On the Migrant Subject

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-214
Author(s):  
Hengameh Ziai

AbstractPluralism is deployed to govern migration across the Global North and Global South in contradictory ways. Fearing the arrival of migrants on its own shores – a threat to its biopolitical constitution – Europe deploys discourses of pluralism in the Global South to encourage migrants en route to Europe to sedentarize in “transit” countries like Sudan. Neoliberal development projects propagate the virtues of pluralism to host communities in Sudan, who are exhorted to view migrants as potential economic assets. Yet, in the context of Europe those same migrants continue to be seen as an economic and racial threat. While a lack of skills and entrepreneurialism are framed as the “root cause” of migration to Europe, migrants are paradoxically presented as trainable and therefore economically productive in the Global South. This article offers a critical examination of consolidating migration management practices in Sudan, their imbrication with development projects, and the racial anxieties they evoke in both Europe and in “transit” countries. It homes in on not only populations headed towards Europe, but those intending to remain in Sudan, notably Syrians, and explores the lessons and aporias of Sudan's hitherto open-door policy towards the latter.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Stanley

In recent years, the migration and development framework has shifted to a focus on the role of diasporas and migrant remittances in homeland development. Using criticality and particularly political economy as a methodology, this research paper sheds light on how the so-called migration-development nexus is embedded within a context of unequal neoliberal economic globalization. The research paper demonstrates that current approaches are a resurgence of modernization theories of development, which ignore the structural and historic conditions within which international migration from the Global South to the Global North is embedded. The research paper puts forward that the current focus on remittances as a source of development places the burden of a country's development onto an exploitable migrant workforce.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Stanley

In recent years, the migration and development framework has shifted to a focus on the role of diasporas and migrant remittances in homeland development. Using criticality and particularly political economy as a methodology, this research paper sheds light on how the so-called migration-development nexus is embedded within a context of unequal neoliberal economic globalization. The research paper demonstrates that current approaches are a resurgence of modernization theories of development, which ignore the structural and historic conditions within which international migration from the Global South to the Global North is embedded. The research paper puts forward that the current focus on remittances as a source of development places the burden of a country's development onto an exploitable migrant workforce.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Stanley

In recent years, the migration and development framework has shifted to a focus on the role of diasporas and migrant remittances in homeland development. Using criticality and particularly political economy as a methodology, this research paper sheds light on how the so-called migration-development nexus is embedded within a context of unequal neoliberal economic globalization. The research paper demonstrates that current approaches are a resurgence of modernization theories of development, which ignore the structural and historic conditions within which international migration from the Global South to the Global North is embedded. The research paper puts forward that the current focus on remittances as a source of development places the burden of a country's development onto an exploitable migrant workforce.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alison Stanley

In recent years, the migration and development framework has shifted to a focus on the role of diasporas and migrant remittances in homeland development. Using criticality and particularly political economy as a methodology, this research paper sheds light on how the so-called migration-development nexus is embedded within a context of unequal neoliberal economic globalization. The research paper demonstrates that current approaches are a resurgence of modernization theories of development, which ignore the structural and historic conditions within which international migration from the Global South to the Global North is embedded. The research paper puts forward that the current focus on remittances as a source of development places the burden of a country's development onto an exploitable migrant workforce.


Author(s):  
Floor Haalboom

This article argues for more extensive attention by environmental historians to the role of agriculture and animals in twentieth-century industrialisation and globalisation. To contribute to this aim, this article focuses on the animal feed that enabled the rise of ‘factory farming’ and its ‘shadow places’, by analysing the history of fishmeal. The article links the story of feeding fish to pigs and chickens in one country in the global north (the Netherlands), to that of fishmeal producing countries in the global south (Peru, Chile and Angola in particular) from 1954 to 1975. Analysis of new source material about fishmeal consumption from this period shows that it saw a shift to fishmeal production in the global south rather than the global north, and a boom and bust in the global supply of fishmeal in general and its use in Dutch pigs and poultry farms in particular. Moreover, in different ways, the ocean, and production and consumption places of fishmeal functioned as shadow places of this commodity. The public health, ecological and social impacts of fishmeal – which were a consequence of its cheapness as a feed ingredient – were largely invisible on the other side of the world, until changes in the marine ecosystem of the Pacific Humboldt Current and the large fishmeal crisis of 1972–1973 suddenly changed this.


Contexts ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-41
Author(s):  
Lindsey Ibañez

Most sociological studies of job searching are from higher-income, industrialized countries, often referred to as the Global North. Much less is understood about job search behavior in the lower-income countries of the Global South, where there are fewer labor market institutions, weaker social safety nets, higher underemployment, more informality, and more precarity. In this environment of deprivation and insecurity, low-wage workers in the Global South turn to their personal networks for the resources that markets and states cannot provide. While job referrals allow workers to earn a living, however, they also extend employer surveillance and control beyond the bounds of the employment relation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8399
Author(s):  
Sally Adofowaa Mireku ◽  
Zaid Abubakari ◽  
Javier Martinez

Urban blight functions inversely to city development and often leads to cities’ deterioration in terms of physical beauty and functionality. While the underlying causes of urban blight in the context of the global north are mainly known in the literature to be population loss, economic decline, deindustrialisation and suburbanisation, there is a research gap regarding the root causes of urban blight in the global south, specifically in prime areas. Given the differences in the property rights regimes and economic growth trajectories between the global north and south, the underlying reasons for urban blight cannot be assumed to be the same. This study, thus, employed a qualitative method and case study approach to ascertain in-depth contextual reasons and effects for urban blight in a prime area, East Legon, Accra-Ghana. Beyond economic reasons, the study found that socio-cultural practices of landholding and land transfer in Ghana play an essential role in how blighted properties emerge. In the quest to preserve cultural heritage/identity, successors of old family houses (the ancestral roots) do their best to stay in them without selling or redeveloping them. The findings highlight the less obvious but relevant functions that blighted properties play in the city core at the micro level of individual families in fostering social cohesion and alleviating the need to pay higher rents. Thus, in the global south, we conclude that there is a need to pay attention to the less obvious roles that so-called blighted properties perform and to move beyond the default negative perception that blighted properties are entirely problematic.


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.


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