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Depleting fragile bodies: the political economy of sexual and reproductive health in crisis situations
Abstract
In a crisis-prone world, the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) uprooted by both armed conflicts and environmental disasters has drastically increased and displacement risks have intensified. Despite the growing attention within global security and development agendas to sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), there remain striking gaps in addressing SRHR in crisis situations, particularly among IDP women and girls. This article examines the continuum between social reproduction in times of crisis and the material and ideological conditions that restrict women’s bodily autonomy in everyday life. Using the case of the Philippines where millions of people are routinely affected by conflict and disaster-induced displacements, it argues that the failure to recognise the centrality of women’s health and bodily autonomy not only hinders the sustainable provision of care and domestic labour during and after crisis, but also fundamentally constrains how security is enacted within these spaces. Thus, the article highlights an urgent need to rethink the gendered political economy of crisis responses as a building block for stemming gendered violence and depletion of social reproductive labour at the household, state, and global levels.
... practices of everyday life and of social reproduction, and the insights they offer us into gendered political economies [18][19][20][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] where the government requires external support and declares a state of emergency [38]. ...
... 70 percent of the population is also estimated to be working in the informal economy [57], and low wages typical of both formal and informal employment mean that people commonly engage in several income-generating activities simultaneously to make ends meet. As elsewhere in the world, during times of crisis, the burdens of creatively managing household assets tend to be carried by women, who in addition to reducing their personal food intake (by skipping meals for example) also take on multiple jobs known as 'sidelines' to generate additional incomes [58] (see also [35,36,59]). Lindio-McGovern [60] similarly notes 'that poor Filipino women, who generally are the ones to attend Ramalho -Engendering disaster risk management and resilience-building: the significance of the everyday in evaluations of the exceptional to the daily needs of the family, are the first to suffer the social psychological impact of the price escalation of food and of other basic daily needs'. ...
... Lindio-McGovern [60] similarly notes 'that poor Filipino women, who generally are the ones to attend Ramalho -Engendering disaster risk management and resilience-building: the significance of the everyday in evaluations of the exceptional to the daily needs of the family, are the first to suffer the social psychological impact of the price escalation of food and of other basic daily needs'. The everyday political economy of maintaining social reproduction and related 'feminisation of responsibility and obligation' [4] extends to disaster and post-disaster contexts, in which the reproductive responsibilities associated with care and survival are intensified alongside pre-existing inequalities [20,[61][62][63], furthering the depletion and deterioration of women's bodies, health, and wellbeing more generally [36]. ...
This article argues for greater consideration of ‘the everyday’ within evaluations of ‘the exceptional’ and presents this as a practical means of engendering disaster risk reduction and management (DRRM) and resilience-building. Building on scholarship from feminist geography, gender and development and feminist political ecology, it charts a new way of theorising disaster risk and resilience from a gendered perspective through the analytic of the everyday, and substantiates this with findings from ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2017 in disaster-prone informal settlements in the Philippines. As this case reveals, a focus on the everyday helps to uncover the multiple subjective embodiments of risk and insecurity and the structural systems that underpin related inequalities and exclusions. Crucially, the lens of ‘the everyday’ also exposes the social reproductive labours and power hierarchies embedded in community-based DRRM and resilience-building programmes; insights which are vital to advancing more inclusive, sustainable and socially just approaches to disaster risk governance and climate change adaptation.
... Globally, there have been important strides in rendering visible the "conflictrelated" violence that women and girls experience in security frameworks such as the United Nation (UN) Women, Peace and Security agenda (Davies and True 2019). As this article will show, social reproduction is a vital yet taken-for-granted resource for the survival of affected populations during and after conflicts especially in war-torn urban and rural communities and in sites such as internal displacement and refugee camps (see Tanyag 2018). We argue that the recognition and redistribution of care should be an integral part of conflict response and peacebuilding. ...
... For example, maternal mortality is largely preventable but deaths still occur on a large scale especially in fragile and conflict-affected settings not only because of conflict but also because of the structural violence manifested by poor health infrastructure and services. The gradual depletion of women's lives culminates in the gender-specific violence of maternal death, which could have been addressed by economically valuing women's social reproductive labor and health, and as a matter of security in times of conflict (Tanyag 2018). Neglecting the care economy after conflict through the gradual or immediate erosion of care institutions and services constitutes structural violence. ...
... Feminist political economists have examined social reproduction and the costs of neglecting the care economy in the context of economic crises (Elson 2012;Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas 2014;Hozic and True 2016), health epidemics (Harman 2016), displacement (Tanyag 2018), and in the context of feminized forms of productive labor and migration (Gunawardana 2016;Piper 2003). Unlike, PEVAW analysis, however, the DSR framework has not been applied to the analysis of depletion in conflict-affected situations. ...
Drawing on depletion through social reproduction and political economy of violence against women (PEVAW) approaches, we show how the context of violence intensifies the depletion of women’s lives as they labor to meet their household needs; and how this depletion heightens their vulnerability to violence in conflict-affected contexts and inhibits their roles in peacebuilding. We propose the concept of the “regenerative state,” as a post-conflict moment of openness when state policy underpinned by attention to issues of depletion, social reproduction, and violence against women can help reshape gendered power relations in post-conflict transitions.
... SRH has been identified as an important security issue, given its potential as a cornerstone for creating prosperous communities. However, scholars have highlighted its frequent neglect in humanitarian and peacebuilding efforts (Percival et al., 2014;Tanyag, 2018;Davies and Harman, 2020;Hedström and Herder, 2023). The impact of armed conflict on women's SRH, therefore, represents a This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. ...
... Women across the world face depletions of their bodily autonomy in everyday life; in times of war and other crises, this harm can intensify. Still, global military expenditure far outweighs resources allocated for public health and peacebuilding (Tanyag, 2018). Davies and Harman (2020) advocate for the elevation of SRH within the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, emphasising the need for a feminist, rights-based, and human-centred approach to frame SRH as a global security concern without transforming it into a measure of population control. ...
This study explores the impacts of armed conflict on women's sexual and reproductive health in Colombia, building on a reproductive justice perspective on original interviews with stakeholders in healthcare, women's rights, and peacebuilding. The analysis reveals a threefold impact of war on women's sexual and reproductive health, through violent politicization, collateral damage, and intersectional dimensions. Multiple armed actors have used women's health as an instrument in politically motivated strategies to increase their power, assigning political meaning to sexuality and reproduction within the context of war. Women's health has also suffered from secondary damages of conflict resulting from a range of factors. Marginalized women have been particularly affected by a discriminatory nexus of poverty, ethnicity, and geographic inequality. The article concludes with a reflection on opportunities for reproductive justice in Colombia.
... Globally, most political and economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic failed to properly consider the ways that women are particularly vulnerable to food and economic insecurity, resulting in disproportionate negative impacts experienced by women (UN Women, 2020). This political economy 'blind spot' can be traced to an economic and policy failure to recognize the ways that reproductive labour shapes women's lives and livelihoods during a crisis (Tanyag, 2018). Failure to consider the direct impacts of COVID-19 public health measures (especially lockdowns) on food and economic security demonstrates a failure to recognize social reproduction (and, thus, women's labour) as central, not marginal, to economies and thus to economic responses to crises (Mezzadri et al., 2022;Stevano et al., 2021). ...
