Networks of Resilience: Legal Precarity and Transborder Citizenship among the Karen from Myanmar in Thailand

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-89
Author(s):  
Indrė Balčaitė

AbstractThis study probes the relationship between legal precarity and transborder citizenship through the case of the Karen from Myanmar in Thailand. Collected through ethnographic multi-sited fieldwork between 2012 and 2016, interconnected individual life stories evolving across the Myanmar-Thailand border allow the critical interrogation of the political and legal categories of ‘migrancy’, ‘refugeeness’, and ‘citizenship’, teasing out their blurry boundaries in migrants’ experience. Following the recent critical research in legal ethnography, this study demonstrates that legal precarity is not simply an antithesis to citizenship. The social and legal dimensions of citizenship may diverge, creating in-between areas of not-yet-full-citizenship with varying levels of heft (Macklin 2007). The article consists of three parts. First, it offers a theoretical framework to reconcile the Karen legal precarity (even de facto statelessness) and citizenship, even on both sides of the border (legally impossible). Second, it presents the three groups of Karen in Thailand, produced by the interaction of three major waves of Karen eastward migration and tightening Thai citizenship and migration regulations: Thai Karen, refugees, and migrant workers. All three face varying levels of legal precarity of temporary status without full citizenship. However, the last part demonstrates the intertwined nature of those groups. A grassroots transborder perspective reveals the resilience of the Karen networks when pooling together resources of the hubs established on Thai soil by the three waves. Even the most recent arrivals in Thailand use those resources to move from one precarious legal status to another and even to clandestinely obtain citizenship.

Author(s):  
Oleksii Chepov ◽  

The qualitative and clear definition of the legal regime of the capital of Ukraine, the hero city of Kyiv, is influenced by its legislative enshrinement, however, it should be noted that discussions are ongoing and one of the reasons for the unclear legal status of the capital is the ambiguity of current legislation in this area. Separation of the functions of the city of Kyiv, which are carried out to ensure the rights of citizens of Ukraine and the functions that guarantee the rights of the territorial community of the city of Kyiv. In the modern world, in legal doctrine and practice, the capital is understood as the capital of the country, which at the legislative level received this status and, accordingly, is the administrative and political center of the state, which houses the main state bodies and diplomatic missions of other states. It is the identification of the boundaries of the relationship between the competencies of state administrations and local self-government, in practice, often raises questions about their delimitation and ways of regulatory solution. Peculiarities of local self-government in Kyiv city districts are defined in the provisions of the Law on the Capital, which reveal the norms of the Constitution in these legal relations, according to which the issue of organizing district management in cities belongs to city councils. Likewise, it is unregulated by law to lose the particularity of the legal status of the territory of the city. It should be emphasized that the subject of administrative-legal relations is not a certain administrative-territorial entity, but the social group is designated - the territorial community of the city of Kiev, kiyani. Thus, the provisions on the city of Kyiv partially ignore the potential of the territorial community.


Author(s):  
Aled Davies

This book is a study of the political economy of Britain’s chief financial centre, the City of London, in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher’s first Conservative government in 1979. The primary purpose of the book is to evaluate the relationship between the financial sector based in the City, and the economic strategy of social democracy in post-war Britain. In particular, it focuses on how the financial system related to the social democratic pursuit of national industrial development and modernization, and on how the norms of social democratic economic policy were challenged by a variety of fundamental changes to the City that took place during the period....


Author(s):  
Micheál L. Collins ◽  
Mary P. Murphy

The political economy of Irish work and welfare has dramatically changed over recent decades. Since the 1980s, Ireland has experienced two periods of high unemployment followed by two periods of full employment. Alongside this, we see considerable shifts in both the sectoral composition of the workforce and in the institutional architecture underpinning the labour market. Focusing on the last decade, this chapter contextualizes the Irish labour market in the Irish growth model, highlighting issues including occupational upgrading, low pay, gender composition, and migration. The chapter then explores links between this employment structure and Ireland’s changing welfare regime. It considers recent institutional changes, as the welfare regime shifted to a work-first form of activation, and the long-term sustainability of the social protection system. The chapter concludes by highlighting what we see as the core challenges for the political economy of work and welfare in Ireland.


2022 ◽  
Vol 9 (17) ◽  
pp. 197-225
Author(s):  
Hernán Maltz

I propose a close reading on two critical interventions about crime fiction in Argentina: “Estado policial y novela negra argentina” (1991) by José Pablo Feinmann and “Para una reformulación del género policial argentino” (2006) by Carlos Gamerro. Beyond the time difference between the two, I observe aspects in common. Both texts elaborate a corpus of writers and fictions; propose an interpretative guide between the literary and the political-social series; maintain a specific interest in the relationship between crime fiction and police; and elaborate figures of enunciators who serve both as theorists of the genre and as writers of fiction. Among these four dimensions, the one that particularly interests me here is the third, since it allows me to investigate the link that is assumed between “detective fiction” and “police institution”. My conclusion is twofold: on the one hand, in both essays predominates a reductionist vision of the genre, since a kind of necessity is emphasized in the representation of the social order; on the other, its main objective seems to lie in intervening directly on the definitions of the detective fiction in Argentina (and, on this point, both texts acquire an undoubtedly prescriptive nuance).


