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This article explores why people in Namibia go into debt to eat. Until recently, food sharing practices were maintained by social relationships in which everyone owed everyone else. This made sense, as needs would rotate evenly. However, in recent decades, and largely through state employment and social grants, the political economy has changed. Now, needs are distributed unequally. This article explores how the movement of resources through time and space is altered via the mechanism of credit/debt. The haves have become merchants and refer the have-nots to credit books in their recently opened village stores. This has two effects: for one, today the entire community owes only a very small number of people. Food transfers no longer crosscut groups but manifest them. Secondly, credits do not fully replace existing social relationships and enable sharing in other situations, mostly around meals, which also suggests continuity in shifting forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through ethnography of de-agrarianization and extraction in Myanmar, the article shows how threshold subjects – poor laborers uncertain whether they are relatively or absolutely unnecessary to the social system of profits and distribution – become vulnerable to the necroeconomy, a system of value extraction constituted by combining extraction processes that spatially, mechanically, and politically require death-making; willing laborers driven by debt, dispossession, and existential desperation; and biopolitical abandonment (by states or corporations) of subjects to the carnage of extraction. The article considers what politics may be inhabited by the threshold subject, given s/he is both simultaneously surplus and essential to social reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent decades have seen an exponential growth in the field of international schools, and a concurrent rise in the number of young Anglo-Saxon teachers overseas. Such mobile teaching careers have largely been presented in terms of emphasising exploration, travel and lifestyle-related migration. While acknowledging such factors, we also draw attention to financial constraints, and in particular, to the challenge of personal debts, which weighs heavily over many Anglo-Saxon teachers. We therefore discuss international teachers' mobile trajectory in terms of a balancing act of negotiation between lifestyle and financial factors and point to a strategic trade-off between the two. Moreover, by emphasising the neglected aspect of indebtedness, we argue that, while a key point of appeal for such teachers' participation in the international school sector lies in the ostensible participation in the carefree, privileged environment of lifestyle migration that would have been out of reach for them otherwise, in reality, such horizons of opulence are limited, as teachers are locked into a precarious system that offers little protection and is highly unpredictable. In this context, the accumulation of professional experience provides only a limited pathway for assuming control over one's future destiny/destination – be it professional, geographic, or financial – and at times may even backfire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding access to credit remains a key central government strategy for promoting agricultural development and livelihood diversification in south India and more widely. Smallholders borrowing from multiple credit sources are faced with obligations in addition to financial repayment. Available evidence on the consequences of indebtedness extending beyond monetary debt and its influence on vulnerability is incomplete in important ways. This paper presents an integrated vulnerability framework and illustrates the framework through case studies of three pairs of smallholder clients and credit sources. Using process-tracing and progressive contextualization methods, this paper shows the diversity of feedbacks that shape indebtedness and provides examples of social-ecological consequences. Unpacking these consequences in individual cases demonstrates indebtedness as an important root cause of vulnerability, which is in contrast to an examination of proximate causes, such as credit policy or temperature, that is the focus of a large share of scholarship. The paper shows that different credit sources are associated with different sets of obligations, leading to varied livelihood and agricultural consequences. Suggesting 'credit stacking' as an important adaptation strategy and research agenda item, the paper makes a plea for careful analysis of the conditions when credit is a factor in adaptive capacity and indebtedness of vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The drive to internationalise campuses is an important dimension of the globalised neoliberal university, and it is leading to large numbers of students crossing national borders to pursue their education. As key global consumers of higher education, middle-class students from India migrating overseas to study are at the centre of this trend. Drawing from ethnographic research conducted at a public university in New York, this article considers how notions of obligation become critical to these students’ movements, their practices of place-making, and their futures. I use the term educational debts to capture the different forms of indebtedness that not only structure these young people’s educational migration, but also inform the sensibility shaping their negotiations of everyday life as overseas students. Attending specifically to their experiences with work, both the part-time labour they provide on campus and their search for work after they receive their degrees, I argue that educational debts position them precariously in the linkages between global education and labour markets. Elucidating how particular experiences of precarity are produced through the process of educational migration, this article offers insights into the differences that exist among the transnational class formations of Indian high-skilled migrant populations in the neoliberal era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on fieldwork in Ulaanbaatar, this article explores the spatio-temporal properties of debt relations in urban Mongolia. During socialism, relations of debt were mostly restricted to closed circuits of friends, whose exchange of objects and favours often stretched over a long time. With the transition to capitalism in the 1990s, both the number of debt obligations and the size of loans expanded dramatically, without being subject to similar curtailment or other formalization. The result is that ‘no one pays back what they owe’, as people complain. Departing from the seemingly peculiar fact that people nonetheless keep on lending others money – including debtors they hardly know or with a bad reputation – I argue that debt has acquired a gift-like nature in Ulaanbaatar, and show how the temporality of such ‘generalized debt’ is inseparable from the neo-liberal deregulation of residential spaces in this and other postsocialist cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Microcredit's potential for poverty reduction is a highly contested issue. In Cambodia, the dramatically increasing commercial microcredit coexists with widespread private moneylending. These two practices are rooted in different economic world views: neoliberalism on the one hand, and the traditional Khmer economic sociality permeated by patronage on the other. The ethnography shows that far from competing with each other, microcredit and private lending have adapted to form a symbiotic relationship, and much private lending is financed through microcredit. While microcredit is often beneficial to people living well above the poverty line, the widespread access to credit, through microloans as well as private lending, is threatening the livelihoods of the economically most vulnerable and precipitating their social, economic and spatial exclusion from their local communities. In contrast to the social and economic exclusion caused by land grabbing and forced evictions, which has received a fair amount of public attention, exclusion as a consequence of indebtedness has, for sociocultural reasons, remained much less visible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]