The COVID-19 pandemic and socio-economic rights

COVID-19 is the respiratory disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which was first detected in Wuhan, China, in 2019. On 30 January 2020 the World Health Organisation declared the outbreak of COVID-19 a Public Health Emergency of International Concern and on 11 March assessed it as a pandemic. Since its onset, the COVID-19 pandemic has affected 221 countries and territories, and caused millions of deaths. In the wake of the pandemic, governments initially focused on accessing and distributing vaccines, enforcing social distancing and mask-wearing, closing schools and public events, and restricting the movement of people via border closures, lockdowns and curfews, to avoid the spread of the virus. While some of these measures were eased up in 2021, there was continued vigilance on minimising risk of exposure as, in many countries, the easing has also been associated with the occurrence of more cases. While the macro-level figures have been contested, as have the policies and priorities of governments, they highlight to some extent the spread and intensity of the pandemic and the efforts by governments to contain the infection. What they do not fully reveal are the inequalities and inequities in the occurrence and experience of the virus globally and within countries, and how marginalised and discriminated groups were often exposed to greater risks in the context of COVID-19. It is therefore essential from a social justice and human rights perspective to use a political economy framework and analyse the challenges that the COVID-19 pandemic has posed for vulnerable groups, and to struggle to ensure that post-pandemic growth be guided and embedded in a more equitable and inclusive pattern of development

Income Distribution, Poverty and Employment

The marginalization of woman, both in theory and in reality, has been the essence of her situation in society. It is reflected in society in terms of differential economic benefits, dependence relations and social inferiority, and often these features are perpetuated with increasing contradictions

Flexicurity and Gender Mainstreaming: Deliberative Processes, Knowledge Networks and the European Labour Market

Gender mainstreaming and flexicurity have been adopted as separate labour market objectives in the European Union since the mid-1990s. It is remarkable that there has been a virtual absence of gender concerns in the deliberations on flexicurity for over a decade. When gender concerns were introduced into the flexicurity deliberations in 2007, they were incorporated in the 6th principle of flexicurity which “should support gender equality by promoting equal access to quality employment for women and men, and by offering possibilities to reconcile work and family life” (European Union 2007:10). The basic assumption was that the objectives of flexicurity and gender mainstreaming were compatible and even mutually supportive. Flexicurity – the labour market policy that claims to combine and enhances both flexibility and security in the labour market – emerged as an important concept in the mid-1990s and is currently viewed by the European Commission as key to the “EU’s dilemma of how to maintain and improve competitiveness whilst preserving the European social model” (European Commission 2007)....

Enacting Citizenship and the Right to the City: Towards Inclusion through Deepening Democracy?

In this introductory article, the main theoretical concerns guiding this thematic issue are briefly discussed, alongside an overview of relevant literature on rights and urban citizenship. We draw on the work of Engin on ‘enacted citizenship,’ and combine Hannah Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’ with Henri Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city,’ for inspiration. The hope is that these concepts or theoretical tools help our contributors explore the ‘grey areas’ of partial inclusion and exclusion, and to connect the informal with the formal, migrants with professionals, locals with those from elsewhere. Since the contributions in this issue come from practitioners as well as scholars, we are interested in very different forms of urban citizenship being enacted in a range of settings, in such a way as to overcome, or at least side-step, social, economic and political exclusion within specific urban settings. In this introduction we reflect on urban migrants organising and mobilising to enact their own citizenship rights within specific urban spaces, and present each of the eight published articles, briefly illustrating the range of approaches and urban citizenship issues covered in this thematic issue. The examples of urban enacted citizenship practices include efforts to construct economic livelihoods, gain access to health care, promote political participation, reweave the social fabric of poor neighbourhoods, and provide sanctuary. All of which, our contributors suggest, requires the engagement of the local urban authorities to allow room for the informal, and to accept the need for improved dialogue and improved access to public services