Labour Left Out: Canada's Failure to Protect and Promote Collective Bargaining as a Human Right,by Roy J. Adams

The international labour movement's campaign to fortify the International Labour Organization's (ILO's) core labour standards by way of a World Trade Organization (WTO) social clause failed in the 1990s. Many purported beneficiaries of such a clause conceived of the proposal as a proverbial ‘terrorist’ rather than a ‘freedom fighter’. Reappraising debates in India and the USA, this paper understands the failure in terms of discursive struggles played out both within national contexts, and in the transnational domain. It is argued that previous attempts at unpacking the debate have employed too simplistic discursive schema and paid insufficient attention to its transnational dynamics. The international union movement can only advance the ILO–WTO linkage idea by acknowledging, coming to terms with and addressing the concerns of a pervasive counter-hegemonic discourse.     

“We feel that our strength is on the factory floor”: Dualism,shop-floor power,and labor law reform in late apartheid South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores the transformation of South African labor relations during the 1980s. In 1979, prompted by new shop-floor militancy, the Wiehahn Commission recommended that black workers, previously excluded from state labor machinery, be permitted to join recognized trade unions. Most discussions of this shift in apartheid labor relations focus on the ensuing debate within the black unions, torn between preserving their independence or securing state legitimation. This article looks instead at the related debate about ‘levels of bargaining’: should emergent black unions demand to negotiate at the factory level, where they had secured shop-floor strength through organizing and democratic practice, or pursue the benefits of the corporatist bargaining structures that had long excluded them and had privileged white workers? The eventual drift towards corporatism, I argue, imprinted the character of the South African labor movement into the post-apartheid era. An understandable desire to wield influence at the level of the national political economy eroded the tradition of workers’ control, shop floor democracy, and struggle unionism that black unions had forged during the 1970s and 1980s.     

The Africa-China relationship: challenges and opportunities

The dramatic growth in the relationship between Africa and China is one of the great stories of the twenty-first century, part of the profound transformations taking place in the global political economy. It has been greeted with excitement, consternation, and confusion. To its cheerleaders, it represents the enduring partnership between Africa and China, spawned by the historical affinities of struggles against Western imperialism and humanistic aspirations for development. To its critics, it is reminiscent of European colonisation a century earlier, in which Africa serves as a cheap source of raw materials, a lucrative export market for Chinese manufactured goods, and an outlet for its surplus capital. Rather than a development partner, some see China as Africa's biggest development competitor, whose explosive growth and insatiable quest for global markets threatens Africa's industrialisation and competitiveness. This paper examines the factors behind the development of Africa-China relations, especially its economic magnitude, and the challenges and opportunities it offers both regions.     

Socio-economic differentiation and shea globalization in western Burkina Faso: integrating gender politics and agrarian change

In this paper, we examine the way a local manifestation of the globalization process, the boom in the shea trade in western Burkina Faso, has fueled socio-economic differentiation in shea activity as part of a wider differentiation process. We refer to the gender politics and agrarian change literatures to inform both within- and across-household mechanisms of differentiation. We analyze both the mechanisms of change and the resulting inequalities. Our results reveal the interplay between multiple drivers of change, and nuance the analysis of the winners and losers of globalization of shea activity.     

东亚文化与出版交流的实践与思考——东亚出版人会议的意义解读

东亚出版人会议紧扣着东亚文化与出版两大主题,从人的交流、书的交流到企划出版的交流这3个层面,既务虚也务实。一方面通过相互间的文化与理念的交流,期望了解彼此邻近却隔膜的现代化的心路历程;另一方面则通过共同出版"东亚人文书100",进行跨越国界的文化事业的交流。不过,中、日、韩3国所推荐的书目依然代表着各自不同的文化诉求,因此,如何通过文化的交流来重构东亚的价值和理念,还需要出版人的进一步努力。     

Contested paradigms of ‘viability’ in redistributive land reform: perspectives from southern Africa

This article reviews some of the salient aspects of the controversy over capitalism and the fate of Russian peasantry, among the Russian Marxists and the narodniks immediately prior to and after the Bolshevik revolution. At issue was the characterization of peasant economies. The narodniks believed that neither marginalism nor Marxism fully captured the nuances of peasant agriculture and the economic system/systems that evolved out of it; neither the market model nor class analysis adequately described the allocative and distributive processes in such economies. While nineteenth-century narodniks stressed the role of institutions based in the village community, Chayanov's twentieth-century populism stressed the organizational dynamic of peasant households within an institutional framework. Accordingly, the economics of the Chayanovian interpretation are examined from an institutional and organizational perspective. Such an exercise, it is argued, lends more credibility not only to the narodnik agenda, but also to the peasantist model of development.     

Post-Arab Spring: changes and challenges

This paper advances the proposition that post-Arab Spring politics are a product of globalisation’s economic and social liberalisation. The global market and privatisation have fundamentally deconstructed centralised autocratic rule over state and society, while facilitating corruption and selective development, culminating in public outrage. The political order of the Middle East and North Africa since the Arab Spring synthesises globalisation’s dialectic duality, in which economic integration has contributed to the demise of national authoritarianism, inciting communalism and political fragmentation. This paper analyses emerging political trends and challenges based on a comparative analysis of Egypt and Tunisia.     

The politics of HIV/AIDS in South Africa: government action and public response

A decade ago it seemed likely that African governments would be destabilised by the impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This article tests some of the presumptions in such forecasting with an examination of the South African case. It begins with an assessment of the effects on the public health system of the South African government’s efforts to cope with the illness. Efforts to implement universal treatment of people who are HIV-positive appear to have strengthened government, while the costs have been affordable. The efforts have extended the embrace of the public health system and prompted the engagement of civil society in policy formation and implementation. Survey evidence suggests that the government has gained public approval and that its health service delivery has become more socially accountable. Civil protest to engender political reforms in the treatment of AIDS patients has enhanced the role of constitutional checks on executive authority.     

Kurdish policies in Syria under the Arab Uprisings: a revisiting of IR in the new Middle Eastern order

The effect of the Arab Uprisings on the interplay of state and non-state entities is revealed as influencing the emergence of multiple players of non-state status pursuing democratic rights, and as attempting to dismiss regional despotism as an intrinsic element of ongoing transition in the Middle East. This article focuses on the positive overall effect on the Kurdish movement of unity and cooperation between KRG and PKK-PYD actors to achieve Kurdish harmony, and as interconnected paradigms vis-à-vis their influence and interaction with regional players. Given the rise of the Kurds in Syria and the KRG’s regional importance as the first actual Kurdish de facto state entity, the PKK’s role appears key for unifying and institutionalising the relatedness of the Kurdish movements in Iraq and Syria. An empirical understanding of the Kurdish case, explained through a conceptual model of ‘multi-dimensional interrelations’, may further clarify how the theoretical framework can be applied to International Relations.     

Conflicts of customary land tenure in rural Africa: is large-scale land acquisition a driver of ‘institutional innovation’?

This study combines legal and anthropological approaches to investigate how the establishment of a large-scale biofuel agro-industry is reinterpreting and potentially transforming customary institutional arrangements in rural Sierra Leone. The contractual relationships established between land acquirers and local authorities can be seen as an ‘institutional innovation’ that aims at interpreting and overcoming the limits of the national land regime. However, by formalizing customary land tenure structures through land registration, such innovations are exacerbating pre-existing social inequalities. We identified four categories of resulting conflicts: interlineage, intervillage, interfamily and intergenerational conflicts. Taken together, these conflicts question the current land-based sociopolitical structures of rural Sierra Leone and could be drivers of societal change.