Global South rhetoric in India’s policy projection

While an on-going statist project tries to portray India as a ‘rising power’ in world politics, the fact remains that India’s global projection continues to be heavily fashioned by the Global South rhetoric. Such rhetoric is inclusive of irredentism and contestation with western norms and ideals along with cooperation leading to a complex process of interactions shaping up the global order. For countries like India being claimant to the status of ‘civilisational state’, the strong urge for autonomy along with the self-perception of national and cultural greatness is shared by the elite along with a sense of strategic importance. Such identity formation, however, reduces and sometimes obliterates the gaps between ‘internal’ and ‘external’, bringing into academic scrutiny the whole range of policymaking and to what extent it matches the state rhetoric.     

Migration diplomacy in the Global South: cooperation,coercion and issue linkage in Gaddafi’s Libya

Despite a recent resurgence in research on the politics of migration, foreign policy analysts have yet to approach cross-border population mobility as a distinct field of inquiry. Particularly within the Global South, scant work has theorised the interplay between migration and interstate bargaining. This article proposes the framework of migration diplomacy to examine how mobility features in states’ issue-linkage strategies, in both cooperative and coercive contexts. Drawing on Arabic, French and English primary sources, it empirically demonstrates the salience of its framework through an analysis of Libya’s migration diplomacy towards its Arab, African and European neighbours under Muammar Gaddafi.     

Women’s Political Participation in Bangladesh: Role of Women’s Organizations

Reviewing the history of women’s movement, this article expects to find a large role of women’s organizations in the process of change that has helped to increase participation of women in local government political process of Bangladesh. While there is considerable support for the presence of the women’s movement, there is much ambivalence as to the specifics of such influence: its objects, means, and magnitude. The difficulty in assessing influence may stem from the reliance on informal channels, which makes tracing and tracking influence a great challenge, and calls for more grounded research to expose the intricate interactions between actors.     

Participation in Micro-Finance Programmes and Women’s Mental Health in South Asia: A Modified Systematic Review

Micro-finance provides financial services to poor women from developing countries where cultural and social constraints limit their opportunities for economic advancement. Using Forbes’s process of conducting systematic review, 12 quantitative studies from South Asia reporting on the impact of micro-finance on women’s mental health outcomes were analysed. Overall, studies revealed that the duration and depth of involvement in micro-finance activities would make a difference in women’s mental health and not just receiving loans; however, rigorous programme evaluation is needed. Collaborative actions by micro-finance and health care practitioners to recognise women’s mental health needs and to strengthen measures to optimise the beneficial effects of micro-finance must be considered.     

‘High Value’ Migration and Complicity in Underdevelopment and Corruption in the Global South: receiving from the attic

Through a focus on the UK's ‘High Value Migrants’ programme, this article directs attention to how commercial migration laws and policies of developed countries could negatively affect the global South. Drawing mainly on insights from criminology and development studies, it investigates how the commercial migration laws and policies, specifically the aspects that deal with encouraging or attracting ‘high-value’ foreign entrepreneurs and investors, make the state potentially complicit in corruption and underdevelopment in the global South. There is an important need to address the implicated migration laws and policies as a critical and integral part of international efforts to combat corruption and promote peace and development in the global South. Reform of such laws and policies is in the long-term interest of all stakeholders.     

Reconsidering Women’s Empowerment: the Contradictory Effects of Microfinance for Guatemalan Women

In light of changing global trends that connect women’s empowerment and development, this paper extends debates by exploring how projects aimed at empowering women in the Global South intertwine with diverse women’s lived realities in ways that complicate assessments of “success” or “failure.” The article begins by analyzing the incorporation of the concept of empowerment into mainstream development, demonstrating that the conceptual fuzziness of empowerment has allowed it to be associated with vastly different development strategies: some have interpreted it narrowly to promote self-help strategies whereas others have interpreted it broadly to promote structural change. The former has targeted women with “choice-enhancing” resources that are thought to have spillover effects; the latter tends to adopt a more holistic approach. In order to explore how these contrasting strategies affect women’s empowerment experiences and outcomes on the ground, this article then draws on comparative ethnographies of two microfinance non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that are emblematic of these diverging approaches. It finds that despite their differences, both spillover and holistic approaches lead to diverse and contradictory experiences that defy easy classification as “empowering” or “disempowering.” This finding reveals the advantages and limitations of relying on the concept of empowerment for evaluating development outcomes and raises questions about our ability to generalize about the effects of the varying approaches encompassed under the current feminization of policy. The analysis also suggests that we should adjust our understanding of women’s agency to include the agency women exercise when they transform, challenge, or reject empowerment projects themselves.     

