Malagasy society is historically highly hierarchical, endlessly differentiating and ranking individuals in keeping with a hereditary inegalitarian order that has lost none of its symbolism over time. Social inertia is further reinforced by weak formal and informal intermediary bodies, a missing vertical link between president and the population. This phenomenon is accentuated by the subsistence of a traditional political theology that instils the state with a providential quality and attaches Raiamandreny status (duly respected father and mother of their subjects) to those who embody it. The upshot of these elements is a yawning divide between the elites and the people.Social fragmentation is also a factor in the chronic political instability. Madagascar features a lack of stable, long-term coalitions of elites. The scant attention paid the populations and the fragility of the clientelistic connections do not afford broad-based popular support for the men in power.External factors form one last explanatory element for the long-term political instability. The consequences of the donors’ ongoing operational actions, which effectively weakened the state from the early 1980s to the 2000s, were disastrous. This pressure, combined with the people’s poor capacity to demand accountability, brought on the gradual institutional decay and loss of legitimacy.

Introduction

What kinds of places do contemporary mobilities of capital and labour create, and what kinds of place-specific capitalism do they enable? This chapter addresses these questions through an examination of the restructuring and rise of the largest Philippine-nationality conglomerates (PNCs) from 2001 to 2015, a period which saw the emergence of property development businesses as a core interest among these companies. It situates this development within two place- and periodspecific sets of labour and capital mobilities: the continued growth of the overseas Filipino workforce and their inbound remittances; and the emergence of a foreign direct investment (FDI)-driven, information technology-enabled business process offshoring industry in the country's major urban centres, and a concomitant strengthening of domestic rural–urban migration flows. While PNCs had played only minor and indirect roles in facilitating these two developments, they have been the primary beneficiaries of demand for residential, office, and retail property which these movements of labour and capital have created.

This chapter argues that meeting this demand was a matter of staying in place, in two senses of the term. First, the foremost advantage of PNCs over both foreign firms and smaller domestic firms was in the acquisition and development of newly privatized and brownfield tracts of urban land, which is restricted to juridical Philippine nationals—an advantage that also extends to the power, water, communications, and transportation infrastructure that undergird these developments. By diversifying into these sectors, PNCs thus became vertically integrated rentiers, able to capture substantial portions of capital flows through the built environment without any direct involvement in either the deployment of Filipino labour overseas or in the operation of business process outsourcing (BPO) firms. In its purest form, this is expressed as mixed-use development ‘townships’ that carry echoes of cash crop latifundism: the sources of demand are ultimately global, and the value is created through labour, but the basis of the key surpluses are rents on land and other inputs to production and reproduction.

Second, the place-based and place-specific opportunities presented by demand for urban property in the Philippines allowed PNCs to obviate the need to seek new markets for their former core interests elsewhere or to invest in new businesses that could plug into global production networks. With a few exceptions, the surpluses that were extracted from urban property have not been invested in value-adding, or job-generating, sectors.

Introduction

India ranks among the top recipients of remittances from people settled in Western countries. The Punjabi community, scattered in different parts of the world, has been actively engaged in sending back remittances to family members in the homeland. The diaspora community has also contributed significantly to the development of their ancestral villages. When diaspora philanthropists sponsor projects in their ancestral homeland, they do not just make capital indiscriminately available for local use; rather, they fund particular kinds of activities that they consider necessary and valuable.

Scholars of migration have shown that historically and in the contemporary period, migration shapes the lives of people both in the places of origin and in places of destination. Migrant communities must, therefore, be studied as ‘transnational’ because they cross different kinds of boundaries, in terms of movements of goods, people, ideas, and cultures, creating and transforming spaces across the globe. It is this framework of the ‘transnational’ nature of migrants that I examine through my work on Punjabi migrants and the diverse links they maintain across national/ transnational boundaries. In Punjab, I selected Kharoudi village because of its transnational movements and the connections which migrants maintain with this village, especially the connections which are apparent in the form of capital flows that have driven development processes in the village.

Remittances and Development

Diasporic communities are globally spread but at the same time linked back to their homelands. People from developing nations, such as Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Philippines, and India, move to various Western countries, such as the USA, the UK, Canada, and Europe. In the case of Pakistan, transnational migration of Mirpuri Muslims to Britain not only brings economic capital into the area through the flow of remittances, but also facilitates significant social development through the construction of schools, hospitals, and so on (Ballard, 2004).

