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Migrant farmworkers are a ubiquitous but invisibilised, expropriated and exploited component of the global agricultural economy. Their conditions took centre-stage during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fear of production disruption in the migrant labour-intensive sectors led to foreign workers being deemed ‘essential’ in many countries, and exceptional procedures and regulations were instituted that further increased their exploitation, illnesses and deaths. However, the pandemic has not merely exposed the long-established structures of racialised exploitation and expropriation in the domain of farm work. Although it exacerbated the precariousness of the living and working conditions defining the reality of migrant farm workers, there is evidence that the pandemic also strengthened farmworkers' individual and collective consciousness, along with forms of organisation and resistance. The symposium ‘Migrant Farmworkers: Resisting and Organizing before, during and after COVID-19’ explores two dimensions reflected in migrant farmworkers' realities during the pandemic. First, the contributions look at the general conditions defining power structures and material outcomes within the political economy of agriculture before and during the pandemic. Second, they explore the conditions under which resistance and solidarity emerged to question established structures of exploitation.
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Vasanthi Venkatesh and Fahad Ahmad reflect on the BJP’s insidious use of legitimate state power through administrative regulation, constitutionalism, citizenship determination, adoption of internat…
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This paper provides a conceptual intervention through an analysis of the myths surrounding agricultural citizenship and migrant work that underlie the temporary foreign worker program in two settler countries: Canada and Israel. The paper offers a brief insight into the ideologies around farm work that informed the colonisation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the expropriation of non-citizen labour. It begins with a historical overview of how agriculture was used as a tool of colonisation even as settlers struggled to cultivate Canadian lands because of the seasonal nature and the persistent lack of labour. From the time of Confederation, agriculture began to be intimately tied with immigration policies culminating in the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) that persists to this day. The paper then expands the analysis to Israel to show how other settler nations have also followed similar ideological and policy trajectories. The paper illustrates how racial capitalism intertwines with settler colonial practices discursively and institutionally through immigration policies.
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Criminalization of sexual violence against women in intimate relationships must form a central part of the human rights agenda for achieving gender equality. According to a study by the United Nations Secretary-General, “[t]he most common form of violence experienced by women globally is intimate partner violence” including “a range of sexually, psychologically and physically coercive acts.” The World Health Organization reports that nearly one in four women in some countries may experience sexual violence perpetrated against them by an intimate partner. Other research suggests that approximately 40% of all assaulted women are forced into sex at one time or another by their male partners.
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Ending the marital rape exemption in criminal law is a demand for legal equality and autonomy for women, rights that are enshrined in international human rights law. Drawing on international human rights law as a source of authority for challenging the marital rape exception in criminal law allows feminist and other social justice organizations, within their specific national and local contexts, to seek greater state action and accountability toward ending this form of violence against women and this violation of women’s human rights. In this reply, we challenge the arguments in the symposium that oppose or caution against criminalizing sexual violence in intimate relationships as a necessary legal strategy, and that refute our view that ending the marital rape exemption is required by international human rights law.