Microenterprise development, industrial labour, and the seductions of precarity

Microenterprise development is underpinned by an ideology that the solution to poverty is the integration of the poor into market relations. This article addresses the paradox that its ‘beneficiaries’ may be dispossessed industrial workers who already have a long history of participation in the capitalist economy. Exploring the transformation of garment workers in Trinidad from factory employees to home-based ‘micro-entrepreneurs’, I argue that working conditions and labour rights have deteriorated under the protective cover of seemingly laudable policies to promote economic empowerment via self-employment. Showing how microenterprise initiatives contribute to women workers’ ‘adverse incorporation’ (Phillips, 2011) into global production networks, this article calls for renewed attention to the labour politics of microenterprise development

The Global Governance of Paid Domestic Work: Comparing the Impact of ILO Convention No. 189 in Ecuador and India

This article looks at the gradual development of a ‘global governance of paid domestic work’ by assessing the impact of the ILO Convention n. 189 on campaigns for domestic workers’ rights in different countries. Here I compare the case of Ecuador and India as two contrasting examples of the ways in which state and non-state organizations have positioned themselves around the issue, revealing how the context-dependent character of domestic workers’ rights can ultimately condition the mobilisation of different actors in each context. On the basis of the theory of ‘strategic fields of action’, I also define the promulgation of C189 as an ‘exogenous change’ that has differing impacts on the relevant social actors in two countries. As I will show, these national differences give shape to a very different modality in campaigns for domestic workers’ rights, resulting in different roles, purposes and scope of action for key social actors

Be Free? The European Union's post-Arab Spring Women's Empowerment as Neoliberal Governmentality

This article analyses post-Arab Spring EU initiatives to promote women's empowerment in the Southern Mediterranean region. Inspired by Foucauldian concepts of governmentality, it investigates empowerment as a technology of biopolitics that is central to the European neoliberal model of governance. In contrast to dominant images such as normative power Europe that present the EU as a norm-guided actor promoting political liberation, the article argues that the EU deploys a concept of functional freedom meant to facilitate its vision of economic development. As a consequence, the alleged empowerment of women based on the self-optimisation of individuals and the statistical control of the female population is a form of bio-power. In this regard, empowerment works as a governmental technology of power instead of offering a measure to foster fundamental structural change in Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) societies. The EU therefore fails in presenting and promoting an alternative normative political vision distinct from the incorporation of women into the hierarchy of the existing market society

Feminist discursive institutionalism - a poststructural alternative

This paper joins the ongoing conversation about the desirability, or undesirability, of feminists becoming “new institutionalists”, which is linked to broader concerns about feminists seeking legitimacy as political “scientists”. With “feminist discursive institutionalism” as exemplar, it introduces the argument that paradigms, and hence methodologies, matter politically because they create different realities. To illustrate this proposition it examines the political implications of the different meanings of discourse, and related concepts of power, ideas, and “agency”/subjectivity, in Habermasian-influenced discursive institutionalism and in Foucauldian-inspired poststructuralist analysis. A key issue, it contends, is the extent to which institutions (and other political categories) are conceptualized as discrete entities or as more open-ended “assemblages”. This analysis, we suggest, solicits feminist researchers to reflect on the political implications of their theoretical investments.Carol Bacchi and Malin Rönnblo

Sous le développement, le genre

Ignorée, invisible, la question du genre reste cachée sous le développement. Et pourtant, comprendre le développement n’est pas possible sans une perspective de genre. Cet ouvrage, didactique, montre en quoi et comment le concept de genre permet de revisiter les études de développement. Le genre permet de comprendre la construction historique, sociale et culturelle des différences et des inégalités. Il offre des outils pour une analyse critique du système capitaliste globalisé. Le genre, inscrit dans le féminisme, permet aux catégories dominées et marginalisées, en particulier les femmes mais pas seulement, de faire entendre leurs voix. Dans le contexte actuel de crise globale et d’accroissement des inégalités, il propose des pistes pour renouveler la pensée sur le développement, mais aussi pour agir autrement. Combinant diverses disciplines et thématiques, cet ouvrage montre que la portée heuristique du genre ne se limite pas aux domaines habituellement considérés comme féminins (l’éducation, la famille, le social, la santé de la reproduction, etc.) mais s’étend à tous les domaines (le politique, le droit, la sécurité, la diplomatie, l'économie, etc.). Ce livre met aussi en évidence la diversité et l’enrichissement mutuel des diverses traditions de recherche entre le monde francophone, anglophone et hispanophone. Il s’adresse particulièrement aux étudiant-es, chercheur-es et enseignant-es, militant-es, chargé-es de programme dans des organisations de coopération et représentant-es des pouvoirs publics au Nord et au Sud