... Our findings contribute to existing literature showing that the impacts of crises are gendered (Hozić and True, 2016;Tanyag, 2018). This 'crisis within a crisis' was due to a collective failure to recognize the pre-existing economic and social precarity of some populations compared to others (Stevano et al., 2021). ...
... While these approaches could be seen as 'adding women', they are differentiated by analysis of gender as a construct that shapes taken for granted notions of masculinity and femininity that are ascribed to social roles, social and cultural norms, social relations, organisations and institutions (Runyan and Peterson 2015). These approaches examine differential values placed on women and men's work (Mohanty 2003;Peterson 2005;Runyan and Peterson 2015;Tanyag 2018) and expose how institutions and organisations are structured towards masculine bodies and values (Peterson 2005;Kronsell 2010;Enloe 2014). ...
... Gendered institutional approaches are important in a Fig. 1 Addressing gender in climate change research occurs along a spectrum ranging from including women as research participants through to considering the root causes that interact to create multiple crises. Developed with reference to Rocheleau et al. (1996), Peterson (2005), Tickner (2006), Kronsell (2010), Robinson (2011), Hansen (2014, Enloe (2014), Detraz (2015), Elmhirst (2015), Runyan and Peterson (2015), Tanyag (2018) and Sundberg (2017) field that is highly male dominated across all domains of research, negotiations, advocacy, policy development and implementation, due to the privileging of science and technological solutions to climate change (Djoudi et al. 2016). Scholars in this field reveal how climate policy and negotiations 'reflect the gendered power, privilege and preoccupation of most policy makers around the world' (Nagel 2012, p. 470), are prone to elite capture (Eriksen et al. 2015(Eriksen et al. , 2021 and constrain who can define what a security threat is, who is perceived as a victim and what counts as a security issue (Hoogensen and Stuvøy 2006;Oswald Spring 2009;Detraz 2017). ...
This systematic review aims to address gaps in understanding how concepts of gender, climate change and security are given meaning and linked in empirical scholarship within the Pacific Islands Region. The review assesses the 53 articles returned through Web of Science, SCOPUS and ProQuest databases that are derived from empirical research and refer to gender, climate change and security. The findings indicate that this is an emerging topic in a region that is one of the most vulnerable to climate change across the globe. Most frequently gender analysis is given superficial treatment; there is limited literature that connects gendered vulnerabilities to historical legacies and structural inequalities; and women’s critical roles that create security are often overlooked and devalued. The review indicates that greater work is needed to question perceived threats to security and to reveal how climate change, gendered institutions, systems and spaces, historical legacies and politics interact to construct security in the Pacific Islands Region.
... Scrutinising these tensions, critical scholars of social reproduction and feminist political economy have explored the ways in which everyday social interactions, often supported by policy and reproduced in institutions, affect the practice and lived experience of the socio-economic, political and civil rights of the most vulnerable (in particular, Elias and Rai 2015, Tanyag 2018, Nunes 2020. For them, if development is to leave no one behind as the SDGs proclaim, then it is vital both to diagnose the ways in which everyday social norms reproduce patterned structures of inequality with respect to the enjoyment of rights, and to identify mechanisms through which these norms can be contested and transformed. ...
... Feminist work in international political economy is remarkably vast, but a common concern relates to nuanced and often invisible gender-specific challenges that women and girls face in relation to their autonomy and well-being as a consequence of biased power relations and harmful practices affecting health; intra-household labour division; access to and distribution of economic resources; indicators of human well-being; gendered patterns in, and decency of, wages; unpaid care work (Waylen et al 2013, Tanyag 2018, Elias and Rai 2019. It also allows for an intersectional analysis that looks at gendered, raced and classed arrangements of social reproduction and gendered injustices that maintain and reproduce a social order necessary to sustain those power relations Rai 2019, also Caldwell 2017). ...
Sexual and reproductive health needs and rights are one of the bleakest examples of (racialised) gender health inequalities in Brazil. This is so despite legal and constitutional specificity recognising the right to health as right of citizenship. In this paper we argue that a ‘performance gap’ is revealed in contradictions between what the right to health as a normative framework encourages states to do, and institutional arrangements and power relations that underpin everyday gendered inequalities in health delivery. The contribution of this article is two-fold. First, it contributes to feminist political economy accounts of the neglect of sexual and reproductive rights by adding a perspective of human dignity as an approach to gender inequalities. Second, it explores ways in which health inequalities manifest in everyday practices, and how divergent expectations of what the right to health means for professionals and for disadvantaged black women limit the capacity of healthcare to make a difference to their well-being. The article also underlines the importance of complementing legal accountability in health with mechanisms that account for prerogatives of gender justice, equality and dignity.
... A further limitation concerns the predominantly female sample, reflecting the gendered division of the labour force at selected school sites and the disproportionate negative impacts of disasters on women (see Neumayer and Plümper, 2007;Tanyag, 2018bTanyag, , 2018a. However, future studies may benefit from recruiting a gender-representative sample. ...
... Participants in our study felt SRH was considered non-essential; there were uncertainties around access to SRH care and perceptions of a hierarchy of importance whereby SRH was deprioritised compared to COVID-19 care. Women's health has consistently been neglected in emergency situations with health issues being of political concern only when they directly threaten or endanger national and global stability, yet SRH concerns that threaten individual selfdetermination are both politically and economically neglected [29]. However, the need for SRH care remains during COVID-19 and other emergencies, becoming even more important for vulnerable populations [12,30,31]. ...
Objectives
COVID-19 resulted in significant disruption to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services globally, the impact of this remains under explored. This study aimed to explore the impact of COVID-19 on sexual and reproductive health (SRH) during initial weeks of the first UK lockdown.
Design
This rapid study employed a cross-sectional anonymous survey design. Between 9th April and 4th May 2020, participants completed an online questionnaire on the impacts of COVID-19 on SRH. The survey was completed by 194 participants. The findings report on data from closed and free text questions from 32% (n=62) of the total sample who said they were able to get pregnant.
Results
Participants raised concerns around reduced access to, or a denial of, SRH services as well as reduced choice when such services were available. Participants felt their right to access SRH care was impinged and there were anxieties around the impact of COVID-19 on maternal and foetal health.
Conclusions
The study contributes to a better understanding of the concerns of those who could get pregnant during the first 8 weeks of the UK lockdown. Policy makers and planners must ensure that SRH policy, that recognises the importance of bodily autonomy and rights, is central to pandemic planning and responses both in the UK and globally. Such policies should ensure the immediate implementation of protocols that protect SRH service delivery alongside informing service users of both their right to and how to access such care. Further work is necessary with members from minority communities who are mostly absent from this study to explore if, and how, COVID-19 may have exacerbated already existing disparities.
... 32 Gendered depletion from social reproduction intensifies in times of crisis and the level of harm caused differs depending on gender, geopolitics, and class. 33,34 Addressing gendered depletion accumulated from intense and largely unrewarded care work during the pandemic will be one of the most urgent challenges governments will face after the pandemic. Cutbacks in supply chains of contraceptives, closures of reproductive health-care clinics and outreach services, travel restrictions, fear of infection, and loss of income due to the COVID-19 pandemic have affected the ability of girls and women to access services and supplies across Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa to the extent that experts have warned that decades of progress towards securing reproductive rights of girls and women could be undone. ...
