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Women, economy, war

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2010

Carolyn Nordstrom
Carolyn Nordstrom
Affiliation:
Carolyn Nordstrom is Professor at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA
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Abstract

Political violence amplifies contemporary trends occurring worldwide in the twenty-first century: globalization, an increasing reliance on the informal economy, a shift from twentieth-century manufacturing to resource and labour wildcatting, and the growth of complex international extra-legal trade networks. Women are central to all of these, though their roles both as leaders of development and victims of violence are often overlooked in mainstream analyses. To explain these invisibilities, this article introduces the concept of vanishing points – places where formal analyses and policy effectively cease, such as the dividing lines between formal and informal economies, and the violence associated with controlling extra-legal profits that is effectively invisible to the public at large. The realities of women's work amid political violence and postwar development, and across the spectrum of in/formality are explored. The conclusions serve to challenge established notions of power, profit, and economy, and the role of gender within these.

Type
Women
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 92 , Issue 877: Women , March 2010 , pp. 161 - 176
Copyright
Copyright © International Committee of the Red Cross 2010

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References

1 I have spent roughly half of these two and a half decades conducting ethnography in the field, working predominantly in southern Africa and South Asia, with shorter periods in contexts of political violence ranging from Southeast Asia and through the Balkans to the favelas of Brazil, and following the global networks of extra-legal commodity flows linking war zones through developing regions to cosmopolitan centres worldwide.

2 Nordstrom, Carolyn, Shadows of War: Violence, Power, and International Profiteering in the Twenty-first Century, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2004Google Scholar; Carolyn Nordstrom, A Different Kind of War Story, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1997.

3 Nordstrom, Carolyn, Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007Google Scholar.

4 Naila Kabeer, Mainstreaming Gender in Social Protection for the Informal Economy, Commonwealth Secretariat, London, 2008, p. 16.

5 C. Nordstrom, above note 3; R. T. Naylor, Wages of Crime: Black Markets, Illegal Finance, and the Underworld Economy, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2005; Moises Naím, Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, Anchor Books, New York, 2006; Willem van Schendel and Abraham Itty (eds.), Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2005.

6 N. Kabeer, above note 4, p. 28, notes: ‘The World Development Report 2000/2001 confines its discussion of the informal economy to a box in which “labour market risks” are included among the serious risks that the poor face’. Brendan Geary, a student of mine at the University of Notre Dame in the early 2000s, conducted research in London to see how many economics books and texts contained any information on extra-legal economies and, if they did, what information was available. Looking at both university and trade bookstores, he found that many major texts on economics included virtually no discussion of extra-legal economics. If they did, the vast majority had a maximum of just a few pages of generalities. None contained methodologies for collecting data, conducting research, and empirically analyzing data with a rigour demanded for formal economic analyses.

7 M. Naím, above note 5.

8 N. Kabeer, above note 4, p. 28.

9 Sylvia Chant and Caroly Pedwell, Women, Gender and the Informal Economy: An Assessment of ILO Research and Suggested Ways Forward, International Labour Office (ILO), Geneva, 2008; Marilyn Carr and Martha Chen, ‘Globalization, social exclusions and work with special reference to informal employment and gender’, Policy Integration Department Working Paper No. 20, ILO, Geneva, 2004; Report VI: Decent Work and the Informal Economy, Report of the Director-General, International Labour Conference, 90th Session, ILO, Geneva, 2002.

10 N. Kabeer, above note 4, p. 33.

11 N. Kabeer, above note 4, p. 51.

12 Ibid., p. 34.

13 Kabeer (Ibid.) cites ILO (2002) statistics to demonstrate her point: in sub-Saharan Africa, 84% of women workers outside of agriculture are informally employed, compared to 63% of men. In Latin America, the figures are 58% and 48% respectively; while in Asia it is 65% for both women and men. See ILO, Decent Work and the Informal Economy, above note 9.

14 N. Kabeer, above note 4, p. 43.

15 ILO, Decent Work and the Informal Economy, above note 9; ILO, The Informal Economy, Report of the Committee on Employment and Social Policy, Governing Body, 298th Session, Geneva, March 2007.

16 Janet MacGaffey and Rémy Bazanguissa-Ganga, Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2000; C. Nordstrom, above note 3.

