Showing papers in "Development and Change in 2017"

International Migration Report 2015: Highlights

Abstract: M ISREADING M OBILITY ?: B UREAUCRATIC P OLITICS AND B LINDNESS IN UN M IGRATION R EPORTS Loren B. Landau and E. Tendayi Achiume United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division International Migration Report 2015: Highlights. New York: UNDESA, 2016. UNHCR Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2015. Geneva: UNHCR, 2016. INTRODUCTION The past year’s events acutely illustrate the power of human migration. Movements across and within borders can reshape lives and families. The popular and political responses they engender can also catalyse fundamental political reorderings (see Bremner 2015; Kanter, 2015). Few will deny such power in countries bordering Syria, Iraq and Somalia that face millions of new arrivals who are actively, if unwittingly, reshaping their populations (see Aziz 2016; Yarnell, 2016). Yet across all world regions, people’s movements are at the centre of political debate and policy making in ways previously unseen: the Brexit vote; challenges to Angela Merkel’s tenure; promises to build ‘an impenetrable and beautiful’ wall between the United States and Mexico (ITV, 2016a); riots in Singapore; and South Africa’s de facto withdrawal from its obligations under the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention (Smith, 2016). All reflect reassertions of exclusive nationalism as bulwark against migration’s perceived cultural, economic and physical threats. Simultaneous mobilizations for immigrant inclusions and rights reveal hardening battle lines over the future of sovereignty and society (Edwards, 2015; ITV, 2016b). Two major annual reports from the United Nations could not come at a more propitious time. The first, by the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), Population Division, is intended to provide ‘the international community with timely and accessible population data and analysis of population trends and development outcomes for all countries and areas of the world’ (UNDESA, 2016). UNDESA’s International Migration Report 2015: Highlights focuses broadly on movement across international borders irrespective of the motivations or causes of that movement. The second is by the United Nation’s Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and focuses on sub-

Migrant Precarity in Asia: ‘Networks of Labour Activism’ for a Rights-based Governance of Migration

Abstract: This article uses migrant precarity as a lens through which to analyse the issue of mobilization for migrants’ rights by civil society. Such mobilization efforts are vital in light of the emergence of global migration governance, which tends to actively constrain considerations for migrants’ human and labour rights. Asia's temporary migrants have been identified as a particularly precarious group of workers due to their specific position within the international division of labour, one that is defined by poorly‐ or unregulated work with insecure legal and residential status. Moreover, with local employment in countries of origin often characterized by informal employment, poor working conditions and unsustainable livelihoods, migrant workers are caught within a protracted precarity that spans life at home and abroad. Stronger normative and organizational links between global migration governance and migrant rights movements are needed to advance decent work agendas within countries of destination, as well as in countries of origin.

International Allies, Institutional Layering and Power in the Making of Labour in Bangladesh

Abstract: This contribution discusses trajectories of labour power in the making. Taking a practice theory perspective on power, and focusing on the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh, the author asks how Bangladeshi trade unions are attempting to use changes in the industrial landscape after the factory collapse of Rana Plaza in 2013 to constitute different power sources. The article challenges assumptions in power resource theories that associational, institutional and social-cultural power are pre-existing factors, arguing that trade unions have to co-construct and enact those power sources in order for them to become meaningful. The article contributes to the debate on Networks of Labour Activism (NOLA) by showing that networked interactions with global unions and other labour support organizations help to construct power in an incremental way through information sharing, claim reframing, increasing social recognition, and the construction of a ‘shadow of protection’ for trade unions. But it also points out new limitations resulting from managerial and political resistance, which aims to contain and reverse the growing power of labour. The Bangladesh Accord is a double-edged sword: on the one hand it provides unions with new opportunities for developing strategic capabilities, while on the other hand it is used by powerful domestic actors to discredit trade unions and mobilize workers against the constraints of the Accord.

