21 ‘Women in Motion’ in a World of Nation-States, Market Forces, and Gender Power Relations

Abstract

This chapter provides concluding reflections from a set of nineteen case studies of transnational and intranational migration and mobility. It contrasts the 'sedentary bias' present in policy regimes and associated thought centred on nation-states, where movement is seen as exceptional, including normatively exceptional, with the centrality of movement in the processes of socioeconomic change and evolution, particularly those promoted under capitalist systems of economic organization. While market capitalist and nation-state principles of organization differ, they combine in hybrid systems, such as those currently being elaborated in policy regimes for temporary migrant workers, to exploit migrant labour. Many of these arrangements mirror the indentured labour regimes of earlier eras. The chapter presents by contrast a perspective based on principles of human rights and human security that uses a global framework both for understanding and for evaluation and then adds an explicit gender-aware enrichment of that perspective, in order to do justice to the special vulnerabilities and exploitation of women's migrant labour. A human security perspective, in particular, helps to base concern for human rights in an awareness of bodily and emotional needs, of global interconnections, and of the intersecting circumstances in people's everyday lives; but it requires, and lends itself to, gender-enrichment through partnership with insights from feminist theory, as illustrated in the book's various case studies. The systems of the nation-state, market capitalism, and gender power that are discussed in this chapter, that structure the experiences of migrant women workers, are very deeply established. The chapter suggests directions for possible recognition , to reduce and counter the invisibility and misframing of migration, and of women and their work; it also suggests priority areas for research and networking following the format employed for the book: linking researchers, policy practitioners and migrant advocates, South-South-North.

How portable is social security for migrant workers? A review of the literature

“…For most migrants, there is a “central tension between the mobility of labour and the non‐mobility of entitlements” (Gasper and Truong, , p. 385). According to Holzmann, Koettl and Chernetsky (, p. 65), only about 20 per cent of migrants worldwide work in host countries where full portability of pension benefits to their countries of origin is possible with the help of bilateral agreements.…”

What Goes Around Comes Around: From the Coloniality of Power to the Crisis of Civilization

“…Rural to urban and South to North displacements drain the human, cultural, and socialreproductive capabilities of traditional/rural/peasant/agricultural/fishing communities and Southern regions generally (Gasper and Truong 2014). The social reproduction crisis is gendered and racialized, primarily affecting women, peasants, indigenous communities, and people of color (Salleh 2010;Peterson 2010;McMichael 2011).…”

Future global ethics: environmental change, embedded ethics, evolving human identity

“…In global public health and more generally, even the rich lack security if they sanitize or secure their own private space but their neighbours' space and the public spaces remain unsanitized or insecure. Human security analysis supports awareness of this interconnectedness better than do human rights approaches alone (Gasper 2012, Gasper andTruong 2014). Public goods provision cannot be based only on self-interest though, even when, if all participants cooperated, such a system would benefit all in comparison to its absence; for free-riding by some narrowly self-interested agents can undermine the required cooperation and bring disintegration of the system of provision.…”