The power of everyday subordination: exploring the silencing and disempowerment of Chinese migrant domestic workers

This paper examines how Chinese female migrant domestic workers are influenced by different forms of subordination; how norms, practices, and power relations enable and legitimize their subordination; and the ways in which subordination elicits compliance while silencing and disempowering the workers. I advance a new perspective on subordination, linking forms of subordination with forms of consciousness. Consciousness of one’s treatment and how one is changed by it informs the decision of whether to remain silent. Compliance, silencing, and disempowerment are facilitated by recognizable and subtle forms of subordination that can directly control individuals’ actions, shift their perspectives, and cause them to act against their own interests. When workers are not conscious of the insidious impact of subtle subordination upon their attitudes, perspectives, and behavior, they are far less likely to resist.     

The Al Saud family and the future of Saudi Arabia

Summary

We have started by asking the question: why are there international income inequalities? We have ascribed them to differences in applied productive knowledge. This raised the question: why can productive knowledge be communicated and diffused within an advanced nation, but not between nations or within underdeveloped nations? What are the obstacles to the international diffusion of benefits ?

We have found these in two areas: obstacles to communication and absence of suitable technologies. The obstacles to communication can again be divided into those due to costs of transfer and those due to intentional restrictions or the exercise of monopoly power. But even perfect communication would not meet the need for quite different technologies from those developed in high‐income countries.

Measures that reduce the Communications Gap might make the Suitability Gap wider and vice versa, but a set of integrated actions attacking both gaps has a chance of success. Technical knowledge cannot be marketed like other products or factors because it possesses peculiar features: (i) indivisibility, (ii) inappropriability, (iii) embodiment in other factors, (iv) uncertainty and (v) impossibility to know its full value until bought. Policies for closing the two gaps are interdependent, so that the pursuit of any one in isolation might make matters worse. What is needed is a set of integrated actions, attacking both the Communications Gap and the Suitability Gap. Transfer must be supplemented by indigenous capability; adaptation by invention and innovation.     

Japan and the international bill of rights

Points of conflict between the operative law and social practices of Japan, and key UN human rights documents are examined. Differences are found to be more frequent and fundamental in terms of economic than political rights. The general response of the Japanese government to these differences has been a defense of prevailing practices. The positions taken by the government are at times at odds with those of significant segments of the Japanese public. Many of the most disadvantaged of the government’s opponents have turned to the UN for assistance in gaining recognition of their basic rights.     

The Shi'a of Saudi Arabia: a minority in search of cultural authenticity

This article focuses on the transformation of Saudi Shi'a resistance from one which centred on military confrontation in the 1980s to one which invokes searching for cultural authenticity (al‐asala al‐shi'iyya) in the 1990s. Today the struggle of the Shi'a for equal status among the Sunni majority draws attention to the attempts of Shi'a intellectuals to write their own regional history. Shi'a intellectuals and opposition leaders deconstruct official representations of themselves and provide alternative historical narratives which anchor their community in Saudi history and society, thus dismissing suggestions that they are a non‐indigenous community. This article examines Shi'a historical narratives in an attempt to understand the transformation in their struggle against discrimination in Saudi Arabia.     

Dispossession and displacement of migrant workers: the impact of state terror and economic development on Uyghurs in urban Xinjiang

ABSTRACT

The media often focuses on the visible aspects of state violence. However, the invisible aspects of everyday struggle often go under-reported. How does dispossession and displacement occur for Uyghurs in Xinjiang? What is the role of their dispossession in securing state territorial control? Some Uyghurs from rural areas in Xinjiang, China have experienced a triple dispossession: displacement from the countryside, alienation in the city, and eviction from the city. The stories concern the agony people feel as they move from rural to urban settings and back again, pain caused by severe hardship in the economic, political and cultural senses. This case shows how economic development works together with interventionist state power to violently dispossess and displace the most vulnerable poor minorities from their homes and livelihoods.