given the ongoing financial and economic crisis, Greece has attracted a great interest from global academia, various international institutions, and the international press over the last years.

Problems of monetary policy are especially visible in Greece. Discussions of a possible “Grexit” moved questions of monetary policy into the centre of European politics. As the constitutional mandate and responsibilities of the European Central Bank (ECB) were fiercely debated, various contingency plans were floated in case Greece had to leave the Eurozone.

The country became a laboratory of the “money doctors” of the twenty-first century, offering cures that covered the entire political and economic spectrum. Today, Greece remains in the Eurozone but continues to struggle under demands for fiscal austerity and debt repayment.

A whole range of international and regional institutions – and their financial experts – meanwhile continue to work in the country, including the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the European Stability Mechanism. Greece stands, as it were, at the crossroads of political and legal questions of shared monetary sovereignty.

In regulatory terms, Greece can be seen as a – deserved or undeserved – experimental ground in which different ideas and policy approaches are phrased and indeed implemented.

Policymakers at the national, international and European levels will thus be invited to the conference in the hope that the discussion and the output of the conference will have an influence on national and international decision-making on the ground.

The partial collapse of the Greek economy and banking system makes new, data-driven solutions to current economic problems even more attractive though, at the same time, hardly less contentious in political and legal terms.

As a result, Greece has recently attracted the interest of researchers and scholars in economics, political science, international relations and the law as a scientific hub for the study of new developments in the field of financial regulation (Arghyrou 2015).

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