The power of contact: Europe as a network of transnational attachment

In times of multiple crises and a looming partial breakup of the European Union, the question of what binds Europeans together appears more relevant than ever. This article proposes transnational attachment as a novel indicator of sense of community in Europe, arguing that this hitherto neglected dimension is substantially and structurally different from alternative ones such as cross‐border trust and identification. Combining Eurobarometer 73.3 data on ties between all EU‐27 countries with further dyadic data, it is shown empirically that the European network of transnational attachment has an asymmetric core‐periphery structure centred on five extremely popular countries (the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and Spain). In line with transactionalist theory, cross‐border mobility and communication are strongly related to transnational attachment. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the network of transnational attachment is much denser among those with a higher level of education than among those with a lower level. The results suggest that offering European citizens incentives to travel to peripheral countries may help counterbalance the current asymmetric structure of transnational attachment, thereby increasing Europe's social cohesion.     

Foreigners Everywhere,Nationals Nowhere: Exclusion,Irregularity, and Invisibility of Stateless Bajau Laut in Eastern Sabah,Malaysia

ABSTRACT

This article explores impacts of national and regional policies upon the Bajau Laut, who occupy the maritime border region shared by Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. It considers how maritime movements, ethnogenesis, visions for economic development and commercial interaction have evolved in the region. These processes, combined with contemporary nationalism, border securitization, and conservation render such populations both prominent as a target of governmental action and invisible in terms of provision of social services and implementation of conservation initiatives. These facets complicate issues of political belonging within the state of Sabah, the nation-state of Malaysia, and the wider ASEAN region.     

Migrating Within “the Gender-equal Nordic Region”: Icelandic Migrants in Norway and the Gendered Division of Work and Care

Migration is a gendered process that shapes the lives of men and women differently, because they generally occupy dissimilar positions within the household, the labour market, and society. This article examines gender and migration within a Nordic context, between two countries that are often presented as gender-equal in cross-national comparisons. The focus is on how the gendered division of labour is manifested in the experiences of Icelanders who migrated to Norway in the wake of the Icelandic financial crisis of October 2008. The results are based on interviews with people who migrated to Norway both with and without their families. In our analysis, we show how the gender-segregated labour market and gender norms lead to different positions and opportunities for men and women at times of economic crisis and migration. For study participants who migrated with their families, the relocation was often organized around the labour-market position and opportunities of men. Those who migrated without their families emphasized their roles as providers for their families. However, only the women described how their absence was perceived as a failure to fulfil childcare responsibilities. The findings highlight the resilience of the notions of men as providers and women as primary parents within “the gender-equal Nordic region”, and indicate how these roles may facilitate or discourage the migration of men and women.     

Afrovision: rehearsing diasporic Africanism in a Tel-Aviv nightclub

ABSTRACT

During the second half of the 1990s, an extended number of illegal African labor migrants arrived at Israel. Whereas associational life among them was based almost exclusively on their national and tribal social clubs, the Afrovision nightclub was a unique grassroots initiative that crossed these boundaries. Based on studies of festive rituals, and more specifically of the role of music and dance in processes of identity formation among migrants' communities, I show how and why Afrovision enabled African immigrants in Israel to come together and experience a sense of diasporic Africanism as a sort of shared identity beyond the salient sub-divisions within their community. Although this experience was partly a reaction to, or implementation of, common perceptions in Israeli society that view African people as of one fiber, the practical significance of the pan-Africanist option offered by Afrovision in the everyday lives of foreign residents far exceeded purely symbolic aspects.     

跨国网上仲裁若干法律问题研究

作为选择性争议解决方法的一种新形式,网上仲裁遭遇到若干独有的法律问题,诸如如何认定仲裁协议及仲裁裁决的书面形式,如何界定仲裁地和仲裁裁决的做出地,如何明确仲裁所应适用的程序法与实体法,网上仲裁裁决如何承认与执行,等等.如果有关国家的国内法认可网络行为的法律效力,则大多数网上仲裁所引发的难题是可以通过套用普通国际商事仲裁中的原则、规范来加以解决的.     

