GATS - JESSICA KIM

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Global and Transnational Sociology

In this issue:

Notes from the field Insight from two GATS graduate students about their dissertation

research

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FALL 2020

Exclusive Interview with Michael Levien

winner of the 2019 GATS best book award

ASA Info

Paper sessions, Roundtables,

and more!

Proposed Research Agendas

New Publications!

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C O N T E N T S

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Editors’ Note

Message from the Chair

Publication Features

Notes from the Field

Future Directions

Announcements

Member Publications

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Jessica Kim, Stony Brook University

Dear Section Members, As I apply the finishing touches to the Newsletter—justifying margins, adjusting fonts, and the like—I can’t help but ask, “Does any of this matter?” The absurdity (and privilege) of maintaining routine during a global pandemic, where yester-day alone nearly 3 thousand

people succumbed to Covid-19, is certainly not lost on me. Yet this edition’s contents reminds me why even a seemingly commonplace newsletter remains a vital com-ponent of global sociological discourse. Featuring contributions highlighting social issues re-vealed (or exacerbated) by the pandemic (e.g. Western biases about Africa, migrant workers‘ challenges), and suggesting approaches for constructing a more equitable system (“Democratize Diplomacy!”), this edition is sure to be a thought-provoking delight!

Stay vigilant friends, and be well.

-Jess

Alexander D. Hoppe, University of Pennsylvania

Dear GATS section members, Despite the renewed perils of Covid-19, and perhaps because fieldwork has ground to a halt, publications from the members of our section flourish. New research agendas are being mapped out as we work through the storm. Jerome Ho-dos and Paul Lachelier have set up a rich variety of proposals linking cities to the transna-tional arena. We also have contributions from two gradu-ate students, Mary-Collier Wilks and Pei Palmgren, who expand the paradigm of global value chains to investigate global aid chains and migrant rights. Finally, we feature an interview with Michael Levien, whose book Dispossession without Development won the GATS best book award. Here’s to the end of 2020! -Alex

E D I T O R S ’ N O T E

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Member Publications M E S S A G E F R O M T H E C H A I R

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he theme of this year’s virtual ASA is “Emancipatory Sociology: Rising to the DuBosian

Challenge.” DuBois was a pioneering global sociologist, with a deep and abiding interest in Africa and the African diaspora. As a global sociologist, he challenged the conceptual architecture which held that there was an “isomorphism between the universal

structures of reason and the social structures of the West (Cheah 2007: 56). More simply put, he questioned the validity of the commonly held notion that Africa and persons of African descent had played no part in human history, past or present. As he put it in The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part That Africa Has Played in World History, for much of his intellectual career he had labored under the difficult of the “persistent lack of interest in Africa.” This lack of interest was paired with a highly Eurocentric worldview which insisted that “the people of Europe

and North America represented not only the best civilization which the world had ever known, but also a goal of human effort destined to go on from triumph to triumph.” This profoundly narrow way of thinking, DuBois surmised, had not only been “scientifically unsound” but also “dangerous for logical social conclusions” (1946 viii, 1).

The Coronavirus epidemic, global in scope as it was, illustrated how prescient DuBois was—both in his reading of European and American social theory as Eurocentric at best and racist at worst as well as his foresight as to how important a pivot to Africa could be for revitalizing the sociological imagination. The impact of the virus on and in Africa, and the ways in which the progression of the disease on the Continent flew in the face of conventional wisdom, is generative for global sociologists who are serious about “the epistemological value and agency of the world beyond the West” (Bhambra 2013: 295).

Early in the epidemic, numerous news outlets and pundits conjectured that Africa would be devastated by the pandemic. In February Bill Gates prophesied doom, predicting that Africa would see “a death toll in the millions, something you wouldn’t want to think about just before bed.” Melinda Gates painted an even more nightmarish scenario. African cities would, she imagined, be plagued by “dead bodies lying on the streets.” The World Health Organization and the World Economic Forum were similarly pessimistic. Africa had a “Covid-19 time bomb” that would defuse and “overwhelm” its fragile heath care system” the sage minds at Davos predicted. In May 2020 the WHO warned that there would be as many as 10 million infected people in Africa within the next six months and the virus would “smoulder” in Africa for years to come. The Atlantic warned that the world should brace for “disaster” in Africa and dismissed the possibility that any other outcome might be seen, and that Africa might be an exception to global trends, as “remote.” As it turns out, things didn’t go quite the way that The Atlantic, Bill, Melinda, and many others imagined they would.

The bodies of the dead piled up, not in the streets of Darkar, Nairobi, or Oaugadougou but rather in parking

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lots in Detroit, trailers in New York, and conference rooms in Ottowa. The World Health Organization was forced to walk back its dire predictions. The director of WHO’s Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, Lawrence Gostin, admitted to the Los Angeles Times that although the although the “outbreak playbook has always been that the United

States looks on and says, ‘Those poor things, that would never happen here,” much to everyone’s surprise “the script has been flipped entirely.” Meanwhile, African countries responded to the crisis with such efficacy and creativity that last month CNN headlines blared: “What the US can learn from how African countries handled Covid.” The same CNN which had predicted that African healthcare sy s tems would “collapse” under the pressure marveled that “Africa as a continent appears to have handled the pandemic more effectively than the US has.” The august voices at The New Yorker ran a similar story, “What African Nations Are Teaching the West about Fighting the Coronavirus,” which discussed how South Sudan and

the Democratic Republic of the Congo were able to quickly repurpose the protocols and infrastructure set up to combat Ebola and described how Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia were trailblazers with their aggressive approach to contract tracing, isolation, and testing. Meanwhile, Ethiopia completed a door-to-door survey of its capital, Addis Ababa, in just three weeks, documenting symptoms and travel history for its five million residents in record time. Similar articles appeared in Wired, The Hill, U.S News & World Report, and PBS NewsHour.

Eight months into the pandemic, Africa, which accounts for 17 percent of the global population, was only registering 3.5 percent of global COVID-19 deaths. With a population of 1.3 billion, Africa reported nearly 1.8 million COVID infections as of November 3. The United States has reported more than 9 million cases, the highest in the world.

According to the WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Africa is the only region where COVID-19 cases are not increasing. In a strange twist

of fate, while many of Europe’s borders are closed to Americans, they are open for Rwandans. Lest we think it is simply because Africa tests less people, that hypothesis has been put to rest. During the summer, the WHO reported that there is “no large hidden toll in Africa” and that it was unlikely that African c o u n t r i e s a r e harboring a significant n u m b e r o f u n r e c o r d e d

coronavirus infections. This fact was recently confirmed by the African Centers for Disease Control. While a variety of explanations were floated, many of them biological in nature, the reasons for Africa’s unexpected

success lie almost entirely in the realm of the social. Neither genetics, nor Africa’s youthful population, nor the heat and humidity on the Continent are primarily responsible for the differences in outcome. Rather, “striking differences in the quality of leadership, disaster preparedness, conformity to scientific advice, and coherence in pandemic response” have led to a situation whereby the United States is plunging further into chaos while African nations are seeing steady positive progress. Natural scientists and epidemiologists are scrambling to understand the ‘African paradox’.

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“The impact of the virus on and in Africa, and the ways in which the progression of the disease on the Continent flew in the face of con-

ventional wisdom, is generative for global sociologists who are serious about “the epistemological value

and agency of the world beyond the West””

Global sociologists, even those who are not interested in medicine, but who are interested in culture, political sociology, diffusion theories, network analysis and institutional analysis may also find their sociological imaginations sparked by this unexpected turn of events. All 54 African countries responded differently to the pandemic and thus provide a wealth of opportunities

for global sociologists to expand their intellectual horizons.

Sociology, as a discipline, has been organized around the question, “what makes societies modern, or not?” For much of its history, global sociology was held in the thrall of modernization theory. More, recently, diffusion theories, which examines how norms and practices originate in ‘the West’ and spread globally, have gained traction. In many theories, societies are seen as ‘containers’ of social processes, which advanced along a continuum. The ‘West’ has commonly been depicted as the most advanced across a range of indices such as wealth, adherence to democratic norms, gender

relations, freedom of the press, and health outcomes. The indices that were believed to indicate whether or not a society was ‘modern’ as well as those that were proxies for ‘progress’ appeared to be objective.

Few scholars operating in mainstream institutions and publishing in mainstream journals questioned the objectivity of the view that some societies ‘led’ and others ‘followed’.

