Global Dialogue, Magazine of International Sociology Association

Shruti Majumdar is currently the acting Programme Manager for the Ending Violence against Women portfolio in UN Women’s Afghanistan office. She has over a decade of field experience at the World Bank and the United Nations at the intersection of programming and research on women’s empowerment programmes in multiple countries such as India, Bangladesh, Serbia, Jordan and Uzbekistan. Shruti has an MA and PhD in Sociology from Brown University, and a BA in Sociology from Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University. Here she is interviewed by Sebastián Galleguillos, a doctoral student at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), where he also completed an MA in International Crime & Justice. He is a Youth Representative for the International Sociological Association (ISA) to the United Nations and Research Associate at the Centro de Estudios de Derecho Penal, Universidad de Talca, Chile. His research interests include comparative criminology, social media and crime, and alternatives to incarceration. SG: Can you tell me about your current position at the United Nations? How long have you held that position and what are your principal duties? SM: Since 2018, I have been working at the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence against Women at UN Women. We support and invest in civil society organizations...

12.1

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Latest Issue. GD 12.1, April 2022

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Ukraine, Putin’s Imperial Paradigm, and Euro-America

by Sari Hanafi

The Russian criminal invasion of Ukraine that has rocked the world is not only an isolated war but also an exceptional one. It is exceptional based on its capacity to turn into a third World War and more specifically, in its risk of becoming a nuclear one. The eastward expansion of NATO is a provocation, or at least what the Palestinian philosopher Azmi Bishara (2022) called “determination to not avoid the road to war,” yet it does not at all justify this furious invasion and the unilateral stepping over the sovereignty of a country. The International Sociological Association (ISA) released a statement[1] at the beginning of this war expressing its deep concern about the Russian military offensive in Ukraine. For the ISA, and for me personally, war is never an acceptable solution and is against all the values we uphold. The ISA stands in solidarity with the Ukrainian social scientists and with our colleagues elsewhere, including in the Russian Federation and Belarus, who have raised their voices against this war, and have defended democracy and human rights.[2] Putin’s imperial paradigm Putin’s Russia is persistently undermining the liberal democratic ideals that humanity has long been developing. Not only has Putin been in power effectively since 2000, but he has also been actively waging war against any attempt at democratization by other countries (Georgia, Syria, Ukraine ...

Entrepreneurial Universities and Epistemic Injustice An Interview with Jill Blackmore

by Jill Blackmore, Johanna Grubner

GD 12.1

Jill Blackmore PhD is Alfred Deakin Professor in Education, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Australia, and Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences. She researches – from a feminist perspective – globalization, school and higher education policy, and governance; international and intercultural education; leadership and organizational change; research assessment and epistemic justice; spatial redesign and innovative pedagogies; and teachers’ and academics’ work. Recent projects have focused on international student mobility, identity, belonging, and connectedness; employer attitudes to graduate employability in China and India; and school autonomy reform. A previous project is to be published in Disrupting Leadership in the...

The COVID-19 Pandemic and Class Struggle

by Dario Azzellini

GD 12.1

Crises under capitalism tend to increase existing inequalities. This is also a consequence of the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Global labor income decreased by an estimated 10.7 % (or US$3.5 trillion) in the first nine months of 2020 compared to the previous year. Meanwhile, the total combined wealth of the more than 2,200 official billionaires worldwide grew from $9.5 trillion on December 31, 2019 to an estimated US$11.4 trillion a year later. Studies throughout the world confirm that poor and working-class people are at a higher risk of being infected and of being hospitalized due to COVID-19 and that Black, Indigenous, and racialized working-class populations experience disproportionate COVID-19 infection and death rates. Struggles linked to the pandemic Working-class...

Militant Labor Organizing in the Philippines

by Sarah Raymundo

GD 12.1

The victory of the 1896 Philippine Revolution against Spain after the latter’s nearly 400 years of colonization was sabotaged by US imperialism. The transfer of countries under the Spanish empire – the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and Puerto Rico – to the US was legitimized through the 1898 Treaty of Paris; the US paid Spain $20 million as “compensation.” This marked the end of the Spanish empire and the continuing colonization of the Philippines by US imperialism, a project defined by neocolonial institution-building and genocide. This has resulted in a persistent economic underdevelopment that maintains an export-oriented and import-dependent economy with a huge army of reserve labor. Kilusang Mayo Uno, the May One Movement In...