Minority Reconsidered: Towards a Typology of Latvia’s Russophone Identity

Abstract

Latvia’s Russophones are often seen as a consolidated ethno-linguistic unit. The goal of this essay is to test this assumption by exploring Russophones’ in-group differentiation over an extended period of time. Conceptually, the essay combines social representation theory with the quadratic nexus model. By analysing cross-sectional survey data it is argued that citizenship of Latvia and generational belonging are two major factors that explain the deviation from the standard model of identification that is primarily imposed by Russia as a symbolic homeland. The essay also suggests that the standard model has experienced inconsistent support over the years and this has opened up space for identification with a more emancipated in-group representation.     

Micro-Finance,Women’s Empowerment and Fertility Decline in Bangladesh: How Important Was Women’s Agency?

Abstract

As Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has argued “[Bangladesh’s development achievements have] important lessons for other countries across the globe, [in particular a focus on] reducing gender inequality”. A major avenue through which this emphasis has been manifest lies, according to this narrative, in enhancements to women’s agency for instrumental and intrinsic reasons particularly through innovations in family planning and microfinance. The “Bangladesh paradox” of improved wellbeing despite low economic growth over the last four decades is claimed as a paradigmatic case of the spread of both modern family planning programmes and microfinance leading to women’s empowerment and fertility reduction. In this paper we show that the links between microfinance, empowerment and fertility reduction, are fraught with problems, and far from robust; hence the claimed causal links between microfinance and family planning via women’s empowerment needs to be further reconsidered.     

Will blockchain emerge as a tool to break the poverty chain in the Global South?

Just like its recent predecessors, blockchain – also known as the distributed ledger technology – is considered to have the potential to cause major economic, political and social transformations in the Global South. The visible effects of this technology are already being noted there. We present early evidence linking the use of blockchain in overcoming some economic, social and political challenges facing the Global South. The article highlights the key applications and uses of blockchain in developing countries. It demonstrates how blockchain can help promote transparency, build trust and reputation, and enhance efficiency in transactions. The article looks at opportunities and key triggers for blockchain diffusion in these countries. It also delves into challenges and obstacles that developing economies are likely to encounter in the use of blockchain.     

Television on Women’s Empowerment in India

Abstract

We used a nationwide demographic survey to study the relation between television exposure and women’s empowerment in India. Ordinary least squares (OLS) results suggested that TV exposure improved Indian women’s status. We used the propensity score matching (PSM) method to mitigate the potential threat of endogeneity. The results indicate that TV exposure is correlated with greater awareness of autonomy, greater financial independence, less unwanted pregnancy (birth control), negative attitude toward beating, a lower tendency of giving birth, a smaller family, and a lower preference level for sons.     

Women’s Rights, Shari‘a Law, and the Secularization of Islam in Iran

Rather than a simple imposition of the shari‘a law, the Islamization of postrevolutionary Iran transpired at the intersection of political necessities, social realities, religious considerations, and legislative initiatives. As much as the Islamization project transformed society, this social transformation also reconfigured the meaning of the shari‘a and expanded the boundaries of communities with interpretive authority over its legal injunctions. The Iranian postrevolutionary experience highlights the fallacies of bifurcated conceptions of religion and politics and more specifically that of church and state. Through the examination of two important legislations on abortion rights and women’s inheritance, I show the contingencies in which the shari‘a is understood and contested in public. The success or failure of the Islamic Republic depends not on the separation of church and state but on how pluralistic and open the communities that lay claim on religious interpretive authority will become.     

Women’s Participation in Communal Activities in Rural Bangladesh

This article seeks to examine the extent of women’s participation in communal activities in rural Bangladesh, based on an analysis of a development programme, namely REFLECT (Regenerated Freirean Literacy through Empowering Community Techniques). This article evaluates the REFLECT programme with regard to its stated goal of enhancing female participation in local community affairs. Using Michael Mann’s classification of sources of power, the study emphasises the importance of participation as a contribution to political as well as ideological power in the community of Monsurabad Island in rural Bangladesh. To that end, this article aims at analysing women’s participation in community decision-making processes through voting behaviour, traditional village court (Salish) involvement and other civic activities. This study also reviews the views of village elders (matabars) on women’s participation at the communal level and the resulting empowerment. Based on the views of participant women themselves, the study concludes that the implementation of the REFLECT project in the local community under investigation has indeed resulted in empowering women, but this effect remains confined to their families and the handling of women’s issues. As the effect of the REFLECT project has not reached out to the realm of community politics, its impact on women’s participation in the community has been limited. This study argues that without any change in the existing social fabric of Monsurabad, women’s ideological power in that community could not be transformed into political power in accordance with Michael Mann’s theory.     

Domestic Violence and Women’s Land Rights in Rural China: Findings from a National Survey in 2010

In recent decades, China undertook a series of agricultural land tenure reforms to increase the security of land use rights for rural households. While these reforms boosted agricultural production, they also increased landlessness among women due to patrilocal and patrilineal customs. Utilising data from China’s Women Social Status Survey conducted in 2010, this paper examines the impact of women’s land rights on the incidence of domestic violence in rural China. The results show that women who have lost claims to contract land or have no residential land face significantly higher risks of being physically or psychologically abused by their husbands.