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(2014). Negotiating Global Body Politics. Gender, Technology and Development: Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 1-8.

China’s strategy for claiming sovereignty in the South China Sea, based on UNCLOS which it has signed and ratified, is to be seen as an evolving process of interaction. Periodic adjustments to various situational logics are apparent: the material conditions on the mainland; the tenor of international relations shaped by China’s rise; China’s relationship with ASEAN as a regional organization and with its individual members. China’s understanding of ‘maritime borders’ tends to conflate the notion of a ‘nation’ with that of a Confucian ‘family’. The application of this to foreign diplomacy is baulked by a form of nationalism derived from a neo-Confucian interpretation of culture and identity. The framing of territorial sovereignty in terms of a lineage to support its claim to exclusive rights and authority over this maritime area faces the litmus test of successful institutional building with “Chinese characteristics” over a culturally hybrid sea space in order to achieve peaceful coexistence.

This chapter uses a simplified version of Foucault’s genealogical method to trace the emergence of the South China Sea as a ‘complex’ in international relations. It demonstrates how different knowledge systems and the ways of using and claiming this maritime area are interlinked and transformed through time. The mechanisms of power that have transmogrified a ‘common’ into something that holds the characteristics of a ‘territory’, with multiple sovereignty claims and conflicts, call for reflection on the value of independent institutions in bilateral diplomacy.

This chapter argues that that Critical Realism, a philosophy of science, when applied in combination with the morphogenetic approach in historical and social research, can contribute to a deeper understanding of social transformation and help to disentangle the structure–agency relations in the maritime disputes in the South China Sea. The ways in which a society (or a group of people) understands maritime space, adopts practices of demarcating borders, and negotiates disputes, cannot be taken as given. Making them subject to historical and social analysis is both scientifically significant and politically relevant, especially with respect to the role of self-reflexivity in social science research into peaceful transformation.

A spate of gender research in transnational migration at interdisciplinary interfaces has revealed powerful insights on how migration systems have co-evolved with geo-political dynamics of globalisation, revealing emerging forms of intersecting inequality and the need to clarifying the different epistemological positions in the debates about gender inequality. The international classification system used in the definition of rights and entitlements is now in conflict with the rapidly changing realities of migration in which local/global dynamics that have de-stabilised its established categories. Interpreting ‘gender’ in transnational migration today in defence of the human rights of migrants must go beyond ‘gender’ as a pre-given heuristic device handed down from previous theories. Aspirations for a gender equal world cannot avoid employing epistemic vigilance to discern where and which thinking about ‘gender’ is valid, and how unjustifiable biases may be corrected to ensure satisfactory treatments of th...

Dans le present article, l’auteur etablit l’interface entre les migrations et la traite des etres humains en Afrique subsaharienne sous le double angle de la gouvernance et de la pauvrete. Un trait saillant des cadres de gestion des migrations qui se dessinent est la conception implicitement double de la mobilite qu’ils vehiculent : si la mobilite liee au commerce est bien protegee par la reglementation publique, la mobilite liee a la recherche d’un moyen de subsistance est soumise a un systeme repressif ou il est difficile de remedier au decalage entre l’interpretation juridique des droits de la personne et du bien-etre humain et leur interpretation sociale. Il se peut que l’augmentation du nombre de femmes, d’enfants et de jeunes gens qui migrent, a la fois selon les pratiques traditionnelles ou en rupture avec celles-la, et dans des conditions risquees, reflete des transformations structurelles plus profondes que ne le reconnaissent communement les decideurs. Des reactions motivees par des considerations de droits humains ont contribue a la creation de nouveaux cadres internationaux, regionaux et nationaux pour prevenir les pratiques brutales et spoliatrices face aux migrations. L’existence patente de divergences d’interets dans les diverses facons d’aborder tous les problemes – gestion des migrations, lutte contre le crime, normes du travail, reduction de la pauvrete et besoins particuliers des communautes a risque – oblige a adopter un concept de bonnes pratiques propre a prendre en compte le rapport entre les formes dominantes du savoir social et le champ de la decision, afin de situer et resoudre, a differents niveaux de la gouvernance, les problemes relatifs a la violation des droits et a leurs rapports mutuels.

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 discusses the social construction of identities in transnational migration as experienced by a community of undocumented Vietnamese service workers in Bangkok. Being of rural origins, ...

Since the end of the Cold War human trafficking has evolved from localized practices of labor recruitment into globalized and multidirectional forms of migration. These new forms of migration patterns have acquired considerable economic and political significance in terms of their regional and global magnitudes and complexities. Previously limited to the purpose of sexual exploitation trafficking now cross-cuts a multitude of female and male migrants searching for work in a wide range of low-skilled and labor-intensive economic sectors particularly construction light industries agriculture and fisheries. There has been a rise in autonomous migration by women young people and children within and outside traditional practices of migration. The growing migration business which takes place under conditions of information asymmetry and under the control of diverse brokers has produced major reactions based on human rights principles. These have contributed to new international regional and national legislative frameworks for prevention prosecution and the social re-integration of trafficked persons. However the implementation of such legislations has led to inconclusive debates about the issues of victimhood and agency on the one hand and the responsibilities of states on the other. The prevalence of differences of interests in the variant policy approaches and civic responses to all the issues-migration management crime control labor standards poverty reduction and particular needs of communities at risk-reflect a fragmented understanding of the situation. The securitization of migration policy which accelerated since 9/11 has reaffirmed the notion of state sovereignty in forceful ways further preventing meaningful negotiations about the discrepancy between the legal and social interpretations of human rights and well being in migration. (excerpt)