Multi-scalar Labour Agency in Global Production Networks: Contestation and Crisis in the South African Fruit Sector

Abstract: Integration into global production networks poses significant challenges, and also opens up opportunities, for labour agency Governance by lead firms affects working conditions and can drive precarious employment; this interacts with and can constrain national labour legislation covering labour rights The global production networks (GPN) approach facilitates examination of commercial value chains, their interaction with institutionally and societally embedded labour markets, and potential leverage points for labour contestation transcending local, national and global scales This informs analysis of commercial/societal articulations as contested processes opening space for multi-scalar labour agency within global production networks This article examines how tensions between global commercial and societally embedded dimensions of global production networks drive precarious work, and seeks to understand the implications for emergent forms of multi-scalar community-based labour agency These questions are explored through an examination of labour casualization and contestation in South African fruit production in 2012–13, using the GPN approach The authors find that multi-scalar channels of labour agency leveraging both global commercial and government actors can enable reworking by unorganized community-based labour to bargain for better pay and conditions, but if the underlying global commercial logic is to be challenged, more systemic strategies are required

Beyond Hybridity to the Politics of Scale: International Intervention and ‘Local’ Politics

Abstract: The evident failures of international peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions (PSBIs) have recently prompted a focus on the interaction between interventions and target societies and states. Especially popular has been the ‘hybridity’ approach, which understands forms of peace and governance emerging through the mixing of local and international agendas and institutions. This article argues that hybridity is a highly problematic optic. Despite contrary claims, hybridity scholarship falsely dichotomizes ‘local’ and ‘international’ ideal-typical assemblages, and incorrectly presents outcomes as stemming from conflict and accommodation between them. Scholarship in political geography and state theory provides better tools for explaining PSBIs’ outcomes as reflecting socio-political contestation over power and resources. We theorize PSBIs as involving a politics of scale, where different social forces promote and resist alternative scales and modes of governance, depending on their interests and agendas. Contestation between these forces, which may be located at different scales and involved in complex, tactical, multi-scalar alliances, explains the uneven outcomes of international intervention. We demonstrate this using a case study of East Timor, focusing on decentralization and land policy.

Networks of Labour Activism: Collective Action across Asia and Beyond. An Introduction to the Debate

Abstract: As an Introduction to the Debate section that follows, this article develops the concept of ‘Networks of Labour Activism’ (NOLA) as a distinct, and important, aspect of cross-border, cross-organizational mobilization of workers, trade unions and other organizations and groups. NOLAs are seen as different from traditional labour activist networks in that they are neither solely connected to the position of labour in production processes, nor wholly reliant on the soft and discursive power of advocacy coalitions. The authors understand NOLAs to be characterized by the interaction of different types of labour rights, social movement and community organizations, joining forces in complex forms of strategizing vis-a-vis multiple targets. Thus, cross-boundary strategizing (across organizational and geographical divides) is seen as a basic characteristic of NOLAs. The authors argue that NOLAs continue to be deeply embedded in political-economic contexts of the state and global value chains, and alliance formation reflects the peculiar vulnerabilities and constraints resulting from this embeddedness. This Introduction draws on multiple studies of NOLAs from around the world, but its main focus is on some of those Asian countries which are at the centre of global supply chain capitalism and labour exploitation, and which have become the laboratory for new forms of networked worker agency and activism.

Enrolling the Private Sector in Community Development: Magic Bullet or Sleight of Hand?

Abstract: The role of the private sector in international development is growing, supported by new and evolving official programmes, financing, partnerships and narratives. This article examines the place of the private sector in ‘community development’ in the global South. It situates corporate community development (CCD) conceptually in long-standing debates within critical development studies to consider the distinct roles that corporations are playing and how they are responding to the challenges and contradictions entailed within ‘community development’. Drawing on field-based research across three different contexts and sectors for CCD in Fiji, Papua New Guinea and South Africa, the article suggests that caution is required in assuming that corporations can succeed where governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and international development organizations have so often met with complex challenges and intractable difficulties. We argue that four specific problems confront CCD: (a) the problematic ways in which ‘communities’ are defined, delineated and constructed; (b) the disconnected nature of many CCD initiatives, and lack of alignment and integration with local and national development planning policies and processes; (c) top-down governance, and the absence or erosion of participatory processes and empowerment objectives; (d) the tendency towards highly conservative development visions.

