Workers without rights as citizens at the margins

This article presents a normative account of citizenship which requires respect for labour rights, as much as it requires respect for other human rights. The exclusion of certain categories of workers, such as domestic workers, from these rights is wrong. This article presents domestic workers as marginal citizens who are unfairly deprived of certain labour rights in national legal orders. It also shows that international human rights law counteracts the marginal legal status of this group of workers. By being attached to everyone simply by virtue of being human, irrespective of nationality, human rights can complement citizenship rights when both are viewed as normative standards. The example of domestic work as it has been approached in international human rights law in recent years shows that certain rights of workers are universal. Their enjoyment cannot depend on citizenship as legal status or on regular residency. The enjoyment of labour rights as human rights depends, and should only depend, on the status of someone as a human being who is also a worker.     

Women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion in Mexico City: citizenship,experience and clientelism

In April 2007, after a period of intense social debate, the Mexico City Legal Assembly legalized abortion during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, which was an unprecedented development in women's rights in Mexico. Within the context of a proliferation of public discourses about women's citizenship rights changes in women's social status in Mexico, this article explores the extent to which the newly legalized character of abortion is interpreted by women as a right. Drawing on 24 interviews with women who had a legal termination of pregnancy between 2008 and 2009, this research shows that legalization opens up new and complex relationships between women as subjects of rights and the state. Such relationships are expressed as three discursive figures: legal abortion (1) as a concession from the government, (2) as ‘excessive’ tolerance by the state, and (3) as a right to be protected and guaranteed. The analysis shows that women's interpretations of the right to legal abortion are mediated by profound transformations, which Mexican society is currently undergoing. These include changes related to a shift from a clientist political culture to one more framed in terms of citizenship, the subjective effects of family planning policies, and their ambivalent relationships with Catholic notions of women and motherhood, and the effects of feminist discourses of women's citizenship, abortion, and reproductive rights.     

Kurdish migrant mothers in London enacting citizenship

The article explores the mothering work of a group of Kurdish women in London as enactments of citizenship. Rather than focusing on their integration, it foregrounds the migrant mothers' ability to disrupt hegemonic citizenship narratives and bring into being new political subjects. They co-construct diasporic citizenship, through their mothering work, producing their children's cultural identifications as both British and Kurdish. These identifications are contingent, involving intra-ethnic contestations of legitimate Kurdish culture. Kurdish migrant mothers' cultural work is not simply about making nation state citizens. By giving meaning to cultural continuity and change, the mothers reference multiple levels of belonging (local, national and diasporic) which challenge state boundaries. The article shows that although mothers play a key role in constructing their children's cultural identities and their articulation in ethnic and national terms, they also contest the meaning of ethnic minority cultural practices and group boundaries, potentially disrupting hegemonic narratives of good citizenship as ethno-national.     

Civic Involvement and Modernization

Abstract

This paper investigates how broad processes of modernization affect individuals' relations to the civil sphere. It first introduces a model of civic involvement as a system of expectations between participants and associations. Next, the issue of change is explored. It is argued that recent social transformations, such as individualization, globalization and technology changes, undermine classic notions of civil society participation. Old types of involvement vanish, while new ones emerge. We investigate in more detail how macro-changes affect three core models of civic involvement: as a member, a volunteer and a citizen. Each model holds particular relations between adherents and associations. The conventional understanding of each model is examined in the light of ongoing processes of dis- and re-embedment of civic involvement. The paper is based on secondary analyses of literature concerned with the issue of change within the civic field. The findings can be summarized in four points. First, we observe a shift from face-to-face interaction in long-lasting civic groups towards mediated interaction within networks in flux. Falling rates of participation seem to be followed by new types outside traditional measures of civic engagement. Secondly, individuals seem to move from value-based to consumer-based relations within the civic sphere. Associations, on her hand, increasingly present her activities as ‘products’. This means that civic engagement, more often than before, is mediated in ways usually associated with the for-profit market. Thirdly, civic engagement is shifting from diffuse horizontal involvement to centrally coordinated activities. ‘Amateurism’ gradually becomes replaced by professional standards, administered by staff-led bodies, in close connection with central authorities. As a fourth conclusion, we observe a shift from an engagement mediated by associations to a direct involvement, or engagement mediated by structures that usually are not defined as civic ones.     