In low-income and middle-income countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial implications for women's wellbeing. Policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the gendered aspect of pandemics; however, addressing the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic comprehensively and effectively requires a planetary health perspective that embraces systems thinking to inequalities. This Viewpoint is based on collective reflections from research done by the authors on COVID-19 responses by international and regional organisations, and national governments, in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa between June, 2020, and June, 2021. A range of international and regional actors have made important policy recommendations to address the gendered implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's health and wellbeing since the start of the pandemic. However, national-level policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have been partial and inconsistent with regards to gender in both sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, largely failing to recognise the multiple drivers of gendered health inequalities. This Viewpoint proposes that addressing the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on women in low-income and middle-income countries should adopt a systems thinking approach and be informed by the question of who is affected as opposed to who is infected. In adopting the systems thinking approach, responses will be more able to recognise and address the direct gendered effects of the pandemic and those that emerge indirectly through a combination of long-standing structural inequalities and gendered responses to the pandemic.
... We cannot expect radical change from "resilience" approaches that push for women's economic participation under a promise of postcrisis economic recovery and growth while leaving inequalities in social reproduction intact (Elias 2016). Much like resource extraction, participation is ultimately folded within an economic model underpinned by depletion because it keeps hidden an array of interlinked costs and limits to women's participation (Rai, Hoskyns, and Thomas 2014;Tanyag 2018). Consequently, women are drawn into complicity in the degradation of their own health and wellbeing as well as of the environment because in the absence of alternative economic models, they are bound to exhaust both. ...
iwishi couldw riteth epoemi
wantor eadina timeo fcrisis
{repeat}
ineed towriteth epoemi
wantor eadina timeo fcrisis
{repeat}
thisi snotth epoemi
needtow riteina timeo fcrisis
{repeat}
thisi sjustat est ofawri terina
timeo fcrisis
{repeat}
—Teresia Teaiwa (2013)
Reflecting on the two previous conversations in Politics & Gender (2015 and 2017) regarding the diverging paths in global political economy and security studies that feminist international relations (IR) scholars have taken, I am reminded of Teresia Teaiwa's poetry, which for me speaks about how crisis gives birth to the radical starting points of our feminist inquiries. We are all undoubtedly on the cusp of ever-intensifying forms of insecurities, and peoples who have least contributed to their creation and hastening are bearing the worst impacts. It is projected that by 2100, the compounded threats that humanity will face as a result of climate change will be in multitudes across five main human systems: health, water, food, economy, infrastructure, and security (Cramer et al. 2018; Mora et al. 2018, 106). The complex consequences of climate change demand an approach that encompasses the interaction effects of different risks and hazards. However, across natural and social sciences so far, the norm has been to focus on specific aspects of human life and to examine hazards–including conflict and violence—in isolation from one another. We then run the risk of misleading ourselves with partial, if not incorrect, assessments of the global processes surrounding climate change. In particular, we are yet to understand the multiscalar dynamics of environmental degradation and extreme weather as they are entangled with other crises such as armed conflicts, health pandemics, economic recessions, and resurgences of authoritarian leadership. Whether feminist or not, we simply cannot afford to think in “camps” instead of “bridges” given the nature of the multiple crises we as humanity are facing. As Anna M. Aganthangelou (2017, 741) points out, “[g]lobal politics are never just ‘economic’ or ‘security’ issues,” so the kind of assumptions we hold and how these inform the questions we raise need to “attend to the highest stake of politics: existence.”
... Care deficits and DSR (Elias and Rai, 2015;Rai, Hoskins, and Thomas, 2014;Tanyag, 2018) were central drivers of mobility, which in many cases began during childhood through variations of traditional fosterage arrangements such as Restavek. ...
This dissertation asks: how does intimate labour interact with the mobility and political subjectivities of Haitian migrant women and women of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic (DR)? It answers this question in three specific ways. First, it explains the relationship between intimate labour and the spatial trajectories of women of Haitian ancestry who work as domestic workers. Second, it examines how the interaction between intimate labour and human mobility plays out in the Dominican border regime. Third, it explains how these subaltern women act politically in the midst of the intersections between borders, mobilities, and intimacy. The dissertation proposes the use of 'intimate-mobility entanglement' as a concept that explains the deep interrelation between intimacy and human mobility. Intimate labour requires a certain immobility, while it also affects the pace and motivations of mobility. In tandem, mobilities may set the conditions under which social reproduction occurs and intimate labour is provided. The dissertation argues that the intimate-mobility entanglement has relevant geopolitical implications that affect the ways borders function, demonstrating, among others, some of the ways sexual violence is used as a form of control that is enacted by diverse state (i.e. border officers) and non-state (i.e. smugglers) actors and affect black women of Haitian ancestry. The dissertation identifies two ways of acting politically in the midst of the intimate-mobility entanglement. It argues that embodied struggles for survival and bodily integrity are a primary form of political claim-making that coexists with discursive claim-making practices such as labour union activism, and local-international grassroots organizing by and for subjects that experience precarity of status. These contributions are the result of fourteen weeks of fieldwork, and qualitative analysis based on ethnographic methods that include participant observation, interviews, and focus groups with 165 domestic workers, migrants and activists in the DR, in communities located in 4 different geographic regions of the DR including the Haiti-DR border strip. One of the main contributions of the dissertation is to bridge scholarship on transnational social reproduction (which is mostly grounded on global political economy, iii feminist geography, and international political sociology) with scholarship on migrant studies, geopolitics, and the mobilities paradigm. In particular it contributes to Hyndman's embodied mobilities, and Sheller's reproductive mobilities, by emphasizing the centrality of the sustenance of life to why we move, how we do it, as well as how mobility is controlled. Thinking about the intimate-mobility entanglement brings livelihoods to the forefront of international relations and identifies existing ways of acting politically in a global context where new forms of differential inclusion and gradations of belonging continue to emerge. This research may be further developed by looking at the relationship between sexual and reproductive health, human mobility, and border politics in contexts of forced migration and denationalization.
... In the following brief remarks, I focus in particular on the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo. However, my observations likely also apply to other contemporary postconflict SGBV interventions, since judicial prosecution and health services have become their standard instruments (Kirby 2015;Houge and Lohne 2017;Tanyag 2018). ...
The prevention and mitigation of sexual and gender-based violence in (post-) conflict societies has become an important humanitarian activity. This introductory article examines the analytical discourses on these interventions, the institutionalization of SGBV expertise in international politics, and the emancipatory potential of anti-SGBV practices. It argues that the confluence of feminist professional activism and militarized humanitarian interventionism produced specific international activities against SGBV. As part of the institutionalization of gender themes in international politics, feminist emancipatory claims have been taken up by humanitarian organizations. The normal operating state of the humanitarian machine, however, undercuts its potential contribution to social transformation towards larger gender equality in (post-) conflict societies.
... In the region, early marriages and adolescent pregnancies continue to arise specifically out of crisis situations and of broader structural violence in a specific context (Tanyag 2018). For example, through my research on internal displacements caused by armed conflicts and natural disasters, a female informant in the Philippines argued that the [P]revalence of unsafe sex in crisis situations is rooted in the lack of sex education in the country. ...
