Trafficking of Ethiopian women to Europe – making choices,taking risks,and implications

ABSTRACT

This piece focuses on the Ethiopian women victims of trafficking – the agency of these women in the whole trafficking process, and issues of choice – ‘trying a chance’, or just taking a risk to get out of poverty or difficult social circumstances, considering that they are lured, tricked, coerced, or even forced into the hands of traffickers by a wide range of circumstances and people, including family and friends. Traffickers target girls with economic, social, and family problems. Most of the trafficking of women and girls from Ethiopia is carried out through the use of service ‘agencies’ and human smugglers who facilitate the process of migration through a number of routes. Many of those who use the ‘desert route’ often begin from Sudan to North Africa from where they cross to Europe. The data for this contribution were generated in a study – ‘Captured in Flight: Experiences of violence among African women in Sweden’ – funded by the Swedish crime prevention agency (Brottsoffermyndgheten). The research for the project has been carried out in Sweden, but the women whose case studies are presented here have been in the Middle East, Turkey, Italy, Finland, and Greece before coming to Sweden.     

Manhunt Presidency: Obama,race, and the Third World

Abstract

President Obama’s commitment to a creedal narrative of American exceptionalism and his understanding of the Third World as a space of ontological deficit together made for a presidency that could neither mitigate the structural racism of the United States nor deflect a racist foreign policy premised on an unending war against terror. By examining the murders of two American teenagers – Trayvon Martin and Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki – this essay argues that the very self-fashioning narratives that propelled Obama to the presidency of the United States rendered him incapable of effecting any substantive changes in the racism than animates its domestic and foreign policies.     

Hedonists and husbands: piracy narratives,gender demands,and local political economic realities in Somalia

The grand narrative of piracy has been instrumental in shaping how piracy off the coast of Somalia is understood and responded to. Self-proclaimed pirates, suspected pirates, and convicted piracy prisoners continue to tell the story of taking up arms against foreign illegal fishers to protect their personal livelihoods as well as Somalia’s natural resources. Although the grand narrative remains the most popular piracy narrative, this paper introduces and examines two newly emergent narratives of Somali piracy – the Somali women’s narrative and the piracy prisoner self-narrative. I explore how these narratives reveal a central paradox surrounding piracy and social reproduction in Somalia that, until now, has been absent from discussions about piracy narratives and the issue of Somali piracy. Whereas the grand narrative of piracy fails to address gender demands and local political economic realities in Somalia, the new narratives present piracy as a gendered experienced that is situated within the broader, evolving context of courtship and marriage in Somalia. I argue the new narratives can help push beyond over-simplistic understandings of piracy off the coast of Somalia as a ‘man’s crime’ that should be addressed by men.     

Commemorating 1917 in Russia: Ambivalent State History Policy and the Church’s Conquest of the History Market

Abstract

Russia’s historical policy towards the centenary of 1917 was composed of several parallel strategies: diminishing the meaning of the event to avoid the head of state and other government figures having to take a stance; outsourcing commemorative events, with no pre-planned grand design; developing a reconciliatory narrative of the ‘Whites’ and the ‘Reds’; and allowing other actors to promote a plurality of contradictory readings of the events. Yet the space left by the state’s refusal to commemorate 1917 has been taken over by the Church, which, as today’s most active engineer of Russia’s historical policy, promoted a very clear pro-Tsarist narrative best embodied by the multimedia historical park ‘Russia—my history’ (Rossiya—moya istoriya).     

Intergenerational Consequences of Early Age Marriages of Girls: Effect on Children’s Human Capital

Abstract

We use nationally representative data from India on test scores in an instrumental variable framework to identify the effects of early age marriages of girls on the human capital of their children. Early age marriages reduce mother’s educational attainment, which can adversely impact the education outcomes of their children. On the other hand, better marriage prospects of young brides may compensate and improve children’s educational outcomes by way of resource provision. Consequently, the effect of early age marriages of girls on their children is theoretically ambiguous and warrants an empirical examination. In our empirical analysis, we use variation in age at menarche to instrument for age at marriage. Our estimates show that a delay of one year in the age at marriage of the mother increases the probability of being able to do the most challenging arithmetic and reading tasks on the administered test by 3.5 percentage points.     

Marx’s critical political economy, ‘Marxist economics’ and actually occurring revolutions against capitalism

Abstract

Most revolutions against capitalism have occurred in ‘backward’ and Third World societies, and they have divided and disarrayed Marxisms in the West. One key reason, this paper argues, is intellectual. When, long ago, Marxists surrendered to the bourgeois challenge to Marx – neoclassical economics – developing, in place of Marx’s critical political economy, a ‘Marxist economics’, they lost touch with Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production. That analysis could illuminate how capitalism’s contradictions drive its imperialist expansionism and how and why resistance to it must, equally necessarily, take national forms. As a result, major currents of Marxism in the West either have paid attention to imperialism and anti-imperialist resistance but without Marx’s analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production or have insisted that their (mistaken) conception of Marx’s analysis implies that capitalism has no necessary connection with imperialism. Neither tradition can actually develop Marxism to comprehend the actual historical record of revolutions since Marx’s time. Neither can inform new mobilisations against capitalism, whether in or outside its homelands. It is high time we return to Marx’s analysis of capitalism as value production and develop it.     

