Suchergebnisse

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the variation in migrant labour market regimes and what these reveal about variant patterns of state and extra state regulation in two contemporary political economies.Design/methodology/approachResearch based upon a participatory action research agenda in Mexico and the north of Ireland. Migrant workers and their families where involved in the project and its development. This included participation in the research design, its focus and purpose.FindingsMigrant workers experiences of labour market subordination are part of wider processes of subordination and exclusion involving both the state, but also wider, often meta- and para-state, agents. In different locations, states and contexts, the precarity experienced by migrant workers and their families highlights the porosity of the formal rational legal state and moreover, in the current economic context, the compatibility of illegality and state sponsored neoliberal economic policies.Research limitations/implicationsIt is important to extend this study to other geographic and political economy spaces.Practical implicationsThe study challenges the limits of state agency suggesting the need for extra state, i.e. civil society, participation to support and defend migrant workers.Originality/valueNotwithstanding the two very different socio-economic contexts, the paper reveals that the interaction, dependence and restructuring of migrant labour markets can be understood within the context of meta- and para-state activities that link neoliberal employment insecurities. Migrants' experiences illustrate the extent to which even formal legal employment relations can also be sustained by para- and meta- (illegal and alegal) actions and institutions.

Agrofuels are increasingly sourced and sold as a socially and environmentally beneficial solution to oil dependence. The promotion of sugar-derived ethanol as a substitute for petroleum has thus been key to state development and international trade policies by Brazil and the European Union, respectively, and subsequent investment by leading energy and food transnational corporations has transformed socio-spatial relations in the new sites of production. Brazilian rural worker testimonies, however, point to large-scale labour exclusion rather than reform and a deepening, rather than disruption, of historic power inequalities in the sector. Labour contestation challenges a converging institutional discourse of responsible technological innovation and social upgrading associated with emerging commodity chains and the 'green' economy. Although corporate and statutory response has been market-orientated certification and 'more technology' the idea of the 'techno-institutional fix' provides a power relation-attentive analysis that invites the further exploration of socially committed alternatives to food and energy production.

During the current pandemic, forest loss in 2020 has dwarfed the devastation of the previous year. The scale of environmental crimes and aggression towards indigenous peoples and people of African-descendent has been a characteristic of the Bolsonaro administration in the Amazon region. As cases of COVID-19 rise daily in remote areas of the Amazon, a recent study indicates that indigenous lands that aren't formally demarcated are more vulnerable to intrusion and hence disease: indeed illegal loggers have emerged as a key vector of Covid-19 transmission in a region with Brazil's lowest number of intensive care units. The weakening of environmental protection in the Amazon has been systematic and a feature of the Brazilian shift from neo-liberalism to neo-developmentalism which can be characterised politically as neo-liberal authoritarianism. If Covid-19 also is now becoming a metaphor for the poisonous spread of neo-liberal globalisation, plunder and land grabs in the Brazilian rainforest can be seen to represent the most egregious of many egregious cases on the ground zero of neo-liberalism unchained. With the rise of Bolsonaro, we can see that the previous conjuncture characterised by the hegemony of PT and Lula was the exception to Brazil's long embrace of the caudillo going back to the 1930s. Even then, a look at the mechanism of Lula's rule raises questions as to precisely what changed under Lula when it came to the state and the rule of big capital.

