PhD candidate Rundong Ning publishes article on regulation of foreign exchanges in Central Africa

PhD candidate Rundong Ning has published “Bureaucratic valves: Paperwork as a contested tool in the international transfer of the franc CFA in Congo-Brazzaville” in the journal Africa. His work proposes the concept of “bureaucratic valves” to highlight how paperwork is used to control foreign exchange flows in Central Africa. The article theoretically reflects on the role of paperwork in bureaucracy and argues that, in addition to serving just as laissez-passer, it can also serve as valves to fine-tune the speed of bureaucratic procedure. This work is also an attempt to use ethnography to study central banking, a method less often used on this topic, especially in non-Western economies. This research project was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Yale University. With the help of Yale Libraries, it is published open access here.