Surveillance, Constriction, Exclusion: Digital Authoritarianism Through Financial Infrastructure

As financial systems digitize globally, the infrastructure through which citizens transact is becoming subject to new capacities for surveillance, constriction, and exclusion that remain unexamined as a form of digital authoritarian control. Digital authoritarianism (DA) has focused on information and communication technologies, examining online censorship, digital surveillance, disinformation, and repressive laws, while overlooking the financial infrastructure through which states can monitor, constrain, and deny citizens' economic participation. This paper introduces Digital Financial Authoritarianism (DFA): a domain of DA operating through financial infrastructure. DFA describes conditions under which financial privacy is eroded, exclusion from financial participation is enabled, and authoritarian control over transactions becomes feasible, whether by design or as an unintended consequence of individually reasonable policies. The paper develops a three-mechanism framework that identifies surveillance, constriction, and exclusion as the capacities through which DFA operates. It examines their most prominent current manifestations: Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), regulatory restrictions on privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, and political debanking. Drawing on Pearson's (2024) promotion-based definition and Roberts and Oosterom's (2025) five-element analytical framework, the paper demonstrates that the analytical tools developed for DA apply to the financial domain without modification. Illustrations drawn from democratic and authoritarian contexts, including the EU, Switzerland, China, El Salvador, Canada, and the United Kingdom, show that DFA results from policy and institutional choice rather than regime type. Beyond this variation, the financial domain is a site where the boundary between digital and physical authoritarianism is particularly thin: comprehensive transaction surveillance constrains what citizens can privately fund or purchase; the elimination of anonymous alternatives channels all economic activity into monitored systems; and account freezing immediately prevents individuals from meeting basic material needs. The paper concludes by identifying research directions at this intersection, including whether DFA substitutes for or supplements physical repression, whether it proves more resistant to countermeasures than communicative forms of DA, and whether financial and communicative surveillance produce compound deterrent effects that exceed those of either mechanism alone