Conditions of cultural citizenship: intersections of gender,race and age in public debates on family migration

This article analyses problem framings in public debates on family migration in Finland. The study focuses on the less-examined category of age and how it intersects with gender, race and religion. We examine the discursive context within which parliamentarians and the media negotiate questions of migration policies, belonging and citizenship. Our analysis identifies problem framings by combining frame analysis with the ‘What is the problem represented to be?’ approach, which understands policies as problematizations. We found that the debates held up the rather common notion of vulnerable women and children as groups that tighter family migration policies protect. The debates excluded certain racialized migrant families from cultural citizenship. Simultaneously, however, the public debate ‘whitewashed’ other families to make them suitable for inclusion. Here, the right to care for elderly family members played a central part in negotiations over cultural citizenship.     

迁徙自由权辨析

迁徙是动物趋利避害的一种本能,迁徙自由是人类维持生存与发展的一项基本人权。迁徙与"流动"、"迁移"等概念既有联系,也有区别,不应混同使用。迁徙自由可从两个层面去理解:一方面,迁徙自由是一种主观意志自由,其主体不受其他外力左右或主导;另一方面,迁徙自由本质上要求权利的同等对待。迁徙自由的特性,既说明了迁徙自由不同于人身自由,需要得到宪法的独立确认,又充分彰显了迁徙自由的价值与宗旨。     

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.     

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.     

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.     

“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.     

The significance of ethnicity in the Estonian return migration policy of the early 1920s

In this article the Estonian return migration policy is analyzed from the perspective of the return migrants' ethnicity. The time period of this study covers the most intensive phase of the state-organized return of emigrants to the newly established Republic of Estonia. The survey of attitudes of the Estonian authorities towards the return of emigrants with different ethnic backgrounds leads to the conclusions that the return of ethnic Estonians was preferred to the return of non-Estonians during the first years of Estonia's independence on both economic and political grounds. The political loyalty of non-Estonians was doubted in the administrative circles of Estonia which was especially the case with regard to the emigrants that had formerly belonged to the ruling power elites. The negative attitudes towards the return of non-Estonians were further aggravated by the crisis the Estonian economy was facing at that time. As a result, a parallel with the return migration policies of other new nation-states that emerged from the ruins of the Russian empire can be drawn.     

The Fallacy of the ‘Failed State’

This article examines the origins and evolution of the concepts of ‘failed’ and ‘failing’ states, arguing that the terms have come to be used in such widely divergent and problematic ways that they have lost any utility. The article details six serious problems with the term ‘state failure’ and related terms like ‘fragile’ or ‘troubled’ states, concluding that analysts should abandon these terms. It concludes with a modest attempt to develop alternative concepts and principles for thinking about diverse states that pose varied challenges for academic analysis and policy makers.     

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.     

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.