From Force to Legitimation: Rethinking Land Grabs in Cambodia

Abstract: This article moves beyond a focus on the brute force involved in high-profile land grabs to examine the way legitimation, regulation and coercion intersect in Cambodia's property regime. It builds on the ‘powers of exclusion’ framework developed by Hall, Hirsch and Li to argue that increased connections within civil society in Cambodia and engagement with Western commodity markets have motivated state and private concessionaires to use different means of land exclusion, with less outright force and a greater focus on repressive regulation and legitimation. These exclusionary powers work through informal political connections, secrecy and obfuscation, which the authors term the ‘power of informality’. This argument is substantiated with two case studies that illustrate a move away from the dominant narrative of forceful expulsion of land users in Economic Land Concessions (ELC) towards approaches that provide in-kind compensation and carve out land for smallholders: a recent land titling campaign in ELC areas, and the first oil palm ELC to gain responsible investment certification. While the authors remain cautious of the implications of this shift, given the persistence of the power of informality, these cases illustrate the potential for new forms of state–society relations: a shift from fear of authorities to a demand for greater accountability and responsiveness.

Monetary and Multidimensional Child Poverty: A Contradiction in Terms?

Abstract: Although the multidimensional nature of poverty is widely recognized, the extent to which monetary measures can serve as a proxy for non-monetary measures remains unresolved. This is of particular concern for children given their dependence on others for fulfilment of basic needs and assumptions about intra-household distribution that underpin monetary measures. This article adopts an innovative mixed-methods approach to investigate child poverty overlap and mismatch in the low- and middle-income countries of Ethiopia and Vietnam using secondary longitudinal survey data and primary qualitative data from adults and children. Findings indicate that monetary and multidimensional poverty are distinct constructs that are linked, but cannot serve as a proxy for one another. While the degree of dissonance depends on the types of indicators under consideration, poverty mismatch persists regardless of time, place and multidimensional measure under consideration.

Pastoralism and Land-Tenure Change in Kenya: The Failure of Customary Institutions

Abstract: Until recently, the Pokot in the highlands of the Baringo area in Kenya have practised semi-nomadic pastoralism. Today they are rapidly sedentarizing and in many areas suitable for farming, they are adopting rain-fed agriculture. As a result of these dynamics, claims to individual property on de facto communal rangelands have arisen, and to such an extent that they seriously threaten the peace of the community. This article explores the conflicts that emerge in the transition from common property to private tenure. Using locally prominent land disputes as exemplary cases, it focuses on the role of traditional gerontocratic authorities in the attempt to resolve a growing number of land disputes; on the emerging power of patrilineal clans and local elites in the enforcement of access to land; and on the incompetence of government agencies to intervene. The failure of customary institutions to ensure land tenure security leads to a situation in which women and marginalized actors in particular are threatened with displacement, and in which most local actors want the state to intervene and establish formal property rights.

Labour Networks under Supply Chain Capitalism: The Politics of the Bangladesh Accord

Abstract: The Bangladesh Accord on Fire and Building Safety is a transnational governance approach towards implementing factory safety standards in the Bangladeshi garment sector. Some commentators argue that the Accord is a ‘game changer’ in times of corporate social responsibility (CSR), especially because it includes transnational buying companies in a legally binding contract with union federations. This article takes the Accord as an interesting case for how labour networks become part of a transnational governance arrangement. Taking a cultural political economy perspective, the author assumes that the Accord marks a practice of implementing ethical demands under conditions of supply chain capitalism and argues that calling the Accord a paradigm shift would be overly optimistic: while labour networks were able to use a crisis in the regime of CSR policies, they could not challenge the managerial culture of translating political demands according to the conventions of supply chain management. These conventions separate the sources of profit from the political claim for decent labour standards. In a transnational governance initiative, labour networks rely on such management conventions, since they are constitutive of the production network. From this perspective the Accord is an impressive reaction to the Rana Plaza disaster, but not a game changer.