Methodological Challenges for National and Multi-sited Comparative Survey Research

This paper will examine the ways in which ‘textbook’survey research methods need to be adapted and refined for researchwith forced migrants, and the ways in which cross-national contexts,as well as research within one national context with forcedmigrants from different communities, affect the utilizationof survey methods. Linked to this, the ways in which surveydesign issues need to be sensitive to the diversity betweenand within countries and communities will be explored. The paperwill draw on two surveys, one a UK national survey and the othera multi-sited comparative survey in the UK and South Africa,to explore access to forced migrants in different contexts andthe appropriateness of different modes of data collection betweenand within countries and communities (e.g. paper self-completion,face-to-face interviews and web-based surveys). The impact ofpolitics, language and literacy, gender, and immigration status,especially irregular and insecure statuses, will be examined.     

论跨国公司与经济主权的关系

跨国公司与经济主权之间确实存在着冲突。二者的关系在实质上体现了社会的国际化发展与以主权为核心的民族国家的冲突。这种冲突的缘由则是国际社会新领域的存在未被清晰地认识以及由此导致的国际关系新结构未得到相应地合理调整。全球性领域的出现,并不意味着地方性、国家性领域的消失,而是要求民族国家对于其自身在新型国际政治经济关系中的地位以及相应的主权行使范围有理智与现实的认识。跨国公司与民族国家将在国际事务中长期共同发挥作用,跨国公司与经济主权之间的冲突也将长期存在。     

Chinese migrant factory workers across four decades: shifts in work conditions,urbanization, and family strategies

ABSTRACT

Today about 90 million urban Chinese factory workers are migrant workers from the countryside, comprising the largest and most rapidly expanded industrial working class in history. Before the mid-2000s, these workers from the countryside were employed only temporarily in factories, and almost all were young, very poorly paid and exploited. But as labor shortages have developed and as restrictions against residing in China’s cities have relaxed, they are not as vulnerable as they were in previous decades. More of them are older, married, and have children, and many of them would like to settle on a permanent basis near their workplace with their families. Drawing on three decades of on-site interview research up through November 2018, the authors examine the changes that have occurred and the obstacles – such as the remaining difficulty of obtaining an affordable urban education for their children – that still stand in the way of migrant Chinese families remaining intact and settling permanently in urban areas. As a means of conceptualizing the implications of the shifts in migrant workers’ circumstances, especially for work relations and labor disputes, their evolving situation will be analyzed through the paradigm of Albert O. Hirschman’s concept of Exit vs. Voice.     

Continuing Suicide Among Laborers in Korea

Dock workers have a reputation of being particularly strike-prone, across time and space. This is the spectre of Kerr and Siegel: one of the few things that has survived the passage of time since their 1950s article on inter-industry propensity to strike is the dockers' disposition to stop work. But, Kerr and Siegel's own results show that the dockers' militancy was in fact modest. More recent research has taken as an article of faith the strike-proneness of dockers. True, dock workers and their conflicts have attracted much attention. But, the reason is not the frequency of strikes in the ports but dockers' crucial position in distribution.     

The fabric of irregular labor migration in twentieth-century Western Europe and North America: a comparative approach*

Abstract

This paper investigates the role government policies and non-state actors have played in determining irregular migration in both Western Europe and North America. While immigration restriction is admitted to have generated illegality throughout the twentieth century, receiving-oriented regulatory policies have also produced flows of irregular migrants. Though differences in migration regimes should not be minimized, our primary intent is to highlight similarities in the way irregular migration was legally and politically produced in the post-World War II years. By focusing on the management of labor migration at that time, it is possible to understand how both the US and the main European receiving countries secured legal migrants rights at the same time as they created unintended irregularity by entering into international agreements. With a view to analyzing the determinants of labor migrant illegality in a comparative perspective, our paper examines the guestworker programs implemented throughout the Eastern and Western hemispheres in the labor shortage post-war years.