Blogging Zhanaozen: hegemonic discourse and authoritarian resilience in Kazakhstan

Post-Soviet authoritarian regimes – particularly in Central Asia – have proved highly resilient since independence. Existing explanations for regime longevity should be augmented by consideration of non-material, discursive sources of political legitimacy. A robust authoritarian regime requires the production and circulation of a hegemonic discourse that is internalized by influential social groups. This type of dominant discourse has emerged in Kazakhstan, making it difficult for political opponents to promote alternative political imaginaries and mobilize popular support. State control over media is challenged by Internet-based platforms, but in Kazakhstan social media and blogging have also offered an opportunity for the regime to reproduce its own hegemonic discourse. This article uses a discourse analysis of posts by bloggers in the aftermath of a violent conflict in Zhanaozen in Kazakhstan in 2011 to demonstrate how central elements in the state discourse are reproduced online, even by independent bloggers, suggesting that an official discourse has the ability to maintain its hegemonic status despite widespread use of blogs and social media.     

The integration of cooptation and coercion: China’s Taiwan strategy since 2001

In the past half-decade, China has developed a careful balance of cooptative and coercive power in its attempts to dampen the Taiwan independence movement and pursue political unification. In essence, attempts to curry favor with politically relevant constituencies on Taiwan have been paired with attempts to diplomatically isolate and militarily threaten the island's top policymakers. This balance is risky because of the possibility that it may appear too lenient to PRC nationalists, and too provocative to ROC residents. Nevertheless, the current structure of carrots and sticks has emerged for three reasons. First, the institutional coherence of Chinese decision-making and implementation has allowed for the viability of an adaptive, long-term approach. Second, the constraints on both unreinforced cooptation and coercive diplomacy have mediated toward a posture in which the former is enhanced and the latter downplayed. Third, expanded external opportunities in recent years have made it possible to exploit this middle ground.     

Toward the center: Implications of integration and democratization for Taiwan’s mainland policy

Two fundamental changes have taken place in Taiwan in recent years. One is its economic integration with the Chinese mainland and the other is political democratization in the island. Whereas the economic integration has led to the development of a new structure of interests favoring current relations between Taiwan and the mainland, the political democratization process has discouraged radical voices of the political extremes. These two developments have reduced Taipei’s choices on its mainland policy. While undermining such extreme positions as reunification or independence, they have increasingly favored more moderate policy options in between.     

Narratives of Islam in Uzbekistan: authoritarian myths and the Janus-state syndrome

ABSTRACT

Under the late Islom Karimov, the authoritarian regimes in Uzbekistan created dual myths of Islam. On the one hand, Islam was encompassed in the larger context of manaviyat (spirituality), and on the other, a myth of an Islamic ‘extremism’ that challenges security and stability on a regional scale was cultivated. This ‘threat’ is so pervasive and pernicious that it commands the authoritarian nature of governance that characterizes the Karimov era, leading to a Janus-state syndrome in which Islam is simultaneously cast as a sine qua non of national myth and an existential threat to state security. This article examines the mythology of political Islam in Uzbekistan and the Janus-state syndrome resulting from the duality of Islamic myth. It argues that a civil society cannot flourish in Central Asia unless moderate Islamic groups are allowed to build the very social structures that provide the foundation for interaction, peaceful coexistence, toleration and pluralism.     

Education for Child Labour: Evaluating the National Child Labour Policy in West Bengal,India

Transitioning child labourers from work to education is a key component of global efforts to eliminate child labour. In India, the National Child Labour Project is the central programme aimed at achieving this goal. This paper examines the operation of the project in the state of West Bengal using original survey data collected in 2008. The survey reveals a number of promising findings, including high rates of provision of both midday meals and free learning materials to students, as well as evidence of adequate schooling quality and availability. However, areas of concern were also identified, including irregularities in stipend payments to parents of child labourers who send their children to school and inadequate provision of free health services to children who attend school rather than work. These operational short-comings revealed by the survey reduce the incentive and ability parents have to send their children to school rather than work and, accordingly, undermine the effectiveness of the project.     

Street-level Politics: Labour Protests in Post-authoritarian Indonesia

This article discusses the promotion of economic “reintegration” programs among migrant domestic workers in Hong Kong. The programs include training migrants in savings and investment, business planning and entrepreneurship, with the immediate aim of helping them to achieve some steady income as an alternative to continued working overseas, and the longer-term objective of channelling migrant savings into national economic development “back home.” The reintegration programs are analysed in the context of hegemonic neo-liberal or popular capitalism, which inter alia, encourages the transformation of citizens with rights into entrepreneurs who can be held responsible for their own failures. It argues that such programs discipline rather than liberate migrant workers and that despite good intentions on the part of progressive non-government organisations (NGOs), represent individualistic solutions to structural problems which may undermine campaigns like the campaign for the rights of migrant workers and their families.     

Post-socialist China: Labour relations in Korean-managed factories

Abstract

How are labour relations practiced in Korean-managed factories in China? It is often said that labour relations in Korean transnational factories are abusive, even despotic. In this article, I argue that the disciplinary nature of labour relations in Korean factories in China is more complex and so multi-dimensional that they cannot be characterised as a simple economic matter of labour exploitation. These relations entail hierarchical segregation, normalising workers' behaviour through fines and salary reductions, personal degradation and dissimilar cultural practices.     