Just Farming? Neoliberal Subjectivities and Agricultural Livelihoods among Educated Youth in Kenya

Abstract: Given the precariousness of graduate employment in most African countries, coupled with intersecting challenges of food insecurity, urbanization and population growth, educated youth are increasingly being encouraged to seek alternative livelihood opportunities in agriculture — a sector traditionally associated with the uneducated rural poor but which has received considerable developmental attention. This article examines how and with what impacts educated youth in Kenya construct and perform new identities as farmers, distinct from the stigmatized smallholder farmers and in keeping with their status as elite, urbanized, social change makers. By developing the concepts of neoliberal youth subjectivities and opportunity space, and examining their life and work histories, the article analyses how educated young farmers construct themselves as productive and socially respectable through different and locally understood neoliberal subjectivities. The author argues that the performances of educated youth who identify themselves as diversified selves, as members of the elite, and as social change makers challenge the normative notions of protracted youth-hood and, instead, illuminate the neoliberal lives of these young people, facilitated by a liberalized economy and their social positioning in society.

Engendering the New Enclosures: Development, Involuntary Resettlement and the Struggles for Social Reproduction in Coastal Tanzania

Abstract: This article engages with the feminist concept of ‘social reproduction’ to arrive at a richer understanding of the gendered processes and outcomes of contemporary large-scale land acquisitions, or the ‘new enclosures’. It focuses on the case of a recent land deal for industrial sugarcane production in the Coast Region of Tanzania and the resultant process of involuntary resettlement. It critically analyses people's struggles for land in the face of imminent displacement, and the gendered ways they experience the erosion of their pre-existing modes of social reproduction. It argues that enclosure of rural landscapes does more than immediately strip peasants and pastoralists of their means of production and turn them into wage labourers. It gradually uproots them from their socio-ecological knowledges, cultural practices and historical memories, which are rooted on the land and articulated through gender. The highly uncertain processes of enclosure and displacement also force rural women and men to renegotiate their livelihood strategies and intra-household gender relations.

Income inequality and wealth concentration in the recent crisis

Abstract: This article shows that the increase of income inequality and global wealth concentration was an important driver for the financial and Eurozone crisis. The high levels of income inequality resulted in balance of payment imbalances and growing debt levels. Rising wealth concentration contributed to the crisis because the increasing asset demand from the rich played a key role in the growth of the structured credit market and enabled poor and middle-income households to accumulate increasing amounts of debt. This analysis is the first that puts both income and wealth inequality to the epicentre of the recent crisis, and is crucial for social scientists researching on not just the effects but also the causes of the crisis related to inequality. Our findings strongly suggest that the policy response to the crisis must not be limited to financial regulation but should involve policies to address inequality by increasing the bargaining power of labour as well as redistributive tax policies.

A Plantation Precariat: Fragmentation and Organizing Potential in the Palm Oil Global Production Network

Abstract: This article draws on research conducted among migrant workers in the palm oil industry in Malaysia. It explores the fragmentation and the precaritization of palm oil labour and discusses how workers react to different forms of precarity in pursuit of their own spatial strategies of social reproduction. The article shows how migrant workers use extensive, transnational networks to circumvent or challenge the strategies of spatial control of capital. Migrant workers use these spatially and temporally contingent networks to avoid national border controls, to abscond and switch employers, and to organize collective bargaining and wildcat strikes. Fragmentation thus provokes a counter-reaction from workers, who scale up everyday resistance strategies, producing the potential for new spatialities of solidarity. It is argued that this everyday practice of workers could become the basis for more political spatial organizing strategies within the palm oil global production network (GPN).

