Realising women’s human rights in Malaysia : the EMPOWER report

Why do activist groups representing some of society’s most marginalised employ legalistic forms of “rights talk” when the reality of securing rights via the judicial system is almost unimaginable? The article considers this question in relation to the work of the Malaysian non-governmental organisation (NGO) EMPOWER which, in 2012, produced the Malaysian women’s human rights report focusing attention on the rights of informal sector workers, refugees and sexual minorities, and women’s rights under non-Islamic family law. The engagement of a legalistic human rights perspective is important to this group – the existence of some constitutional guarantees for socioeconomic rights and Malaysia’s commitments to CEDAW do, after all, provide scope for activism. Yet such activities take shape within the context of rising Islamic conservatism within the political and legal system, commitments to an economic development model in which the interests of labour are subordinated to those of capital, and state authoritarianism. Attempts to engage with justiciable frameworks for human rights serve to legitimate human rights claims in the sense that claims are presented in an appropriately legalistic language. This is a largely aspirational exercise – albeit one that is tied to wider civil society led critiques of Malaysia’s political and economic system

Governing domestic worker migration in Southeast Asia : public-private partnerships, regulatory grey zones and the household

Focussing on the example of domestic worker migration, this article seeks to explore the regulatory regimes that control the flow of migrants across Southeast Asia. Although at first glance, this appears to be a deeply statist regime, the aim of this article is to complicate this picture and to look at the role that private power and authority places in shaping migration governance. The article focusses on three interrelated issues: (i) how states have increasingly come to regulate migration via partnership arrangements with private sector actors; (ii) how these partnership arrangements are emblematic of broader processes of state transformation that take shape within the complex governance practices surrounding domestic worker migration in Southeast Asia; (iii) how a focus on the micro-processes of domestic worker governance (that is, how migrant worker bodies are constructed and disciplined) also highlights the significance of private actors in this aspect of governance

Civil society and the gender politics of economic competitiveness in Malaysia

Malaysian government planning and policy-making have increasingly come to recognise the role of women and the household in the promotion of a number of strategies aimed at enhancing economic competitiveness. Government planning documents emphasise the need to boost women's labour market participation, increase women's levels of entrepreneurship, and the need to strengthen and support the family unit—developments that can be understood in terms of a market-building agenda in which women's labour and the household are viewed as untapped resources in the struggle to maintain international competitiveness. This article explores an important dimension of this policy turn: the role of civil society in both promoting and resisting this market-building agenda. The paper focuses in particular on two case studies: religious non-governmental organisations involved in implementing ‘family strengthening’ programmes and civil society engagements with the issue of women's representation on corporat

Who gets ‘left behind’? : promises and pitfalls in making the global development agenda work for sex workers - reflections from Southeast Asia

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) do, at least on a rhetorical level, tie countries and other development actors to a rights-based vision of development, which expressly includes labour rights, migrant rights and women’s rights. Despite this, sex workers continue to migrate and work in the margins where rights are difficult to claim. In looking for sex work in the SDGs, we ask how the SDGs respond to the rights of sex workers and whether more needs to be read into the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development so that states are able to keep the new promise that no one be ‘left behind’? In investigating this issue, we draw upon research conducted in the Southeast Asian region and in Cambodia in particular. In analysing the commitment that development should be inclusive in ways that ‘leave no one behind’, we raise concerns about the target driven nature of the SDG development agenda that may well prove incapable of mediating the heated debates over the understandings of sex work that play out at both the international and the local level

Producing migrant domestic work : exploring the everyday political economy of Malaysia’s ‘maid shortage’