The five shades of grey: party systems and authoritarian institutions in post-Soviet Central Asian states

ABSTRACT

This article overviews and seeks to explain the processes of party system formation in the post-Soviet Central Asian states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) by focusing on a crucial party-system property, fragmentation. The analysis reveals that to a much greater extent than in democracies, where party systems are largely shaped by societal factors, the level of party system fragmentation in autocracies is determined by the scope of presidential powers, as entrenched in the formal institutional order and reflected in the national constitution. The level of authoritarianism is largely inconsequential for party system fragmentation, while the role of electoral rules is secondary. Institutionally weak and institutionally strong autocratic presidents have a preference for fragmented party systems, while presidents with an intermediate range of powers seek and obtain low levels of party system fragmentation.     

Organised Labour,Dualisation and Labour Market Reform: Korean Trade Union Strategies in Economic and Social Crisis

Labour markets across industrialised countries have seen an increasing polarisation between insiders and outsiders as a result of labour market deregulation and welfare retrenchment, with governments responding to rising pressure from employers. But where are trade unions in this process of labour market deregulation and dualisation? Insider/outsider as well as producer coalition approaches portray organised labour as a structurally conservative force that is ready to prioritise the interests of insiders at the expense of those at the margins of the labour market. Rather than protecting the entire working class, unions are seen as being “complicit” in labour market dualisation that leaves an ever greater number of workers vulnerable. Our examination of the Korean case, though commonly perceived as an example of unions pursuing particularistic interests, does not comply with this image, but shows greater union inclusiveness in the face of socio-economic and socio-political challenges. Understanding the change in Korean trade union strategies, we highlight the critical importance of union identities shifting towards social movement unionism, in addition to the perceived imperative to revitalise the movement in order to remain a meaningful social force.     

The Hidden Ingredient: Female Labour in Chilean Fruit Exports

Abstract — The Chilean fruit export sector has expanded rapidly over the past decade. A large army of female temporary workers is recruited annually to work in the fruit export sector, playing a key role in the preparation of high quality off-season fruit for northern markets. Despite their annual employment in a modern export sector, these temporary workers remain a marginalised force in Chile, reflected in the significant underestimation of the female agricultural labour force. This paper examines the reasons for their marginalisation. the gender segmentation of the temporary fruit labour market, and considers the potential effect of increased international competition on the employment of female temporary labour.     

Precarious Work and its Complicit Network: Migrant Labour in Singapore

ABSTRACT

How does precarious work entail social vulnerabilities and moral complicities? Theorists of precarity pose two challenges for analysing labour conditions in Asia. Their first challenge is to distinguish the new kinds of social vulnerability which constitute precarious work. The second is to assign moral responsibility in the social network that produces vulnerability in depoliticised and morally detached ways. In this article, the social and normative dimensions of precarious work are connected through a conceptual investigation into how Singapore allocates responsibility for managing temporary migrant labour. First, it analyses how various management strategies, driven by globalisation and government deregulation, increase worker vulnerabilities. These strategies intensify relations of dependence, disempowerment and discrimination, which the workers may accommodate or resist in limited ways. Second, it assesses why the strategies leave the state, employers, agents and others complicit in producing the vulnerabilities. These actors enable, collaborate with, or condone the production of precarity. Their complicity is complicated by varying support or resistance to reforms. The result is a novel conceptual scheme for analysing the complicit network behind precarious work, which can be used in other sites of precarity where some are complicit in the vulnerability of others.     

Women's Labour in the Islamic Republic of Iran: Losers and Survivors

This article examines the changes in the female class structure of the urban work force in post-revolutionary Iran by investigating the rate and pattern of the exclusion and the incorporation of women in the market between 1976 and 2006. We examine the gender marginalization thesis and test it empirically by focusing on the class nature of women's exclusion and incorporation into the labour force. We rely on decennial census data and present our empirical finding in the context of the social hierarchy of work. Moreover, we provide a comparative empirical analysis of the economic marginalization process for urban women's and men's class locations historically.     

Secondary Precarity in Asia: Family Vulnerability in an Age of Unfree Labour

ABSTRACT

Scholarly discussions of precarious work have identified and analysed the conditions and structures that produce precarity, the contextual nuances that characterise worker relations across a range of sites and sectors and the possibilities of resistance by the precariat. In these studies, workers are often discussed with inadequate attention to their social embeddedness. Taking workers’ embeddedness in social relations and norms as a starting point for analysis, this article explores a secondary aspect of precarity amongst families of exploited workers. This aspect is analysed according to three registers of vulnerability and risk: economic (household and livelihood), intimate (anxiety and negative emotional relations) and physical (mobility and movement). The article outlines this framework through a case study of trafficked fishers and their families from Cambodia and the Philippines. Human trafficking is an extreme form of precarious labour, characterised by unfreedom and hyper-exploitation. The article contributes to the understanding of the trafficking of migrant fishers, which has not seen rigorous academic documentation and is relatively poorly understood in comparison to other forms of trafficking.     

Labour and Epistemic Communities: The Case of 'Managed Migration' in the UK

How do new ideas flow through networks to reframe policy questions, and what role is played by the growing world of think tanks and policy experts? This article takes the remarkable shift in UK labour migration policy since 2000 and demonstrates how policy was redesigned by networks of actors working between and within the worlds of think tanks and government, including the Prime Minister's Policy and Innovation Unit (PIU), the Treasury, the Home Office and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). The article shows how different kinds of ideas and knowledge flowed through different actors and networks to influence the reframing of policy, using the epistemic communities hypothesis (ECH) as a theoretical framework for the analysis.