The South Asia to Gulf Migration Governance Complex – Edited by Crystal A. Ennis and Nicolas Blarel: Review

Namrata RajuLeave a comment

Migration Governance: Moving Away from “Uncle Always Knows”

Almost everyone on social media has that one Instagram friend who posts bronzed pictures in Santorini, or screenshots of champagne flutes atop the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai skyline looming in the background.  To those internationals for whom travelling on holiday was an annual rite of passage, the pandemic’s travel restrictions resulted in adventures that were inopportunely thwarted. Conversely, to economic migrants everywhere, the implications of banned travel, whether by air, train, or foot, equated directly with the fundamental ability to survive. The scrambles of governments worldwide to gauge appropriate responses to COVID-19 was understandable, inasmuch the magnitude of the event was entirely unprecedented, and the need to contain its spread dire. Yet, one of the largest follies of the pandemic remains undebated: instinctive government responses moved to ban travel without duly considering the global interconnectedness of labour markets in the modern age. Belonging to one state but working in another meant that with travel bans, economic migrants were either shackled to their workplaces, away from their families; or held back from gainful employment whilst trapped at home. In most contexts, migrants are to countries like an unknown opening band at a music concert: the audience does not fundamentally care, and everybody is simply waiting for the headline act. In their origin states, migrant workers often escape the focus of governments who are more concerned with those who remain behind. In the meanwhile, the countries to which they migrate often look at them as charity, despite these workers’ crucial role in economic development. Since they belong to places differently, being of and from multiple geographies at once, migrant workers have shifted typical state-worker relationships to a new realm. What, therefore, does good governance look like for an individual- a migrant– who is from several places at once?

Multiple answers to this question can be gleaned from . As the title suggests, the volume focuses on the South Asia-Gulf migration nexus. There are various considerations that render this book highly topical. First, the movement of people around the world, particularly for employment, has outmoded traditional conceptions of citizenship and a worker’s relationship with a state. This necessitates the re-engineering of these traditional conceptions of citizenship in ways that account for a dynamic and modern global workforce which is constantly on the move. Second, a fitting place to start thinking about the redefinition of worker-state relations is from the lens of workers emigrating from South Asia into the Arab Gulf. These geographies are of particular significance given the staggering volume of South Asian emigrants in the Arab Gulf, with over 80 percent of the region’s labour force being comprised of migrants, as Blarel and Ennis describe in their introduction. Governing this sizeable migrant workforce is what is collectively termed Kafala, a complex set of legal and policy frameworks centred around an employer-oriented visa sponsorship system. For years now, the Kafala system has come under severe criticism from human rights groups for rendering low-wage migrant workers in various conditions of modern day slavery, most recently with the . Further compounding the importance of the South Asia-Gulf nexus is the phenomenon of South-South migration, where the Gulf’s ambitious development projects tend to drive largescale demands for a workforce that can be tailored to expand and contract as per their whimsy (Ennis and Blarel; Hamadah; Walton-Roberts et al). Above all, this volume is timely given the now universal tussle between the need for good governance and sustainable worker livelihoods on the one hand, versus competing pressures for labour market flexibility on the other (Devkota; Babar; Hamadah).

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Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Post-Soviet Currency Boards

jsalygaLeave a comment

The surge of right-wing populism in East-Central Europe is often portrayed as an unforeseen shift from the earlier post-1989 liberalization path. The “illiberal transformation” narrative underlines stark differences between the policy arsenals that informed democratization and marketization reforms in the early 1990s and those fueling current “.” Yet this framing conceals the analytical maneuver of disconnecting the political sphere from its socioeconomic counterpart, thereby limiting democracy to the former and defining democratic participation based on electoral competition.

It was precisely this separation, which at the dawn of post-communist transformation, tended to align democratization not with leveling erstwhile power and wealth disparities, but with by the lingering elements of Soviet bureaucracy. Conceived in this way, democratization was deemed to be an engine of market reforms. Insofar as much of the “transitology” scholarship operated with a parochial “democracy” versus “authoritarianism” dichotomy, it repeatedly obscured authoritarian tendencies in consolidating democratic systems.

