Temporary Labour Migration and the “Ceremony of Innocence” of Postwar Labour Law: Confronting “the South of the North”

Author(s):  
Adrian A. Smith

AbstractThe article considers the temporary labour migration program in Canada, which catapults workers from the global South into work and wider relations in the global North, in the context of debates swirling around Anglo-American labour law. There is widespread consensus that labour law is experiencing a sustained moment of crisis in the face of neoliberal globalization. Not widely considered is how this crisis relates to temporary labour migration and the global South-North relationship and, in turn, how this relationship may impact emergent approaches tasked with transforming or transcending the field. Critical interventions seeking to confront the “southern question” within the socio-legal imaginary have gone largely unnoticed by labour law scholars. Transnational labour law may hold potential for an alternative account of the racialized production of unfree migrant labour. But only if its adherents can truly confront the dynamic unfolding through temporary labour migration—that of the “South of the North.”

Author(s):  
Doug Ashwell ◽  
Stephen M. Croucher

The Global South–North divide has been conceptualized in political, cultural, economic, and developmental terms. When conceptualizing this divide, issues of economic growth/progress, technology, political and press freedom, and industrialization have all been used as indicators to delineate between the “North” and the “South.” The North has traditionally been seen as more economically, technologically, politically, and socially developed, as well as more industrialized and having more press freedom, for example; the South has been linked with poverty, disease, political tyranny, and overall lack of development. This conceptualization privileges development efforts in the Global South based on democratic government, capitalist economic structures with their attendant neoliberal agenda and processes of globalization. This negative view of the South is a site of contest with people of the South offering alternative and more positive views of the situation in the South and alternatives to globalization strategies. While there may be some identifiable difference between some of the countries in the identified Global South and Global North, globalization (economic, political, technological, etc.) is changing how the very Global South–North divide is understood. To best understand the implications of this divide, and the inequalities that it perpetuates, we scrutinize the Global South, detailing the background of the term “Global South,” and examine the effect of globalization upon subaltern groups in the Global South. We also discuss how academic research using frameworks of the Global North can exacerbate the problems faced by subaltern groups rather than offer them alternative development trajectories by empowering such groups to represent themselves and their own development needs. The culture-centred approach to such research is offered as alternative to overcome such problems. The terms usage in the communication discipline is also explained and the complexity of the term and its future is explored.


Hypatia ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 119-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison M. Jaggar

Neoliberal globalization has deepened the impoverishment and marginalization of many women. This system is maintained by the debt supposedly owed by many poor nations in the global South to a few rich nations in the global North, because the obligation to service the debt traps the people of the South within an economic order that severely disadvantages them. I offer several reasons for thinking that many of these alleged debt obligations are not morally binding, especially on Southern women.


Author(s):  
Clarence M. Batan ◽  
Adam Cooper ◽  
James E. Côté ◽  
Alan France ◽  
Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts ◽  
...  

This essay comprises reflections of scholars in and originating from the Global South, plus some comments from Northern scholars, forming an integrated dialogue. It focuses on the development of youth studies in Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and the Caribbean, illuminating how youth studies in, from, and for the South emerge as a result of struggle—to get recognition, to theorize beyond dominant Northern frameworks, and state-led developments, and to be heard. Paradoxically, youth studies from the South are strongly influenced by the work of Northern scholars. Despite these influences, Northern ideas struggle to grasp local contexts and conditions and consequently there is a need for more localized knowledge and theorizing to make sense of young people’s lives outside the Global North. The reflections provide a reminder that struggles over the meaning and situation of youth, within particular contexts, are highly political.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-260
Author(s):  
John Harrington

AbstractThe spread of COVID-19 has seen a contest over health governance and sovereignty in Global South states, with a focus on two radically distinct modes: (1) indicators and metrics and (2) securitisation. Indicators have been a vehicle for the government of states through the external imposition and internal self-application of standards and benchmarks. Securitisation refers to the calling-into-being of emergencies in the face of existential threats to the nation. This paper contextualises both historically with reference to the trajectory of Global South states in the decades after decolonisation, which saw the rise and decline of Third-World solidarity and its replacement by neoliberalism and global governance mechanisms in health, as in other sectors. The interaction between these modes and their relative prominence during COVID-19 is studied through a brief case-study of developments in Kenya during the early months of the pandemic. The paper closes with suggestions for further research and a reflection on parallel trends within Global North states.


2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442198970
Author(s):  
Maissaa Almustafa

The end of 2015 witnessed a global record in the number of forcibly displaced people fleeing because of wars and persecution. The unprecedented total of 65.3 million displaced individuals, out of which 21.3 million were refugees, was the highest number that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has recorded since its establishment in 1950. During the same year and in the face of this large-scale crisis, only 107,100 refugees were admitted for resettlement through official resettlement programs, whereas 3.2 million people applied for asylum globally. And in spite of the fact that the majority of the world refugees are hosted in ten developing regions, the dominant narrative in the global media was about the “unauthorized” arrival of more than one million asylum seekers in Europe by sea during 2015. This paper argues that the unexpected nature of refugees’ arrivals has proven that refugees were supposed to be contained in their camps in the Global South, deterred from reaching the territories of the Global North, represented here by Europe. Thus, the paper proposes that these arrivals are rather reflections of a crisis of protection that developed in the Global South where containment and deterrence strategies against refugees from the Global South exacerbate their inhumane displacement conditions in home regions. In the same context, the paper discusses how international protection structures have been reconstructed to serve the same goals of containment and deterrence, with the ultimate aim of putting people ‘back in place’ with minimal access to protection and rights.


