Dominant Discourses,Debates and Silences on Child Labour in Africa and Asia

Drawing on the relevant literature, this article explores key debates and controversies on child labour in the context of Africa and Asia. It first identifies and analyses three dominant discourses on child labour: 1) the work-free childhoods perspective; 2) the socio-cultural perspective; and 3) the political economy perspective. Against the backdrop of these discourses, the article goes on to critically examine aspects of child labour that are underrepresented in the literature and in international policy circles. It concludes by highlighting the importance of grounding children's gendered work within the complex material social practices of interconnected histories and geographies in which their livelihoods unfold.     

Themes in official discourses on terrorism in Central Asia

This article explores the manner in which the governments of Central Asia, in particular Uzbekistan, have analysed and portrayed the actual and perceived threat from Islamist terrorism. It examines and critiques the core themes in this discourse, including the theoretical and legal definitions of the term terrorism, the delegitimisation and depoliticisation of the terrorist and the continuation of Soviet rhetoric on terrorism. It seeks to place this discourse in the wider political culture and objectives of the regimes and the broader security considerations of these newly independent states seeking to consolidate state- and nationhood.     

Evidence on substitutability of adult and child labour

Whether child labour displaces adult labour, giving rise to unemployment, is a matter of their substitutability in production. Using a flexible form production function fitted to data on Egypt's economy, we generate Hicks elasticities of complementarity, own and cross‐price elasticities, as well as simulate employment effects on adult labour as a result of changing the fixed quantity of labour in compliance with the international call to end child labour. Adult males appear to be complementary with, and adult females substitutes for child labour, although the employment effects of banning child labour are inconclusive.     

Women's labour force participation and child care in Romania

This article examines market-led agrarian reform (MLAR) and its variants in the form of voluntary land transfer schemes under the Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program (CARP) in the Philippines. Analysis of MLAR variants in the Philippines offers a preview of what is likely to happen when the MLAR model currently being pushed by the World Bank is implemented in the real world: Not only do MLAR and MLAR-like schemes fail to promote redistributive reform, they also undermine potentially redistributive state-led land reform policies.     

Informed powerlessness: child marriage interventions and Third World girlhood discourses

Child marriage has gained increased international prominence over the past decades. Organisations working with the issue have promoted empowering girls as the best strategy to address it. Informed by postcolonial feminist theory, this article will locate these discourses in broader ‘turn to the girl’ and ‘turn to agency’ in international development, analysing how Third World girlhood, agency, resistance and voice are conceptualised. Girls are constructed as threatened by their families and communities, with agency exercised through resistance and materialised by their voice. I argue that this ignores the complexity of decision-making processes and broader structural factors related to child marriage, so that interventions providing ‘empowerment-as-information’ for girls to be agents of change instead leave them in a state of informed powerlessness.     

The impact of household income on child labour in urban Turkey

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the determinants of child labour in urban Turkey with a special reference to low household income or poverty as one of its root causes. Studies done elsewhere have produced mixed results which necessitate the relationship to be studied at country-level. The data from urban Turkey indicate that children from poorer families stand at a higher risk of employment. This finding is confirmed using various measures of household material well-being. Simulation results have further pointed out that current interventions are not likely to produce a sizeable impact on the child labour problem.     

The regional brand: collective image consciousness in Africa and Southeast Asia

States in the same region are bound together by the ways in which the world imagines them as a collective. One distinguishing feature of post-Cold War regionalism is its outward orientation – the importance of the external dimension of regional cooperation. By and large, though, existing analysis of regional institutional development in the Global South does not explicitly conceptualise and theorise collective image consciousness and management. This paper works to address this conceptual gap. Making use of two cases of regional image crisis – post-1980s Africa and post-1997 Southeast Asia – it draws out two primary logics of regional image consciousness: the logic of influence and the logic of resources. A region’s ‘brand’ with respect to (dys)function and international norm (non-)compliance matters to regional actors because it affects the region’s political influence in international arenas and the region’s ability to attract resources from donors and investors.     

The frustrating partnership: Honor,status, and emotions in Russia's discourses of the West

This paper analyzes Russia's presidential discourses and emotions of the West from March 2008 to December 2012. By studying the languages of inclusiveness and exclusiveness in annual addresses to the Federation Council and public statements, I have identified several distinct stages in the Kremlin's emotional evolution from fear to hope to frustration: the initial fear (March 2008–June 2009), hope (September 2009–the late 2010), and frustration (since the early 2011). The Russia's emotional shifts are shaped by the country's historically established social relations with the West and are not to be reduced to the dynamics of power and prestige/status. Russia's deep emotional connection to the West as well as Russia's own concept of national honor are the two factors that drive the nation's leaders' complex actions, feelings, and rhetoric. Russia displays emotions of hope each time it feels that its honor is being respected and those of frustration, fear and anger when in the eyes of Kremlin its identity/honor as not recognized.     

Dugin,Eurasianism, and Central Asia

Eurasianism as a concept emerged among Russian émigrés in the 1920s, with the premise that Russia is a unique ethnic blend, primarily of Slavic and Turkic peoples. Its geopolitical implications for Russia include gravitation toward mostly Turkic Central Asia. Alexander Dugin, one of its best-known proponents, believes that the demise of the Soviet Union was simply a tragic incident. The people of the former USSR should again be united in a grand Eurasian empire, with Russia a benign and generous patron, providing its “younger brothers” clients economic largesse and defense, mostly against the predatory USA. The “orange revolutions” and the rise of Russian nationalism, for whose proponents a restored imperial presence is rather marginal, indicate that Eurasianism—along with the dream of the resurrection of the USSR—is becoming less viable.     

Socialism,political ideas and the labour party

Nicholas Ellison, Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics. Retreating Visions, (Routledge, London 1994). 272pp. ISBN 0–415–06972–6 (hb).

Eric Shaw, The Labour Party Since 1979. Crisis and Transformation, (Routledge, London 1994). 276pp. ISBN 0–415–05614–4 (hb), 0–415–05615–2 (pb).

Robin Archer, Economic Democracy. The Politics of Feasible Socialism, (Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995). 280pp. ISBN 0–19–827891–8 (hb).     

独大型政党制度:定义、类型及其运作

独大型政党制度作为多党制的一种特殊形态,是指在实行多党竞争的国家,有一个政党由于实力明显超过其他政党实力的总和从而能够单独长期稳定地执掌政权.根据其所处社会结构的性质,可以分为同质社会中的独大型政党制度和分裂社会中的独大型政党制度两种类型.独大型政党制度下政党政治有如下特征:派系政治发达;独大型政党在组织体制及社会发展政策方面具有极强的社会整合能力;反对党的压力边缘化,政治中的民主往往内化为独大型政党内部各派系之间的竞争.     

Seasonality,differential access and interlinking of labour and credit

This article explains the interlinking of rural labour and credit transactions in terms of differential access to credit markets and seasonality. A model is developed which incorporates not only seasonality and differential access but also several other explanations for interlinking suggested in the literature. Moreover, it allows one to test the sensitivity of the results to differing powers on the part of landowners relative to working households.