A social reproduction framework that uses depletion reveals how multiple crises intersect. We deploy this framework to examine the relationship between depletion and conflict. Drawing on research undertaken in Myanmar and Sri Lanka in early 2020, we argue that the weight of social reproduction under conflict conditions increases women's depletion. Our findings showed, however, that increased depletion was not due primarily to increased social reproductive labour but because of the intervening effects of conflict and violence against women. These findings add utility to the concept of depletion. We argue that understanding the depth of depletion in conflict requires more than a mathematical calculation. We also contend that depletion of social reproductive resources is a tactic of conflict. Therefore, to understand depletion through social reproduction in conflict, we must expand the concept to include the depletion of social reproduction. Lastly, we show that violence against women is a significant factor in women's depletion.
Despite the potentially catastrophic nature of disasters, survivors can be highly resilient. Resilience, the capacity to successfully adapt to adversity, is both individual and collective. Policymakers and academics have recently emphasised the importance of community resilience, but with little consideration of local survivors’ perspectives, particularly young survivors within low- and middle-income countries. Therefore, this exploratory study aims to give voice to disaster-affected caregivers, teachers and female adolescent students by examining their conceptualisations of community coping and priorities for resilient recovery following the 2018 Central Sulawesi earthquake and tsunami. A total of 127 survivors of the devastating disaster, including 47 adolescents, answered open-ended survey questions related to post-disaster resilience. A content analysis identified key constituents of community resilience. The results indicate that survivors highly value community cohesion and participation, drawing on the community’s intra-personal strengths to overcome post-disaster stressors. Student conceptualisations of and recommendations for a resilient recovery often differ from the views of important adults in their lives, for example, regarding the role played by the built environment, “trauma healing” and religiosity in the recovery process. These findings have implications for the design of disaster resilience interventions.
Conflict and displacement are gendered processes which impact women in refugee communities in various ways. The following case study, in a small refugee camp in Chennai, explores whether the design of a small refugee camp allows for increased mobility among women and a different position for female refugees in the community. Findings from a two-year long study, including participant observations, FGDs and interviews, show that Rohingya women gained social mobility by accessing schools, market places, health centers and the police station outside the camp. Through such interactions, women gained skills and knowledge which somewhat altered their position in the camp.
This article traces the discursive construction of women as “civil society actors”; a discourse common to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) Doctrine and the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) Agenda. I argue that the discursive construction of women as civil society actors relies on and (re)produces gendered constructions. By tracing the discourses and logics across the R2P Doctrine and WPS Agenda, I demonstrate that both normative frameworks rely on gendered logics of agency. This poses significant dilemmas concerning the implementation of the R2P Doctrine and WPS Agenda. Namely, the gendered and therefore unequal expectations of women's civil society organizations (CSOs) to prevent, detect, and respond to violence. This paper contributes to broader concerns regarding the closer alignment of R2P and WPS, with a focus at where these two frameworks overlap in relation to mass atrocity detection, prevention, and response. The argument this article develops demonstrates that the spaces within and between the WPS Agenda and R2P Doctrine, the agency of women's CSOs is constrained, instrumentalized, and co-opted by the state and market. This presents concerns for the implementation of the aims (shared or otherwise) of R2P and WPS. Finally, this article raises urgent questions concerning the relationship between states and women's CSOs, the funding and independence of CSOs and the expectations placed on CSOs to contribute to international peace and security.
Recent global health emergencies have highlighted the critical role of health care workers in stemming the spread of pandemics. Healthcare workers provide an essential service to local communities impacted by epidemics such as Ebola. Global health scholars suggest that carers may suffer harm while performing this essential work. Building on feminist theories of ‘harm’ and ‘social reproduction’, this article uses as case studies the early 21st century Ebola epidemics that broke out in West Africa and the DRC to ask how do women carers in humanitarian crises experience harm? The article illustrates the hierarchical and gendered nature of harm, and how those at the bottom of social hierarchies face intersectional harms stemming from their race, class and economic status. The article highlights an urgent need to rethink how law at both the domestic and international levels has contributed to the reproduction of inequalities faced by these carers.
This chapter explains why, despite some major regime transformations including democratisation, Southeast Asian polities continue to be dominated by oligarchies and place severe limits on political participation and contestation. Using a “Modes of Participation” framework, which builds on the Murdoch School, it draws attention to the legacies of Cold War authoritarianism and state-led development in creating profoundly unequal social power relations, which are institutionalised in ways that shape and limit socio-political contestation. Nonetheless, capitalism’s dynamic, conflictual nature ensures that Southeast Asia’s oligarchs continually face challenges of political management, often manifesting as struggles over political institutions. The framework explains the outcome of these struggles, illustrated with two brief case studies from Singapore and Indonesia.
This chapter considers what it means to focus on gender in analysing the political economy of Southeast Asian development. Drawing on examples from across the region, it uncovers the role that women in Southeast Asia play in both economic production and social reproduction. It shows that development planning is rooted in assumptions about the availability of a reserve army of low-cost female labour, with implications of widening gender pay gaps and inequalities. State planning has also been starkly non- or even anti-welfarist, placing burdens on female family members to undertake the work of care, which are exacerbated during times of economic downturn and crisis. Gender inequality has therefore played a central role in Southeast Asia’s development.
This chapter reconceptualises global violence and security through a feminist political economy framework. Violence and insecurity is intimately related to unequal political and economic power. However, the ‘continuum of violence’ is obscured by masculinist norms of security within gendered structures of political economy especially the division of public/private spheres, of production/reproduction activities, and of war/peace. These divisions are reproduced despite processes of globalisation that increasingly materially displace them. Feminist political economy analysis allows us not only to see the range of forms of violence and insecurity in war and conflict contexts but moreover, to understand how they are structurally connected to violence and insecurity within apparently peaceful societies and households. Applying this framework the chapter challenges the ‘silo-ing’ of the political-military and socioeconomic stabilisation pillars of international security. It reveals the disproportionately negative impact that this dichotomous approach to security has on individuals and communities, particularly on women’s rights to protection and participation in peace and security. Economic and political marginalisation exacerbates experiences of physical and structural violence both in and outside of conflict and hinders the achievement of sustainable peace. Fundamental change in global security governance must involve transforming the underlying structures of political, social, and economic inequality rather than prescribing more ‘good governance’, and ‘gender mainstreaming’ grafted onto security and humanitarian interventions.
Over the past decade, significant global attention has been paid to the issue of ‘widespread and systematic’ sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). To contribute to the prevention of SGBV, researchers have examined the relationship between the presence of armed conflict and the causes of SGBV. Much of this causal literature has focused on the individual and group perpetrator dynamics that fuel SGBV. However, we argue that research needs to lay bare the roots of SGBV in normalized and systemic gender discrimination. This article brings back structural gender inequality as a causal explanation for SGBV. In order to better understand and prevent SGBV, we propose a critical knowledge base that identifies causal patterns of gendered violence by building on existing indicators of gender discrimination.