In the recently published article , I argue that the corpus on “authoritarian neoliberalism” is well-positioned to instigate a much-needed departure from this externalization of “political” and “socioeconomic” spheres when revisiting the intricacies of post-communist transformation in general and monetary reforms in the Baltic states in particular.

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Working Overtime or Being Laid Off: The Pressure under Hopelessness among Workers in Chinese Internet Companies

yunyunyunaaaLeave a comment

“I’ve been working until 1:00 am or later, then getting up at 8:00 am to continue working this week, but my mentor still pointed out a lot of problems that need to be reworked. But there’s no space to escape, if I don’t work harder, I would be laid off in the next quarter. I couldn’t imagine if I lost this job, either I had a rich family to rely on or had some indispensable skills. Now there’s massive laid-off everywhere due to the economic downturn, and it would be extremely hard to find another job if I’m being dismissed. The most probable result of my life would be nothing.”
– Linda, a 26-year-old operation specialist in Tiktok, Shanghai

In China’s bustling urban centers, a significant number of young individuals are employed in Internet firms, driven by the desire for a more promising future characterized by secure employment and affordable housing. Linda’s experienced colleagues at Tiktok, who worked diligently like her, underwent a transformation in their lives. Originating as diligent students from rural or small-town backgrounds as Linda, known as “,”(“小镇做题家”) they excelled academically, performing well in entrance exams and securing places in top universities. While they lacked broader perspectives and social networks, they nonetheless successfully transitioned into urban elites with competitive salaries, stock shares and options from China’s most valuable company in the early years, becoming firmly established in first-tier cities.

However, this once cherished aspiration has been shattered due to the end of rapid growth and the impossibility of significant salary advancements. The soaring property prices in China, especially in big cities, make it impractical for most people to purchase an apartment in such a metropolis, diminishing the chances of achieving such an exciting miracle. Returning to their smaller hometowns or cities is a challenging prospect for these individuals, primarily due to the limited Internet-related job opportunities outside major urban hubs such as Beijing and Shanghai. Furthermore, young individuals like Linda, who often belong to the first generation of college graduates in their families, face immense expectations of securing respectable employment and surpassing their parents’ financial achievements. These young people are swashed down by hopelessness.

Overtime pressure still grows under hopelessness. According to Chinese labor law, workers should not work more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week, and overtime is restricted to 36 hours a month. However, staff in the Internet sector, especially at big tech firms, face unpaid compulsory overtime, . The pervasive in Chinese internet companies is exemplified by the widespread adoption of the (working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week) and the (work six days a week, every other week).  Despite the alarming occurrences of sudden due to long working hours, which serve as a warning to society, the common issue of excessive overtime work remains largely unchanged.

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Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya: Q&A with Matteo Capasso

Farwa Sial1 Comment

In Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Matteo Capasso provides an alternative analysis of Libya’s history and regime under Colonel Gaddafi leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. The book offers a compelling counterargument to the mainstream narrative of Libya as a stateless, authoritarian and rogue state by focusing on international and geopolitical dynamics impacting Libya’s governance.

Q.1 Your book argues against the dominant western analysis of Libya under Colonel Gaddafi as a dictatorship, completely dependent on its economic legitimacy from oil. To quote:

‘This book has cautioned readers from rushing to define the Jamahiriya as an umpteenth authoritarian regime in the Arab world that crushes and controls its people. The significance of this issue lies in how the increasing repressible characteristic of the regime inevitably reflected wider power’. 

What do you mean by wider power dynamics?