Harmoni ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-240
Author(s):  
M. Alie Humaedi

The relationship between Islam and Christianity in various regions is often confronted with situations caused by external factors. They no longer debate the theological aspect, but are based on the political economy and social culture aspects. In the Dieng village, the economic resources are mostly dominated by Christians as early Christianized product as the process of Kiai Sadrach's chronicle. Economic mastery was not originally as the main trigger of the conflict. However, as the political map post 1965, in which many Muslims affiliated to the Indonesian Communist Party convert to Christianity, the relationship between Islam and Christianity is heating up. The question of the dominance of political economic resources of Christians is questionable. This research to explore the socio cultural and religious impact of the conversion of PKI to Christian in rural Dieng and Slamet Pekalongan and Banjarnegara. This qualitative research data was extracted by in-depth interviews, observations and supported by data from Dutch archives, National Archives and Christian Synod of Salatiga. Research has found the conversion of the PKI to Christianity has sparked hostility and deepened the social relations of Muslims and Christians in Kasimpar, Petungkriono and Karangkobar. The culprit widened by involving the network of Wonopringgo Islamic Boarding. It is often seen that existing conflicts are no longer latent, but lead to a form of manifest conflict that decomposes in the practice of social life.


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilde Heynen

Making Home(s) in Displacement critically rethinks the relationship between home and displacement from a spatial, material, and architectural perspective. Recent scholarship in the social sciences has investigated how migrants and refugees create and reproduce home under new conditions, thereby unpacking the seemingly contradictory positions of making a home and overcoming its loss. Yet, making home(s) in displacement is also a spatial practice, one which intrinsically relates to the fabrication of the built environment worldwide. Conceptually the book is divided along four spatial sites, referred to as camp, shelter, city, and house, which are approached with a multitude of perspectives ranging from urban planning and architecture to anthropology, geography, philosophy, gender studies, and urban history, all with a common focus on space and spatiality. By articulating everyday homemaking experiences of migrants and refugees as spatial practices in a variety of geopolitical and historical contexts, this edited volume adds a novel perspective to the existing interdisciplinary scholarship at the intersection of home and displacement. It equally intends to broaden the canon of architectural histories and theories by including migrants' and refugees' spatial agencies and place-making practices to its annals. By highlighting the political in the spatial, and vice versa, this volume sets out to decentralise and decolonise current definitions of home and displacement, striving for a more pluralistic outlook on the idea of home.


Two Homelands ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Della Puppa

Trade unions have a crucial role in the social integration processes of migrants. Nevertheless, some aspects of this relationship are still relatively unexplored, particularly that of the relationship between trade unions and racism and that of the trade unions’ fight against racial discrimination. This paper aims to investigate the still partially unexplored link between Italian trade unions and racial discrimination within the framework of the 2008 economic crisis. Through the narratives of stakeholders, trade unions, and migrant workers, the author provides an in-depth look at the efforts of Italian trade unions to fight discrimination and examines the main barriers that prevent migrants from being involved in unions.


Author(s):  
Guillaume Heuguet

This exploratory text starts from a doctoral-unemployed experience and was triggered by the discussions within a collective of doctoral students on this particularly ambiguous status since it is situated between student, unemployed, worker, self-entrepreneur, citizen-subject of social rights or user-commuter in offices and forms. These discussions motivated the reading and commentary of a heterogeneous set of texts on unemployment, precariousness and the functioning of the institutions of the social state. This article thus focuses on the relationship between knowledge and unemployment, as embodied in the public space, in the relationship with Pôle Emploi, and in the academic literature. It articulates a threefold problematic : what is known and said publicly about unemployment? What can we learn from the very experience of the relationship with an institution like Pôle Emploi? How can these observations contribute to an understanding of social science inquiry and the political role of knowledge fromm precariousness?


Author(s):  
Duncan Kelly

This chapter binds the book together, recapitulating its general argument, and offering pointers as to how the study relates to some contemporary questions of political theory. It suggests that a classification that distinguishes between Weber the ‘liberal’, Schmitt the ‘conservative’ and Neumann the ‘social democrat’, cannot provide an adequate understanding of this episode in the history of political thought. Nor indeed can it do so for other periods. In this book, one part of the development of their ideas has focused on the relationship between state and politics. By learning from their examples, people continue their own search for an acceptable balance between the freedom of the individual and the claims of the political community.


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