For much of sociology’s history, DuBois was alone in his insistence that sociology’s “remarkable and reprehensible ignorance of the Negro people” had been devastatingly bad for the progress of social science and the development of coherent theories about human action (1904: 86). His 1904 essay, “The Atlanta Conferences,” was a damning critique of the state of sociological research and the effectiveness of the discipline. Although DuBois was writing about a different time and place, and his target was American sociology’s failure to grapple coherently with a domestic social problem—the ‘Negro Problem’ as it was inelegantly called—his critique is quite useful for

contemporary global sociologists.

Dubois pointed out how Eurocentrism and racism caused sociologists to squander valuable opportunities to create new knowledge and expand their theoretical insights. The horror with which most Americans regarded ‘mixed’ marriages and ‘mixed race’ persons was a valuable case in point. Because “amalgamation” or “race mixing” was a “sore point” sociologists “neglected and threw away every opportunity to study and know” anything about the process or the persons thus produced. Furthermore, they “deliberately and doggedly” based their sociological conclusions on “pure fiction or unvarnished lies” (1904: 86). A similar process happened when social scientists, epidemiologists, and governmental agencies framed Coronavirus as a social problem and speculated how its impact would vary across different locations around the globe. Writing in The Guardian, Afua Hirsh asked: “Why are Africa’s coronavirus successes being overlooked?” Her conclusion, that patronizing attitudes

worked to “ensure we don’t learn the lessons Africa has to offer” mirrored what DuBois said so many years ago. Because Africa has been widely depicted as a basket case, the hopeless continent, and a singular example of the excesses of the failed state in both popular and scholarly accounts predictions about COVID all ran in one direction. Because there was a readily available and accepted set of explanations (not a few of which were generated by sociologists) for Africa’s failures which ranged from the biological, to the cultural, to the political this conjecture was not treated as conjecture, but rather as fact. Not one news outlet,

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“Rather, “striking differences in the quality of

leadership, disaster preparedness, conformi-

ty to scientific advice, and coherence in pan-

demic response” have led to a situation

whereby the United States is plunging further

into chaos while African nations are seeing

steady positive progress.”

academic, medical professional, or development agency suggested that Africa would even weather the epidemic well, let alone outpace and out-perform ‘the West’. And yet, the usual dynamic between colonizer and colonized was profoundly reversed. Rwanda, a country

of 12 million, has recorded around

2,200 cases and just eight deaths, making it a country with one of the lowest COVID-19 fatality rates per capita in the world. Meanwhile Belgium, their former colonizer had 591,000 cases and 16, 547 deaths. Uganda had 23,000 cases and 207 deaths while the i r co lon i a l overlords, the British, upon whose empire the sun never set, is seeing new surges.

What lessons can be drawn for global sociology here? In the aforementioned essay, “The Atlanta C o n f e r e n c e s , ” D u B o i s o n c e observed that if Africans were still “lost in the forests of central Africa we

could have a government commission to go and measure their heads” (1904: 86). Likewise, if an African president had suggested that his people drink bleach and declared the virus to be a ‘hoax’ only to have himself and scores of his administration felled by the disease or had gun toting Africans stormed their capitals, brandishing weapons, and refusing to wear masks, we would have no shortage of sociological studies and theories to explain it. Now that the social

world had shown us something different, we must rise to the challenge and use it as an opportunity to question some of our well-worn orthodoxies. In economics, when wealthy countries look to less affluent countries for solutions, the phenomena is called ‘reverse innovation’. Perhaps some of that is in order for global sociology, with a specific focus on Africa.

Africa can be a source of agenda setting research for global sociologists rather than simply a ‘case’ to confirm pre-existing notions of theories developed elsewhere. It is clear that a number of African governments did a better job than those in Europe or North America of managing the coronavirus. Why was this the case? How might this be generative or new and better ways of seeing for global political sociology? For the sociology of culture? Or for global historical sociology?

How might existing historical events be conceived of differently? Ebola, widely viewed as a historical curse was an unexpected game changer. The East African countries that are, so for, outperforming the ‘global West’ seem to have benefitted from prior Ebola preparations. The countries that border the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Burundi, South Sudan, and Uganda) were forced to respond to the Ebola outbreak in 2018 and had existing rapid-response teams, trained contract tracers, logistics routes, and other public health protocols which they were quickly able to repurpose to respond to the coronavirus. We so often think of things in the global south in terms of ‘curses’—might we reconfigure out notion of ‘curse’ and use it to generate new concepts and theories?

How might we view our own society differently given the irony of the fact that “some of the nations that are most burdened by COVID-19 taught their African counterparts how to do [the] work of contact tracing.” Jeffrey Sachs, professor of development economics at Columbia, speculated that “one of the reasons things got so out of control in the U.S. and Europe is that for us, epidemics are something that happen elsewhere.”

One of the questions that has driven sociology almost from its conception is the question “how is society possible?” We have distilled that question into a number of component parts; how and why do people engage in collective action; what is the origin and basis

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“Likewise, if an African

president had suggested

that his people drink

bleach and declared the

virus to be a ‘hoax’ only to

have himself and scores of

his administration felled by

the disease or had gun

toting Africans stormed

their capitals, brandishing

weapons, and refusing to

wear masks, we would

have no shortage of socio-

logical studies and theories

to explain it.”

; what is the origin and basis for ongoing solidarity; how do groups achieve consensus. From Durkhem’s time onward, the notion that there were two kinds of solidarity—organic and mechanical—and that they attached to two different social formations, modern and primitive, has haunted the sociological imagination. The fact that “the battle against the novel coronavirus

has been a slow, humiliating depiction of how the U.S. has lost its capacity to commit to the sort of collective action required to confront contagion” is certainly intellectually provocative and holds potential for rethinking notions of c o l l e c t i v e action and s o l i d a r i t y that trouble both the m o d e r n /traditional divide. Without collapsing into romantic racialism or ‘noble savage’ type analysis, we must reorient ourselves theoretically and pivot away from the too-easy imagining of Africa as a space of scarcity or lack and take as a serious point of theoretical investigation why the solidarity and commitment to the collective that was so key in stopping the spread in a number of African countries was absent in the United States. Studies point to the fact that across the African Continent, “public support for safety measures was high, enabling African Union member states to contain the virus. …African leaders learned from Ebola that

infectious diseases do not respect borders and that leaders must act collectively.”

Although global sociology has moved far beyond and explicit commitment to modernization theory and the idea that there are societies that lead and societies that follow, that way of thinking still permeates. This is particularly true when global sociology focuses on African societies. The urgency of abandoning this point of view is becoming clearer every day. The Los Angeles Times mused that the “past journey’s” of African states must provide the United States with “a

blueprint for the battle.” K. Riva Levinson, a medical journalist, agreed that her time travelling across West Africa during the pandemic convinced her that it was time to “recalibrate our historically-ingrained perceptions of who holds the knowledge and who owns the expertise.”

The way in which the Covid-19 played out across the African continent also suggests a rethinking and reworking of the indices that signal ‘progress’. Although sociology has long questioned the idea that

‘ p r o g r e s s ’ was value neutral or that it could be indexed by a set of variables we r e m a i n c a u g h t within this

type of thinking. The idea of more of certain things—money, technological expertise, education, etc. was a reliable indicator of ‘better’ or could easily lend itself to providing ready explanations of why some societies succeed and other fail has not been challenged in so dramatic a way as the way that COVID-19 in Africa has challenged it. Lawrence Gostin of the WHO put it bluntly in his assessment that “West Africa taught us that scientific prowess alone doesn’t work.”

When we think about DuBosian sociology as “emancipatory” we usually conceptualize emancipation in political terms. However, the ways in which DuBois saw knowledge of, about, and from Africa as a source of new and better theories and concepts also suggests that renewed and serious attention to what happens in Africa can emancipate us from stale ways of thinking. Eurocentricity, GATS member Zophia Edwards (2020: 3) reminds us, “fails to consider the creative and innovative capacities of people in the periphery with respect to ideals, policies, and institutions of global significance.” The panels that we have put together for ASA 2021 (see the announcements below for details) reflect an ongoing commitment by GATS scholars to acquiring knowledge and insights about those people

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“Africa can be a source of agenda setting research for global sociologists rather than simply a ‘case’ to confirm pre-existing notions of theories de-veloped elsewhere. It is clear that a number of African governments did a better job than those in Europe or North America of managing the coro-navirus. Why was this the case? How might this be generative or new and better ways of seeing for global political sociology? For the sociology of

culture? Or for global historical sociology?”

and places who have been ‘othered’ by conventional approaches as a way of creating a global sociology that is reflective of and responsive to the imperatives of a postcolonial and decolonial present and future. ■

-Zine Magubane Section chair

Works Cited

Bhambra, Gurminder. 2013. “The Possibilities of and for Global Sociology: A Postcolonial Perspective.” Political Power and Social Theory 24 (Spring): 295-314.