Better than Cash, but Beware the Costs: Electronic Payments Systems and Financial Inclusion in Developing Economies

Abstract: This article considers current proposals for using electronic payments systems to promote financial inclusion — that is, to widen the availability of financial and monetary services in developing countries. While such systems can generate significant savings in the operation of monetary systems, payment services markets are typically uncompetitive and require regulatory and broader state interventions to ensure those savings are widely distributed. The use of those systems to broaden the reach of for-profit lenders raises a number of concerns, as a growing literature has documented how microcredit initiatives in developing countries have resulted primarily in expansions in consumption credit to households, often under predatory terms. The authors advance two original arguments in this connection. First, the perverse results of many microcredit initiatives reflect the underdevelopment of the areas concerned: without broader development strategies, potentially transformative productive projects are rare and unprofitable to finance. In contrast, widespread unmet consumption needs ensure consumption credit offers lenders a profitable alternative business orientation. Second, and in light of this, electronic payments platforms can contribute to economic development by enabling the establishment of well-regulated or public systems of electronic ‘narrow banks’ restricted from lending, but capable of widening access to affordable payments, savings and insurance services.

On ‘Natural Capital’, ‘Fairy Tales’ and Ideology

Abstract: Review essay for Dieter Helm's 'Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet'. London: Yale University Press, 2015. 277 pp. £20 hardback, £12.99 paperback.

The shady side of consultation and compensation: 'divide-and-rule' tactics in Bolivia's extraction sector

Abstract: The rights to prior consultation and compensation have been established within the framework of international indigenous peoples’ rights. However, in practice these processes have often gone hand in hand with adverse social consequences for local populations, such as the exacerbation of conflicts, the division of communities and the weakening of indigenous organizations. These phenomena have received little attention, despite their great relevance for these populations. This article sheds light on the use by the Bolivian state and extraction corporations of exclusionary participation and negotiation processes, on the one hand, and ‘carrot-and-stick’ techniques on the other, which have together accounted for negative social impacts on the ground. The article is based on recently conducted field research, focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews in Guarani communities in Bolivia. The findings extend the existing literature by providing a fine-grained and systematic analysis of divisive undertakings and their sociocultural and sociopolitical consequences in neo-extractivist Bolivia. The broader implications of the study add to academic debates about participation in development, about ‘divide-and-rule’ tactics and about the practice of indigenous peoples’ rights.

The Impossible Trinity: Inflation Targeting, Exchange Rate Management and Open Capital Accounts in Emerging Economies

Abstract: This article contributes to the debate on macroeconomic management and capital account regulations in developing and emerging countries (DECs). It argues that the recommendation by neoclassical economists and international financial institutions (IFIs) to combine an inflation-targeting regime with exchange rate management, whilst maintaining open capital accounts, is not only impossible but also potentially counterproductive. The article draws on extensive semi-structured interviews with currency traders in Brazil and London to show that this is due to the particular way such a regime shapes central bank interventions in the money and foreign exchange markets and the destabilizing way these interventions interact with financial market expectations. The interview results also demonstrate that the guidelines issued by IFIs actually undermine, rather than aid, DEC central banks’ initial attempts to manage excessive exchange rate movements. These results support the long-standing argument by heterodox economists and critical international political economists that DECs need to make the exchange rate an explicit instrument and goal of their macroeconomic policy and complement it with comprehensive capital account regulations to reduce the destabilizing impact of international capital flows. The interview results also give some concrete suggestions on how to achieve this.