Unions and Labor Market Deregulation in Japan

by Hiroaki Richard Watanabe

GD 12.1

Japan has suffered from economic stagnation since the collapse of the bubble economy in the early 1990s. Japanese companies also have experienced intensified economic competition from neighboring East Asian countries. In response to employers’ demand for greater labor market flexibility to cope with this situation, the government of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has implemented labor market deregulation since the 1990s by increasing its authoritarian tendency in the policymaking process. To implement neoliberal labor market deregulation, the LDP government has excluded labor unions from the policymaking process in several Cabinet councils. Neoliberal labor market deregulation With respect to deregulation of non-regular employment, the 1999 amendment...

Indonesian Workers’ Resistance to Suharto’s Regime

by Verna Dinah Q. Viajar

GD 12.1

As is often said, those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. History gives us lessons as we grapple with the rise of authoritarianism around the world amidst the crippling crises of neoliberalism and the political-economic inequalities of our time. It may be helpful here to study the trade union movements in Southeast Asian countries that have confronted repression from authoritarian rule during the postcolonial and Cold War period. One such example is the Indonesian labor movement. The Indonesian labor movement was forged in the anti-colonial movement against the Dutch, persecuted during Suharto’s authoritarian regime, and then emerged resurgent in the democratization process in the post-Suharto period. Even though weak, the labor movement during Suharto’s repressive...

Futures of Gender Regimes

by Sylvia Walby, Karen Shire

GD 12.1

Gender matters at a global level. This set of papers addresses new thinking about gender relations at the macro level needed to analyze the global. They debate the best way to theorize varieties of gender regime. They add an intersectional lens to the analysis of class that has, so far, been the main focus of macro-level analysis of the global in sociology. They add a macro level to the analysis of gender that has, so far, been predominantly analyzed at the micro and meso levels. The papers develop from a debate held in Social Politics in 2020 as to how theories of varieties of gender regime are to be developed to address the current crisis and to more rigorously include the Global South as well as the Global North. How is the impact of crises, especially the COVID crisis, on gender relations to be theorized? Are varieties of public gender regime different in the Global South as compared with the North? How is modernity, or rather, multiple entangled modernities, gendered? How is the great transformation to modernity, a core issue in contestations in sociological theory, gendered? Are domestic forms of social relations inherently or contingently modern or premodern? Is the most important distinction in varieties of gender regime the one between domestic and public forms of gender regime? Is the distinction between neoliberal and social democratic varieties of gender regime found...

Are New Varieties of Gender Regime Emerging?

by Sylvia Walby

GD 12.1

The identification of emergent varieties of gender regimes and the trajectories through which they have developed matters for gender relations and for society, as my colleagues and I have argued in the special issue of Social Politics in 2020. While most attention has been on increasingly unequal forms of gender regimes, there are also emergent practices that might be indicative of less unequal gender regimes. There have been pressures on some (but not all) societies that drive an increase in gender inequality; these pressures include COVID, Brexit, and Trump, as well as economic recession. There are also forms of collective response that drive a decrease in gender inequality, including state-based (e.g., public health) and non-state-based (e.g., feminism) forms. These raise issues...

All in the Family: Conservative Gender Regimes

by Karen Shire

GD 12.1

Gender regime theory envisions two ideal-type trajectories for the development of public gender regimes. The first is a neoliberal trajectory, where opportunities for women to gain an equal position with men are opened by their equal access to competitive markets. This trajectory largely ignores the ways in which the gendered division of unpaid labor and the gendered segregation of labor disadvantages women. Social-democratic trajectories establish gender equality as a goal of all policies, most significantly, care policies and other social protections that equalize employment protections and guarantee women equal participation in political and economic leadership. In terms of real cases, the US comes closest to the neoliberal gender regime, and Sweden to the social-democratic ideal ...

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