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Materialising Resistance: Menstrual Politics, International Law, and Decolonial Futures in Brent Libraries
No full textThis article examines the material and spatial dimensions of international law through a case study of Brent Libraries in London, exploring how everyday urban spaces reflect, resist and reimagine legal norms and silences. Focusing on menstruation as a site of embodied resistance, the article critiques the 2021 UN Resolution on ‘Menstrual hygiene management’ for its narrow, hygiene-centred framing and product-based solutions. By analysing Brent’s ‘Period Dignity’ initiative—a collaboration between local government and social enterprise ‘heygirls’—it shows how libraries function as contested spaces where international legal gaps become visible and are actively negotiated. While such interventions challenge menstrual stigma and make menstruation publicly legible, they also risk reproducing colonial narratives and depoliticised frameworks. The article argues for a situationist and decolonial approach to international law that recognises the political potential of local, embodied practices and calls for a more expansive and justice-oriented understanding of menstruation within global legal regimes
Multinational enterprises (MNEs), heterogeneity in corporate social responsibility (CSR), and subsidiary employment in host countries: A signaling perspective
No full textUsing a sample of 11,086 subsidiary-year cases from Japanese MNEs between 2002 and 2013, this study examines the heterogeneous impacts of social versus environmental commitment practices on employment levels at MNEs’ overseas subsidiaries from a signaling perspective, which are proposed to be contingent on the firms’ outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) motivations and geographic scopes. The empirical findings from the study are threefold: (1) both social and environmental commitment practices of MNEs positively relate to subsidiary employment in host countries, with the former’s effect stronger than the latter’s; (2) the positive impacts of social commitment practices on subsidiary employment are more pronounced for MNEs pursuing downstream market-seeking motivations with their outbound FDI projects and for those operating within their home region; however, (3) the positive impacts of environmental commitment practices on subsidiary employment are not significantly affected by MNEs’ outbound FDI motivations or geographic scopes. The study concludes with theoretical, empirical, and managerial implications for MNEs in the international business (IB) literature
Sustainable Agribusiness, Food Security, and Women’s Empowerment: Rural Women at the Heart of the Virtuous Cycle
No full textThis chapter examines the significant role that rural women play in agribusiness and food security, explores how this can lead to women’s empowerment, and lastly, constructs a use case to examine how the linkages and interrelationships among three constructs lead to a virtuous cycle. Anchored on the theory of multifunctional agriculture (MFA), an in-depth literature review is adopted as the methodological approach. Findings reveal that rural women play central roles in agribusiness and food security. They engage in the entire chain of agribusiness from the production stage to processing, marketing, and distribution. In food security, rural women are essential in managing household food production, maintaining vegetable gardens, rearing livestock, and are responsible for household diet and nutrition. Both agribusiness and food security were discovered to contribute to women’s empowerment in various dimensions – economic, social, psychological, and political. Consequently, the chapter develops a virtuous cycle of agribusiness, food security, and women’s empowerment while exposing the interconnectedness and linkages among the three constructs. Governments must provide tailored credit schemes to rural women, involve them in training and green agricultural technologies programs, and design policies that will address gender norms to facilitate land and asset ownership
An Ethiopian Descartes? A French Zera Yacob? Comparison, connection and the prospects for a global history of philosophy
No full textA growing consensus holds that the history of philosophy must move beyond its traditional parochialism, yet there has been less clarity about what non-Eurocentric histories that do not reproduce inherited exclusions might look like. One influential alternative is ‘comparative philosophy’, which David Wong characterises as ‘bringing together’ traditions that developed in ‘relative isolation’ and are defined along “regional and cultural lines”. I argue that this framework faces three persistent difficulties – speculation, incommensurability, and geopolitical categorisation – illustrating these problems through the frequently-invoked comparison between René Descartes and Zera Yacob. I argue that these difficulties not only obscure what is philosophically distinctive about each thinker but also hinder our ability to place both within a unified, global narrative of seventeenth-century philosophy. I propose instead a ‘connected history of philosophy’: an approach that centres on tracing concrete material and linguistic connections between thinkers and intellectual milieux. This approach, I suggest, provides a more historically grounded basis for comparison, illuminates the philosophical parallels between Descartes and Zera Yacob, and enables both to be located within the emerging global networks of seventeenth-century intellectual exchange. I conclude by outlining how connected histories can lay foundations for a genuinely global account of early modern philosophy
This Body has Been Hurting: Immunocompromised Bodies, Pandemics, and the Politics of Immunity
No full textThe climate crisis meets the ECB: tinkering around the edges or paradigm shift?
Full text linkIn recent years, the European Central Bank (ECB) has integrated climate considerations into its policy framework. This paper assesses whether the ECB’s approach adequately responds to the challenges posed by the climate crisis. I identify three transformative implications of the climate crisis for the ECB: (i) the diminishing effectiveness of traditional monetary policy tools in controlling inflation; (ii) the growing necessity for the ECB to actively support decarbonisation in line with the EU’s net-zero targets; and (iii) the insufficiency of traditional risk exposure approaches to address financial instability arising from physical climate risks. I examine the extent to which these implications are reflected in the ECB’s climate actions and plans, arguing that a significant gap exists between the ECB’s ‘tinkering around the edges’ approach and the systemic transformation of central banking required in the climate crisis era. Drawing on post-Keynesian and critical macro-finance perspectives, I develop the theoretical foundations of a climate-aligned central banking paradigm and explore its implications for the ECB’s policy toolbox and mandate
Skills Training, Corruption and Organisational Capabilities: An Analysis of Bangladesh’s Garment Industry
Full text linkSkills training programmes are critical for job creation and structural transformation in developing countries. However, they often achieve poor results because of corruption. By looking at evidence of fraud in a group of training providers in Bangladesh, we identify a deeper problem. Many firms have low productivity due to low organisational capabilities and prefer to employ cheaper untrained workers because their production lines do not move fast enough for training to make a difference. At the other end, very high-capability firms also have limited demand for trainees from average training providers. Without addressing this problem, skills training may fail to create employment. What is worse, outcome-based reward schemes create incentives for providers to fraudulently overstate trainee placements, hiding the source of the problem. We test the hypothesis that providers supplying lower-capability firms and very high-capability firms are compelled to engage in higher levels of fraud. We test this non-linear relationship between the propensity to misreport by training providers and the organisational capabilities of firms by utilising a unique dataset from the Sudokkho skills programme, covering the first half of 2018. Our regression results support the hypothesis and demonstrate the importance of jointly addressing firm capabilities with skills training
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