Many labour migrants in the Arab Gulf countries are from South Asia. Necessary to local economies, they enjoy few rights and protections from host states, particularly when accused of serious crimes. Our original empirical data suggests a disproportionate number of Pakistanis sentenced to death and executed in Saudi Arabia and we explore explanations within a wider discussion of the place and experiences of South Asian migrants in the Gulf. Our data suggest that drug laws and penal policies leave migrant workers particularly susceptible to capital punishment, with the administration of migrant employment recruitment processes exposing Pakistanis to coercion into drug trafficking such that some could be regarded not as criminally liable but as victims of human trafficking.
This paper draws upon my doctoral research into the experiences of women who have been sentenced to death for drug trafficking in Malaysia. I utilise this case-study as a lens through which to examine the relationship between women, crime and economic factors. From my data derived from 47 ‘elite’ interviews, as well as legal and media database searches (resulting in information on 146 cases), I argue that current feminist criminological theorising should be updated to incorporate the relationship between women’s crime and precarious work. As I show, precarity is gendered and disproportionately affects women from the global south. Overall, I find that many of the women who have been sentenced to death in Malaysia were engaged in precarious work and drug trafficking was a way to make ‘quick money’ to address economic insecurity. Clearly, capital punishment is incommensurate with the crime.
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