Cheah, Pheng. 2008. “Universal Areas: Asian Studies in a World in Motion,” pp. 54-68 in The Post-Colonial and the Global, edited by Revathi Krishnaswamy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

DuBois. W.E.B. 1904. “The Atlanta Conferences,” The Voice of the Negro 1 (3): 85-90.

-----. 1946. The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part which Africa has Played in World History. New York: International Publishers.

Edwards, Zophia. 2020. “Postcolonial Sociology as a

Remedy for Global Diffusion Theory,” The Sociological Review 68(6): 1-17.

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Member Publications Member Publications P U B L I C A T I O N F E A T U R E S

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Dispossession

without

Development:

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An Interview with Michael Levien By: Smitha Radhakrishnan

Land Grabs

In

Neoliberal India

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Abstract:

Since the mid-2000s, India has been beset by wide-spread farmer protests against “land grabs.” Dispos-session without Development argues that beneath these conflicts lay a profound transformation in the political economy of land dispossession. While the Indian state dispossessed land for public-sector in-dustry and infrastructure for much of the 20th cen-tury, the adoption of neoliberal economic policies since the early 1990s prompted India’s state govern-ments to become land brokers for private real estate capital—most controversially, for Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Using long-term ethnographic re-search, the book demonstrates the consequences of this new regime of dispossession for a village in Ra-jasthan. Taking us into the diverse lives of villagers dispossessed for one of North India’s largest SEZs, it shows how the SEZ destroyed their agricultural livelihoods, marginalized their labor, and excluded

them from “world-class” infrastructure—but absorbed them into a dramatic real estate boom. Real estate speculation generated a class of rural neo-rentiers, but excluded many and compounded pre-existing class, caste, and gender inequalities. While the SEZ disap-pointed most villagers’ expectations of “development,” land speculation fractured the vil-lage and disabled collective action. The case of “Rajpura” helps to illuminate the exclu-sionary trajectory of capitalism that underlay land conflicts in contemporary India—and explain why the Indian state is struggling to pacify farmers with real estate payouts. Us-ing the extended case method, Dispossession without Development advances a sociologi-cal theory of dispossession that has relevance beyond India.

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For his book Dispossession without Development: Land Grabs in Neoliberal India (Oxford, 2018), Michael Levien (Johns Hopkins) won the 2019 GATS best book award. Featured here is an inter-view conducted by Smitha Radhakrishnan (Wellesley).

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M: The topic came long be-

fore the fieldsite. My interest in land dates to my undergrad-

uate thesis on the production of “ghettos” in the U.S. and subsequent years working with

environmental justice groups and community land trusts. All of this taught me the im-

portance of land ownership for inequality. This was also the time of post-Seattle move-

ments around “alter-globalization,” and I think many of us involved in those

protests became interested in a variety of non-traditional left

movements—against privatiza-tion, free trade, biopiracy, dis-placement, and so on. It was

about this time—around 2003—that I read about In-dia’s vibrant anti-dam move-

ment the Narmada Bachao Andolan, which was trying to stop several hundred villages

from being submerged for the Sardar Sarovar Dam. I had saved a few thousand dollars

and, through an Indian activist I knew, emailed to see if they

could use a volunteer. I made my way to central India, found

a niche writing a variety of documents for the movement and wound up staying for a

year, the most educational of

my life. After watching dozens of villages being brutally

flooded from their homes without any resettlement to

speak of, and having run out of money, I decided to return home and apply to graduate

schools so I could keep work-ing on the topic—the typical fate of curious activists. A few

years into graduate school at Berkeley I was in Delhi when the West Bengal government

massacred farmers for a Special Economic Zone. All of the sudden, there was a new wave

of land struggles across the country—not against public sector dams and infrastructure,

but against private-sector pro-jects that bore the mark of In-dia’s “new economy.” Unlike

the dam movement, many of them were winning. I wanted

to understand what had changed in the political econ-omy of dispossession and start-

ed looking for an SEZ to study. As it happened, while studying Hindi in Jaipur I

found out that one of India’s first and largest was being built

just 25km away. It seemed like as good a case as any, so I

eventually made my way to “Rajpura,” one of the villages dispossessed for the project.

M: I think the biggest chal-

lenges were sadness and loneli-ness. Rajpura was not an idyl-

lic village to start—it had im-mense class, caste and gender inequalities—and what was

happening to it after being dis-possessed was thoroughly de-pressing in almost every way.

There were huge grievances and many people—particularly the village poor, the lower

caste and women—were in very precarious situations, but the village was too divided by

real estate speculation to do anything about it. It was a real

brutal intersection of advanced capitalism and longstanding social inequalities. And while I

got to know much of the vil-

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S: How did you get inter-ested in the issue of land grabs? Did the topic come first or the fieldsite?

S: One of your book’s many strengths is its im-mersive fieldwork. Sure-ly they were many chal-lenges along the way, but can you share one that was particularly tough and how you overcame it?

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lage, and developed a real fond-ness for many individuals in the

Dalit family and neighborhood I lived in, developing close friends my age was difficult for

a variety of reasons. While no two people will experience fieldwork the same way, I think

it’s important to be honest about the personal challenges of

fieldwork so graduate students know what they are getting in-to. At any rate, I never over-

came these but I did have one coping mechanism that wound up being generative. I periodi-

cally travelled to other villages across India where farmers were still protesting against land grabs

for SEZs, and this helped me to write the last chapter placing “Rajpura” in the broader na-

tional context of dispossession politics.

M: That’s nice of you to say.

I’ve always been inspired by Michael Burawoy’s extended

case meth-od, so my ambition

was to use to use eth-nography

to connect micropro-cesses in a

relatively small place to macro

social forc-es and in the process

reconstruct theory. But

I think a big chal-lenge for

many of us doing research out-side of the West is that there is not a rich theoretical literature

within American sociology on many topics that are of primary relevance to the Global South.

So if you’ve decided to take up a topic like land grabs because it’s substantively important

globally, who do you engage with in U.S. sociology? You either have to do acrobatics to

connect your work in a highly abstract way to theories of mar-ginal relevance, or engage pri-

marily with less parochial disci-plines like geography and an-

thropology. Though I am hap-

py that research on this topic has grown rapidly in recent

years, when I started there was not much of a sociology of dis-possession. Really only Marxists

had advanced serious theories

of land dispossession—Marx in

his theory of the origins of cap-italism, Harvey in his expansive theory of “accumulation by

dispossession.” So I had these in my head when I went into the field; but my fieldwork con-

vinced me that both were really inadequate for illuminating

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“I think a big challenge for many of us doing research outside of

the West is that there is not a rich theoretical literature within Amer-

ican sociology on many topics that are of primary relevance to

the Global South. So if you’ve de-cided to take up a topic like land grabs because it’s substantively important globally, who do you engage with in U.S. sociology?”

S: Another huge strength of your book is its so-phisticated theoretical framework. Most of us struggle to make our em-pirical work theoretically powerful, especially in a public context that tends to devalue theorizing. Can you share a bit about your process?

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contemporary forms of dispos-session. Having them in my

head, though, helped me see what was theoretically anoma-lous in my fieldsite. And these

anomalies propelled my recon-

struction. But my own theo-retical argument kept evolving

not only throughout my field-work but until the last draft of

the book. And it keeps evolv-ing as I turn to more compara-tive work.

M: Do not be afraid for career

reasons to take up a topic that you think is important but is

not well-represented in U.S. sociology. Do something new and help to deparochialize the

discipline. ■

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S: What advice do you have for colleagues and grad students starting new projects?

Michael’s book, Disposession with

Development: Land Grabs in Ne-

oliberal India (2018) is now availa-

ble from Oxford University Press.

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Member Publications Member Publications N O T E S F R O M

T H E F I E L D

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rom the perspective of employers, inter-

national labor migrants are ideal precari-

ous workers, lacking citizenship and as-

sociated rights while accepting flexible em-ployment in low-wage jobs. Migrant labor in

sites of global production brings cognate

strands of research on global commodity

chains (GCCs), global value chains (GVCs), and

global production networks (GPNs) in conver-

sation with analyses of state guestwork poli-

cies and migrant rights. My comparative eth-

nography of labor migration governance in Thailand unpacks some relational dynamics.

Among them, human rights norms and activi-

ties from above and below improve aspects of

migrant worker lives while also consolidating

their labor as precarious work in global pro-

duction structures.

