Debt trails: following relations of debt across borrowers, organizations, and states

We introduce the concept of 'debt trails', a methodological and conceptual term to study debt relations across different sites and over time. Recent theories in the interdisciplinary Social Studies of Finance, political economy and economic and human geography have theorised debt in relational terms, although with a distinct and often disconnected theoretical and empirical focus. We propose debt trails to transcend and bridge these areas. Methodologically, debt trails trace the concrete ways in which debt relations are created. Conceptually, debt trails suggest, first, that instead of connecting existing entities, sites and actors themselves are co-constituted through debt relations. Second, debt trails reveal debt as a temporal construct, not as a Maussian obligation, but as a market and policy object designed, marketed, managed and lived with over time. Third, debt trails follow the spatial passage of debt, geographically but also across multiple analytical sites, often market interfaces, through which debt and the entities it relates become concrete. Finally, we discuss the importance of reflexivity and the power aspects of these trails. We then showcase examples where the creation and iterations of debt concretized distinct entities, which cut across conventional categories of borrowers, organizations and states.