Vertovec (2007) demonstrates that remittances are sent by all types of migrant workers—male and female, legal and illegal, permanent and temporary, low-skilled and highly skilled. They can be transferred through various modes such as banks, agencies, directly through the Internet, through professional couriers, or through the social networks of the migrants. Remittances influence the lives of local people who are left behind and transform the sociocultural settings of people in the homeland with respect to their status hierarchies, gender relations, patterns of marriages, and user habits.

Introduction

Although migration to India has remained an important source of people's livelihoods in Nepal for years, migration trends beyond India have massively increased in recent years with over 500,000 Nepalese migrating abroad for employment annually (ILO, 2018). A large segment of this migrant population comprises women who originate mainly from Nepal's small rural villages, where most people have adopted traditional mixed livelihood strategies that combine subsistence farming, livestock, and the extraction of local natural resources. The entrenched patriarchy and its various forms of gender-based discriminations and violence, and the penetration of the unregulated global markets even in the smallest of the villages are exerting a tremendous pressure on women's traditional livelihoods, lifestyles, and aspirations that now demand a monetary mode of production while most Nepalese women have been traditionally engaged in informal agricultural sectors and unpaid care and domestic work. The traditional, informal work that women perform does not get recognized even as ‘work’ in society, let alone monetarily paid. There is thus a disjuncture between the mode of production that Nepalese women have been traditionally involved in and the capitalist monetary mode of production required to address the transformed realities wrought by globalization. This disconnect operates as a powerful catalyst for pushing women out of the villages. Succinctly, Nepalese women's outmigration is a phenomenon resulting from an interplay between various intersecting and interlocking pre-existing systems of oppressions and the newly emerging pressures from global markets and climate change. In such a situation, migration has become a key survival strategy for many Nepalese women, despite the legal and institutional barriers created by the state to contain their mobility and the sociocultural stigmas associated with women's migration for work. It should, however, be noted that for women's migration to happen, there is a simultaneous ongoing twin process, the process of women becoming politically aware of the systems of domination on the one hand and their agentic responses and resistance to those systems on the other.

Against the backdrop of the rapidly shifting socio-economic structures spurred on by globalization, this chapter focuses on the phenomenon of women's labour migration along the Nepal–Persian Gulf migratory corridor. Three dimensions of women's labour migration constitute the key contents of the chapter. First, I examine how the fast-paced outmigration of Nepalese women from the country's previously isolated rural spaces has created new spatialities of migration and distinct forms of governmentality.

Introduction

The chapter examines how previous historical migrations, which resulted in diverse Filipino-Chinese communities, facilitated the dynamics and articulations of the People's Republic of China's (PRC) foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Philippine mining sector. In the early 2000s, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001–2010) set aside the Philippines’ territorial claims in the South China Sea in order to strengthen bilateral ties, culminating in more than 20 major investments from Chinese state-oriented enterprises (SOEs) and an increase in smaller private investments across a wide variety of sectors in the Philippines. Private Chinese investors began forming mining companies with Filipino partners in order to take advantage of the Philippines’ emerging mineral economy. However, Benigno Aquino III's (2010–2016) stand on the South China Sea led to the deterioration of Philippine–China relations, reversing the previous administrative policy of encouraging Chinese investments. Ironically, his term experienced an upturn in activities from numerous Chinese-funded artisanal andsmall-scale mining (ASM) firms, which was paradoxical because national political rhetoric and state preference were discursively against Chinese capital. Despite this, Philippine media and civil society organizations reported the rise of illegal ASM funded by Chinese investors. From the perspective of officials in the Aquino administration, the unsanctioned Chinese mineral extraction was part of China's imperial activities in the South China Sea, one with foundations in the unquenched yearning for South East Asia's strategic resources and juridically sanctioned territories. Indeed, Walden Bello, a former congressman during Aquino's term, said that he ‘received reports of the rise of illegal Chinese mining activities during Aquino, which was an irony because the increasing international conflict [between the Philippines and China]’.