Enforcing ‘Progress’: A Story of an MDG 5 Indicator and Maternal Health in Malawi

Abstract: Considering the importance of metrics in current systems of global health accountability, this article analyses the dynamics behind a maternal health indicator. To achieve the target of Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG 5) and increase the proportion of births attended by ‘skilled health personnel’, some districts in Malawi in 2010 introduced information campaigns to promote births in hospitals and a fine to punish mothers who delivered outside of biomedical health institutions. The study is based on ethnographic research in one Malawian village. While many mothers described the ill treatment and bad conditions in maternity wards, most women still started to publicly sanction institutional births. This apparent contradiction can be understood by looking at the positions and motivations of the various actors who participated in the performance of MDG 5 in the village and how their projects became tied to the focus on improving the indicator. Rather than expressing a demand for the existing maternal health services as such, the ethnography suggests that the actors’ practices expressed hopes and claims to wider material improvements in a context of inequality. The article highlights dynamics that are concealed if we restrict the analysis to one of biopower, and expands the purview of the study of metrics into the spaces which indicators are intended to represent.

Labour Regime Transformation in Myanmar: Constitutive Processes of Contestation

Abstract: This article studies the case of a workers’ strike in Myanmar's ready-made garment sector to illustrate how differently-situated actors have engaged at multiple scales to influence emerging forms of labour regulation in the country. The analysis is drawn out through the historicization of domestic regulatory transformation. As a hegemonic project targeting industrial peace for purposes of capital accumulation, Myanmar's labour regime has been shaped by various actors outside of government circles, including International Labour Organization (ILO) personnel, Myanmar trade unionists, foreign governments, transnational corporations, domestic capitalists and Myanmar workers. Proposing a multi-scalar reading of labour regime transformation attentive to constitutive processes of contestation, the study analyses ways in which varied, and at times unofficial, relations coalesce to shape labour regulation.

Socializing Labour Protest: New Forms of Coalition Building in South China

Abstract: Over the course of the last decade, China has experienced growing labour unrest in many economic sectors including electronics, textiles and services. One reason for this is that the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) is not engaged at the shop floor level; it does not represent workers and has failed to organize strikes. Instead, labour non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have stepped in to fill the representation gap and to support striking workers. This article analyses the networks between labour NGOs, other civil society actors such as student activists, and protesting workers in China's Pearl River Delta. The authors show that a new informal network of activists and transnational linkages has emerged in Guangdong Province. They argue that civil society organizations can play a crucial role in supporting workers’ demands in strike actions, presenting a case of successful coalition building in the service sector during a strike by sanitation workers in the University Town Campus of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. Drawing on a power resource approach and in-depth field research, the authors conclude that the engagement of labour NGOs and other civil society actors in strike actions has the potential to shape labour relations at the level of the firm. However, due to growing state repression, there are limits for emerging civil society actions.

Complementary Currency Systems and their Ability to Support Economic and Social Changes

Abstract: Complementary Currency Systems (CCS) are accounting systems that define local monetary spaces created by non-bank actors to pay for exchange of goods and services inside a trading network. This article aims to investigate the capability of complementary currency systems to foster social and economic changes. The authors use an analysis of the literature to examine the nature and diversity of CCS in terms of objectives, forms, modes of governance, and degrees of connection with political authorities and economic structures. They also assess the potential of CCS to support local economies based on social and environmental values, working to combat economic vulnerability and social exclusion, and examine how CCS challenge the conventional perception of money. The article ends by summarizing the challenges facing CCS, inquiring into the potential problems and benefits that a change of this sort could entail.

Exclusion and Counter-Exclusion: The Struggle over Shrimp Farming in a Coastal Village in Bangladesh

Abstract: This article explores the processes whereby control over land and water is exercised in the context of commercial shrimp cultivation in coastal Bangladesh The authors draw on the insight that the exercise of control over resources implies both inclusion for some and exclusion for others, and that shifting the boundary between the two involves the deployment of four interacting ‘powers of exclusion’ — regulation, the market, force and legitimation — the effectiveness of which depends on specific historical conjunctures The article uses a case study of a village in Khulna District to explore: (a) the processes by which poor farmers were excluded from their land by large shrimp farmers; (b) the ways in which villagers experienced the changes in land use and social relations associated with the shrimp boom; and (c) the conjunction of internal and external factors that enabled smallholders to collectively mobilize to reverse their exclusion from the land Understanding these messy and contingent processes of exclusion and counter-exclusion helps to inform strategies aimed at securing the property rights and livelihoods of the rural poor

