Linkage between internal migration and crime: Evidence from India

Migration has been a major source of human survival, adaptation, and economic change over centuries across regions. Today, more than ever, migration forms a central part of the global flow of humans, practices, and ideas. However, from a social point of view, migration is often considered as a potential source of social disorder and crime. Several explanations have been provided on this aspect in Indian context but none of these provide a sound analysis of the linkage between migration and crime. This paper attempts to investigate empirically the association between interstate migration and crime in India. Our analysis does not show any significant association between interstate migration and crime. Therefore, this study discards the controversial thought that migration is responsible for increasing crime in the nation, and suggests adopting constructive means to control crime rather than staring at migration.     

“Elusive natives”: escaping colonial control in the Leverville oil palm concession,Belgian Congo, 1923–1941

Throughout the inter-war period, in the Belgian Congo's largest oil palm concession, thousands of colonised workers and their families managed to escape administrative surveillance and authority through schemes of dissimulation and elusiveness. The shared nature of sovereignty imposed on this territory, distributed between private and public agents, along with a sparse territorial occupation, left extended areas unsupervised by Western actors and indirect rulers. In these remote places, palm-fruit cutters, with the blessing of their employers, could settle without having to answer to authority. After exposing the specific policies enforced in the concession, this paper highlights how natives were able to maximise their autonomy regarding both the production imperatives imposed upon them and their obligations to the public authorities. The last part details the administration's consecutive failures in its endeavours to tackle workers’ elusiveness. The conclusion challenges the notion of “resistance” as an appropriate concept to recover the fruit cutters’ adaptation to the imperatives of colonial rule and large-scale manual labour within the rainforest.     

Lessons from Ugandan indigenous knowledge systems regarding the management of HIV and AIDS

Abstract

Health is one of the major challenges facing Africa today. Solutions need to come from within and outside Africa, drawing from Africa's indigenous knowledge systems. This article describes the life cycles of malaria, tuberculosis and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and presents some strategies for the control and prevention of these diseases that are lessons and experiences from African countries.     

Being here and there: migrant communities in Sweden and the conflicts in the Horn of Africa

Abstract

The largest migrant communities in Sweden come from Africa's most troubled region, the Horn. These are the Somali and Ethiop-Eritrean communities. This paper examines the not-so-obvious ways in which Ethiop-Eritrean and Somali communities in Sweden influence the political developments, particularly the conflicts at ‘home’. Many of these immigrants living in Sweden keep up with social and political developments in their countries of origin almost on daily basis and remain engaged, to a large extent, in the affairs of both their families and communities ‘out there’ while they ‘are here in Sweden’. This article therefore focuses on the particular forms of engagement that have either intended or unintended impact on the intractable conflicts in which the societies in these countries are engaged. I argue that ‘nostalgia underpins the immigrants’ sense of commitment to the affairs of their countries of origin, and therefore, providing moral and material support to warring groups derives the impetus largely from the affective dimension of migration.     

‘Voting with their feet’: Senegalese youth,clandestine boat migration,and the gendered politics of protest

Abstract

This article explores the political, economic, racialized, and moral dimensions of clandestine boat migration from Senegal to the Canary Islands between 2006 and 2011. I begin with a critical interpretation of clandestine boat migrations as a form of gendered protest and as a strategic response to the perceived lack of economic opportunities for young Senegalese men. I continue with a critique of the overlapping and racialized geographies of the Canary Islands, which simultaneously represent a holiday respite for tourists and the promise of a new life for economic migrants. I conclude with a discussion of the utility of scholarship, such as this, which complicates the tidiness of area studies, illuminates the lived complexities of transnational studies, and paves the way for a more global African Diaspora Studies.     

Is the Filipino Diaspora a Diaspora?

