Broken promises and transoceanic fragments: Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria, 1935–46

This article examines the personal experiences and memories of Japanese tango musicians in Manchuria in the years leading up to and immediately after the Second World War, revealing the tensions between migration and movement, on the one hand, and memory and loss, on the other. By engaging with the ideas surrounding tairiku (‘continents’) in early to mid-twentieth century Japan, this article moves away from triangulating the transoceanic movements of Japanese tango musicians and musical commodities across Japan, China and Latin America at this time. Instead, it considers such movements as the sonic manifestation of the island/continent dichotomy that framed Japanese maritime thinking in the first half of the twentieth century. Consequently, in offering a Japan-reflexive scholarship for the study and writing of global music histories, this article argues for the need to move beyond a geo-oceanic approach in examining transoceanic circulations

Consumer law in Ghana

This chapter examines the evolution of consumer law and policy in Ghana, focusing on reforms induced by crises over the last two decades. It considers whether such reforms converge with or diverge from, international, supranational, and sub-regional standards and initiatives in other jurisdictions. The discussion demonstrates that crises-oriented reforms over the last two decades are more slanted towards public regulatory governance in reaction to the emergence of crises. The analysis further reveals that the regulatory devices broadly converge with international, supranational, and sub-regional standards and initiatives of other jurisdictions, except in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, where some initiatives in Ghana and other jurisdictions manifest divergence in the policy responses. The chapter argues that convergence is predicated on instances where there exist well-thought-out international standards and protocols as guidelines; such standards were non-existent as regards the COVID-19 crisis. As such, each country was grappling to fashion-out measures to deal with the crisis head-on, bearing in mind the peculiar challenges experienced by consumers in the domestic setting, leading to a divergence of approaches. It is, therefore, submitted that while the existence of international standards or initiatives elsewhere is a bedrock for possible convergence of national legal systems in dealing with crises of identical character, the non-availability of such international standards provides space for the divergence of measures bearing in mind the peculiar national circumstances of various countries dealing with similar crises

The social reproduction of (and through) food: Agrarian change in Uzbekistan

Food systems—and the interplay between food production, marketisation and access—are constituent elements of the social reproduction of life. Using a social reproduction framework, this paper problematises the ontological, epistemological and methodological premises of food system studies in agrarian change. Based on primary data collected during multiple rounds of fieldwork in rural Uzbekistan and adopting mixed methods, it offers a triple contribution. First, it assesses the inequalities of food security and dietary diversity among different classes of farmers and agrarian wage workers. Along these lines, it argues that individualised food security indicators do not unveil the systemic determinants that explain unequal patterns of social reproduction through nutrition during processes of agrarian marketisation. To move beyond individual-based theorisations, it extends the investigation to state policies, market drivers and gender norms in relation to food knowledge, provision, affordability and availability. In so doing, it unpacks the contradictions that explain the uneven conditions of social reproduction of (and through) food. Finally, by investigating the modalities of access and availability of ultra-processed food in rural areas, it reflects on the tensions between the capitalist global food system and its interaction with the logics of state-led development to maintain the social reproduction of rural life

What makes a spokesperson? Delegation and symbolic power in Crimea

This article argues that spokespersons who claim to speak on behalf of a social group cannot escape the structural problem of delegation whereby speaking in someone’s name entails speaking instead of someone. This form of delegated and authorised silencing through the promise of empowerment imposes symbolic violence on a group which recognises the spokesperson as a valid representative, without recognising its own potential disenfranchisement. I build on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological writings on language and symbolic power to theorise the trajectories of authorisation of spokespersons. In doing so, I critically engage with theories in International Relations which rely on a separation between speaker and audience to analyse the legitimation of political speech. Instead, I reformulate the speaker/audience relation through the concept of symbolic power and introduce the category of the spoken-for. When spokespersons struggle over symbolic power, they seek to impose social classificatory categories on social groups and spaces. I illustrate these dynamics in the context of human rights politics in Crimea, showing how various spokespersons are engaged in a symbolic struggle over ‘authenticity’ of their speech and the ‘universal’ of human rights. I conclude by suggesting new lines of inquiry to analyse creative strategies to mitigate the spokesperson problem