17 Rahul Oka, ‘Stable trade, violent borders: how can refugees and conflict zones have multimillion dollar commerce?’, paper presented at the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 17–21 March 2009.

18 van Wormer, Katherine, ‘Anti-feminist backlash and violence against women’, in Social Work & Society, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2008, pp. 332–333Google Scholar.

19 Sara Horrell, Hazel Johnson, and Paul Mosley (eds.), Work, Female Empowerment and Economic Development, Routledge, New York, 2009.

20 Carolyn Elliott (ed.), Global Empowerment of Women: Responses to Globalization and Politicized Religions, Routledge, New York, 2008, p. 9.

21 Carolyn Nordstrom, ‘Toward a (gendered) theory of war’, in Karamé Kari and Tryggestad Torunn (eds.), in Gender Perspectives on Peace and Conflict Studies, International Peace Research Institute/Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, Oslo, Norway, 2000, pp. 17–40.

22 Nordstrom, Carolyn, ‘Visible wars and invisible girls: shadow industries and the politics of not-knowing’, in International Feminist Journal of Politics, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1999, pp. 14–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Carolyn Nordstrom, ‘Girls behind the (front) lines’, in Uli Linke and Danielle Taana Smith (eds.), Cultures of Fear, Pluto Press, London, 2009, pp. 189–200.

23 See Carolyn Nordstrom, ‘Public bad, public good(s) and private realities’, in Paul Gready (ed.), Political Transition: Politics and Cultures, Pluto Press, London, 2003, pp. 212–224.

24 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Taylor, London, 2002.

25 My use of the slash (in/formal, extra/legality) indicates that both meanings in the term are intended, e.g. informal and/or formal.

26 Nordstrom, Carolyn, ‘Carita's war’, in Development, Vol. 44, No. 3, September 2001, pp. 30–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 These questions are investigated in C. Nordstrom, Shadows of War, above note 2.

28 UNICEF, Child Protection from Violence, Exploitation and Abuse: Child Trafficking, available at http://www.unicef.org/protection/index_exploitation.html (last visited 30 October 2009); UNICEF, The State of the World's Children 2006: Excluded and Invisible, available at http://www.childinfo.org/files/The_State_of_the_Worlds_Children_2006.pdf (last visited 30 October 2009); US Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report 2008, available at: http://www.state.gov/g/tip/rls/tiprpt/2008/ (last visited 2 November 2009).

29 Global Trends in Child Labour 2000–2004, ILO, Geneva, 2006; Mark Hecht, ‘Private sector accountability in combating the commercial sexual exploitation of children’, a contribution to the World Congress against the Exploitation of Children and Adolescents, available at http://www.ecpat.org.uk/downloads/World%20Congress%20III/Thematic%20Paper_Corporate%20Social%20Responsibility.pdf (last visited 5 May 2010).

30 BBC correspondents probably did not wilfully mislead audiences. A subtle but powerful system, promoted by those who in any way profit from the less than legal, moral, or scrupulous, pushes investigators to ask certain questions and not others, to interview certain people and not others, to accept certain explanations and not even think of others.

31 Kevin Bales, Understanding Global Slavery, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005; David Batstone, Not For Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade – And How We Can Fight It, Harper One, New York, 2007.

32 Peter Andreas, Blue Helmets and Black Markets, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008; M. Naím, above note 5; Douglas Farah and Stephen Braun, Merchant of Death: Money, Guns, Planes, and the Man Who Makes War Possible, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ, 2008.

33 ILO, Global Trends, above note 29.

34 International Monetary Fund, World Economic Outlook Database, update 2009, available at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2009/01/weodata/index.aspx (last visited 1 November 2009).

35 Hannah Arendt, On Violence, Harvest Books, New York, 1970; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, Pantheon Books, New York, 1972; Slovoj Zizek, Violence: Big Ideas/Small Books, Picador, New York, 2008.

36 As defined in N. Kabeer, above note 4, p. 28.

37 For the full interview see C. Nordstrom, above note 3, ch. 15.

38 Nordstrom, Carolyn, ‘Global fractures’, in Social Analysis, Vol. 52, No. 2, Summer 2008, pp. 71–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.