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We consider cross‐border migration through the lens of the capabilities approach, with special reference to transnational migration and to implications for the approach itself. Cross‐border migration has profound and diverse effects, not least because it accelerates change in the nature of political community. A capabilities approach can be helpful through its insistence on multi‐dimensional, inter‐personally disaggregated, reflective evaluation. At the same time, the realities of migration exercise pressure on capabilities thinking, to deepen its underlying social and political theory and nuance its efforts to counter communitarian tendencies. By extending its attention to migrants and the locality‐spanning social and political spaces in which they live, the capabilities approach will be able to better concretize and situate the picture of the ‘we’ who ‘have (or seek) reason to value’ purported goods and rights.

The Social Field of Migration: Conflict and Contention This volume examines intersections between gender, state policy, socio-cultural environment, with a focus on micro-interactions that shape the experience of migration in particular ways. It breaks from the convention that treats different social worlds of international migration as mutually exclusive legal categories. Dominant conceptions of migration produce forms of knowledge that fragment the processes of migration into internal, regional and transnational domains, while maintaining a strict analytical distinction between categories of legal and illegal migration. This fragmentation can obliterate dynamics that lie at the interface between the local, regional, and global domains and between the interlocking systems of migration and the embodied practices of control. Migration networks and practices respond to policy shifts as well as to the strategies of recruiters, employers, and migrants themselves. Knowledge about these dynamics is central to an understanding of contemporary transformations, from which more adequate responses to a range of denial of entitlements and rights and social experiences of security may be derived. Critically revisiting theories, concepts, and methodologies used, and their motivating values, can help to identify flaws and expose unjust aspects of dominant knowledge frameworks.

This article analyses the Asian miracle both as an ideological construct and as an empirical experience. As an ideological construct, the Asian miracle can best be understood in the context of the western construction of Otherness. Such a construction is an expression of a complex web of power relations forged mainly by a struggle between east and west over industrial achievement, the meaning of industrial progress and governance. As an empirical experience, industrialization in East Asia may be apprehended through gender as a key organizing principle manifested in a four-tier system of industrial work. Industrial strategies in East Asia have been deployed in conjunction with reproductive strategies which correspond to the specificities of capital formation and degree of capitaltechnology intensity. The emerging social patterns since the crisis began in 1997 indicate that gradual changes which have taken place in the political economy of women's labour in East Asia have not necessarily altered a gender order governed by cultural conservatism which privileges males over females. A female gaze on the relation between economy and polity may contribute to the redesign of development policy along norms and values that can promote more gender-balanced and humane societies.

Since the late 1990s there has been a rising trend of Vietnamese women migrating to neighbouring countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and China) for marriage. Previous studies of such cross-border marriages have emphasized either issues of choice and agency for women, or their poverty and victimhood. This chapter analyses this trend along the lines of the debate on the East Asian model of welfare and family policy, with case studies in Taiwan and South Korea. It views commercially arranged transnational marriages (CATM) as an institution that connects changing gendered regimes of social reproduction at the sending and receiving ends. Mediated by a combination of asymmetrical relations – gender, class, age, ethnicity, and national belonging– this institution operates in a transnational space through which material and symbolic resources are circulated. These in turn construct subjectivities and identities for participating actors. There is a dimension of trans-masculinity embodied in the practices of CATM and this requires further exploration regarding informed consent and the rights of its users. Beyond this, CATM should be further analysed in the context of changing family welfare and intergenerational care as gendered regimes, and such an analysis should also address how households adapt and devise new strategies to sustain and reproduce themselves economically, socially, and culturally. Such an understanding can help open the research agenda on social policy and rights and provide a regional perspective.

This chapter provides a perspective on the chain of social injustice faced by Indonesian migrant domestic workers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). By using the lens of gender to connect practices within the Indonesian management system for labour migration with those guided by regulations governing the management of foreign labour in the UAE, the chapter reveals the consequences of the absence of a specific law governing the presence of domestic workers in both countries. Labour migration management systems are bounded by the nation state, whereas domestic workers must rely on transnational coordination between two systems. Where their work is not legally defined, they can become subject to arbitrary treatment at different points in their migration along a transnational chain of relations of structural dependency. They tend to bear the weight of institutional dysfunctions, often with dire consequences for their private lives. Learning from their experiences can help us draw lessons for future action towards achieving standards of decent work within a territory and standards of basic human security applicable to their transnational movement. Just as research into transnational migration has moved beyond methodological nationalism, so also labour migration policy needs to find frames of reference appropriate to context to ensure that workers’ rights are protected in different places.