2020 ◽  
Vol 91 (5) ◽  
pp. 535-552
Author(s):  
Astrid Wood

In the post-colonial context, the global South has become the approved nomenclature for the non-European, non-Western parts of the world. The term promises a departure from post-colonial development geographies and from the material and discursive legacies of colonialism by ostensibly blurring the bifurcations between developed and developing, rich and poor, centre and periphery. In concept, the post-colonial literature mitigates the disparity between cities of the North and South by highlighting the achievements of elsewhere. But what happens when we try to teach this approach in the classroom? How do we locate the South without relying on concepts of otherness? And how do we communicate the importance of the South without re-creating the regional hierarchies that have dominated for far too long? This article outlines the academic arguments before turning to the opportunities and constraints associated with delivering an undergraduate module that teaches post-colonial concepts without relying on colonial constructs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 381-393
Author(s):  
Manisha Desai

In this article, I focus on the work of the South Asian Network for Gender Transformation (SANGAT) to show how it goes beyond the current turn to the Global South in much contemporary transnational feminisms. It does so in two ways. One, as evident in the name, it defines a regional imaginary, which is place-based and informed by the long history of interactions in the area beyond the colonial, postcolonial, and recent global forces, as well as in conversation with discourses and practices from the North. Second, its praxis connects activists across borders in a process of mutual learning that acknowledges power inequalities and draws upon local as well as transnational feminist theories and methodologies to enable sustainable collaborations for social and gender justice in the region. Thus, rather than reproducing the North/South binaries with its attendant erasures SANGAT seeks to go beyond them to develop place-based yet connected ‘solidarities of epistemologies’ and praxis.


2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie M. Hughes ◽  
Pamela Paxton ◽  
Sharon Quinsaat ◽  
Nicholas Reith

Over the last century, women increasingly transcended national boundaries to exchange information, build solidarity, and bring change. Accounts suggest that as women's international presence expanded, the types of women who participated also shifted. During the first wave of women's movements, White Western women dominated, but over time women of the Global South increasingly organized themselves. Yet we do not know whether North-South inequalities in women's organizational membership have diminished. We collect longitudinal network data on 447 women's international nongovernmental organizations (WINGOs) and use visual tools and network measures to explore changes in the network structure from 1978 to 2008. Results suggest (1) WINGOs—while increasing in frequency—are not connecting to greater numbers of countries, (2) the North/South split in WINGO memberships does not change over time, (3) significant power differences between the North and South persist, and (4) substantial inequalities in WINGO memberships within the Global South also exist.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Stewart

The ‘evidence for development’ community aims to produce research that is useful and used to address issues of poverty and inequality, largely in low- and middle-income countries (often referred to as the ‘global South’). The unspoken norm, however, is that much of the engagement, funding and attention is focused on organizations and individuals in the global North, with the assumption that they are effective in supporting the needs of the global South. In this research paper, I explore the initiatives and the individuals and organizations that are working within the ‘evidence for development’ community in Africa, using the lens of the African philosophy of ubuntu. I present findings from a programme of work undertaken across Africa to identify and better understand the innovation in evidence-informed decision-making taking place across the continent. I demonstrate that, while resource-poor and not well publicized, the evidence community in Africa is world leading in a number of respects. These include the interconnections within its continent-wide network, and the engagement of some governments within its ecosystem. Reflecting on these findings, I discuss and critique the underlying foundations of patriarchy, development and coloniality that shape the field of ‘evidence for development’. I highlight how, in an era of decoloniality, post-‘development’ and antipatriarchy, the ‘evidence for development’ community risks becoming outdated and being ineffective if it does not engage with the challenges inherent within these concepts. I argue that using the alternative lens of ubuntu enables us to celebrate the successes of Southern evidence communities, and to work together on a level footing with the North to tackle the challenges of poverty and inequality through better use of evidence.


Author(s):  
Marcel Van der Linden

Often, all too often, global working-class solidarity remains fragile, conditional or fails to be realized in practice, whatever the lofty rhetoric may be. The present paper explores one possible explanation: workers in the North profit from the exploitation of workers in the South through cheap commodities and services, and additional job opportunities. For example, wage-earners in the North can buy T-shirts so advantageously because their real wages are much higher than the real wages of labourers in the Global South. This is what I would like to call a relational inequality within the world working class: some workers are better off because other workers are worse off. The paper presents a very tentative historical outline of global relational inequality since the 1830s.


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