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The book investigates how the United Nations, governments, and aid agencies mobilise and instrumentalise migration policies and programmes through a discourse of safe migration. Since the early 2000s, numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs), UN agencies, and governments have warmed to the concept of safe migration, often within a context of anti-trafficking interventions. Yet, both the policy-enthusiasm for safety, as well as how safe migration comes into being through policies and programs remain unexplored. Based on seven years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Mekong region, this is the first book that traces the emergence of safe migration, why certain aid actors gravitate towards ...
For those at the high end of the trafficking chain, the sex trade is an alluring and lucrative business: the supply of girls is constant, the costs of operations are low, and interference from law enforcement is weak to non-existent. Anti-trafficking organizations and governments commonly appropriate such market metaphors of supply and demand as they struggle with the moral-political dimensions of a business involving trade, labor, prostitution, migration, and national borders. But how apt are they? Is the sex trade really the perfect business? This provocative new book examines the social worlds and interrelationships of traffickers, victims, and trafficking activists along the Thai-Lao bor...
Sounding Out Heritage explores the cultural politics that have shaped the recent history and practice of a unique style of folk song that originated in Bắc Ninh province, northern Vietnam. The book delves into the rich and complicated history of quan họ, showing the changes it has undergone over the last sixty years as it moved from village practice onto the professional stage. Interweaving an examination of folk music, cultural nationalism, and cultural heritage with an in-depth ethnographic account of the changing social practice of quan ho folk song, author Lauren Meeker presents a vivid and historically contextualized picture of the quan họ “soundscape.” Village practitioners, ...
According to the Chinese zodiac, 2018 was the year of the ‘earthly dog’. In the middle of the long, hot, and feverish dog days of the summer of 2018, some workers at Shenzhen Jasic Technology took their chances and attempted to form an independent union. While this action was met by the harshest repression, it also led to extraordinary demonstrations of solidarity from small groups of radical students from all over the country, which in turn were immediately and severely suppressed. China’s year of the dog was also imbued with the spirit of another canine, Cerberus—the three-headed hound of Hades—with the ravenous advance of the surveillance state and the increasing securitisation of Chinese society, starting from the northwestern region of Xinjiang. This Yearbook traces these latest developments in Chinese society through a collection of 50 original essays on labour, civil society, and human rights in China and beyond, penned by leading scholars and practitioners from around the world.
Colonial documents and works of literature from early modern Spain are rife with references to public women, whores, and prostitutes. In Profit and Passion, Nicole von Germeten offers a new history of the women who carried and resisted these labels of ill repute. The elusive, ever-changing terminology for prosecuted women voiced by kings, jurists, magistrates, inquisitors, and bishops, as well as disgruntled husbands and neighbors, foreshadows the increasing regulation, criminalization, and polarizing politics of modern global transactional sex. The author’s analysis concentrates on the words women spoke in depositions and court appearances, and how their language changed over time, pointing to a broader transformation in the history of sexuality, gender, and the ways in which courts and law enforcement processes affected women.
Changes in the character of the political regime in Laos after 2000, a massive influx of foreign investment, and disruptions to rural life arising from improved communications and new forms of mobility within and across the borders have produced a major transformation. Alongside these changes, a group of young scholars carried out studies that document the rise of a new social, cultural and economic order. The contributions to this volume draw on original fieldwork materials and unpublished sources, and provide fresh analyses of topics ranging from the structures of power to the politics of territoriality and new forms of sociability in emerging urban spaces.
"Microcredit is part of a global trend of financial inclusion that brings banking services, and especially small loans, to the world's poor. While credit for the poor has increasingly come under the rubric of commercial banking, Paraguayan solidarity lending offers a window into the tensions between social development and global finance. There, non-profit development programs offer group loans to women. These highly regulated loans are secured through mutual support and peer pressure--social collateral--rather than through physical collateral. To understand the broader issues of economic interdependency and its regulatory features, Social Collateral tracks collective debt across the commercial society and smuggling economies at the Paraguayan border. The story of social collateral cannot be told without an interwoven story about the feminization of solidarity lending. At its core is an economy of gender--from pink-collar financial work, to men's committees, to hard women smugglers. At stake are interdependencies that bind borrowers and lenders, financial technologies, and Paraguayan development in ways that structure both global inequality and opportunity"--Provided by publisher.
The humanitarian crisis in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon has become one of the most populist causes in the world, yet the causes of the crisis have been misrepresented, whilst on-going humanitarian assistance could arguably be said to amplify problems that exist in the camps. Shedding light on the disturbing occurrence of corruption, rent-seeking and racketeering, together with the emergence of zones of privatised territory based on self-enrichment, this book challenges the conception of refugees in camps as helpless, vulnerable individuals. Based on detailed and sustained research at the camp of Shatila in Beirut, Humanitarian Rackets and their Moral Hazards reveals that even the...
This book both considers labour migration in its totality, showing how the divide between illegal and legal migration is often blurred, and also examines how governmental and international measures to counter illegal migration are translated into action on the ground, and what impact on all kinds of migration they have in practice.
Wisaijorn explores how the concepts of space and temporality in traditional geopolitics have influenced the understanding of the Thai-Lao border since Laos became independent in 1954. Arguing that a state-centric conceptualisation of the Thailand-Laos border falls into both a territorial and temporal trap, Wisaijorn contests that privileging a theoretical border silences the voices of people on the ground. In doing so, he expands the concept of a temporal trap with the addition of a temporal dimension – analysing how the state claims a monopoly not only on a geography, but also a history. Rooted in orientalism, colonialism and the expediencies of the Cold War, the border operates in the in...