In this chapter the experiences of Filipina domestic workers in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Qatar are examined in the framework of their structural vulnerability to health problems. The chapter shows how their poor state of Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH) can be the outcome of a combination of forms of institutional discrimination that are interconnected and should be investigated in respect of: (a) the worth of their ‘identity’ (migrant, female, the work they do); (b) the distinct aspects of discourse on sexuality and normativity which specifically relate to their presence in the destination countries; and (c) ideational and material realities constraining their own agency in finding adequate care. The chapter shows how variations in the potential for access may be explained by the types and degree of their structural vulnerability regarding labour rights, their relationship with employers and migrants’ associations, and their personal SRH awareness–together with what emerges from cooperation between those government officials and civil society organizations who work with migrant domestic workers. Attentiveness to the particular combination of forms of institutional discrimination in a given cultural and institutional context, especially the ways in which the Sexual and Reproductive Health of Filipina domestic workers are linked to the ways in which labour migration are organized, should be helpful for effective SRH advocacy.

This book examines the links between gender and migration and their implications for social justice thinking, both at the experiential and normative levels. It offers insights also into the uses of human security thinking as a framework for attention to social justice concerns, including in trans-border contexts, and to their intersectional complexity. The volume presents a diverse but selective set of empirical, theoretical, and methodological issues on gender in migration from migrant-centred and Southern perspectives. Its aim is to stimulate debate and discussion among migration scholars and professionals engaged in migration-related policy and to enable insights and enrich practices on gender and social justice.

This chapter provides concluding reflections from a set of nineteen case studies of transnational and intranational migration and mobility. It contrasts the ‘sedentary bias’ present in policy regimes and associated thought centred on nation-states, where movement is seen as exceptional, including normatively exceptional, with the centrality of movement in the processes of socio-economic change and evolution, particularly those promoted under capitalist systems of economic organization. While market capitalist and nation-state principles of organization differ, they combine in hybrid systems, such as those currently being elaborated in policy regimes for temporary migrant workers, to exploit migrant labour. Many of these arrangements mirror the indentured labour regimes of earlier eras. The chapter presents by contrast a perspective based on principles of human rights and human security that uses a global framework both for understanding and for evaluation and then adds an explicit gender-aware enrichment of that perspective, in order to do justice to the special vulnerabilities and exploitation of women’s migrant labour. A human security perspective, in particular, helps to base concern for human rights in an awareness of bodily and emotional needs, of global interconnections, and of the intersecting circumstances in people’s everyday lives; but it requires, and lends itself to, gender-enrichment through partnership with insights from feminist theory, as illustrated in the book’s various case studies. The systems of the nation-state, market capitalism, and gender power that are discussed in this chapter, that structure the experiences of migrant women workers, are very deeply established. The chapter suggests directions for possible re-cognition, to reduce and counter the invisibility and misframing of migration, and of women and their work; it also suggests priority areas for research and networking following the format employed for the book: linking researchers, policy practitioners and migrant advocates, South-South-North.

This chapter provides a perspective on the migration of communities of blind beggars from Mali to Dakar, Senegal. Migration for begging across borders as a way of making a living adopted by persons affected by river blindness involves being guided by non-blind guides – usually a girl or young woman who can be a relative or acquaintance. The patterns of movement are generally seasonal and circular and are based on a variety of social arrangements for guiding, including a modification of ‘child fostering’ as a tradition, biological kinship and marriage, and employment. Each type of arrangement delineates specific obligations and entitlements between the guides and the beggar according to the relationship involved: parent, guardian, spouse, or employer. The last arrangement applies especially to girls and women who migrate on their own account in search of other types of work but end up as guides. Social justice strategies that address the individual rights of young migrants from Mali to Senegal have yet to recognize the existence of this group of female guides. Understanding the experiences of the migrant blind beggars from the perspective of multiple conditions of ‘disability’ may help towards an appreciation of how mutual dependency based on gender and age can be interwoven into layers of culturally defined inter-generational obligations, for which social justice strategies built only on the idea of the individual rights of women or children may not necessarily be appropriate.