ABSTRACT:

Despite the widespread popularity of the discourse on diasporas since the 1980s, the recognition of a Filipino diaspora in the wider Anglophone scholarly world did not occur until the mid 2000s. A major factor for this recognition was the considerable number of scholarly works on Filipino Americans produced largely by Filipino American scholars who used diaspora as theoretical frame starting in the late 1990s. Grappling with the realities of the global migrations of Filipinos, the Philippine state and Filipinos in the Philippines and in other parts of the world also began to deploy the diaspora discourse. This article analyzes the ways in which the discursive fields in the US and in the Philippines have converged or diverged. Although diaspora can be a problematic concept, the author examines methodological issues that focus not so much on identities but on the imagined and constructed collectivity within which the putative diasporan identity of Filipinos is embedded. Without reducing diaspora to a reifying checklist, the author explores the Filipino diaspora discourse along these five dimensions: (a) population dispersal from an original homeland, real or imagined; (b) a process of diasporization; (c) ongoing relationship with the homeland, nurtured by collective memory or mythology; (d) idealization of return to the homeland; and (e) self-awareness or collective consciousness that is intergenerational and interrelated to coethnics and compatriots within the diaspora.     

Creating and contesting meanings of place and community in the Ylay Talaa Valley of Kyrgyzstan

Formal schooling was virtually non-existent before the Soviet power in nomadic Kyrgyzstan, as communal life and learning was organized informally at the household and clan level. During the Soviet period, however, educational success became an avenue to a new form of upward social and geographical mobility, and the school provided new and prestigious positions for local teachers and administrators. This paper explores how the externally imposed Soviet collectivization policies reshaped the understandings and meanings of place and community during the twentieth century, a reshaping that centrally involved redefining education and the importance of ‘the school’. In the post-Soviet period, the utility of secondary and higher education in local and national labour markets has diminished, as has the power and prestige of educators. Yet the appeal of education lingers on. The authors seek to document these claims using oral histories, ethnographic interviews and participant observations in the Ylay Talaa Valley of the Kyrgyz Republic.     

Invisible capitalism: political economy and the regulation of undocumented ­immigration in France

What explains the French government’s unwillingness to accept more legal immigrants or at least ignore those who enter or over-stay clandestinely? This paper answers this question by exploring the political economy and regulation of undocumented immigration in France during the 1990s. In light of a broad liberal and Marxist literature on the political economy of immigration, I argue that three ‘proximate determinants’ shape the regulation of undocumented immigration in France (a ‘Europeanized’ security agenda, ‘self-limited sovereignty’ and control of the labour market, especially informal employment). However, these proximate determinants do not necessarily excavate the social relations of power (that is political economy) which constitute the basis for policy making. I argue then that a return to the importance of the labour market (and thus the class and racial constitution of French society) is essential, but without a simple return to Marxist political economy. Instead, I suggest the value of ‘virtualism’ for carving out a new post-structuralist/‘postmodern’ political economy of immigration.     

From cultural sojourner to guestworker? The historical transformation and contemporary significance of the J-1 visa Summer Work Travel Program

Since the mid-1990s, the J-1 Summer Work Travel (SWT) program has quadrupled in size. While many J-1 visa holders are in the U.S. to study or conduct research, the primary activity of SWT participants is low-wage labor. We analyze the trajectory of the SWT program since its origins in the Fulbright-Hays Act, underscoring both change and continuity in the practical and discursive handling of what are, in effect, guestworkers. Our analysis reveals both longstanding concerns about the SWT program’s risks to foreign and domestic workers, as well as repeated efforts by U.S. government officials and private sector stakeholders to justify its status as cultural exchange rather than temporary work. Yet despite these concerns, over the last two decades, the SWT program has become larger and less regulated. We explore these changes in the context of two contending forces shaping the labor market: on the demand side, a transformation in the organization of work towards ‘fissured’ workplaces and contingent employment, and, on the supply side, limited access to foreign labor due to political gridlock over comprehensive immigration reform. We conclude that the SWT program both reflects broader trends in managed migration and embodies the model of flexible migrant labor many employers now demand.     

台湾的印尼客家新娘——海外客家人的社会变迁之二

客家人常说"人往高处走,水往低处流",这句俗语也许可以用来解释客家人为什么喜欢不断地迁徙。客家人到了海外之后,还会不断地迁徙,促使他们不断地迁徙的原因固然很多,追求更加美好的生活应该是其中最重要的动因。在目前的台湾,有大量的印尼客家新娘,她们为什么要像父辈那样,再一次跋山涉水,移民台湾?她们追求什么?她们在台湾的生活状况如何?