When I entered the field in 2015, external pressure on the Thai government’s migration

policies was a fresh topic of conversation with

migrant labor experts, NGO staff, and docu-

mentation brokers. On the heels of interna-

tional watchdog and media exposés detailing

human trafficking, forced labor, and other ab-

horrent conditions on Thai fishing boats that

source seafood for worldwide consumption, in June 2014, the US Department of State de-

moted Thailand to the lowest ranking in its

Trafficking in Persons report, rebuking the

government’s failure to combat human traf-

ficking in the seafood industry. A year later,

the EU issued a “yellow card” to Thailand,

threatening to end seafood trade if it did not

address illegal fishing and labor rights viola-tions.

In 2017, just before I began a longer stint in

Samut Sakhon, a major site of seafood sourc-

ing and processing, the government issued

the Royal Decree on the Management of Alien

Workers, imposing harsh punishments for un-

documented migrant workers and their em-ployers as part of an intensified effort to en-

force a formal guestwork system. In Samut

Sakhon, provincial immigration and employ-

ment officials told me their stricter regulations

reflect the need to “think with the internation-

al community” and “fix the system” to save

seafood exports. Workers from Myanmar

shared experiences of police extortion and heightened risks of arrest and deportation

amid a push to “regularize” the legal status of

all migrants already working in the country.

Representatives of Thai seafood suppliers de-

tailed how negative attention toward the in-

dustry prompted global buyers (e.g., Costco,

Nestle, Walmart) to promote international la-

bor standards in their supply chains. Global firms fearing “reputational damage”, as a Thai

supplier put it, imposed requirements that re-

inforced Thai firm compliance with the state’s

guestwork system.

F

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Migrant rights and exploitation in global production: a view from above and below in Thailand Pei Palmgren, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, UCLA

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One result has been some “social upgrading”

in the form of guarantees of rights, entitle-

ments, and minimum wage for formal guest-

workers. At a structural level, however, such upgrading occurs with stricter state control

over labor circulation, which feeds seafood

suppliers a rotation of temporary, low-wage,

non-unionized workers whose legal status is

tied to employment. The state consolidates

the circulation of precarious seafood labor in

accordance with global human rights norms

and to the benefit of em-ployers.

Guestwork formalization

looks different in the Tak

border zone, a site of

frontline border control

and the government’s

flagship border Special Economic Zone (SEZ), es-

tablished in 2015 to at-

tract investments and fa-

cilitate Southeast Asian

production and trade. For

decades, the area has

hosted migrants who

cross a porous riverine border with Myanmar to work in the many

garment factories and agriculture fields. Since

2017, a “border pass” option allows employers

to hire migrant workers on renewable short-

term work permits void of benefits and only

valid in designated border districts. The new

system codifies flexible migrant labor for gar-

ment factories facing declining orders amid a global economic downturn and rising compe-

tition from Cambodia and Laos, securing a

supply of state-approved precarious workers

previously had in the form of undocumented

migrants.

Here, as I observed during fieldwork in 2019, a

large collection of civil society actors and insti-

tutions advance migrant rights and welfare

from below. Centered in the main district of Mae Sot, a social infrastructure has expanded

from early grassroots health and education

institutions that war-displaced Karen refugees

and Burmese political exiles established in the

late 1980s. Migrant communities grew with

the arrival of the garments industry in the

1990s, attracted by cheap labor from Myan-

mar, and refugee and migrant as-

sistance organiza-

tions proliferated

in the 2000s.

Now, community-

based ethnic and

migrant labor as-

sociations exist alongside large

international

agencies, assis-

tance NGOs

(funded by inter-

national donors),

religious charities,

and a rotating population of humanitarian professionals and

volunteers. Migrant workers access a free

health clinic, and nearly 70 migrant “learning

centers” scattered throughout the border dis-

tricts educate their children.

This social infrastructure helps precarious mi-

grant workers survive amid difficult economic circumstances, which have worsened since

COVID-19, with shrinking garment orders, de-

creasing shifts, and moves to piecemeal pay-

ment systems. At the same time, its support

enables the social reproduction of labor – the

daily and long-term regeneration of lives and

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

”human rights interventions from above

and below positively impact the lives of

migrants but in ways that reinforce precarious

migrant work systems.”

20

labor power – for a struggling garments in-

dustry, farms, and a developing SEZ, without

Thai state and employer investments. Put

simply, as state policies codify flexible labor and contain workers at the border, grassroots

communities and human rights and humani-

tarian actors and institutions ensure their con-

tinued ability to live and work for production

industries.

As these examples show, human rights inter-

ventions from above and below positively im-pact the lives of migrants but in ways that re-

inforce precarious migrant work systems. Such

outcomes raise further questions about the

entanglement of human rights and economic

interests in a global South development con-

text. What tensions, resolutions, and unin-

tended consequences arise when these inter-

ests converge and coalesce? In what ways are the fight for human rights/welfare and the

capitalist drive for accumulation countervail-

ing forces and how are they complementary?

In the broadest sense, how do civil society,

capital, and the state interact at multiple

scales to advance both the wellbeing and ex-

ploitation of (migrant) labor in the global

economy? ■

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

21

y dissertation project began with a

puzzle. Despite a shared aim of im-

proving women’s health, interna-

tional nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) from the U.S. and Japan implement very differ-

ent programs in Cambodia. Japanese INGOs

focus on strengthening government-provided

maternal health services in Cambodia. Con-

trastingly, U.S. organizations are more likely to

see improved maternal and reproductive

health as a goal that requires the participation

of private providers and civil society organiza-tions. How can this variation be explained?

I contend that to answer this question we need

to analyze not the individual INGOs, but the

‘aid chains’ through which development pro-

grams are delivered, and in which each INGOs

is embedded. These chains originate with do-

nor organizations, which may be corporations or international foundations, but are often the

bilateral development aid agencies, such as

USAID, that are part of donor country govern-

ments. Next in the aid chain are the INGOs

that these donors fund, followed by smaller,

typically local organizations that implement

the programming funded by donors and de-

signed by INGOs (Swidler & Watkins, 2017). Often studies investigate NGOs as single units

or in large data sets (Rinaldo, 2013; Smith,

Hughes, Plummer, & Duncan, 2020). Yet, I ar-

gue we also need to examine INGOs as actors

within the set of relationships constituting aid

chains. In doing so, we move the unit of analy-

sis from the organization to the development

program itself, as it travels through multiple

organizations.

Differences between Japan- and U.S.-originating aid chains include not only the

content of health programming, but also how

and by whom this programming is delivered.

Take, for example, a Japanese INGO I call

Health Services Asia (HSA). Japanese donors

and HSA’s headquarters office in Tokyo focus

on strengthening public health services in de-

veloping countries. For staff at HSA’s Cambo-dia office, this takes the form of designing pre-

natal and maternal health education. At an

HSA-supported village health training, I ob-

serve HSA’s program manager, Samnang as he

coaches a male public health center worker on

what to say to new mothers. Samnang shows

the public health worker a flipbook containing

information about appropriate diet and breastfeeding for children between six and

eight months. Then, twenty mothers sit quietly

as the health worker provides the information

on breastfeeding and shows photos of the

types of foods that they should begin integrat-

ing into a six-month old’s diet. After the train-

ing, I ask Samnang why he doesn’t conduct

the training himself, like many other NGOs. He explains that what we do is ‘empower state

officials to do this themselves, to implement

their own policies.’ This is a very different no-

tion of the “who” and “how” of empowerment

than we find in the U.S. case.

Contrastingly, U.S. donors and INGOs based in

M

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

Development Imaginaries &

Global Aid Chains Mary-Collier Wilks, Sociology Department, University of Virginia

22

Washington

D.C. promote

a diverse

healthcare sector that

includes pri-

vate providers

and civil soci-

ety organizations. In D.C., family planning edu-

cation is understood as a path to women’s eco-

nomic empowerment and a way to decrease

maternal mortality rates. Donors and headquar-ter organizations also promote the importance

of monitoring and evaluation, measuring pro-

gram outcomes. Thus, the U.S. INGO Global

Family Aid (GFA) funds local NGOs like Cambo-

dian Development Society (CDS), which provides

information to women from rural villages on

family planning, maternal health, and nearby

clinics. Sotheary, the director of the women’s health team at CDS, describes its organization’s

objective: “we provide women with reproductive

and maternal health information” so they can

“advocate for themselves.” Sotheary’s health

team members live in the regions they serve and

get to know women well before providing ma-

ternal and reproductive health trainings in small

groups. In contrast to HSA, participants are pro-vided with information about all the modern

birth control options and provided with the

space to ask personal questions to female NGO

workers. However, one of the ways GFA assesses

the effectiveness of reproductive health pro-

gramming in Cambodia is tracking the number

of women who begin using medical birth con-

trol, requiring quarterly reports. Thus, in Cambo-dia, emphasis on measurable results in U.S. aid

chains affects efforts to empower young Cam-

bodian women. In rural Cambodia, local NGO

staff who implement this activity are highly mo-

tivated to get a certain number of women to

receive IUDs in order to meet quotas.