When you pick any book on the political history of Libya, you are bound to encounter the argument that Qaddafi’s Libya (not the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya or the Libyan government) was a stateless society, governed ruthlessly by a dictator who was aiming to disrupt the US-led international order.? In the book, I define these arguments as a conceptual tryptic, including the ideas of statelessness, authoritarianism and rogue state. The book starts off questioning the use of these analytical frameworks and instead proposes to address questions of political legitimacy and authority via the study of the everyday. To do so, however, brought me to face another problem, namely the fact that most academic studies approach the ‘everyday’ with an overemphasis on the agency and power of the people. This, in turn, has led to dismiss a bit too quickly the impact of global and structural factors; and this is where I come to answer your question. While the everyday gained prominence and became a privileged site for studying politics in the Arab region, especially in the aftermath of the 2011 mass uprisings, these analyses ?remain disconnected from long-standing international dynamics of politics and political economy. In other worlds, how were these states integrated in the wider international political economy? Did the political projects pursued by the Libyan government, especially in the aftermath of the 1969 revolution, challenge the interests of Western geopolitical forces? Why was Libya progressively subject to military assaults and geopolitical pressure?? If one ignores—rather conveniently—these aspects, it ends up to square one, basically explaining the politics of the country as the result of internal factors. In this manner, one not only delinks the socio-political formation of countries in the Global South from the international world, but also ends up flattening out its hierarchies existing.

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The Salaried Man and His Others: Rethinking Pressure in the Longue Durée

Jordanna MatlonLeave a comment

Colon statue, C?te d’Ivoire. Author’s collection, 2023.

The burgeoning scholarship over the past several decades documenting youth stalled in their quest for adulthood, the scholarship on waiting, on restless underemployed laborers buying time in the informal economy, on the crisis of African masculinities, on the accumulating material and psychic pressures of unmet familial and community responsibilities – all these are ways of depicting the longue durée of failure best contextualized within the beguiled patriarchal promise of colonial civilizing missions: the breadwinning wage.

In this blog, I draw from my recent book, , to explore how socioeconomic forces particular to the postcolonial African city induce a permanent state of pressure among young men at the interrupted point of social becoming. Observing that the crisis of work is also a crisis of masculinity, I historicize the pressures of late capitalism in African cities – namely, surviving in informal economies – within the longue durée of the wage economy. I show how the introduction of wage labor during European colonial rule produced at its outset an overwhelmingly unachievable male breadwinner norm. The salary was both an entitlement and a source of intense pressure as it produced a novel form of patriarchal privilege but also the social and domestic responsibilities that came to collapse manhood with this exceptional, and exceptionally rare, form of economic activity. Examining these pressures within the long shadow of colonialism critically illuminates the role of race-making and racial difference in the emergence of financial expectation and deeply personalized societal failure among contemporary urban African men.

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Walt Rostow’s development theory shows that capitalism relies on brutal violence

benjaminselwynLeave a comment

Economist Walt Rostow advanced an influential development theory while working as an adviser to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Rostow’s advocacy of murderous violence in Vietnam flowed directly from his theory of how to promote capitalist growth.

Commonsense notions of development associate it with capitalist modernization. Such notions assume that cumulative economic growth enables poor countries to become more like rich ones.

To facilitate such growth, policymakers, international institutions, and many academics urge poor countries and their populations to adopt modern ways of thought and action, dispensing with familial or communal loyalties and embracing the benefits of capitalist markets and impersonal bureaucracies.

Those who adopt this perspective insist that such modernization will be beneficial for developing societies in the long run, even though there will always be those who lose out and seek to resist the process. However, since the benefits of economic growth and cultural change outweigh the losses, it is legitimate to forcefully suppress such opposition.

No thinker was more influential in theorizing and popularizing such notions of development underpinned by violent coercion than Walt Whitman Rostow (1916–2003).

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Colonialism and Indian Famines: A Response

Tirthankar RoyLeave a comment

Tamoghna Halder criticized one of my writings on nineteenth-century Indian famines. Halder distorts my views and wrongly implies that I suppressed data. He misreads the very nature of the Indian famine debate, thinking it is about facts. It is not. It is about method, about how economic historians and development scholars should read the history of climatic shocks. The piece demands a response and a clarification of the issues involved.

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