Since new distributed ledger technologies hold out a promise to restructure cross‐border flows of people and material resources, they affect globalization and alter transnational spaces. Their capacity to facilitate secure and disintermediated value transfer through crypto‐code and smart contracts enables novel forms of remittance transfer, resource management and digital identity verification – and may also generate new vulnerabilities. In this article, we examine the use of emerging blockchain applications in various migration and diaspora related initiatives in the emerging economies of Africa, Asia and Europe. By building on existing social networks of mutual obligation and quasi‐ethnic affinities, blockchain technologies may facilitate the ability to enlarge the scope of diasporas and change the nature of belonging, sovereignty, migration and statehood. Through exploring the selective foregrounding of mutuality and materiality in such alternative value transfer systems, we seek to explain the dynamics of trust and agency that these networks generate to extend commitments and loyalties in the transnational space.
Solutions to global sustainability challenges are increasingly technology-intensive. Yet, technologies are neither developed nor applied to governance problems in a socio-political vacuum. Despite aspirations to provide novel solutions to current sustainability governance challenges, many technology-centred projects, pilots and plans remain implicated in longer-standing global governance trends shaping the possibilities for success in often under-recognized ways. This article identifies three overlapping contexts within which technology-led efforts to address sustainability challenges are evolving, highlighting the growing roles of: (1) private actors; (2) experimentalism; and (3) informality. The confluence of these interconnected trends illuminates an important yet often under-recognized paradox: that the use of technology in multi-stakeholder initiatives tends to reduce rather than expand the set of actors, enhancing instead of reducing challenges to participation and transparency, and reinforcing rather than transforming existing forms of power relations. Without recognizing and attempting to address these limits, technology-led multi-stakeholder initiatives will remain less effective in addressing the complexity and uncertainty surrounding global sustainability governance. We provide pathways for interrogating the ways that novel technologies are being harnessed to address long-standing global sustainability issues in manners that foreground key ethical, social and political considerations and the contexts in which they are evolving.
The paper enquires into the practices of cooperation and mutuality that are reproduced in contemporary mutual help groups of post-socialist Tanzania. Diverse associations of cooperative work and mutual security are on the rise in globalizing African communities. Local institutions of mutual assistance are becoming increasingly important in regulating access to resources and redefining socialities in environments of persistent instability. Mutual help groups among Kuria people have emerged as institutions for facilitating exchange through relationally oriented expansion that enables the rise of new economic niches and social identities. A complex intermingling of diverse organizational features has enabled the associations to engage novel types of resources and categories of participants. The paper examines hybrid and haphazard elements of formalization that occur with the regularizing of work reciprocities and the increasing use of monetary loans and savings. Exploring culturally relevant metaphors of life-sustaining flows and passageways, indispensable for individual and social growth, the article investigates the value conversions mediated by the groups and their impacts on wider public spaces in Tanzanian communities.
African communities are witnessing a perplexing proliferation of diverse arrangements of mutual security that draw upon old and new solidarities and inventively merge market logic with reciprocal forms of distribution and sharing. The dynamics of such voluntary arrangements and their broader social impacts emerge as increasingly important topics of study. The changing nature of global economies poses challenging questions about the novel relationships between state and market, and the potential of human agency to find alternatives to address growing inequalities. This collection focuses on local institutions of mutual security as alternative – yet also interdependent – forms of distribution that have become particularly relevant in the current era of global financialization and the changing dynamics between private and public social spheres. Various voluntary associations and informal economic networks, financial mutuals and savings/credit groups are becoming central in regulating access to resources and defining patterns of association in African communities. The articles in this themed part-issue explore these social security networks and organizations, concentrating on their ambiguous potential to empower the marginal as well as to contribute to social strife and political conflict. Ethnographic cases from diverse parts of Africa illustrate the impacts of the environments of uncertainty on the emergence of novel forms of association. The contributions suggest that contemporary mutual help arrangements should be seen as being central to the emergence of new social spaces and power configurations in such settings, revealing a broader social dynamic of globalization.
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