Policy Reforms and Evolution of Market Structure in an Emerging Economy: The Case of India

Policy reforms have facilitated entry of quite a few transnational corporations (TNC) into Indian industries. This has important implications for the evolution of competitive industrial structure. This article focuses on the issue of the response mechanism of local firms to competition from new entrant TNCs and the possible strategies of TNCs in penetrating the Indian market. It develops a conceptual framework by incorporating elements of intangible assets theory and new institutional economics into a simple sequential entry oligopoly model. This yields interesting insights into qualitative behaviour of firms in the post-reforms period. A few hypotheses drawn from the conceptual framework are empirically tested on the basis of firm level panel data drawn from a set of Indian industries.     

On the stalling of the Malaysian industrialization project

Abstract

In a recent article in this journal, Henderson and Phillips (2007 Henderson, J. and Phillips, R. 2007. Unintended consequences: Social policy, state institutions and the ‘stalling’ of the Malaysian industrialization project. Economy and Society, 30(1): 78–102.  [Google Scholar]) argue that Malaysian industrialization is ‘stalling’ because it is locked into low- to medium-technology operations. They attribute this to an affirmative policy that sidelined the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) capable of benefiting from linkages with transnational corporations (TNCs) and an immigration policy that provided cheap foreign labour and weakened the pressure on firms to upgrade themselves. While not disputing these explanations, this paper shows that the evidence they provide is unconvincing and, sometimes, undermines their case. Their argument is further weakened because they fail to explain why the proportion of high-tech exports in total Malaysian manufacturing exports is surprisingly high, unlike that of an economy concentrating on low- or medium-tech production.     

Regionalist governance and transnational collective action in Latin America

Abstract

New forms of regionalism are now a central element in global governance. It is sometimes suggested that new regionalism represents an opportunity for transnational civil society activism. I explore this argument through a comparison of processes of collective action in two emerging frames of regionalism governance in the Americas, the FTAA/Summit of the Americas and Mercosur. I show that, while civil society activism has regionalized to some extent in relation to both hemispheric regionalism and sub-regionalism, this process is far more marked in the former. I suggest, further, that the influence of civil society actors in regionalist governance in the Americas is extremely limited. This is due to persistent institutional barriers to inclusion, the practical obstacles for many groups of scaling up to the regional/transnational level and the particular difficulties associated with accessing trade-based negotiations.     

Making space for space

This article explores the effectiveness of appeals to ‘active citizenship’ as an answer to the ‘neoliberal’ political vocabulary of consumer choice and market freedom. It does so through a case study on recent reforms to post-compulsory education in Australia. A common response to education and social welfare policy is to expect government to accord with ideals of citizenship such as self-determination, participation and equality. However, the case study suggests that the governmental rationalities of modern mass-education systems are irreducible to these abstractions. Reference to the social rights of citizens is embedded in the rationales of social and education policy. Nevertheless, this should not be construed as the recognition or misrecognition of an absolute ideal or principle. Instead, the negotiation of social rights can be seen as the product of the mass school system's own capacity to apply common norms to a population and to use these norms in maintaining the settlements negotiated within expanding social welfare systems.     

The recovery of radical Islam in the wake of the defeat of the Taliban11Many of the websites cited in this article have either been suppressed or have moved from address to address. When this is the case I have placed an asterix in brackets (∗) at the end of the URL.

This article analyses the intellectual and religious processes through which radical Islam has had to confront its defeat in Afghanistan and rebuild during the period since that time, including paradigms of battle, dreams and martyrologies and apocalyptic readings of history and current events.     

The Increasing Role of Religion in State Failure: 1960 to 2004

This study examines the extent of religious conflict between 1960 and 2004 in the context of all domestic conflicts in that era based on data from the State Failure dataset. The findings show that until 2002 religious conflicts were a minority of all conflicts, but from 2002 to 2004 they were a majority of all conflicts. This study also examines the extent to which groups belonging to different religious traditions (i.e., Christianity, Islam, etc.) participate in conflict. The specific results on the relative participation in conflict by Christian and Muslim groups depend on the method used to measure conflict. However, no matter how conflict is measured, the results consistently show a rise in Islamic participation in conflict since the late 1970s. Also, for nearly the entire period covered by this study, the majority of religious conflicts involved Muslims. All of this supports contentions that rather than causing religion's demise, modernity has caused a resurgence of religion.