Esmé Bosma is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam and part of project FOLLOW, funded by the European Research Council.

For her PhD research she studies how banks counter terrorist financing in practice, focusing on the mediating role of technologies. She analyses Know Your Customer practices, transaction monitoring technologies and public private financial information-sharing partnerships. By doing ethnographic fieldwork in banks and in the financial crime sector she describes how private actors absorb an increasing amount of security responsibilities and the ethical, technical and practical dilemmas that arise in this process. 

Her research lies at the intersection of International Relations and Science and Technology Studies (STS). She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Political Science in which she specialised in security practices in the EU. From September till December 2019 she was a visiting researcher at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is co-editor of Secrecy and Methods in Security Research. A Guide to Qualitative Fieldwork (Routledge, 2020).

Project FOLLOW
This PhD is part of the project 'FOLLOW: Following the Money from Transaction to Trial,' led by Prof. dr. Marieke de Goede (UvA) and funded by the European Research Council. FOLLOW observes and analyses countering terrorism financing efforts in practice. The project follows the path of the suspicious financial transaction across private and public spheres through the analysis of how knowledge is formed and mobilised by banks, FIUs and courts. FOLLOW is interested in the everyday life of security practices and the complex dilemmas faced by the actors at stake, and relies on participant observation coupled with in-depth semi-structured interviews. See for more information: http://www.projectfollow.org/.