In this article we explore the concept of depletion through social reproduction (DSR). We describe depletion, identify its key indicators and suggest different methodologies that could be used to measure it. We discuss issues having to do with gendered harm as well as questions about how depletion might be reversed. We conclude that recognizing DSR in this way can be a powerful tool for understanding the consequences of non-recognition of the value of domestic work to national economies, as well as the harm that might accrue in the doing of this work at both a systemic and individual level.
The Inter-agency Working Group on Reproductive Health in Crises conducted a ten-year global evaluation of reproductive health in humanitarian settings. This paper examines proposals for reproductive health activities under humanitarian health and protection funding mechanisms for 2002-2013, and the level at which these reproductive health proposals were funded.
The study used English and French health and protection proposal data for 2002-2013, extracted from the Financial Tracking Service (FTS) database managed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Every project was reviewed for relevance against pre-determined reproductive health definitions for 2002-2008. An in-depth analysis was additionally conducted for 2009-2013 through systematically reviewing proposals via a key word search and subsequently classifying them under designated reproductive health categories. Among the relevant reproductive health proposals, counts and proportions were calculated in Excel based on their reproductive health components, primarily by year. Contributions, requests, and unfunded requests were calculated based on the data provided by FTS.
Among the 11,347 health and protection proposals issued from 345 emergencies between 2002 and 2013, 3,912 were relevant to reproductive health (34.5%). The number of proposals containing reproductive health activities increased by an average of 21.9% per year, while the proportion of health and protection sector appeals containing reproductive health activities increased by an average of 10.1% per year. The total funding request over the 12 years amounted to 2.031 billion USD was received. Among reproductive health components for 2009-2013 proposals, maternal newborn health comprised the largest proportion (56.4%), followed by reproductive health-related gender-based violence (45.9%), HIV/sexually transmitted infections (37.5%), general reproductive health (26.2%), and lastly, family planning (14.9%).
Findings show that more agencies are responding to humanitarian appeals by proposing to implement reproductive health programs and receiving increased aid over the twelve year period. While such developments are welcome, project descriptions show comparatively limited attention and programming for family planning and abortion care in particular.
Feminist scholars have been highly attentive to the ways that crises have become an everyday technique of global governance. They are particularly sensitive to the mechanisms through which ‘crisis management’ entrenches the power of particular economic orders and constrains the possibilities, and space, for contestation and critique. This paper seeks to contribute to but also to extend existing feminist research on financial crisis by arguing that, over the course of what has commonly been labelled the ‘global financial crisis’, the emergence of ‘crisis governance feminism’ has enabled existing structures and mechanisms of gendered privilege, such as the global financial industry, to suppress calls for their overhaul and to re-entrench their power in the global political economy. Adopting a discursive approach to gender and governance that situates gender centrally in understanding governance discourses and their reproduction of common sense (about what people do, how they labour, where they invest and so on), this paper argues that the governance of crisis in the contemporary era, in particular the various actors, institutions, policies and ideas that have sought to describe and ‘contain’ the global financial crisis, are gendered. Gender has become, in the contemporary global political economy, a technique of governance, and with deleterious effects. Despite inciting more discussion of ‘gender’ in economic systems than ever before (particularly in terms of discussions of ‘economic competitiveness’), this paper argues that the ‘global financial crisis’ has precipitated and continues to reproduce techniques of governance that trivialise feminist concerns while further embedding a masculinised, white and elitist culture of global financial privilege.
The metaphor of “care drain” has been created as a womanly parallel to the “brain drain” idea. Just as “brain drain” suggests that the skilled migrants are an economic loss for the sending country, “care drain” describes the migrant women hired as care workers as a loss of care for their children left behind. This paper criticizes the construction of migrant women as “care drain” for three reasons: 1) it is built on sexist stereotypes, 2) it misrepresents and devalues care work, and 3) it misses the opportunity for a theoretical change about how skills in migration contexts can be understood.
Recent studies have found significant excess mortality in women during and immediately after armed conflicts. This article directly assesses one of the most likely explanations, namely that war negatively affects reproductive health. Armed conflicts may contribute to sustain high fertility levels through increased social insecurity, loss of reproductive health services, and lower female education. Further, war's deteriorating impact on health infrastructure is expected to increase the relative risk that women die from complications associated with pregnancy and childbirth. These claims are tested in a global time-series cross-national study from 1970 through 2005. Three major findings are reported. First, armed conflicts are associated with higher overall fertility in low-income countries only. Second, maternal mortality rates are elevated, albeit moderately, in conflict countries. Third, conflicts in neighboring countries are associated with lower maternal mortality, possibly indicating that health interventions among refugee and host populations are relatively successful. While addressing one of the least successful UN Millennium Development Goals, this study also responds to the UN Security Council Resolution 1325, in which Article 16 specifically calls for the “Secretary-General to carry out a study on the impact of armed conflict on women and girls.”
The global migration and trafficking of women is anchored in particular features of the current globalization of economies in both the north and the south. Making this legible requires that we look at globalization in ways that are different from the mainstream view, confined to emphasizing the hypermobility of capital and to the ascendance of information economies. The growing inmiseration of governments and whole economies in the global south has promoted and enabled the proliferation of survival and profit-making activities that involve the migration and trafficking of women. To some extent these are older processes, which used to be national or regional that can today operate at global scales. The same infrastructure that facilitates cross-border flows of capital, information and trade is also making possible a whole range of cross-border flows not intended by the framers and designers of the current globalization of economies. Growing numbers of traffickers and smugglers are making money off the backs of women and many governments are increasingly dependent on their remittances. A key aspect here is that through their work and remittances, women enhance the government revenue of deeply indebted countries and offer new profit making possibilities to `entrepreneurs' who have seen other opportunities vanish as a consequence of global firms and markets entering their countries or to long time criminals who can now operate their illegal trade globally. These survival circuits are often complex, involving multiple locations and sets of actors constituting increasingly global chains of traders and `workers'. A central point of the article is that it is through these supposedly rather value-less economic actors low-wage and poor women that key components of these new economies have been built. Globalization plays a specific role here in a double sense, contributing to the formation of links between sending and receiving countries, and, secondly, enabling local and regional practices to become global in scale.
Over the past decade, health has become an increasingly important international issue and one which has engaged the attention of the foreign and security policy community. This article examines the emerging relationship between foreign and security policy, and global public health. It argues that the agenda has been dominated by two issues – the spread of selected infectious diseases (including HIV/AIDS) and bio-terror. It argues that this is a narrow framing of the agenda which could be broadened to include a wider range of issues. We offer two examples: health and internal instability, including the role of health in failing states and in post-conflict reconstruction; and illicit activities. We also argue that the relationship between global public health, and foreign and security policy has prioritised the concerns of the latter over the former – how selected health issues may create risks for (inter)national security or economic growth. Moreover the interests of the West are prominent on this agenda, focusing (largely though not exclusively) on how health risks in the developing world might impact upon the West. It is less concerned with the promotion of global public health.
