Liam Keenan, Assistant Professor in Economic Geography at the University of Nottingham, is a co-author of the Atlas of Finance. In this discussion, Liam explores one of the Atlas' visualisations: 'Weaponizing Finance'. He explains the motivation behind its creation, the data used, and provides insights into how you can create a similar visualisation.
What story does this visualisation tell?
The visualisation tells the story of the history and geography of financial sanctions around the world. We use a stream graph to try and visualise this geographical distribution and to consider the evolution of financial sanctions from 1950 all the way up to 2019. The stream graph shows the active financial sanctions by sanctioned countries at the regional or continental level. The bigger the region, the more sanctions are active in countries within that region, so essentially these are the more sanctioned places.
The visualisation specifically looks at financial sanctions, for example, when a sovereign nation limits another country's use of financial firms or freezes its assets. There are lots of different types of financial sanctions and many of these are included in this visualisation.
The visualisation shows a really significant rise in financial sanctions over time. In the 1950s, financial sanctions are very minimal; by the 1970s, you see a spike in Latin America; and from the 1990s, there is an explosion in the use of financial sanctions. The visualisation really shows a changing geopolitical climate.
The visualisation also shows the geographical unevenness of sanctions. It's typically the USA and countries in Western Europe that have financial power to sanction other countries. These countries host the biggest financial firms and banks in the world. It's the smaller, less developed nations that obviously don't have that power. And this unevenness is really important.
Why was it created?
The aim of the Atlas of Finance more generally was to make financial geography more accessible, taking really complex issues relating to financial assets, financial markets, and financial actors and visualising them. We don't try and provide all the answers. We just want to show people that these complex discussions aren't just for bankers and economists. Everyone can understand, and it's just a matter of communication.
When we were writing and making the Atlas, it was around the time that Russia was invading Ukraine. There were immediate sanctions and it was all in the news, and that's really kept pace. Even in the last few weeks, we've been seeing more and more talk of new sanctions. It really inspired us to look at the evolution of sanctions, and we were really surprised at what we found.
Of course we can't really capture in the visualisation how sanctions affect people. They are a form of slow violence affecting populations, often innocent populations, reducing living standards and harming economies. That's really important to keep in mind as you look at the graphic.
The data and methods
Tell us about the data. What methods did you use to collect and analyse the data?
The data comes from the Global Sanctions Database. We used the 2021 version, but now there's a newer version. Essentially, a joint team of academics working across different economics departments have collated a huge database that captures lots of different sanctions from 1950 onwards.
The sanctions are grouped by category, with information on the sanctioning country and the sanctioned country. It includes a range of sanction types, such as financial sanctions, military sanctions and travel sanctions.
We looked through the database and saw financial sanctions and thought this very reliable, well-curated academic work. It was a goldmine for then visualising something that included the two countries for each sanction. It's fully available online, you just have to fill in an online form to access it.
To select the key dates on the timeline, we did our own research on the biggest geopolitical events to understand the spikes and rises in different periods. The database helped to explain specifics in the countries, but we wanted to draw out the bigger moments going on. These included conflicts and worker strikes.
Also, with the changing geographies of nation states, a lot of the countries we examined were not fully formed at points in the time frame.
Why did you choose to present the data in this way over other approaches?
We had a couple of ideas at the start. One was just to create a map, so to pick a year or a period and try to map it. The other was to do some sort of Arc diagram which focused more on the connections, because sanctions always involve both sanctioning and sanctioned countries.
But we found that these approaches came at the expense of accessibility and making the visualisation really clear and understandable. Most importantly, they didn't help us tell the story of how sanctions have changed over time.
We thought about online interactive maps where you can change the scale and the date, which would have worked perfectly if we were doing a digital Atlas, but the fact that this visualisation was printed on page took so many of those options away.
In the end, we landed on the stream graph. We thought this was perfect in terms of showing changes over time. We tried to really imbue the pages with meaning, making sure every single colour and everything about that page helped to illustrate financial sanctions, weaponizing sanctions and geopolitics.
The canon on the left side of the page and then a stream graph, almost like a plume of smoke, is intended to show how countries are using finance as a form of violence against each other.
The impacts
What impact has the visualisation had in research, policy and other contexts?
The Atlas has only been out since last September, so we're yet to see the impacts. As a team of researchers, we're currently working on an academic paper. This work involves co-author Dariusz Wójcik and a couple of others, and looks at the unevenness of sanctions and the uneven power in which nation states have the ability to sanction others.
Advice for using this visualisation technique
How else might this approach or data be used?
In terms of the data, the Global Sanctions Database, available online, could be hugely valuable to anyone interested in sanctions. It contains not just financial sanctions, but also travel and military arms sanctions as well. The data lend themselves perfectly to any sort of geographical analysis.
In terms of the stream graph, because it's a simple visual, compared to using GIS and mapping, it has a lot of merit. Sometimes, simple visualisations actually make the message clearer itself. Using visualisations like stream graphs, sankey plots, choropleth maps and chord diagrams can be a really easy and powerful way to visualise data.
What's your one top tip for geographers looking to visualise data in this way?
I think it would be to have confidence in not always creating a map - resisting the temptation to think that a map is always the perfect way to visualise geographical data. Obviously, cartography is central to geographical work, but I think in the Atlas we've tried to show that you can communicate spatial data and tell a geographical story in a slightly different way.
Explore the visualisation
To explore the stream graph in more detail, take a look at the Atlas of Finance webpage.