The Gentle Decolonial Civilizer of Nations

Book review of Umut Özsu's Completing Humanit

Refusing the ancestry test: Malagasy Ethnic Identity and Genetic Testing

Through navigating personal and socio-political planes, this essay problematises the use of genetic testing in the Malagasy context, and in its invocation as a form of identity formulation that privileges scientific rationality over storied histories. Through considering the social roles of genetic data, this piece interrogates how DNA fails to acknowledge ethnic variation, ancestral histories and storied identify formulation in Madagascar

Trade Barriers or Catalysts? Non-Tariff Measures and Firm-Level Trade Margins

This paper empirically examines how standards and technical regulations affect export margins in three African countries at the firm level. The approach involves combining detailed customs transaction data at the firm-product level with bilateral information on non-tariff measures within a gravity model of trade framework. The findings show standards and technical regulations have no impact on the extensive margin of firm-level trade. However, they do diminish trade at the intensive margin in both the agriculture and manufacturing sectors. Small firms are more affected at the intensive margin compared to medium and large firms, and similarly, final goods are more affected compared to inter-mediate goods. Moreover, in the manufacturing sector, firms with initially higher product quality experience a reversal of the trade-reducing effect of standards and technical regulations, whereas in the agriculture sector, this effect is less pronounced for their counterparts. The results also suggest that African exporting firms face equivalent impacts in both regional and global markets

Commodified by displacement: the effects of forced displacement on Syrian refugee women in Lebanon’s agricultural sector

In an effort to contribute to an emergent body of ethnographic work addressing the labour economy of forced displacement and the contribution of women refugee-labour more precisely, the article uses the case-study of Syrian refugee women in Lebanon’s agriculture to uncover how forced displacement has contributed to the exploitation of an already-commodified, invisible, and migrantized workforce. While there is an established and diverse body of literature that investigates female labour invisibility in agriculture (on the one hand), and the relationship between labour commodification and agriculture (on the other hand), less discussed is the relationship between forced displacement and female labour commodification. Based on ethnographic research including interviews and participant observations conducted between May 2018 and September 2019 in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, this article demonstrates how refugee-labourers are subjected to various tactics and instruments of labour coercion, which affect their decision-making power in both the work sphere and the domestic sphere, reinforcing their invisibility as cheap labour and docile refugees. A closer investigation into the labour dynamics on site yet reveals a much more complex reality where women engage in various acts of negotiations by making instrumental use of their femaleness. Notwithstanding the situation of forced displacement, the conditions facing the case of these female refugee-labourers mirrors more broadly the structural problems inherent to contracted labour regimes in corporatized sectors like agriculture

The colonial migration state

This article sheds new light on the historical roots of contemporary migration politics by introducing the notion of the colonial migration state. Bringing together research on colonial population politics and the political science literature on the ‘migration state,’ we compare modes of migration management in three distinct cases of colonialism – settler colonialism in Algeria, protectorate colonialism in Egypt, and corporate colonialism in Saudi Arabia. We show that migration management in these three colonial spaces operated according to similar hierarchically-structured logics of economic extraction and legal-political differentiation. At the same time, these produced different local migration regimes based on variations in modalities of colonial rule, imperial economic interests, and pre-existing local institutions. Through a careful empirical exploration of migration and mobility practices in colonial peripheries, we contribute both to the global history of colonialism and empires, and to more recent work that rethinks the ‘migration state’ concept and its application to contexts across the Global South. We draw attention to the relationship between historical and contemporary forms of hierarchically structured regimes of mobility management, including the enduring importance of racial and religious categories as significant markers of differentiation in global migration, and suggest ways in which contemporary mobility regimes intersect with larger structures of economic extraction and socio-legal differentiation

Trust Matters: The governance of private and public services organizations' external relationships

This chapter focuses on the external relationships of private and public sector organisations and puts trust in the focus of a comparative analysis. It starts with identifying the function of trust and suggests that it is a governance mechanism that ensures cooperation and coordination of expectations in social interactions. Trust is then examined in more detail with regard to how it can fulfil this task, and it is compared to functionally equivalent social mechanisms for governing organisations’ external relationships, such as power and the market principle. Furthermore, this chapter looks at the key actors and their mutual relationships in the private sector and in the context of public service organisations. Thus, the overarching goal is to elucidate what is known about trust in inter-organisational relationships in the private sector and apply it to the relationship between public sector organisations and citizens. It will be argued that accountability plays a central part in how these relationships can be governed and that the latter can only release its full potential when complemented by trust