The social services provided in any country are determined by resource allocation. How money is spent, the way in which programmes are organised, and the services that are prioritised can have important implications for health, including the sexual and reproductive health of men and women. Choices in how resources are allocated are influenced by a number of factors. Covering the years from the late 1970s to the current time, this article reviews the contexts that have influenced the provision of sexual and reproductive health services and provides examples of instances where decisions about resource allocation are not evidence-based. The role of donors in determining how services are provided and their lack of accountability is discussed. We conclude that sexual and reproductive health and rights activists need to engage with and take into account the macroeconomic environment in their efforts to improve sexual and reproductive health outcomes.
Résumé
Les services sociaux fournis dans tous les pays sont déterminés par l'allocation de ressources. La manière dont les fonds sont dépensés, l'organisation des programmes et les services jugés prioritaires peuvent avoir des répercussions importantes sur la santé, y compris la santé génésique des hommes et des femmes. Les choix en matière d'allocation des ressources sont influencés par plusieurs facteurs. L'article examine les contextes qui ont influé sur la prestation de services de santé génésique depuis la fin des années 70 jusqu'à aujourd'hui, et donne des exemples de cas où les décisions sur l'allocation des ressources ne sont pas fondées sur les faits. Il débat du rôle des donateurs pour déterminer comment les services sont assurés et leur manque de responsabilisation. Nous concluons que les activistes en faveur de la santé et des droits génésiques doivent interagir avec l'environnement macroéconomique et que leurs efforts pour améliorer l'état de santé génésique doivent tenir compte de cet environnement.
Resumen
Los servicios sociales proporcionados en un país se determinan por asignación de recursos. La manera en que se gasta el dinero y en que se organizan los programas y los servicios priorizados pueden tener importantes implicaciones para la salud, incluida la salud reproductiva de hombres y mujeres. Numerosos factores influyen en las opciones de asignación de recursos. En este artículo, que abarca desde finales de la década de los setenta hasta la actualidad, se revisan los contextos que han influido en la prestación de servicios de salud reproductiva y se exponen ejemplos de casos en que las decisiones sobre la asignación de recursos no estaban basadas en evidencia. Se examina el papel que desempeñan las agencias donantes en determinar cómo se proporcionan los servicios, así como su falta de responsabilidad. Concluimos que los activistas a favor de la salud y los derechos sexuales y reproductivos deben estar al tanto del ambiente macroeconómico y tomarlo en cuenta en sus esfuerzos por mejorar los resultados relacionados con la salud sexual y reproductiva.
Although the resources and knowledge for achieving improved global health exist, a new, critical paradigm on health as an aspect of human development, human security, and human rights is needed. Such a shift is required to sufficiently modify and credibly reduce the present dominance of perverse market forces on global health. New scientific discoveries can make wide-ranging contributions to improved health; however, improved global health depends on achieving greater social justice, economic redistribution, and enhanced democratization of production, caring social institutions for essential health care, education, and other public goods. As with the quest for an HIV vaccine, the challenge of improved global health requires an ambitious multidisciplinary research program.
The International Labour Organisation's Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work of 1998 formalised an approach to global labour issues known as the Core Labour Standards (CLS). The CLS have privileged a specific set of labour standards as possessing the kinds of universalistic qualities associated with ideas of 'human rights'; the abolition of forced and child labour, equality of opportunity, and trade union rights. But what does this 'human rights' approach mean from the point of view of those women workers who dominate employment in some of the most globalised, and insecure, industries in the world? In this article, I make the case for critical feminist engagement with the gender-blind, and neoliberal-compatible, approach to economic rights as set out in the CLS. Not least, this article raises wider concerns about the insufficiency of approaches to economic rights that are designed to work within the (gendered) structures of a neoliberal economic development paradigm. It is suggested that the CLS have endorsed a voluntarist approach to labour standards that views the promotion and regulation of human rights by global corporations as unproblematic. The article challenges this perspective, drawing upon the work of number of feminist scholars working in the area of women's employment and corporate codes of conduct. These feminist writings have specifically avoided the language of human rights; thus questions need to be asked concerning the possibilities and the limitations that the CLS opens up for women's human rights activism. Yes Yes
Reproductive health needs are particularly acute in countries affected by armed conflict. Reliable information on aid investment for reproductive health in these countries is essential for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of aid. The purpose of this study was to analyse official development assistance (ODA) for reproductive health activities in conflict-affected countries from 2003 to 2006.
The Creditor Reporting System and the Financial Tracking System databases were the chosen data sources for the study. ODA disbursement for reproductive health activities to 18 conflict-affected countries was analysed for 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. An average of US 509.3 million (2.4%) was allocated to reproductive health. This represents an annual average of US $1.30 disbursed per capita in the 18 sampled countries for reproductive health activities. Non-conflict-affected least-developed countries received 53.3% more ODA for reproductive health activities than conflict-affected least-developed countries, despite the latter generally having greater reproductive health needs. ODA disbursed for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment increased by 119.4% from 2003 to 2006. The ODA disbursed for other direct reproductive health activities declined by 35.9% over the same period.
This study provides evidence of inequity in disbursement of reproductive health ODA between conflict-affected countries and non-conflict-affected countries, and between different reproductive health activities. These findings and the study's recommendations seek to support initiatives to make aid financing more responsive to need in the context of armed conflict.
Feminist scholars have critically demonstrated the links between the global political economy, social reproduction and gender-based violence. This article builds on this scholarship by investigating restrictions to reproductive freedom and their connection to the depletion of women’s bodies in the global political economy. Specifically, I use the Depletion through Social Reproduction (DSR) framework to reveal how the work of social reproduction is harnessed to service economic activity at the cost of rights to bodily integrity with the aid of religious fundamentalist ideologies that (re)inscribe discourses of female altruism such as the “self-sacrificing mother” ideal. Drawing on the case of the Philippines, I argue that the control of women’s bodies is integral to the Philippines’ economic strategy of exporting care workers in a competitive global political economy. This strategy is abetted by local Catholic religious fundamentalists who challenge reproductive rights reform at various levels of policy-making and legitimize the lack of investment to sustain social reproduction in the household, community and country as a whole. This article suggests that the neoliberal global economy is increasingly reproduced through women’s labor at the cost of their bodily integrity and reproductive freedoms.
This chapter examines the social dimensions of the recent global economic crisis through the prism of social reproduction, allowing us to examine the invisible, unpaid parts of economies, as well as the much more visible paid parts. The crisis has been a crisis of capital accumulation, with falling investment, output and employment. But it has also been a rupture in social reproduction, understood as ‘the process by which all the main relations in the society are constantly recreated and perpetuated’ (Mackintosh 1981: 10) This process requires non-market and not-for-profit activities as well as market and for-profit activities, and includes unpaid work in families as well as paid work in businesses (Elson 1998). Social reproduction involves the reproduction of labour as well as of capital. It is a contested and contradictory process, and, from time to time, action by the state is required to try to safeguard it. In the recent crisis, there was swift action by governments to safeguard some aspects of social reproduction, but not of others. This chapter asks why, and examines some of the consequences.
The international response to Ebola brings into stark contention the conspicuous invisibility of women and gender in global health governance. Developing feminist research on gender blindness, care and male bias, this article uses Ebola as a case to explore how global health rests on the conspicuous free labour of women in formal and informal care roles, yet renders women invisible in policy and practice. The article does so by demonstrating the conspicuous invisibility of women and gender in narratives on Ebola, emergency and long-term strategies to contain the disease, and in the health system strengthening plans of the World Health Organization and World Bank.
