In the past decade, hundreds of thousands of women from poorer countries have braved treacherous journeys to richer countries to work as poorly paid domestic workers. Scholars and activists denounce compromised forms of citizenship that expose these women to at times shocking exploitation and abuse.In From Servants to Workers, Shireen Ally asks whether the low wages and poor working conditions so characteristic of migrant domestic work can truly be resolved by means of the extension of citizenship rights. Following South Africa's "miraculous" transition to democracy, more than a million poor black women who had endured a despotic organization of paid domestic work under apartheid became the beneficiaries of one of the world's most impressive and extensive efforts to formalize and modernize paid domestic work through state regulation. Instead of undergoing a dramatic transformation, servitude relations stubbornly resisted change. Ally locates an explanation for this in the tension between the forms of power deployed by the state in its efforts to protect workers, on the one hand, and the forms of power workers recover through the intimate nature of their work, on the other.Listening attentively to workers' own narrations of their entry into democratic citizenship-rights, Ally explores the political implications of paid domestic work as an intimate form of labor. From Servants to Workers integrates sociological insights with the often-heartbreaking life histories of female domestic workers in South Africa and provides rich detail of the streets, homes, and churches of Johannesburg where these women work, live, and socialize.
This textbook helps students and readers navigate the various factors ranging from the legacy of the past, ethnic, sectarian differences, and cultural rivalry to the impact of colonial rule, modernization and state building, plus the evolving nature of the international political system and great power policies in shaping Arab-Iranian relations in the last seven decades. The first part of this book looks into factors such as history, ethnic, sectarian and cultural issues that have shaped Iran’s relations with Arab states. It explores the impact of the process of modernization and state-building in the Arab world on these relations, plus the legacy of colonialism and the shifting dynamics of international politics and the evolution key global players’ policies towards Iran and the Arab states. The second part examines case studies in the evolution of Iran’s relations with several key Arab states, including Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the smaller Persian Gulf Arab states. By highlighting the complex set of factors and their interactions that have shaped Arab-Iranian relations, the book hopes to be a corrective to the simplistic and reductionist interpretations of these relations. This approach shows how a variety of factors and their interactions have shaped these relations; sometimes they have exacerbated the conflictual aspects of these relations and at other times have fostered accommodation and even cooperation.
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