Local governments and their arm’s length bodies

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we discuss the state of the art on the creation of arm’s length bodies (ALBs) by local governments. We make three main contributions. First, there are many different types of ALBs and each country has its own categories; an expert survey was held identifying three common types of body, to enable future comparative research. Second, we point out that the creation of ALBs has led to a number of new challenges for local governments, particularly regarding governing bodies at arm’s length to ensure ALBs’ good performance. A lack of capacity and information have to be countered, for example, by increased monitoring – also for democratic accountability purposes. Special attention is needed for the multiple principal problem that arises when local governments jointly create ALBs. Third, research into local ALBs is still in its early stages. We present a research agenda to develop knowledge on the topic.     

Convergence as political strategy: social justice movements,natural resources and climate change

Abstract

Critical scholars and activists have now been contending with a widely recognised convergence of global crises for a decade. The issues have intersected decisively, with staple food sources proving inaccessible for the world’s poor, banks foreclosing on the most vulnerable, fuel sources causing war and impacting migration, and climate change-related instabilities shaking low-income communities to their core. At the same time, agrarian, environmental, indigenous and fishers’ movements – among others – have used this moment to converge in their own right. This article explores this intertwining of social justice movements with an eye on such interrelated challenges. Its overall objective is, on one side, to provide some broad empirical brushstrokes on the intertwining of transnational social justice movements at the local, national and regional scales as they work with and trade frameworks of food sovereignty and climate justice. On the flip side, this article offers a set of tools to analyse and understand the politics of convergence as political strategy – as a means of advancing global social justice – against the rising tide of climate-related resource grabs.     

Plural strategies of accessing land among peri-urban squatters

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses strategies utilized by migrants/squatters in accessing land for settlement and livelihoods in places where the state and the indigenes are not sympathetic to their needs. Although of significant policy and theoretical significance, this area has not received attention from scholarship, its dominant focus being on understanding the diverse origins, destinations, drivers and processes of migration. In addressing this issue, the study uses the case of Malawian migrants located in Zimbabwe’s peri-urban area of Norton. The finding of the paper is that there are as many strategies for acquiring land as they are migrants. The identified strategies (inheritance, seizures, and purchase) are contingent based – varying according to the access of the parties involved in the transactions.     

Revolutions: a twenty-first-century perspective

Abstract

We held the ‘Revolutions’ conference in 2017 to commemorate the Russian Revolution and redeem the actual record of revolutions in the Third World for the left. A quarter-century after the demise of the USSR, we found liberal capitalist triumphalism unwarranted. Two of the most important expectations to which it gave rise – that the world had become ‘unipolar’ and that it would enjoy a ‘peace dividend’ – remained unfulfilled. Instead, the world became multipolar and the West, led by the United States, engaged in unprecedented economic and military aggression against countries that contested its power. If this were not enough, social unrest and explosions in the First World as well as the Third underlined the relevance of revolutions. To trace their lineage, we recall capitalism’s intimate relation with revolution. It has needed revolutions to usher it into history and to usher it out. In addition to revolutions against developed capitalism, we also underline how important and necessary revolutions against nascent capitalism in various parts of the world have been. The contributions in this volume explore different parts of this lineage and vivify revolutions for our time.     

Local Council Development Areas and Local Service Delivery: How a Fourth-tier Government Unit is Improving Access to Primary Health Care and Education Services in Lagos,Nigeria

ABSTRACT

Emerging accidentally from an array of political and legal contestations is a fourth-tier government unit in Lagos state – Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs). The LCDAs have survived almost two decades of existence without the ’traditional’ monthly federal allocation, which has been the mainstay of the existing 774 LGAs in Nigeria. This study attempts an explanation of this apparent survival by examining the institutional structure of the LCDAs vis-à-vis their service delivery performance. Different from earlier studies that have examined service delivery using final outcomes, the study examines accessibility as an intermediate output; dimensioned as availability, adequacy and affordability. Using a mixed-methods research design, the study shows that Lagos LCDAs’ inclusive operational structure is significantly improving access to primary health care and education services. Thus, the study finds evidence within the operational structure of Lagos LCDAs for Acemoglu and Robinson’s theory of inclusive and extractive institutions.     

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.     