What accounts for the rise of Chinese ASM during the Aquino administration? I present two interrelated but distinct points on the Philippine mining sector and Chinese FDI from a political economy approach in concert with ethnographic research on three Chinese mining companies in one Philippine province. First, I examine the successive eras of state authoritarianism (1965–1985) and neoliberalism (1986-onwards) to explain the emergence of ASM in the Philippines. I show how the historical evolution of the Philippine and Chinese economies led to a confluence of factors that resulted in the proliferation of Chinese-funded ASM mining. The crisis of the Philippine mining economy and the neoliberal transition institutionalized the position of regional–local elites to greatly manage the mining sector.

The general conclusion wraps up the main findings of the book highlighting its innovative approach to considering how Madagascar functions in order to understand the country’s trajectory since independence. It investigates the hybrid nature of contemporary Malagasy society, a mix of external and internal influences in fateful combination (a chimera), despite the conclusion that endogenous dynamics are leading the dance. Drawing on the most recent trends, the chapter elaborates three potential scenarios for the years to come. Chaos is not the least probable. The second is the road to a more positive societal change, by establishing sustainable coalitions among elites and more organised top-down patron-client system. This scenario would establish a stable social order, but would mean the abandonment of the democratic process. The third scenario called democratic consolidation would be achieved by means of an inclusive social, political and economic dynamic. Perhaps the most ambitious, it would build on Madagascar most positive assets: the institutional capacity for regulation demonstrated in the past, the taboo on violence and the democratic aspirations of the population. The only avenue is for Madagascar to consolidate countervailing institutions and develop intermediary bodies, and giving more voice to the people.

The first chapter first presents the data on the Malagasy mystery: not only has per capita GDP been trending downward since 1960 (the puzzle), but every time the country has set out on a growth path, it has been stopped in its tracks by a socio-political crisis that has shattered the hopes it raised (the paradox). The chapter uses a range of information sources (macro aggregate and micro surveys) to allow for data triangulation to underpin the diagnosis of Madagascar’s puzzle and paradox. We looked for explanations first in the economists’ toolbox, i.e. growth and development theory and its offshoots. We then sounded out a broad spectrum of possible determinants (the usual suspects) to decide whether any of them displayed dynamics tentatively specific and deficient enough to be potential suspects to explain Madagascar’s misfortune. Yet these factors generally put forward by the development theories appeared powerless to explain Madagascar’s poor long-run performance. This first sweep fails to provide satisfactory answers to our question and even adds to the veil of mystery surrounding Madagascar’s trajectory, in that most of the conditions found appear to be positive. This leads to making a foray into political economy as a potential solution to the problem.

Introduction

The association between capital and labour varies spatially and shifts temporally. Post-1980 China represents arguably the most striking and largest-scale reconfiguration of international capital and domestic labour. China not only has become the largest recipient in the developing world of foreign direct investment (FDI), most of which has flowed into manufacturing, but has also experienced the largest domestic movement of rural labourers, over 500 million, into city-based factories in history. As this massive combination of capital and labour transformed China into a global economic superpower with abundant foreign reserves and surplus capital, it has turned China into a major new source of capital outflow, mostly into the Global South. Conventional capital mobility is driven primarily by private multinational corporations towards both safe and profitable markets in the Global North and emerging economies with lower production costs and greater market potentials. But China has introduced a new mode of outward capital mobility directed by a strong party-state that also acts as a global capitalist-state. China challenges the prevailing market-capitalist principle and patterns of global capital and labour mobility by unleashing a large wave of capital flow from China to the Global South and thus triggering potentially new but uncertain labour movements within and across national boundaries.

With its powerful role in reshaping a new era of global capital and labour mobility, China offers a timely case for exploring and understanding the spatial reconfiguration of capital–labour relations across a much more expansive swath of the Global South compared to the previous dominance of capital investment from the Global North. By pushing heavy investment into the Global South through such government channels as state development banks and state-owned companies, China presents new questions concerning how a powerful state deals with its weakening domestic economy by sending and steering capital flows to neighbouring national and subnational recipients with weak governance capacities.

This chapter has three purposes. First, we focus on China's heavy capital investment in the Global South, primarily in the least developed part of South East Asia, to understand the formation and consequences of a new zone of cross-border infrastructure-driven regional development. Second, we conduct a two-fold analysis of how Chinese investment in South East Asia differs between a powerful state channel and a more flexible conduit and how this simultaneous but bifurcated capital mobility leads to varied labour movement.