The Impact of Government Policy Responses to the COVID‐19 Pandemic and Brexit on the UK Financial Market: A Behavioural Perspective

At the height of the COVID‐19 pandemic in the United Kingdom, the Governor of the Bank of England, while granting an interview, described the pandemic as an unprecedented economic emergency and said that the Bank could go as far as radical money‐printing operations. In reaction, the UK financial market, particularly the FTSE 100 and pound sterling, witnessed record‐breaking losses. Considering this evidence, we hypothesized that the emotions and moods of investors towards the financial market might have been impacted by the information they obtained from frequent government policy announcements. Furthermore, we proposed that the United Kingdom's final exit from the European Union (Brexit), which coincided with the pandemic, could have worsened the outlook of the UK financial market, as investors began to diversify their portfolios. Consequently, we examined the impact of government's policy announcements on investors’ reactions to the concurrence of the COVID‐19 pandemic and Brexit. Our findings reveal that the psychology of investors during the pandemic was significantly shaped by frequent policy announcements, which in turn affected overall market behaviour

Tourism Demand in the Face of Geopolitical Risk: Insights From a Cross-Country Analysis

This paper develops a novel Bayesian heterogeneous panel vector autoregressive model (B-HP-VAR) that quantifies the impact of geopolitical risk shocks on the tourism industry of 14 emerging market and developing economies (EMDE). We find that increasing geopolitical tensions have a persistent negative effect on tourism demand in most of these countries, as shown by our impulse response estimates. Furthermore, evidence from forecast error variance decomposition reveals that geopolitical risk shocks in many EMDE economies constitute the main driver of tourism demand. Analysis from historical decompositions demonstrates that geopolitical tensions have been particularly influential in driving tourism demand in Ukraine, Russia, Turkey, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Colombia, and Mexico. Our main findings are robust to several perturbations to the benchmark specification. Our results have several important implications for policymakers in their efforts to strengthen the ability of the tourism industry to absorb shocks from geopolitical tensions

The social reproduction of agrarian change: Feminist political economy and rural transformations in the global south. An introduction

The last decade has seen a renaissance of feminist political economy studies centred on the concept of ‘social reproduction’. These aim at studying global capitalism from the vantage‐point of what produces and sustains life, expanding the social boundaries of processes and subjects analysed in political economy. Contributing to this research agenda, the special issue we present in this Introduction explores the Social Reproduction of Agrarian Change. Building on the contributions comprising this collection, we argue that the study of agrarian change through social reproduction enables us to de‐invisibilise processes of life‐making behind agrarian transformations in three distinct ways. First, the lens of social reproduction enables us to better grasp the regeneration of ‘classes of labour’ in rural areas; gender processes of de‐agrarianisation and their implications for livelihoods; and centre reproductive labour within and beyond the household ‐ across spaces and temporalities ‐ as central to life in the countryside. Secondly, this lens also allows us to complicate the land question beyond productivist readings, explore its significance for life in rural settings, and multiply the agrarian questions of our times, whose histories and trajectories must grapple with debates on economic justice. Finally, the study of the social reproduction of agrarian change also provides us with a novel vantage point to read the formation and reorganisation of complex global geographies of the rural, their relation to crises of social reproduction and the ability to redraw the urban–rural divide. All contributions in this issue insightfully advance debates on methods in social reproduction analysis. The study of the agrarian lifeworlds analysed here also contributes significantly to social reproduction debates. It challenges rigid dichotomies between the ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’. It problematises the households as a unit of analysis and sets land as central to planetary debates on crises of social reproduction and their resolution

Introduction: Jews and Judaism in Late Antiquity

By focusing on Jews and Judaism in late antiquity, this Handbook fills a gap left by other volumes that deal with early Byzantine Christianity only. Jews interacted and competed with pagans and Christians and experienced a number of significant developments between the third and seventh centuries, which marks this period as a time of transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages: the emergence of synagogues as religious centers of local communities, the increasing significance of rabbinic Judaism and the compilation of rabbinic documents, the consolidation of Jewish Diaspora communities, and the expansion of rabbinic Judaism to Sasanian Persia (Babylonia), which eventually topped Byzantine Palestine in its importance for the development and survival of Judaism