Gender and the right to mobility in South Asia

"South Asia including Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka encompasses source, transit and destination areas for women who migrate for employment. In context of current migration patterns, this study identifies and analyzes sociopolitical restrictions on women s mobility; and highlights local, national and regional feminist perspectives, strategies and approaches to promote mobility, work and freedom from violence at all stages of migration. The strategies and tactics discussed in this report expand current discourses on migrant rights and provide insight that can inform local, national and regional policies and programmes to promote migrant rights. Part I provides a brief overview of migration patterns, delineates the many restrictions on women s mobility and underlines the spectrums of violence faced by migrant women. Violence in this context includes economic, physical and sexual violence. Part II documents the range of strategies used by South Asia Women s Fund (SAWF) partners. These social movement actors are committed to addressing all forms of migration related violence through an explicitly feminist, rights-based and regional approach. Key thematic areas of engagement include confronting defacto and dejure restrictions on women s right to mobility, right to work and right to information; and challenging social and policy practices that undermine and stigmatize women s work. Finally, the study concludes with thematic recommendations grounded in grassroots experience to inform partner strategies, SAWF funding priorities and future directions of rights-based anti-trafficking initiatives. These insights are relevant to recent global initiatives to address the impact of uneven economic growth within and among countries, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda, Habitat III Urban Agenda and International Labour Organization deliberations on Decent work in global supply chains and Violence against women and men in the world of work.

Gender and the right to mobility in South Asia

"South Asia including Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka encompasses source, transit and destination areas for women who migrate for employment. In context of current migration patterns, this study identifies and analyzes sociopolitical restrictions on women s mobility; and highlights local, national and regional feminist perspectives, strategies and approaches to promote mobility, work and freedom from violence at all stages of migration. The strategies and tactics discussed in this report expand current discourses on migrant rights and provide insight that can inform local, national and regional policies and programmes to promote migrant rights. Part I provides a brief overview of migration patterns, delineates the many restrictions on women s mobility and underlines the spectrums of violence faced by migrant women. Violence in this context includes economic, physical and sexual violence. Part II documents the range of strategies used by South Asia Women s Fund (SAWF) partners. These social movement actors are committed to addressing all forms of migration related violence through an explicitly feminist, rights-based and regional approach. Key thematic areas of engagement include confronting defacto and dejure restrictions on women s right to mobility, right to work and right to information; and challenging social and policy practices that undermine and stigmatize women s work. Finally, the study concludes with thematic recommendations grounded in grassroots experience to inform partner strategies, SAWF funding priorities and future directions of rights-based anti-trafficking initiatives. These insights are relevant to recent global initiatives to address the impact of uneven economic growth within and among countries, including the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda, Habitat III Urban Agenda and International Labour Organization deliberations on Decent work in global supply chains and Violence against women and men in the world of work.

Gendered Technologies of Power: Experiencing and unmaking borderscapes in South Asia

Across South Asia, women migrate for employment within their home countries, within the region, and to more distant destination countries. Despite regular and ongoing transit, they are subject to restrictions on their mobility. How do migrant women workers confront and resist these restrictions? This question calls for an analytical approach that considers both the nature of the restrictive forces they confront and the resistance strategies they bring to bear. Scholarship on governmentality traces how nation states, as sovereigns, deploy a dual system of thought and management to exert control over populations and the nations they inhabit. Gendered migration governance at the legal and policy level maps one of many forces that restrict women’s mobility across the region. Within South Asia, social control over women is informed by not only legal, but also political, cultural, and ideological discourses that are anchored in patriarchal social systems. Women workers migrate through varied “borderscapes,” landscapes traversed by competing discourses and practices that seek to define parameters of mobility (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007). Based on fieldwork conducted between October 2015 and July 2016, this paper considers how local, national, and regional networks of migrant women in South Asia circumvent restrictive policies and resist patriarchal binaries. Examining their modes of resistance, this study lends critical insight into how gendered technologies of power are experienced and unmade

Migration Corridors – Governance at the Systemic Edge

The three papers that comprise this dissertation contribute key building blocks for my analysis of migration corridors as critical spatialities with the potential to significantly rework our approach to global migration governance—including in legal, political, and scholarly discourses. The study is a multi-site ethnographic account of migration corridors—circuits of human mobility within and across national borders that are governed by nation states as well as transnational financial, political, and social forces. It examines governance of migration corridors traversed by migrant agricultural, domestic, and garment workers in relationship to three building blocks: (1) expulsions that propel migration (e.g. national/global patterns of uneven development, environmental devastation, corporate land grabs, and conflict); (2) junctions where disparate migration flows converge and are redirected, including urban production and service hubs, special economic zones (SEZs), and territorial borders; and (3) forces that direct migration flows (e.g. legal regimes, product and labor supply chains, securitization, patriarchal norms, and local processes shaped by women labor migrants, recruitment intermediaries, and kinship and social networks)

Gendered Technologies of Power: Experiencing and unmaking borderscapes in South Asia

Across South Asia, women migrate for employment within their home countries, within the region, and to more distant destination countries. Despite regular and ongoing transit, they are subject to restrictions on their mobility. How do migrant women workers confront and resist these restrictions? This question calls for an analytical approach that considers both the nature of the restrictive forces they confront and the resistance strategies they bring to bear. Scholarship on governmentality traces how nation states, as sovereigns, deploy a dual system of thought and management to exert control over populations and the nations they inhabit. Gendered migration governance at the legal and policy level maps one of many forces that restrict women’s mobility across the region. Within South Asia, social control over women is informed by not only legal, but also political, cultural, and ideological discourses that are anchored in patriarchal social systems. Women workers migrate through varied “borderscapes,” landscapes traversed by competing discourses and practices that seek to define parameters of mobility (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr 2007). Based on fieldwork conducted between October 2015 and July 2016, this paper considers how local, national, and regional networks of migrant women in South Asia circumvent restrictive policies and resist patriarchal binaries. Examining their modes of resistance, this study lends critical insight into how gendered technologies of power are experienced and unmade