The way in

which material,

organizational

and symbolic resources flow

along global aid

chains often

reproduces

power dynamics between the global North and

South. Yet, the use of the aid chain concept is

not to imply that local practitioners are power-

less in the face of donor demands. Khmer prac-titioners have context-specific knowledge that

make them valuable sources of input, and they

frequently adapt programming to better reflect

the concerns of the communities in which it is

being implemented. Moreover, Khmer staff lev-

erage the opportunities their work provides to

pursue personal and professional ambitions. For

example, many local employees at HSA use the relationships they cultivate with state officials to

transition into government careers. Neverthe-

less, examining the program as it flows through

the chain allows us to see that development

buzzwords, like empowerment, are interpreted

in donor and headquarter organizations in be-

fore traveling to recipient nations. What flows

along these chains is not just money and mate-rial aid, but also contending ideas about the role

of the state, civil society, and gender in the de-

velopment process. This means, depending on

which aid chain in which they are embedded,

Khmer practitioners are faced with different op-

portunities and constraints as they interpret

programs to beneficiaries in Cambodia. ■

Works Cited Rinaldo, R. (2013). Mobilizing piety: Islam and feminism in Indone-sia. New York: Oxford University Press.

Smith, J., Hughes, M.M., Plummer, S., and Duncan, B. (2020). “Inter-Organizational Relations in Transnational Environmental and

Women’s Activism: Multilateralists, Pragmatists, and Rejectionists.” Globalizations. doi:10.1080/14747731.2020.1789028.

Swidler, A. and Watkins, S.C. (2017). A Fraught Embrace: The Ro-mance and Reality of AIDs Altruism in Africa. Princeton: Princeton

University Press.

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

“we also need to examine INGOs as actors within the set of relationships constituting aid chains. In

doing so, we move the unit of analysis from the or-ganization to the development program itself, as it

travels through multiple organizations.”

23

Member Publications Member Publications F U T U R E D I R E C T I O N S

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

24

I concluded my 2011 book, Second Cities: Globaliza-

tion and Local Politics in Manchester and Philadelphia,

by speculating about whether the late-20th-century

emergence of cities onto the world stage as “global

political actors” engaged in “municipal foreign poli-

cy” (MFP) was likely to continue. As I prepare to re-

turn to the topic, I am pleased to see how much de-

velopment has occurred in the intervening years.

Here I would like to sketch the beginnings of a re-

search agenda on cities as meaningful actors at a

global or transnational scale.

The term MFP arose in the 1980s, during a wave of

attempts by city governments to project themselves

more forcefully beyond national borders. There was

even a short-lived Bulletin of Municipal Foreign Policy

in the late 1980s, and a number of scholars began at

that time to study what cities were doing and why.

MFP efforts come in several flavors, which one might

rank in order of how much they imply a commitment

to genuine urban political autonomy:

Friendship networks and cultural exchanges that

contribute to global civil society (e.g., sister city

programs).

International trade and economic development

missions, dedicated to increasing local employ-

ment, foreign investment, and opportunities

abroad for local firms.

Openly political (often explicitly partisan) re-

sistance to national-level foreign policies (e.g.,

nuclear-free zones, immigrant “sanctuary cit-

ies”).

Attempts to institutionalize urban political influ-

ence at transnational scale (Eurocities, Benjamin

Barber’s call for a world parliament of mayors).

More broadly, MFP is just one facet of a larger trend

that gathered steam over the past decade or so at

the intersection of globalization, urban studies, and

political sociology. Barber’s If Mayors Ruled the World

is probably the most prominent work, but the trend

also includes research by Michele Acuto, Geoffrey

Parker, and more. These scholars employ varying

theoretical approaches, but all are steeped in the lit-

erature of globalization; many adopt a critical per-

spective that questions both the discursive and the

material realities of state and corporate power. One

common thread is to interpret city governments as

states in their own right – generally not fully inde-

pendent, but instead possessed of some degree of

autonomy and with a desire on the part of their lead-

ers to flex their political muscles beyond national

borders.

These authors have made substantial progress in an-

swering one of the most fundamental questions

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

The Ebb and Flow of Municipal Foreign Policy: Cities as States on the World Stage Jerome Hodos, Associate Professor and Chair

Department of Sociology

Franklin & Marshall College

25

about the recent rise of MFP: why now? What is it

about the contemporary world situation that calls

forth this kind of urban activism? Plausible answers

to this question include:

Following world polity analyses, the growth of

global civil society has increasingly legitimized

engagement in “foreign affairs” and global citi-

zenship.

The upswing in economic globalization

since about 1970 has certainly shaped

the priorities of municipal leaders.

The neoliberal restructuring of the

state has thrust cities into more direct,

unmediated contact with global forces

and actors, potentially catalyzing MFP.

As noted in James Holston’s essay

“Urban Citizenship and Globalization,”

the increase in global migration since

the 1960s has made city populations

more diverse, and may have pushed

city governments to be more interna-

tionally active.

Beyond this causal question, I suggest a

two-part research agenda. First, there is a

need for a more systematic empirical

effort: what kinds of MFP are cities en-

gaged in, and how many cities are doing it?

A global database of MFP, created perhaps in part-

nership with one or more international city leagues

or organizations, would likely have significant bene-

fits for scholars and policymakers alike. This research

project might pursue questions like:

Has the rise in MFP has been continuous, or has it

occurred in a series of waves?

To what extent do city governments partner with

other local actors to pursue MFP, and what im-

pact do such partnerships have on both policy

adoption and implementation?

What policy arenas (e.g., climate change) are

most conducive to this kind of urban action?

And, in keeping with recent scholarship on policy

transfer, how do networks of cities promote the

exchange, copying, or diffusion of policies across

places?

What sorts of interest-formation processes do

city leaders engage in across borders? What do

efforts to build a shared political consciousness

look like, and how successful are they?

Second, what are the broader historical and compar-

ative implications of the rise in MFP? One possibility,

for example, is that political contestation between

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

“I suggest a two-part research

agenda. First, there is a need for

a more systematic empirical

effort: what kinds of MFP are

cities engaged in, and how many

cities are doing it?...Second,

what are the broader historical

and comparative implications of

the rise in MFP?”

26

levels of government, or types of states, might be a

more enduring, important feature of our political

landscape than we usually recognize. Many have

written about the long-term struggle between cities

and nation-states in the early modern era. We know

how that conflict turned out: cities everywhere lost

their independence and much of their decision-

making power. But, as I wrote in a 2009 book chap-

ter, nation-states swallowed their pre-existing cities

only with a good deal of indigestion. In some cases,

city leaders and urban political cultures never lost the

memory of their old freedoms or communal institu-

tions. And in the European Union, state restructuring

has afforded European cities greater opportunities to

exercise international influence, which urban leaders

like Barcelona's Pasqual Maragall have taken ad-

vantage of.

It might also be possible to use the notion of the city

as a partially autonomous political actor to tell alter-

nate histories of state formation processes. Those

alternate histories could address questions like:

What powers do cities have in different coun-

tries, and under different governance structures,

to engage in activity outside national borders?

How do these powers fluctuate over time?

What can the spread of MFP tell us about the

shifting balance of power between the global

North and the global South? Do trends and pat-

terns in MFP reinscribe global power imbalances

or confront them?

In the longue dureé, does a sustained period of

heightened MFP tell us anything about the life

cycle or the hegemony of the nation-state as an

institutional form?

I look forward to turning my attention to these ques-

tions in 2021 and beyond, and I hope to find col-

leagues, interlocutors, and compatriots among the

members of GATS. ■

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

27

Our world is growing more

interconnected yet also

seems more and more in-

secure, divided, and dan-

gerous. Improving in-

comes, transportation and

communication have

spurred international trav-

el, trade and collaboration

but also job flight, piracy,

climate change and terror-

ism, among other problems. Despite the uncertainty

these developments bring, one thing is certain: inter-

national affairs increasingly impact us all, from the air

we breathe, to the prices we pay, to the jobs we get.

For all the impact the wider world has on our lives, it

can seem distant from our everyday preoccupations

and face-to-face interactions. Indeed, the less we

know and connect with the wider world, the more

irrelevant it can seem despite its increasing relevance

to all our lives. This paradox of perceived irrelevance

and mounting relevance calls for democratizing di-

plomacy.