President or Predator? The Social Construction of Donald Trump in a Divided America

ABSTRACT

During the presidential election, numerous women accused Donald Trump of sexual harassment and/or assault. Then a presidential candidate, he denied these complaints and said the women were all untruthful – a position he has continued to espouse. To explore “who the public believes,” we commissioned YouGov to conduct an opt-in online survey of a national sample of 1,000 Americans. Notably, half of Americans (51.0%) believed that “the women are telling the truth when they reported that Mr. Trump sexually harassed or assaulted them” versus 23.1% who sided with the president. Nearly two-thirds (64.9%) stated that it was unlikely that all the women were lying, and 3 in 5 Americans (60.5%) supported President Trump’s impeachment by the U.S. Congress if these accusations could be proven. Informed by research on political psychology (especially Haidt’s The Righteous Mind), the data are explored to see why Americans embrace divergent moral narratives – with some seeing Mr. Trump as a truthful president and others seeing him as a predator unworthy of the office he holds.     

The (un)making of Bimshire and the Black Englishman: Barbadian nationalism in post-colonial Britain

This paper considers Partha Chatterjee’s [1993. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press] theory of anti-colonial nationalism – itself a response to Benedict Anderson [(1983) 2006. Imagined Communities. Reprint, London: Verso] – to understand how migrants from Barbados and their children construct their national identities in postcolonial Britain. Using interviews with first-, second- and third-generation Barbadian-Britons, it aims to determine what it means to be Barbadian, fifty years since independence, and how this identity has developed in the long shadow of colonialism and the more recent era of sovereignty. Guided by Chatterjee’s framework of spiritual and material nationalism, the findings locate Barbadian nationalism in the dynamic spiritual domain of family, racial consciousness and culture, unaffected by British aesthetic and institutions that have endured since the island’s occupation. How is this identity constructed within the borders of the former colonial power? This research locates the Caribbean within these competing discourses of nationalism, particularly nationalism as it responds and adapts to migration.     

Preventing violence through hip hop: an evolutionary perspective

ABSTRACT

For decades Hip Hop cultural practices have been disparaged for allegedly inciting and being responsible for the eruption of urban violence. This assumption, likely built upon pre-existing biases regarding the street culture and ethnic minorities where Hip Hop emerged, ignored how some of the genre’s main elements – particularly freestyle rap, breakin’ or breakdancing and graffiti tagging – initially served the purpose of providing at-risk youths with real alternatives to direct physical violence in their day-to-day lives, and continue do so today. It has also ignored broader analogies with other cross-cultural and cross-species manifestations of similar practices that have served for millennia as effective mechanisms for reducing the likelihood of potentially lethal violence. By presenting these manifestations – namely song dueling and mark making – in comparative terms with Hip Hop’s freestyle song and dance battles and tagging territorial contests, this article seeks to highlight the relevance and potential of Hip Hop for preventing violence while also suggesting a common evolutionary backdrop within the context of strategies aimed at minimizing intraspecific aggression.     

An investigation into the experiences of female victims of trafficking in Ethiopia

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to tell the stories of female victims of human trafficking from Ethiopia. It discusses the causes of trafficking and how it affects the social and emotional well-being of women. The study is conducted using a constructivist framework and involves in-depth interviews with five returnees whose experiences as victims are explored. The goal is to provide insight into the challenges faced by the wider population. Emergent themes in the stories are discussed in line with relevant literature. The study shows lack of job opportunities, limited income, and false promises made by brokers as the major factors drawing women into human trafficking. The findings also show that even after return, the victims experience further difficulties as a result of post-traumatic psychological factors. Looking at the significance of the research outcomes, the gleaned information could be of value for organizations working on migration and countering human trafficking.     

Righting the Resource Curse: Institutional Politics and State Capabilities in Edo State,Nigeria

Abstract

The poor record of liberal reforms sponsored by the international community in postcolonial settings underscores the real politik of institutional change. What we call a ‘new normal’ in development policy and practice foregrounds the role of agency – leadership, networks of connectors and convenors, entrepreneurs and activists – but it has less to say about the political and economic conditions of possibility in which agents operate. The putative powers of agency seem most challenged in contexts of extreme resource dependency and the resource curse. The particular case of Edo, a state in the oil rich Niger delta region of Nigeria, illustrates the intersection of agency and structural conditions to show how ‘asymmetric capabilities’ can emerge to create, constrain and make possible particular reform options.     

The ‘girl effect’: liberalism,empowerment and the contradictions of development

The ‘girl effect’ – the idea that investment in the skills and labour of young women is the key to stimulating economic growth and reducing poverty in the global South – has recently become a key development strategy of the World Bank, the imf, usaid and dfid, in partnership with corporations such as Nike and Goldman Sachs. This paper examines the logic of this discourse and its stance towards kinship in the global South, situating it within the broader rise of ‘gender equality’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ as development objectives over the past two decades. Empowerment discourse, and the ‘capability’ approach on which it is based, has become popular because it taps into ideals of individual freedom that are central to the Western liberal tradition. But this project shifts attention away from more substantive drivers of poverty – structural adjustment, debt, tax evasion, labour exploitation, financial crisis, etc – as it casts blame for underdevelopment on local forms of personhood and kinship. As a result, women and girls are made to bear the responsibility for bootstrapping themselves out of poverty that is caused by external institutions – and often the very ones that purport to save them.