textabstractViews on poverty are deeply rooted in cultural frameworks about the human condition shaped by histories. In the debate on modernity, perspectives on poverty oscillate between: a) making the poor -- their "morals" and "culture" -- responsible for their own situation and b) positioning the causes in structural shifts in regimes of accumulation and changing forms of governing the population. the hegemonic and binary treatment of the "production" of things and "reproduction" and nurturance of human life as different and separate social spaces, rather than as both fundamentally integral to a human society. By valuing the production of things more than the reproduction of human life, this construct has buffeted both class and masculinised power and operates as a gender-based mechanism of selection and exclusion for voice and participation. This is evident in the discourses on poverty, which surfaced in the context of capitalist industrialisation and political debates on pauperism in the 19th century. Early feminist research followed an empiricist mode in highlighting the invisibility of women and the gaps in poverty data. The findings of these studies gradually helped define the contours of a conceptual critique of the neo-liberal model of accumulation. The feminist conceptual critique of poverty knowledge formed part of a broader challenge to the androcentric and culturally specific assumptions of mainstream knowledge systems. However the contributions of feminist poverty knowledge go beyond some of these new knowledge systems through the articulation of key concepts of gender analysis such as intra-household power relations, care economy, the emphasis on subjectivity, agency and the notion of "trade-offs", all of which offer an epistemological position that provides a lens on poverty that addresses a wider social domain. In the policy field there is limited incorporation of gendered poverty knowledge through 1) selective appropriation; 2) the construction of new myths; and 3) the selective articulation of gendered poverty knowledge that omits major implications for social justice and transformation. This reflects the discursive construction of a new orthodoxy in poverty knowledge systems in line with extant neo-liberal rationality. The present transnational character of poverty and its links with gender poses tremendous challenges to theories of social justice. A gendered analysis of the discourse, politics and policies for reducing poverty forms an important component of a broader social justice framework to address the intersection of emerging forms of exclusion and vulnerability marked by class, caste, ethnicity, race as well as local and transnational processes and dynamics of power.

textabstractTransnational migration and its implications for human security as a policy field constitute one of the most complex issues of our time. Current experiences of displacement and security spans between a cyber world characterized by hyper mobility of finance, technology, information and the ‘cosmopolitan’ values of a ‘flexible citizenship’ (Ong, 1999) to the world of human trafficking and smuggling of migrants and refugees as a mode of mobility adopted by people who cross borders on foot, by boat, trucks and planes who are often abandoned to die when arrangements break down (Eschbach/Hagan/Rodriguez, 2001; El-Cherkeh/Hella, 2004). The extant legal vacuum reflects unresolved conflicts of interest at different levels and poses a great challenge to the right to mobility as an expression of the liberal ideal of individual liberty.

This publication is the fourth in a series that documents experiences in different dimensions of social development and social policy issues in Latin America, the Caribbean and East and Southeast Asia. This series has been orchestrated by the Inter-American Institute for Social Development (INDES) and the Japan Program (JPN) of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). This volume documents valuable experiences related to the role of women and women's organizations in social development as presented at the workshop "Women's Participation in the Promotion of Social Development: Lessons from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean", held in Saitama, Japan from October 27-30, 2003. The workshop was organized by INDES and the Japan Program, with ample collaboration from the IDB office in Japan-Tokyo and financial support from the Government of Japan. During the workshop, 26 prominent researchers and practitioners from East and Southeast Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean as well as some invited guests formed a cross-regional exchange to discuss women¿s role in the promotion of social development.

The central Sahara region has a long-standing history of migratory movements as a mode of livelihoods. Movements from the Sahel to Algeria and Libya for seasonal employment emerged in the 1950’s, and by the early 1990’s concerns over migratory movements in this region translated into the important arena of competing interests over livelihood and security. Despite human-made obstacles constituted by the predatory practices of local representatives of the Nigerien state on the one hand and the hardening of North African migration policies on the other, tens of thousands of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa travel each year to North Africa via the city of Agadez in northern Niger. These migratory movements have become an important factor in international relations in multiple directions: between sub-Saharan governments and between North African and European governments.