Diplomacy can be simple to define as the manage-

ment of international relations, but hard to do well,

as any professional diplomat will readily

note. Diplomacy is difficult because there are many

factors and forces—political, economic, religious,

geographic, historical, etc.—including competing

individual and group ambitions, and all are pieces in

an evolving play that can change its focus at any mo-

ment. This is often an argument for professionalizing

rather than democratizing diplomacy. The world’s

complexity, the argument goes, calls for well-trained

and experienced diplomats who can skillfully negoti-

ate the dizzying and potentially explosive mix of in-

terests, cultures and personalities toward peaceful

and mutually beneficial ends. Amateur ignorance of

that complex mix can at best offend, and at worst

lead to war.

Professional diplomats are indeed essential for their

skillful negotiation that can and has resolved crises,

and fostered cooperation vital to international peace

and prosperity. However, professional diplomats are,

at the end of the day, usually paid agents of their

governments. As such, they are first and foremost

servants of government leaders, whether or not they

like it, and whether or not those leaders’ interests

align with those of their people, let alone the people

of the world. Diplomats may and often do promote

international peace and cooperation, but only if it

coincides with their national leaders’ interests.

None of this is meant to condemn diplomacy, nor its

professional practitioners. Professional diplomacy is

essential to international peace, justice and develop-

ment, and countless diplomats have put their lives at

risk in service of these world goods, usually with little

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

Democratize Diplomacy!

Paul Lachelier, founder and director of Learning Life, a Washington DC-based nonprofit lab

devoted to innovating education and citizen engagement

28

if any public recognition. Nonetheless, I suspect that

many if not most diplomats who work to advance

these goods would agree that they could use some

help not just from their governments (in the form of

more staff, equipment, security, etc.), but also from

their fellow citizens.

At its simplest, democratizing diplomacy means en-

larging the circle of participation in diploma-

cy. Whether professional diplomats like it or not, di-

plomacy experts argue that newer communication

technologies (the internet, smart phones, social me-

dia, etc.) are already breaking the traditional near-

monopoly of governments over diplomacy, giving

ordinary people—individuals, networks and non-

governmental organizations—more power in interna-

tional relations (e.g., Grant 2005, Nye 2011).

As political scientist Joseph Nye notes, this widening

of participation in international affairs can be for the

better, or worse (Nye 2010). For better, any motivat-

ed individual or organization with a cell phone or lap-

top and access to the internet and social media can

now, for instance,

expose govern-

ment violence and

corruption, or col-

laborate with oth-

ers across the

world in mutually

beneficial

ways. For worse,

any motivated per-

son or group can

photograph or vid-

eo themselves

burning a country’s

flag or a religion’s

sacred text, beat-

ing or killing a foreigner, or else. Unfortunately, it’s

always easier to burn than build a bridge, and em-

powering more people to communicate makes it far

easier for ideologues and lunatics to destroy the

long, patient work of bridge-building.

Simply widening participation in international affairs

is thus clearly not enough. Experts who advocate de-

mocratizing diplomacy though talk more about for-

eign policy authorities informing publics than about

publics participating in diplomacy (e.g., Sachs 2016,

Bessner & Wertheim 2017). Greater dialogue be-

tween foreign policy experts and publics would, of

course, be a positive development. But those who

attend such dialogues are likely to be more educat-

ed, if not themselves involved in foreign affairs,

hence reinforcing the gulf between those engaged

and disengaged with the world.

A broader public that better understands diplomacy,

world geography, history, cultures, trends, problems,

etc., better grasps the world’s relevance, and is more

likely to call for and

engage in diploma-

cy. That understand-

ing can be developed

in schools, but

schools shouldn’t be

the only vehicles be-

cause they vary so

much in their quality

and pedagogical pri-

orities. Democratizing

diplomacy can help,

and citizen diplomacy

is the vehicle.

In contrast with pro-

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

“Governments that fear their people and seek to control

power and perceptions present formidable obstacles. But

governments that see their people as their greatest strength understand that democratizing diplomacy can help make their

nation and the world more secure, just, and prosperous.”

29

professional diplomacy, citizen diplomacy entails

citizen-to-citizen communication and collaboration

across borders. Professional diplomats frequently

encourage citizen diplomacy if it advances their gov-

ernment’s foreign policy objectives. “Public diploma-

cy” officers commonly bring together ordinary peo-

ple from different countries to promote mutual

goodwill and cooperation. However, given that gov-

ernment leaders and their diplomatic agents are not

always foremost committed to peace, justice and the

welfare of their people, citizen diplomats need to

maintain some independence from professional dip-

lomats. Watchful citizens active in independent polit-

ical parties, non-government organizations and vol-

untary associations are better able than state-backed

groups to hold their governments accountable.

In this vein, independent citizen diplomacy groups

can help lead the democratization of diplomacy as

they collaborate to advance international peace, jus-

tice and development. Current examples of organiza-

tions doing citizen diplomacy include Global Ties

U.S., Sister Cities International, World Learning, and

iEARN. At their best, such groups don’t just foster

dialogue or travel, but educational, economic and

political collaborations. At their best, citizen diplo-

macy organizations also involve populations least

likely to engage in diplomacy: the poor and those

least connected to the wider world. Poverty and dis-

connection don’t necessarily engender xenopho-

bia. But they breed ignorance, and ignorance is fuel

for the xenophobia that attacks immigrants, neglects

refugees, elects demagogues, and sows the seeds of

war.

Thus, at its best, democratizing diplomacy means:

1. Harnessing communication technologies to en-

gage more people, especially the poor and those

globally least connected, in diplomacy.

2. Promoting not just dialogue and travel, but col-

laboration to advance transnational peace, jus-

tice and development.

3. Cultivating and measuring progress in partici-

pants’ world knowledge, interests, skills and so-

cial ties via those cross-national collaborations.

4. Encouraging the development of an independent

citizen diplomacy sector composed of groups

devoted foremost to international peace, justice

and development rather than their country or

government’s self-interest.

5. Thinking and talking about how citizen diploma-

cy can ultimately entail routine and meaningful

yet independent citizen participation in interna-

tional government.

Democratizing diplomacy is a vital step in advancing

human freedom, understood not as individual license

but as collective self-government. The path to inter-

national government of, by and for the world’s peo-

ples is clearly long. But the rise of the United Nations

and other international governmental bodies, pro-

gress in transport and communication technologies,

and growing cross-national trade and cooperation in

the last one hundred years constitute important

steps on that path. Governments that fear their peo-

ple and seek to control power and perceptions pre-

sent formidable obstacles. But governments that see

their people as their greatest strength understand

that democratizing diplomacy can help make their

nation and the world more secure, just, and prosper-

ous. ■

Editor’s note: This essay was recently published

online in The Democracy Chronicles

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

30

References Bessner, Daniel, and Stephen Wertheim. April 5, 2017. ”Democratizing U.S. Foreign Policy.” Foreign Affairs. Grant, Richard. 2005. “The Democratisation of Di-plomacy: Negotiating with the Internet.” Nether-lands Institute of International Relations ‘Clingendael’ and Antwerp University. Melissen, Jan. 2005. “The New Public Diploma-cy: Between Theory and Practice” in The New Public Diplomacy, ed. Jan Melissen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Nye, Joseph. October 4, 2010. “The Pros and Cons of Citizen Diplomacy.” New York Times. Nye, Joseph. 2011. The Future of Soft Power. New York: Public Affairs. Sachs, Jeffrey D. December 21, 2016. “The Democ-ratization of U.S. Foreign Policy.” The Nation.

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

31

Member Publications A N N O U N C E M E N T S

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

32

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

1. ASA GATS Sections ▶ Doing Decolonial Theory in the North vs. the South

In his book “The World and Africa”, Dubois wrote about the important role of Africans and the African diasporas, and of the subjection of African and Afro-diasporic peoples to logics of enslavement, disposses-sion and colonial domination, as key to understanding the making of the modern world and the social conflicts and inequalities within it. And yet when the experiences of African and Afro-Diasporic peoples from outside the United States are studied in Sociology, it is usually as isolated “case studies” to be con-nected with each other only theoretically. How can we consider the role of Africans and Afrodescendants in shaping the modern and contemporary world? How can we consider the broader legacy of transatlantic slavery to the contemporary world while considering that 95% of enslaved Africans brought across the Atlantic were not brought to the United States, but to Latin America and the Caribbean? How can we understand struggles for racial justice while considering not only American minority rights movements,

▶ “The World and Africa” Today: Building on Du Bois’s Pan-Africanist Challenge to Sociology

While the Latin American Modernity/Coloniality thesis and the Indian Subaltern Studies – renamed ‘Postcolonialism’ in North America – are receiving increasing interest in the Global North, there have been various traditions of anti-colonial scholarship in many decolonizing countries, including African, Afro-Caribbean, Southeast Asian and East Asian anti-colonial thought, Indigenous and feminist engagements with the Modernity/Coloniality thesis, and decolonization efforts of First Nation scholars combatting set-tler-colonialism. These different approaches to decolonization stem from different histories of colonization and different local contexts. In light of these discrepant experiences and the strong North-South asymme-tries in global academia, the question arises how to “do” decolonization. This session aims to discuss sever-al aspects of this issue: (1) Problems and controversies surrounding terminologies of decolonization (2) The politics of who is speaking for – and possible over – whom (3) Debates about the goal(s) of decolonization: Are they eradication of eurocentrism from social theory? Creating scholarship that is based on the lived realities and concerns of people living under decolonizing or settler-colonial circumstances? Canonizing the thought of silenced Southern Theorists? Land return to indigenous people and reparations for colo-nized countries? Dismantling academic dependency, i.e. the power relations structuring global academia? (4) What roles do internal colonial divides and nationalist discourses play, and does a too strong focus on the North-South divide displace analyses of nation-state-based inequities, exclusions and exploitation? (5) What are forms of and problems with Global Northern engagement with anti-colonial scholarship (6) What should the roles and codes of conduct of privileged groups be in the decolonization effort?

