Future of South Korea–Japan Relations: Decoupling or Liberal Discourse

South Korea–Japan relations are at their lowest point in decades, as colonial era disputes flare once again. Most pundits argue that the South Korean public is strongly united against Japan. We argue that South Korean elites are sharply divided over how to manage the crisis; this division is starting to impact how South Koreans understand colonial era narratives; and, long-term, bilateral relations depend on how these growing divisions play out. Despite state censorship, a rising counter-narrative in South Korea challenges the dominant, Manichaean, anti-Japanese one. For the first time, Korea and Japan have a realistic chance of reconciling based on liberal public discourse and a nuanced, empirically based understanding of history.     

‘We Could be Rich’: Unemployment,Roadblocks and the Rhythms of Hydrocarbon Work among the Guaraní of the Argentine Chaco

In the Argentine Chaco, indigenous Guaraní lives are deeply entangled with the oil and gas industry. In response to the hydrocarbon sector's shifting dynamics, unemployed Guaraní have found innovative ways to make claims and mobilise for temporary employment. This article emphasises the perspectives of these mobilised populations and describes the political difficulties that precarious labour forces confront. It also draws attention to the temporalities of extraction and to the accompanying rhythms of flexible employment. In doing so, it extends the concept of precarity to highlight continuities between the impermanence of employment and the instability of mobilisation.     

The Future of Belgian Federalism as Seen Through the Eyes of the Social Partners: A Continuing Obstacle to Social Policy Decentralization?

In this article, we take a look at the discussion on the devolution of social policy. Despite the pressure of strong nationalist movements to decentralize socio-economic matters, the federal welfare state does not erode. In their study up to the early 2000s, Béland and Lecours explain this relative standstill by pointing to the institutionalization of neo-corporatistic organizations. These organizations, which are strongly involved in the management of the welfare state, have not split along language lines and prevent the decentralization of socio-economic policies in order to preserve their power. Based on empirical evidence, this paper shows that federal social partners are an important obstacle to social policy decentralization in Belgium while the regional social partners have differing opinions on the devolution debate.     

The flight from cool: American men and romantic love in the 1950s

The article uses love letters to re-analyze current notions about men and romantic love in the 1950s. Examining advice literature as well as evidence from fiction and film, European and American historians generally describe the 1950s as an era of emotional “formalization” or suppression. A newly analyzed set of 300 love letters by over a dozen American men suggests a much more nuanced view. Some of their letters support scholarly accounts of “remasculinization” in the 1950s, displaying a hard-boiled, tough-guy quality to compensate for challenges to men's roles in the workplace and family. Other men, however, openly expressed their passions, fears, and other feelings. Since these letters were written to the author's mother, they also suggest new potentials and opportunities for “personal” research. Given the paucity of love correspondence in postwar archives, professional historians might find personal collections useful evidence to study the character and dilemmas of modern romance.     

“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.     

Globalisation before the crash: the City of London and UK economic strategy

The global financial crisis provides an opportune moment to analyse the rise of the City of London financial markets, their role in the globalisation process and an attempt by the Labour Party Left in the 1970s to challenge emerging transnational forces. The USA became the world's ‘hegemon’ after the Second World War, but London retained its power in finance; well placed to challenge the post-war Keynesian regulatory consensus in favour of globalising interests, theoretically and politically served by the rise of neo-liberal ideology. In response the Labour Party Left devised its radical ‘Programme 1973’ and subsequently the Alternative Economic Strategy, which in seeking to defend social democracy, understood the necessity to prevent the erosion of national financial controls. The 1976 International Monetary Fund crisis was a defining moment in this battle. This article includes interviews with key contemporary actors and is based in the discipline of International Political Economy.     

Where the Low Road and the High Road Meet: Flexible Employment in Global Value Chains

This article examines production organisation and employment patterns in the export-orientated centres of Denizli (Turkey) and Tiruppur (India). It argues that Denizli and Tiruppur's involvement in global value chains has resulted in segmented production patterns and insecure employment arrangements. Larger producers use sub-contractors as a strategy to mediate the instability of international contracts and pass the uncertainty in their global linkages on to smaller firms and their workforces. Such flux, then, has become a regularised feature of manufacturing work within the ranks of sub-contractors. Employers have solidified these production arrangements by recruiting rural and female workers. The article sheds light on the relationship between new production forms and rising employment insecurity.     

Eastern Figures: Orient and Empire in British Writing

This article outlines the labour impacts and social consequences of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis and 2008–09 global financial crisis on Southeast Asia. Both had adverse consequences on output, employment, income and poverty in the region, although the impact of the global financial crisis was much less severe compared to the Asian financial crisis. Economies recovered quickly from both crises. However, labour markets continue to be characterised by informal, vulnerable and precarious employment. The crises and the ensuing efforts of employers to resort to increased flexibility in labour hiring in both crisis and recovery periods fanned labour protests despite the diminutive size of the trade union movement and the underdeveloped system of industrial relations in most countries. In turn, these protests have triggered national and regional debates on rules for labour contracting, minimum wage adjustments and social protection. These debates have remained unresolved even as the region is gearing up for fuller economic integration in 2015 labelled as the ASEAN Economic Community.     

Reviews

The expansion of the global economy and the governance deficit it has generated raise questions about the possibilities for regulating the practices of participants in global production networks. This paper focuses on the regulation of industrial relations in Cambodia's textile and garment industry – a unique ensemble of state, trade union, private sector and international institutions that is promoted as a “fair model of globalisation.” We track the trajectory of Cambodia's industrialisation and insertion into the global economy over three interrelated phases: first, the beginnings of export-orientated garment production in the mid- to late 1990s; secondly, the promotion of Cambodia as an “ethical producer” from 1999; and, thirdly, privileging “competitiveness” in global production networks over labour compliance for its advantage. In doing so we centre our analysis on the complex intertwining of global production, the genesis of the unique ensemble of actors in Cambodia and the anomaly of Cambodia's labour movement.     

Gender,Work and Resistance: South Korean Textile Industry in the 1970s

This paper examines the forces behind South Korean women workers' labour activism in the 1970s, an era of rapid export-orientated industrialisation. Most of the labour strikes initiated by women occurred in the labour-intensive manufacturing sector, and they were in sharp contrast to the overall labour quiescence of male workers during the same period. The actions of South Korean women refute widely held assumptions about the docility of Asian women workers. This case study suggests that women rebel when their lives undergo drastic changes under a set of macro and micro circumstances. Women dialectically interact with the capitalist-patriarchal structure as conscious human agents, and the result of such interaction is their gender- and class-based collective resistance.