This article explores the interface between migration and human trafficking in sub-Saharan Africa from the two angles of governance and poverty. A salient feature in the emerging frameworks of migration management is its implicit bifurcated vision of mobility. Trade-connected mobility is well protected by government rules whereas mobility to sustain livelihoods is subject to a punitive regime with a limited scope for resolving the discrepancy between the legal and social interpretations of human rights and well-being. The rise of migration by women, children and young people within and outside traditional practices under risky conditions may reflect deeper structural transformations than are commonly acknowledged by policy-makers. Reactions based on human rights concerns have contributed to new international, regional and national legislative frameworks for preventing abusive and exploitative practices in migration. The prevalence of glaring differences of interests in the variant policy approaches to all these issues--migration management, crime control, labour standards, poverty reduction and the particular needs of communities at risk--requires the concept of best practices to address the relationship between dominant forms of social knowledge and the policy field to situate and tackle issues of rights violation in different scales of governance and their interrelationships. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (journal abstract)

Taking the work of Martha Nussbaum as one point of departure, this contribution addresses three questions related to capabilities theory: how it can reconcile its pursuit of universal ethical principles with a world of diversity; whether it can liberate itself from neoliberal discourse; and whether it can deal with compassion and care. The challenge for global justice is to gain universal acceptance through dialogue and mutual transformation between paradigms. This requires a modification of Eurocentric orientations in moral reasoning to overcome differences of epistemic practices.

Development ethics as practice-oriented thought has arisen at an intersection of theorising about norms and values with various streams of experience. New ethical questions are now triggered by changes that accompany the process of globalisation. The latter has tended to erode national boundaries, create new spaces and practices, and generate simultaneously new opportunities and forms of suffering. These emerging ethical questions require a corresponding social analysis and additional sources of ethical thought. In this paper, we will trace the progress of development ethics and suggest that the field would benefit from linkages to ethical traditions that emphasise the transformation of consciousness and attitudes in service of human security as a higher goal. We show the value of the addition to the human development discourse of ‘human security’, particularly its motivational basis and focus on right. But both human development and human security discourses require a further consolidation by way of grea...

textabstractThis paper presents a historical overview of feminist frameworks for analysis and advocacy on human trafficking. It traces the major differences and similarities in the forms of knowledge produced since the Anti-White Slavery campaigns nearly two centuries ago. It highlights how institutional and moral considerations – especially concerning the treatment of the female body as an instrument – have played a role in shaping the conceptual possibilities and directions of politics for change. By tracing the epistemological and ethical tensions in the body of knowledge about human trafficking and the power relations involved in interpreting the question of human dignity and agency, the paper hopes to open new lines for debate and cooperation to address the varying interpretations of the use of force as well as the nature of human agency, decision-making and choice in the business of human trafficking. Attention is given to how, under the forces of globalisation, the unprecedented re-writing the human body, and sexuality (as a source of labour, sexual pleasure, and life itself) demands innovative ways for rethinking the relationship between “sex”, “gender” and “power” – both in theoretical terms and as regards transnational social action.

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.

Historical and comparative studies have demonstrated that migration (as human mobility across geographical areas and regions) is a dynamic process, interacting with livelihood systems, regulatory norms and security-enhancing institutions, both materially and subjectively (Hoerder 2002; Schrover/van der Leun/Lucassen/Quispel 2008). Migration cannot be understood in truncated ways, in parts and fragments of reality rather than the totality of the universe in which the phenomenon rose, became institutionalized and transformed at different historical moments. A core issue today is the gradual practical and conceptual erosion of the legal boundaries set in the Westphalian framework of inter-state relations and the emergence of fragmented modes of regulation of the movement of people across border of nation-states. This reflects the inability of governments to reconcile the tension within global capitalism, which on the one hand prises national economies open and on the other remains unaccountable for the adverse human consequences of this openness. The architecture of global governance of migration today shows how diverse rationalities have played out one against another to produce a situation in which growth-driven norms are taking over from rights norms based on human dignity enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This calls for a reconsideration of migration and security as two key areas of state prerogative, in light of their transnational and trans-local implications.

Driven by diverse forces – economic pressures and opportunities, climate change, war, conquest, and transformation of political regimes – human migration has been central to circulation of knowledge and values, goods and labour. Yet it has been subject to mainly disciplinary inquiries and the existing body of studies has lacked a comprehensive perspective. This volume precisely attempts such a comprehensive historical and experiential perspective, and as a result leads us to reconsider the meanings of ‘human’, ‘movement’, and ‘borders.’.

Since the end of the Cold War, relations between immigration politics and national security have undermined the continuing validity of the 1951 Refugee Convention in different parts of the world.1 In the European Union (EU), the effects of the abolishment of internal borders since the Schengen Agreement in 1985 have fostered a linkage between migration and security politics, amplified also by unanticipated external pressures. Efforts to harmonize policy in the domain of migration and asylum within an enlarged EU have produced a hybrid system with blurred competences, opt-outs, and a different status for new member states. Furthermore, the creation of Frontex in 2005 has raised concerns about the legitimacy of extra- territorial border control, amongst many other issues.

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 paper aims to contribute to the development of an analytical framework that provides the space for the understanding of female migrants as reproductive workers in a cross-national transfer of labor. It will first provide some hypothetical guidelines for the explanation of female migration in the context of reproductive labor. Based on accessible data, a discussion on the case of Japan will be presented to highlight the main issues and problems concerning female migrants as reproductive workers. Finally, implications on policy-making and networking at the international and national level will be analyzed and discussed, taking into account the specific ideological, political and socio-economic constraints.