▸ Caroline Schoepf, Hong Kong Baptist University; [email protected]

33

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

1. ASA GATS Sections but global movements for decolonization? How do we consider the fate of African and Afro-diasporic peoples not only in the context of their national territories, or even the links to various European impe-rial projects, but also in the context of various U.S. imperial involvements, Cold War struggles and glob-al wars on drugs and terror? How do we link historically central but sociologically marginalized places like Haiti, Angola, and Cuba to “classic” comparative cases like South Africa, Brazil and the United States? How do we study the contemporary implications of the historical involvement of different Euro-pean empires (e.g., Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, etc), of other peoples and diasporas (e.g., from Asia and the Middle East) and of other colonized populations (e.g., Indigenous peoples in the Americas) in rela-tion to Africans and Afro-diasporic peoples?

▸ Luisa Schwartzman, University of Toronto; [email protected]

We invite submissions to 'Open Topics' on any and all topics in Global and Transnational Sociology.

▸ Ching Kwan Lee, UCLA; [email protected]

▶ Open Topics in Global and Transnational Sociology

▶ GATS Roundtables

The Global and Transnational Sociology section will be hosting roundtables, many of which will be organized in consort with our research clusters

▸ Kristopher Velasco, University of Texas-Austin; [email protected]

▸ Ricarda Hammer, Brown University; [email protected]

▸ John Foran, University of California-Santa Barbara; [email protected]

▸ Shai Dromi, Harvard University; [email protected]

▸ Rebecca Farber, William & Mary; [email protected]

▸ Jake Watson, Boston University; [email protected]

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GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

2. Call for Proposals

I am excited to share the following call for proposals for an interdisciplinary grad student conference that I am helping to organize in March 2021. The conference centers around the ethnographic concept of placing. We invite papers that critically engage with topics such as: waterscapes, excess, pollution and toxicity, post-colonial/decolonial STS, late industrialism, human-animal and interspecies relations, climate change, racialized geographies, multimodality, and engage with the following questions: How can we, as ethnographers, grapple with the impulse to locate, order, and recognize: matter, relations,

beings, environments?

How does the notion of place and the act of placing reveal the analytical insufficiencies of ethnographic method and vice versa?

How can the tools of ethnography help us attune to the labor and affect of placemaking?

How may we analyze ‘patchy places’ beyond narratives of cataclysm and ruin, while also attending to the power dynamics within such sites? What are the legacies of racial capitalism/liberalism on differing geogra-phies?

▸ For the Call for Proposals and more information: https://www.pennenvirolab.org/conference-on-

placing

▸ Raka Sen, University of Pennsylvania

▶ Conference on Placing

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GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

3. Call for Board Members

Learning Life, a sociologist-founded, Washington DC-based nonprofit lab devoted to spreading learning beyond school walls, is seeking board members. In our increasingly interconnected yet divided world, Learning Life develops innovative learning communities to widen access to world affairs, and nurture more caring, capable, connected global citizens. Learning Life runs three programs: (1) the Family Diplo-macy Initiative connects families worldwide online across lines of country, class, race and religion to help build a more caring, less divided world, (2) the International Mentoring Program helps open the world to children from lower-income families in the USA and abroad, and (3) our Democracy Dinners gather metro Washington DC academics, professionals and activists to talk about democracy's local to global challenges and opportunities amidst authoritarian resurgence. We are now recruiting caring, connected,

skilled and experienced folks to join our inaugural Board of Directors, and Board of Advisors. To learn more, click here.

▶ Innovative International Nonprofit Calls for Board Members

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M E M B E R P U B L I C A T I O N S

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37

Books

Moussawi, Ghassan. 2020. Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Disruptive Situations challenges representations of contemporary Beirut as an exceptional space for LGBTQ people by highlighting everyday life in a city where violence is the norm. Ghassan Moussawi, a Beirut native, seeks to uncover the underlying processes of what he calls “fractal orientalism,” a relational understanding of modernity and cosmopolitanism that illustrates how transnational discourses of national and sexual exceptionalism operate on multiple scales in the Arab world. Moussawi’s intrepid ethnography features the voices of women, gay men and, gen-derqueers in Beirut to examine how queer individuals negotiate life in this uncertain region. He examines “al-wad,’” or “the situation,” to understand the practices that form these strategies and to raise questions about queer-friendly spaces in and beyond Beirut. Disruptive Situations also shows how LGBTQ Beirutis resist reconciliation narratives and position their identities and visibil-ity at different times as ways of simultaneously managing their multiple positionalities and al-wad’. Moussawi argues that the daily survival strategies in Beirut are queer—and not only enact-ed by LGBTQ people—since Beirutis are living amidst an already queer situation of ongoing pre-carity.

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Gill, Timothy. 2020. The Future of U.S. Empire in the Americas: The Trump Administration and Beyond. New York: Routledge Press. With the rise of President Trump, many are coming to question where the United States (U.S.) is headed and, whether we might witness an imperial decline under Trump. Social scientists largely recognize the contemporary hegemonic position of the U.S. at the global level, but questions persist concerning the future of the U.S. Empire. With the Trump Administration at the helm, these questions are all the more salient. Drawing on the expertise of a panel of contributors and guided by Michael Mann’s model of power, this book critically interrogates the future of U.S. global power and provides insights on what we might expect from the U.S. Empire under Trump. Recognizing that U.S. imperial power involves an array of sources of power (ideological, eco-nomic, military, and political), the contributors analyze the Trump Administration’s approach towards nine countries in the Western Hemisphere, and five sets of global policies, including inter-American relations, drugs, trade, the environment, and immigration. Each case presents a historical look at the trajectory of relations as they have developed under Trump and what we might expect in the future from the administration. The Future of U.S. Empire in the Americas will be of great interest to students and scholars of U.S. foreign policy, Foreign Policy Analysis, politi-cal sociology, and American politics.

Duina, Francesco and Frédéric Mérand (editors). 2020. Europe’s Malaise: The Long View (Research in Political Sociology Series, Vol. 27). Bingley: Emerald.

Europe is struggling. Its challenges include weak economic growth, populism, geopolitical ten-sions, Brexit, the EU's legitimacy crisis, and much more. Some of the dynamics at work may en-courage further integration, but others are undermining it. This volume of Research in Political Sociology seeks to adopt a 'longer' view to make sense of Europe's current 'malaise'. Written just before the COVID-19 pandemic, it asks vital and long-term questions about the EU. Are the cur-rent challenges unprecedented or do they have roots in, or connections to, past events and devel-opments? Is there a 'big' picture which we should keep in mind? Are there bright spots, and what do they suggest about Europe's present and future? To engage in such questions, leading schol-ars draw from historical and comparative sociology, as well as comparative politics. They offer analyses that see the EU as an instance of state formation. They grapple with the question of iden-tity and institutions, exploring in that context the extent and limit of citizens’ support for more Europeanization. Taken together, they put forward exciting, far-reaching, and illuminating per-spectives of enduring relevance as Europe moves toward an uncertain future.

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Books

Scipes, Kim. 2021. Building Global Labor Solidarity: Lessons from the Philippines, South Africa, Northwestern Europe, and the United States. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

I’ve been working to build global labor solidarity since 1983. This is a compilation of some of my most important articles—some previously published in obscure or now-dead journals, some published only on the internet, and some never published—between 1985-2020. These include articles “from the ground” to theoretical discussions. For a list of all my articles—many linked to the original papers—you can go to https://www.pnw.edu/faculty/kim-scipes-ph-d/publications/ .