In The Ethics of Care, Fiona Robinson demonstrates how the responsibilities of sustaining life are central to the struggle for basic human security. She takes a unique approach, using a feminist lens to challenge gender biases in rights-based, individualist approaches.Robinson's thorough and impassioned consideration of care in both ethical and practical terms provides a starting point for understanding and addressing the material, emotional and psychological conditions that create insecurity for people. The Ethics of Careexamines "care ethics" and "security" at the theoretical level and explores the practical implications of care relations for security in a variety of contexts: women's labor in the global economy, humanitarian intervention and peace building, healthcare, and childcare. Theoretically-innovative and policy-relevant, this critical analysis demonstrates the need to understand the obstacles and inequalities that obstruct the equitable and adequate delivery of care around the world.
It has become common to speak of health security, but the meaning of the latter is often taken for granted. Existing engagements with this notion have been constrained by an excessive focus on national security and on the securitising efforts of elites. This has led to an increasingly sceptical outlook on the potentialities of security for making sense of, and helping to tackle, health problems. Inspired by the idea of security as emancipation, this article reconsiders the notion of health security. It takes as its starting point the concrete insecurities experienced by individuals, and engages with them by way of an analytical framework centred on the notion of domination. Domination deepens analysis by connecting individual experiences of insecurity, the social interactions through which these are given meaning, and the structures that make them possible. Domination also broadens the remit of analysis, shedding light on the multifaceted nature of insecurity. The analytical benefits of this framework are demonstrated by two examples: HIV/AIDS; and water and sanitation. The lens of domination is also shown to bring benefits for the political engagement with global health problems.
Over the past decade, there have been increased attempts to understand the contributing factors to the relationship between healthy populations (that is, populations that have long life expectancy from birth), the prevention of conflict, and governance regimes that enable to survive and thrive. These studies have been largely informed by longitudinal studies on the positive relationship between regime type, provision of health care, and conflict prevention. This article examines what insights a comparison of postconflict countries in a regional setting may provide to challenge or indeed extend the findings advanced so far in the literature on the relationship between regime type and health insecurity. The Southeast Asian experience confirms the obvious – that the cessation of armed conflict is related to improved health outcomes. However, it challenges presumptions that democratisation plays a significant role in shaping this relationship.
Girls and women have become the public faces of development today, through the success of “Gender Equality as Smart Economics” policy agendas and similar development narratives that mediate feminist claims through market logic. Women, these narratives assert, are more productive, responsible, and sustainable economic agents for future growth in the context of global financial crisis and therefore their empowerment is economically prudent. In this article, I provide a feminist reading of Foucault's critique of human capital to examine the discursive terrain of the “Smart Economics” agenda and to understand the knowledge it produces about female bodies, subjectivities and agency. Through a discussion of the World Bank's 201234.
World Bank. 2012. World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development. Washington, DC: World Bank.View all references World Development Report on gender equality, I argue that the current narratives of women's empowerment are premised on a series of gender essentialisms and their “activation” through biopolitical interventions. The activation narrative of human capital appears, under feminist eyes, to reflect the notion that the supposedly intrinsic responsible and maternal nature of women can be harnessed to produce more profitable and sustainable development outcomes and, by extension, “rescue” global capitalism.
This book addresses how sexual practices and identities are imagined and regulated through development discourses and within institutions of global governance. The underlying premise of this volume is that the global development industry plays a central role in constructing people's sexual lives, access to citizenship, and struggles for livelihood. Despite the industry's persistent insistence on viewing sexuality as basically outside the realm of economic modernization and anti-poverty programs, this volume brings to the fore heterosexual bias within macroeconomic and human rights development frameworks. The work fills an important gap in understanding how people's intimate lives are governed through heteronormative policies which typically assume that the family is based on blood or property ties rather than on alternative forms of kinship. By placing heteronormativity at the center of analysis, this anthology thus provides a much-needed discussion about the development industry's role in pathologizing sexual deviance yet also, more recently, in helping make visible a sexual rights agenda. Providing insights valuable to a range of disciplines, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Development Studies, Gender Studies, and International Relations. It will also be highly relevant to development practitioners and international human rights advocates. © 2010 Amy Lind selection and editorial matter. All rights reserved.
This short commentary aims to think through the need to return to a more “integrated” feminist IR through a focus on some of the ways in which feminist political economy (FPE) scholars, such as ourselves, might better integrate a focus on gendered forms and practices of violence into our analysis. We do this via an intervention into debates about the nature of the “everyday” political economy. At the same time, we hope that this intervention might also draw attention to the need for a clearer understanding of the gendered structures and practices of the global political economy in feminist security studies (FSS).
In Bodies in Crisis, Barbara Sutton examines the complex, and often hidden, bodily worlds of diverse women in Argentina (her country of origin) during a period of profound social upheaval. Based primarily on women’s experiential narratives and set against the backdrop of a severe economic crisis and intensified social movement activism post-2001, Bodies in Crisis illuminates how multiple forms of injustice converge in and are contested through women’s bodies. The book reveals the bodily scars of neoliberal globalization; women’s negotiation of cultural norms of femininity and beauty; experiences with clandestine, illegal, and unsafe abortions; exposure to and resistance against interpersonal and structural violence; and the role of bodies as tools and vehicles of political action.
Through the lens of women’s body consciousness in a Global South country, and drawing on multifaceted stories and a politically embedded approach, Bodies in Crisis suggests that social policy, economic systems, cultural ideologies, and political resistance are ultimately fleshly matters.
Excerpt: http://www.amazon.com/Bodies-Crisis-Resistance-Neoliberal-Argentina/dp/0813547407#reader_0813547407
This article discusses the emergence and maturing of Global Health as a sub-discipline within International Relations. It directly addresses three questions. First, it discusses how International Relations? scholarship can deepen our understanding of global health. Second, it asks what the study of global health can tell scholars of International Relations about contemporary world politics. And finally, it examines how the discipline of International Relations might contribute to the improvement of global health outcomes.
This article will outline the legislative history of the Global Gag Rule and will describe the key stakeholders responsible for the policy’s passage and promotion. The negative effects associated with the policy’s implementation will be discussed, as well as its implications for human rights discourse and political activism.
This article introduces the women and international political economy special issue of Signs, tracing its relationship to the crisis of neoliberalism as they developed concurrently and highlighting the key themes elucidated in the articles presented here. Three themes, which are reflected in different ways in these articles, are outlined in this introduction in order to illustrate the importance of gender in analyzing international political economy: first, the benefit of multilayered approaches to governance; second, new insights into debates about social reproduction and work; and, third, pressing concerns of intimacy and sexuality. In particular, the introduction foregrounds transnational and postcolonial approaches to political economy questions, including their application in a national frame. The article then identifies the gaps in the literature, and in the special issue itself, and concludes by reflecting on the Janus‐faced nature of crises. We suggest that discursive and political struggles are already taking place that challenge the power relations entrenched within international political economy.
