Development and Change最新文献

This article examines the relationship between reparations as compensation and reparations as transformation in settler colonial Australia. Much of the global reparations debate on colonization and slavery has focused on important demands confronting the historic damages and ongoing accumulation of disadvantage from colonization in ex-colonies or from plantation slavery. Much less has been said about reparations for settler colonialism which is a specific form of ongoing colonization in the here and now. Drawing on long-standing work around reparations for colonization by Indigenous peoples in Australia, and the woeful compensatory responses the state and judiciary have offered, this article argues that reparations for ongoing colonization could consider options beyond monetary compensation. This includes the critical domain of reparations as transformation that aim less to offset damage and reconcile suffering, but rather to comprehensively transform colonial relations.

This article examines white settler colonialism and racial capitalism as the primary mechanisms for the historical and ongoing land dispossession of Afrikan people in South Africa. It argues that by addressing land dispossession through land restitution, South Africa could begin to meaningfully address the ongoing impacts of settler colonial displacement of Afrikan people. It contends that land reparations are central not only to restorative physical and spatial justice but also to physical healing. The aim of this contribution is to historicize and herstoricize the South African land question; situate this within the context of racial capitalism and settler colonialism; provide a framing of the racialization and feminization of the land economy; and expound on the particularities of misogynoir and critical feminist theory in theorizing the acute land dispossession of Afrikan women. Situated within the Azanian School of thought, its essential contribution is the suggestion that land restoration is a necessary and meaningful reparative measure for South Africans.

This article examines how and why water privatization has been in place for nearly three decades in Mozambique, expanding from cities to towns despite a lack of conclusive evidence of its merits. Drawing on primary data and secondary sources, the article argues that powerful actors driving water privatization in Mozambique ‘produced success’ out of what has been a messy and problematic process of implementing water privatization in cities in the 2000s. This strategy is cultural, in that actors constructed and mobilized a success narrative to legitimize the retention of water privatization in cities and to widen its spatial scope to towns. Yet, because water privatization in cities was not actually successful — quite the contrary — the retention and expansion of water privatization necessarily relied on a political economic process that buttressed this cultural production of success. That is, proponents expended power and resources in critical decision-making moments to ensure water privatization and its underlying neoliberal water imaginary would be sustained, at the expense of alternative (post-neoliberal) modes of water supply. As such, this article concludes that water privatization in Mozambique represents an exemplary case of neoliberal resilience.

The idea of global reparations has received increasing attention in recent years, not only with respect to legacies of slavery and colonialism, but also to interrelated issues such as climate change, debt crisis, or ongoing financial transfers from the Global South to the Global North. This article, which introduces and sets the Debate for the 2024 Forum issue on the political economy of 21st century global reparations, offers a critical perspective on contemporary global reparations agendas, including their macroeconomic and development implications for the Global South. It highlights the contentious, unresolved questions about how reparations movements should interact with the highly unequal structures of global capitalism. To what degree should they seek large redistributive gains within these structures, or else aim for more revolutionary standpoints which reject these structures? If the former, would this compromise any hope for reparations to be truly transformative and able to address the challenges presented by global white supremacy? The hope of reparations movements is to make progressive gains that could become the catalyst for more transformative changes on a global scale. At the same time, sympathetic critics question whether reparations are feasible or should be a primary focus of advocacy for achieving racial and climate justice on national as well as global levels. In outlining these points of debate, the article also considers the questions of how to make global reparations work for recipients, and how to finance them. It concludes by elaborating on the challenge of moving towards a more developmentalist emphasis of ‘systemic reparations’.

The relationship between educational level and the age at which women start families has been extensively researched. However, studies have primarily explored how additional schooling shifts the mean or, more broadly, only one point of the age at first union and first birth distributions. This ignores variation in the association between education and the timing of family formation, and the fact that schooling might shape behaviours of vulnerable and more privileged women differently. Using quantile regressions, this article examines heterogeneity in the relationship between education and the age at first union and first birth across the distribution of these events within 50 low- and middle-income countries. It investigates whether additional schooling shifts relatively early union formation and childbearing (that is, lower parts of distributions) similarly or differently than it shifts other parts of the distributions. It finds that association between an additional year at school and the age at first union and birth is weaker in the lower than the upper parts of the distributions. Education has a relatively weak effect on the reduction of early first unions and births and plays an unequalizing role in shaping family formation within countries. These findings are key to understanding persistently high levels of early marriage and pregnancy, despite the expansion of education.

The Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 has placed reparations firmly on the international agenda. This article discusses the concept of ‘reparations washing’ with reference to the measures of two British businesses, Greene King and Lloyd's of London, in acknowledgement of their historical roots in the slave trade, and the Government of the Netherlands’ public apology for the country's history of slavery. Reparations washing occurs when corporations or governments give a token nod to reparatory justice to enhance their image and to absolve them of institutional guilt. The article employs Malcolm X's metaphor of slavery, as sticking a knife into the back of the enslaved, to argue that in order to repair the harm caused, the knife needs to be removed and the wound healed. It then analyses the reparations demands contained in CARICOM's Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice which exposes the limits of reparatory justice campaigns. The paradox of reparations campaigns is that they ultimately leave intact a system founded on White supremacy and the exploitation of the Global South. It is therefore impossible for reparations to be realized without bringing an end to the current political and economic system. The article concludes that, ultimately, the value of reparations campaigns lies in their highlighting the need for revolution.

India's struggle for independence held the promise of an end to poverty and redemption from the communal-cum-class-based inequality which had kept the peasant economy backward. But the planned substitution of the agrarian-rural fabric for an industrial-urban way of life failed to materialize. Casualization and contractualization of waged work indicated that labour had become thoroughly commodified in a state of ongoing footlooseness. It was a proletarianization which did not allow for the collective action precondition to raise and settle the social question. The onslaught of neoliberal capitalism in the last quarter of the 20th century ended the brokerage of the nation state to secure the interests of labour next to those of capital. Less than 10 per cent of the workforce has continued to enjoy formalized occupational engagement, mainly in the downgraded public economy. Corporate capital in collusion with statist autocracy has not only effectuated the deregulation of employment but also abandoned the legal code of formality. The outcome is a state of lawlessness for the people at the bottom of the pile. Besides big business, politics and governance are identified in this reconfiguration as stakeholders in a brutal regime of informality, erosive of equality, democracy, welfare and civil rights.