GATS NEWSLETTER | FALL 2020

Hashemi, Manata. 2020. Coming of Age in Iran: Poverty and the Struggle for Dignity. New York: New York University Press. Crippling sanctions, inflation, and unemployment have increasingly burdened young people in the Islamic Republic of Iran. In Coming of Age in Iran, Manata Hashemi takes us inside the lives of poor Iranian youth, showing how these young men and women face their future pro-spects. Drawing on first-hand accounts, Hashemi follows their stories, one by one, as they strug-gle to climb up the proverbial ladder of success. Based on years of ethnographic research among these youth in their homes, workspaces, and places of leisure, Hashemi shows how pub-lic judgments can give rise to meaningful changes for some while making it harder for others to escape poverty. Ultimately, Hashemi sheds light on the pressures these young men and women face, showing how many choose to comply with―rather than resist―social norms in their pur-suit of status and belonging. Coming of Age in Iran tells the unprecedented story of how Iran’s young and struggling attempt to extend dignity and alleviate misery, illuminating the promis-es―and limits―of finding one’s place during a time of profound uncertainty.

Share it with the section in our next newsletter!

Send all submissions to Alex and Jess at:

[email protected]

Do you have a new publication?

39

Articles and Book Chapters Castañeda, Ernesto, and Amber Shemesh. 2020. “Overselling Globalization: The Misleading Confla-

tion of Economic Globalization and Immigration, and the Subsequent Backlash.” Social Sci-ences. Volume 9, Number 5, 32 pp.

Chávez, K. and Swed, O., 2020. Off the Shelf: The Violent Nonstate Actor Drone Threat. Air &

Space Power Journal, p.29. Deb, Nikhil and Maya Rao. 2020. “The Pandemic and the Invisible Poor of the Global South: Slum

Dwellers in Mumbai, India, and Dhaka, Bangladesh.” In Social Problems in the Age of COVID-19: Volume 2 – Global Perspectives, edited by Muschert, Glenn, Budd, Kristen, Lane, David, and Jason Smith. Bristol, UK: Policy Press.

Deb, Nikhil. 2020. “Corporate Capitalism, Environmental Damage, and the Rule of Law: The Ma-

gurchara Gas Explosion in Bangladesh.” In the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology, edited by Nigel South and Avi Brisman. London: Routledge.

Deb, Nikhil. 2020. “Law and Corporate Malfeasance in Neoliberal India.” Critical Sociology 46(7-

8):1157–1171. Deutschmann, Emanuel. 2020. "Visualizing the regionalized structure of mobility between countries

worldwide." Socius 6: 1-3 Elfstrom, Manfred, and Yao Li. 2019. “Contentious Politics in China: Causes, Dynamics, and Conse-

quences.” Brill Research Perspectives in Governance and Public Policy in China 4(1):1–90. Fang, Jun and Gary Alan Fine. 2020. "Names and Selves: Transnational Identities and Self-Presentation

among Elite Chinese International Students." Qualitative Sociology 43(4):427-448. Fang, Jun. 2020. “Tensions in Aesthetic Socialization: Negotiating Competence and Differentiation in

Chinese Art Test Prep Schools.” Poetics 79. Gill, Timothy. 2020. Newly Revealed Documents Show How the AFL-CIO Aided US Interference

in Venezuela. Jacobin. Khutkyy, Dmytro. 2020. “How Citizens’ Assemblies Can Strengthen Democracy?” European Digital

Development Alliance. Khutkyy, Dmytro. 2020. “Internet Voting: Challenges and Solutions. Policy Paper.” European Digital

Development Alliance. Kim, Jessica. 2020. “The Diffusion of International Women’s Rights Norms to Individual Attitudes:

The Differential Roles of World Polity and World Society.” Sociology of Development 6(4): 459-492.

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Articles and Book Chapters Kim, Jessica. 2020. “Democracy, Aid, and Diffusion: A Normative Approach to the Hybrid Regime.”

Sociology Compass. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12837. Laguerre, Michel S. 2020. Cyber-spatial Cartographies of Digital Diasporas. In Geographies of the In-

ternet edited by Barney Warf. Routledge Studies in Human Geography. New York: Routledge, pp.318-333.

Levitt, Peggy. 2020. "Becoming a ‘Cultural Destination of Choice’: lessons on vernacularization from

Beirut and Buenos Aires". International Journal of Cultural Policy 26(6): 756-781. Li, Yao, and Manfred Elfstrom. 2020. “Does Greater Coercive Capacity Increase Overt Repression?

Evidence from China.” Journal of Contemporary China 1–26. Lo, Ming-Cheng M., and Hsin-Yi Hsieh. 2020. "The “Societalization” of pandemic unpreparedness:

lessons from Taiwan’s COVID response." American Journal of Cultural Sociology 8(3):384-404.

Molho, Jeremie, Peggy Levitt, Nick Dines, and Anna Triandafyllidou. "Cultural Policies in Cities of

the 'global south': a multi-scalar approach. International Journal of Cultural Policy 26(6):756-781.

Mueller, Jason C. 2020. “Political, Economic, and Ideological Warfare in Somalia.” Peace Review 31

(3): 372-280. Mueller, Jason C., John McCollum, and Steven Schmidt. 2020. “COVID-19, the Vanishing Mediator,

and Postcapitalist Possibilities.” Rethinking Marxism, Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism: A Rethinking Marxism Dossier: Pp. 181-192.

Pula, Besnik. 2020. "Disembedded Politics: Neoliberal Reform and Labour Market Institutions in

Central and Eastern Europe." Government and Opposition 55(4):557-77. Pula, Besnik. 2020. "From Habitus to Pragma: A Phenomenological Critique of Bourdieu’s Habi-

tus." Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 50(3):248-62. Rutherford, Markella and Peggy Levitt. 2020. “Who’s On the Syllabus?: World Literature According

to the US Pedagogical Canon.” Journal of World Literature 5(4): 606-629. Schmidt, Steven, and Jason C. Mueller. 2020. “The Emergence of Participatory Budgeting in Mexico

City.” Pp. 286-298 in The Routledge Handbook of Planning Megacities in the Global South, edited by Deden Rukmana. London: Routledge.

Scipes, Kim. 2020. “Innovations in Labor Studies—Incorporating Global Perspectives—From Exhor-

tation to Making It Real.” Class, Race and Corporate Power, Vol. 8, No. 1, Article 1.

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Articles and Book Chapters Scipes, Kim. 2020. “Regional Aspirations with a Global Perspective: Developments in East Asian La-

bour Studies.” Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 52, No. 11: 1214-1224. Scipes, Kim. 2020. “The AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy Program: Where Historians Now

Stand.” Class, Race and Corporate Power, Vol. 8, No. 2, Article 5. Sievers, Wiebke and Peggy Levitt. 2020. "Scale Shifting: New Insights into Global Literary Circula-

tion: Introduction” Journal of World Literature 5(4):467-480. Swed, O. 2020. "War and Terrorism." In Investigating Social Problems. Sage Publications. Swed, O. and Burland, D. 2020. “Outsourcing War and Security”. In Oxford Encyclopedia of the

Military in Politics. Oxford University Press. Swed, O. and Burland, D., 2020. Contractors in Iraq: Exploited Class or Exclusive Club?. Armed

Forces & Society. Swed, O. and Burland, D., The Global Expansion of PMSCs: Trends, Opportunities, and Risks.

Working Group on the use of mercenaries as a means of violating human rights and impeding the exercise of the right of peoples to self-determination, the United Nations.

Swed, O. and Stubblefield, S.F., 2020. Resisting or appropriating: Two approaches in the study of aid,

violent non-state actors, and governance. In Limited Statehood and Informal Governance in the Middle East and Africa (pp. 166-185). Routledge.

Swed, O., 2020. Breaking the Order: The Intended and Unintended Consequences of Countersurveil-

lance on the West Bank. Surveillance & Society, 18(1), pp.48-60. Swed, O., 2020. When Ideology Replaces the Market: Gentrification in East Jerusalem.

In Gentrification around the World, Volume I (pp. 265-290). Palgrave Macmillan. Xiao, Wenming, and Yao Li. 2020. “Building A ‘Lofty, Beloved People’s Amusement Center’: The

Socialist Transformation of Shanghai Dashijie (1950-1958).” Modern Asian Studies, 1-42. Xu, Bin. 2020. “Listening to Thunder in the Silence on Tiananmen: Politics and Ethics of the

Memory of the June Fourth Incident.” Online first at China Information. Zhang, Yueran. 2020. “Political Competition and Two Modes of Taxing Private Homeownership: A

Bourdieusian Analysis of the Contemporary Chinese State.” Theory and Society 49(4): 669-707.

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