During the current pandemic, forest loss in 2020 has dwarfed the devastation of the previous year. The scale of environmental crimes and aggression towards indigenous peoples and people of African-descendent has been a characteristic of the Bolsonaro administration in the Amazon region. As cases of COVID-19 rise daily in remote areas of the Amazon, a recent study indicates that indigenous lands that aren't formally demarcated are more vulnerable to intrusion and hence disease: indeed illegal loggers have emerged as a key vector of Covid-19 transmission in a region with Brazil's lowest number of intensive care units. The weakening of environmental protection in the Amazon has been systematic and a feature of the Brazilian shift from neo-liberalism to neo-developmentalism which can be characterised politically as neo-liberal authoritarianism. If Covid-19 also is now becoming a metaphor for the poisonous spread of neo-liberal globalisation, plunder and land grabs in the Brazilian rainforest can be seen to represent the most egregious of many egregious cases on the ground zero of neo-liberalism unchained. With the rise of Bolsonaro, we can see that the previous conjuncture characterised by the hegemony of PT and Lula was the exception to Brazil's long embrace of the caudillo going back to the 1930s. Even then, a look at the mechanism of Lula's rule raises questions as to precisely what changed under Lula when it came to the state and the rule of big capital.

The Cerrado biome has been constituted itself in the main axis of the agribusiness expansion. Since the decade of 1970, the region passed to be incorporated to the capitalist frontier of the agriculture, with a strong intervention of the state through the creation of special development programs as the Development of the Cerrados Program (known as POLOCENTRO in 1975), the Program of Japanese-Brazilian Cooperation for the Cerrado Development (known as PRODECER in 1978) and the Constitutional Reserve of Financing of the Brazilian Mid-West (known as FCO in 1988). The military governments promoted the conservative modernization in the Brazilian countryside, in the way that in the Brazilian Mid-West the main goal of thepolicies was to conceive the territorialization of the agricultural capital through the transformation of the large estates in rural enterprises and in the implantation of agricultural industries processor of grains, in a first moment, and, then, the viabilization of the basis for the consolidation of the grain and meat pair. However, the beginning of the 21st century is marked by the arrival of a new hegemonic actor of the agribusiness, compounded by the sugar and energy sector which glimpses in natural potentialities and in the governmental incentives the possibilities of expansion of the sugar and ethanol production. So, this analysis focuses in the comprehension of the capitalist occupation of the Cerrado biome in the state of Goiás by the sugarcane agribusiness, the main policies and programs of promotion of the enterprises, as the importance of the water for the sugarcane activity through the discussion of the agrihidrobusiness

This paper addresses the deepening vulnerability of both domestic and international migrant workers to contemporary slave labour and the challenges for its eradication in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Mato Grosso. Drawing upon the experiences of 40 workers 'rescued' from contemporary slave labour, the paper shows that the repetitive experiences of contemporary slave labour by subjects and the authoritarian turn in Brazil evokes a conceptual reinterpretation of solidarity and its operationalization. It must move away from the distinct liberal approach in the state paradigm to focus on class and agrarian based solidarity and their understanding of liberation. The paper redefines solidarity as structural and relational notion that engages with the epistemic insight of unfree workers to define the terms of their own freedom, pointing towards humanizing, and self-emancipating alternatives that challenge roots of class oppression and slave labour.

In the great civilisations of the past, shapeshifting promised a restoration of order in turbulent times in return for the deference of loyal subjects. It was a strategy of the powerful to maintain advantage and could also be used to bind opponents to an undesired form. This study finds its resonance in the contemporary shapeshifting that is the supposed transition from the fossil fuel economy. With reference to the fusion of oil, grain and sugar companies in Brazil's ethanol sector, it explores how amidst economic, environmental and political insecurity these "old villains" of the carbon economy have fused and emerged as the "new heroes" of the green economy. Accounts of dissenting rural subjects, however, unveil the mythical nature of avowed social gains from this shapeshifting. Amidst rural conflict and a successive weakening of regulation, it becomes evident how their petrification, in a metaphorical and increasingly literal sense is required.

In March 2014 a group of early career researchers and academics from São Paulo state and from the UK met at the University of Campinas to participate in a workshop on 'Responsible Innovation and the Governance of Socially Controversial Technologies'. In this Perspective we describe key reflections and observations from the workshop discussions, paying particular attention to the discourse of responsible innovation from a cross-cultural perspective. We describe a number of important tensions, paradoxes and opportunities that emerged over the three days of the workshop.