This paper sets out a framework for thinking about the gender dimensions of the economic crisis. It considers the likely impact of the crisis, as well as the responses to it, on the part of both individuals and collectivities, in three spheres of the economy: finance; production; and reproduction. It identifies the kinds of 'gender numbers' that we need; sex-disaggregated statistics of various kinds. It also argues that we need to pay attention to gender norms - the social practices and ideas that shape the behaviour of people and institutions. The norms may be reinforced in times of crisis; but they may also start to decompose as individuals transgress norms under the pressures of crisis. In addition, there may be opportunities for the transformation of norms, through collective action to institute new, more egalitarian, social practices and ideas.
Using the conceptual framework of social reproduction as a way of reassessing the AIDS crisis in Africa, this paper finds contradictory tendencies: a devastating impact on agricultural modes of livelihood which sustain the majority and which enable workers to present themselves as cheap labour, but also a crisis for the reproduction of capital as its supply of such labour is depleted. The impact on and response to the epidemic by the state is explored as well as its reflection of marked gender and class inequalities. Conversely the impetus to certain fractions of capital which benefit from AIDS and the confrontation of the state and pharmaceutical companies by an emergent populist movement demanding the right to treatment, exposes the extent to which transformation rather than simple reproduction is in evidence.
Warning of a global crisis of social reproduction, feminist IPE has come a long way to demonstrate how the restructuring of the global political economy increases obstacles to exercise social reproduction activities and thereby endangers social reproduction tout court. While feminist IPE explicitly points to the need for empirical studies of the ways in which this global crisis of social reproduction manifests itself in specific contexts, much of the literature remains rather theoretical and at the macro level. This article addresses this gap with a case study of the crisis of social reproduction in rural Mexico, focusing on the transformations of the conditions of social reproduction, gender regimes and the roles of children. The findings of this case study challenge the universal applicability of the ‘(re-)privatization of social reproduction’ thesis. The main argument is that instead of emphasizing the shifts between the public and the private sphere and the retreat of the state from social provisioning, it is essential to reorient our focus towards the changing and context-specific forms of state involvement, and their implications for the transformation of social reproduction conditions, if we are to gain a better understanding of the variety of ways in which the global crisis of social reproduction manifests itself in different locations.
Reviewing existing scholarship and drawing on our own experience of microlevel qualitative research on gender in countries in three regions of the Global South (Cambodia, the Philippines, Costa Rica and The Gambia), this article examines patterns of women’s altruistic behaviour within poor family-based households. As a quality and practice labeled as ‘feminine’, the article illuminates the motives, dimensions and dynamics that characterise this apparently enduring female trait. It also makes some tentative suggestions as to how the links between women and altruism might be more systematically examined, problematized and addressed in development, and gender and development (GAD) analysis and policy.
Institutions in the global development industry play a pivotal role in governing people's sexual and familial lives. Amy Lind addresses how forms of intimacy are governed through national and global development institutions, both through the visibilization and invisibilization of lesbians, gay men and other individuals who do not fulfill prescribed gender and sexual norms in their societies, with the overall aim of challenging heteronormativity and gender normativity in development thought and practice. Development (2009) 52, 34–42. doi:10.1057/dev.2008.71
This major work combines theoretical innovation with systematic empirical substance to explore the contours and dynamics of a major global social phenomenon - the globalization of reproductive labour. Grounded in careful historical analysis, the book offers important insights into key actors in contemporary globalization processes: migrant care workers. Expanding the traditional focus on domestic workers, the book presents a significant analysis of the international migration of professional nurses and religious care workers and the part they play in forging the 'new' global reproductive economy. Covering a range of countries in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas, this innovative inter-disciplinary analysis of a major global phenomenon of our time is an essential reference for scholars of migration, globalization and gender.
The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule. . . Insofar as its inhabitants [are] stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life, the camp [is] also the most absolute biopolitical space ever to have been realized, in which power confronts nothing but pure life, without any mediation.'' 1 I N Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's concept of the ''state of exception'', human beings are reduced to a condition of ''bare life'', banished from the dignities of citizenship and the protections of ordinary rights. While Agamben considers the Nazi concentration camps as the paradigm case, he warns that under conditions of global economic and ecological crisis and rampant militarism, growing numbers of people find themselves stripped of ordinary rights or even ''the right to have rights'' . 2 These include not only the detainees in militarised sites of the US-led war on terror, but also the millions of internally displaced and transnational migrants and refugees fleeing war, ethnic and armed conflict, tsunami, hurricanes, floods and other disasters. By the end of 2006, according to estimates by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), nearly 33 million men, women and children worldwide qualified for humanitarian assistance: refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs), returnees, and stateless persons. This was an increase of 56% over the available statistics for 2005, reflecting escalating armed conflicts, e.g. in Iraq, Lebanon, Sri Lanka and Timor-Leste. 3 The immediate – and in many cases long-term – result has been the wholesale concentration of ''forced migrants'' in camps and other displacement centres. It is hardly surprising that the face of disas-ter – whether natural or conflict-induced – is highly gendered, as well as marked by divisions of class, race, ethnicity and age. Confronting this reality, increasing numbers of researchers, advocates and agencies have begun to address the gender dimensions of disaster, particularly those related to sexual and reproductive health and sexual and other forms of violence. More-over, as articles in this volume by Judy Austin et al and Audrey Macklin examine, beginning in the mid-1990s with the International Confer-ence on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo* and reactions to the crises in Bosnia and Rwanda, a series of international and inter-governmental initiatives have attempted to secure the access of both refugees and internally dis-placed persons to basic health care services, including reproductive health services and family planning. These efforts have included the work of the Inter-Agency Working Group on Repro-ductive Health in Crises and its Field Manual on Reproductive Health in Refugee Situations; the Reproductive Health Response in Conflict Consortium; the Minimum Initial Service Pack-age that became part of the 2004 revised Sphere Minimum Standards for response to disaster; and UNHCR documents, including most recently, its 2008 Handbook for the Protection of Women and Girls.
Leaving No One Behind: LGBT Rights Post-Haiyan
- Oxfam
United Nations Population Division Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group
- Unicef Who
- World Bank
Counter-geographies of globalization and the feminization of survival; citation_author=Sassen, Saskia; citation_publication_date=2000; citation_journal_title=Journal of International Affairs; citation_volume=53; citation_firstpage=503
- Burden
Invisible labor, invisible bodies
- Tanyag
Tanyag, 'Invisible labor, invisible bodies'.
Women after the Storm: Gender Issues in Yolanda Recovery and Rehabilitation
- Oxfam
Oxfam, Women after the Storm: Gender Issues in Yolanda Recovery and Rehabilitation (Quezon City: Oxfam,
2015), p. 35.
Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace
- Un Women
UN Women, Preventing Conflict, Transforming Justice, Securing the Peace, p. 241.
In rural Philippines, a dearth of doctors
- Blaine See
- Harden
See, for example, Blaine Harden, 'In rural Philippines, a dearth of doctors', Washington Post Foreign Service
(20 September 2008), available at: {http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/19/
AR2008091903678.html}accessed 4 November 2017.
DOH secretary: Philippines lacks 15,000 doctors
- Regine Cabato
Regine Cabato, 'DOH secretary: Philippines lacks 15,000 doctors', CNN Philippines (13 October 2016),
- Sutton
Depletion’; Sophie Harman, ‘Ebola, gender and conspicuously invisible women in global health governance
- Rai