The article considers how the employment of domestic workers by middle class Malaysian households has been thrown into flux by the imposition of bans on the sending of workers by states such as Indonesia and Cambodia, as well as the decline in numbers of women seeking employment as domestic workers in Malaysia and rising employment costs. This article does not seek to focus on the high-level policy negotiations and disputes that have come to characterize systems of temporary return migration for domestic work in Asia, but to focus in on the everyday political economies (of social reproduction, work and everyday agency) that constitute the conditions of possibility within which bilateral disputes and labour agreements between Southeast Asian states take shape. We examine three dimensions of migration for domestic work in Southeast Asia in ways that bring together literatures on everyday life and social reproduction. These interconnected yet distinct dimensions are (a) the relationship between strategies to boost remittances and flows of workers from some of the most impoverished parts of Southeast Asia; (b) the centrality of low cost migrant domestic workers to Malaysian middle class ‘success stories’, and (c) the day to day production of ‘good’ worker subjects – a process that is actively and constantly resisted by workers themselves. Through a focus on these dimensions, the article provides important insights into the mechanisms through arenas of everyday life – and the household in particular - are transformed; becoming sites for the ever widening and deepening of the market economy

The gendered everyday political economy of Kampung eviction and resettlement in Jakarta

This report is the result of a collaborative partnership between the University of Warwick’s Department of Politics and International Studies and Universitas Indonesia’s Centre for Elections and Political Party (CEPP). The research was funded by the British Council’s Newton Fund under an Institutional Links Grant (project reference 217195589). The project had two complementary streams (a) to conduct research into the gender impact of urban resettlement schemes for the poor in Jakarta and to develop policy recommendations that sought to address issues arising from the research; and (b) to develop an academic partnership that would better develop links between UK and Indonesian academic institutions. This report focuses on the research into urban resettlement

Feminist everyday political economy: Space, time, and violence

It goes without saying that feminist International Political Economy (IPE) is concerned in one way or another with the everyday – conceptualised as both a site of political struggle and a site within which social relations are (re)produced and governed. Given the longstanding grounding of feminist research in everyday gendered experiences, many would ask: Why do we need an explicit feminist theorisation of the everyday? After all, notions of everyday life and everyday political struggle infuse feminist analysis. This article seeks to interrogate the concept of the everyday – questioning prevalent understandings of the everyday and asking whether there is analytical and conceptual utility to be gained in articulating a specifically feminist understanding of it. We argue that a feminist political economy of the everyday can be developed in ways that push theorisations of social reproduction in new directions. We suggest that one way to do this is through the recognition that social reproduction is the everyday alongside a three-part theorisation of space, time, and violence (STV). It is an approach that we feel can play an important role in keeping IPE honest – that is, one that recognises how important gendered structures of everyday power and agency are to the conduct of everyday life within global capitalism

Being Cared for in the Context of Crisis: Austerity, COVID-19, and Racialized Politics

This article presents an investigation into the racialized and gendered dynamics of the intensifying crisis in care for older people in the United Kingdom. Deploying a feminist political economy framework, we reveal how the care crisis is an intersectional crisis of social reproduction worsened by both austerity and COVID-19. We do this through an analysis of a small set of interviews with South Asian older women with care needs, conducted during the first period of UK national lockdown in 2020. This was a pilot study, focusing on the challenges faced in accessing formal and informal care during this period of the pandemic. The experiences, fears, and vulnerabilities that came through in the interviews are located within a broader analysis of the racialized care crisis—one that reveals the long-term harms that austerity, including “austerity Islamophobia,” generated for these older women and their families as they struggled to provide and access un/paid care

Feminist everyday political economy : space, time and violence

It goes without saying that feminist International Political Economy (IPE) is concerned in one way or another with the everyday – conceptualized as both a site of political struggle and a site within which social relations are (re)produced and governed. Given the long-standing grounding of feminist research in everyday gendered experiences, many would ask: Why do we need an explicit feminist theorization of the everyday? After all, notions of everyday life and everyday political struggle infuse feminist analysis. This paper seeks to interrogate the concept of the everyday – questioning prevalent understandings of the everyday and asking whether there is analytical and conceptual utility to be gained in articulating a specifically feminist understanding of it. We argue that a feminist political economy of the everyday can be developed in ways that push theorizations of social reproduction in new directions. We suggest that one way to do this is through the recognition that social reproduction is the everyday alongside a three-part theorization of space, time and violence (STV). It is an approach that we feel can play an important role in keeping IPE honest – that is, one that recognizes how important gendered structures of everyday power and agency are to the conduct of everyday life within global capitalism