The World Bank on Mind, Behaviour and Society

Abstract: This article critically analyses the use of psychological and behavioural knowledge in development policy and practice with reference to the World Development Report 2015. It examines the main proposition of the WDR 2015, highlighting the behavioural change framework and policy techniques promoted in the report. The shifts that have taken place in development policy are reviewed from a governmentality perspective which offers a critical view on the psychological and behavioural focus in contemporary development policy. The article focuses specifically on the behavioural techniques the WDR 2015 promotes to show how a certain kind of subjectivity is advanced which not only homogenizes and problematizes non-Western knowledge systems, subjectivities and agency, but also justifies the economization of social life through development.

Transitional justice and political economies of survival in post-conflict Northern Uganda

Abstract: This article explores the interplay between transitional justice and ‘everyday’ political economies of survival in post-conflict Acholiland, northern Uganda. It advances two main arguments. First, that transitional justice — as part and parcel of conventional liberal peacebuilding packages — promotes a repertoire of normatively driven policies that have little bearing on lived realities of social accountability in post-conflict settings. Second, that in transcending the epistemological and ontological boundaries of transitional justice and using concepts developed in the critical peacebuilding literature — the ‘everyday’ and ‘hybridity’ — a nuanced understanding of this dissonance emerges. Based on extensive fieldwork in Acholiland in the period 2012–14, using a range of qualitative research methods, the author examines the means through which people negotiate social and moral order in the context of post-conflict life and analyses the tensions between these forms of ‘everyday’ activity and current transitional justice policy and programming in the region.

The Regional Coordination of Strikes and the Challenge for Union Reform in Vietnam

Abstract: Since the launch of the economic reform (Doi Moi) policy in the early 1990s, the union system of Vietnam has seen little change: the Vietnam General Confederation of Labour (VGCL) retains its monopoly, its political affiliation to and reliance on the Communist Party, while at the workplace, the VGCL-affiliated enterprise unions are too dependent on the management to represent workers’ rights and interests. ‘Collective bargaining by riots’ has become the only way for rank-and-file workers to improve their working conditions. This article draws on more than a decade of research to show that informal organization of workers in some companies has grown to such an extent that the de facto leaders initiate bargaining with the employers and, when negotiations fail, they organize strikes. These strikes are usually settled in favour of the workers, causing a change in wage levels and leading to spontaneous ‘copycat’ strikes in neighbouring companies. This informal coordination of strikes across workplaces not only aims at achieving economic goals such as wage rises but has recently been used to express workers’ discontent with government policy. The nature of the strike waves has shifted gradually from economic to political; together with external pressure, this has pushed the top leadership of Vietnam to initiate serious trade union reform.

Bureaucracies of Blood and Belonging: Documents, HIV‐positive Youth and the State in South Africa

Abstract: In response to its constitutional commitments and social welfare provisions in the era of democracy, the post-apartheid South African state is increasingly called upon to provide for the lives and livelihoods of its citizens. These demands have intensified amid escalating joblessness and the highest numbers of people living with HIV worldwide. Over the past decade, antiretroviral treatment (ART) has been incorporated into an ever-expanding welfare bureaucracy, in which access to state assistance is mediated by the collection and monitoring of biometric, bureaucratic data. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic research in the Eastern Cape, this article explores how state documents bring young people on ART into an ambiguous relationship with the state — one that is at once subordinating and enabling. While social research on ART addresses both the empowering and coercive aspects of treatment taking, less attention has been given to how these modes of participation might be mutually constitutive. In this article, the authors examine how the same technologies that discipline youth on ART might also support and protect them; how welfare dependencies entail paradoxical forms of agency; and how the state's ability to control and to ‘care for’ citizens might be reciprocally dependent.