The rural sphere has suffered from underrepresentation in recent years in part due to growing interest in the urban. A perhaps equally important aspect of the decline has been the troubling of the ...spatial boundaries that define the rural and urban among scholars of mobilities and translocality. Exploring the decline of the rural in relation to these literary works, this commentary interrogates current geographical thinking on spatial categories, positing the concept of ruralities as a means to reinvigorate rural space on its own terms.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, the global issue of modern slavery has become increasingly prominent within development thinking and practice. Efforts to address it largely focus on criminal ...prosecutions of immediate ‘perpetrators’, for instance those who are direct employers or middlemen. This article adds to a growing call from critical scholars to look to the structural drivers of such highly exploitative labour relations. Drawing on an unfree labour approach that views debt bondage as embedded in and reproduced by capitalist accumulation, this analysis explores the diffuse drivers of unfree labour through the experiences of indebted farmers who have migrated from rural areas to work in and around Phnom Penh as debt‐bonded brick‐kiln labourers. The study demonstrates how debt discipline in the context of unregulated microfinance lending in rural Cambodia creates the conditions for unfree labour to emerge. Evidencing links between risky lending practices and unfree labour, the article strengthens calls to understand modern slavery as unfree labour and, in doing so, highlights the failures of the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 8 and other similar policies to make these crucial connections.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, ODKLJ, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article examines the factors shaping the perception of climate change and the relationship between climate change perception and migration. Drawing on a 691-case survey of climate perceptions in ...Cambodia, it explores three dimensions of climate change perception. The first is the relationship of climate change perceptions to space, geography, and scale. Second is the influence of livelihoods to climate change perceptions, and third is the relationship of climate perceptions to migration. The results show that perceptions of climate change are not significantly influenced by spatial distance, meaning that divergent or even opposite climate perceptions might coexist within a relatively small geographical area. The data, however, show that climate perceptions are significantly influenced by both engagement in certain primary livelihoods and contextually specified socioeconomic marginality. Despite this subjectivity of climate perceptions, a strong, statistically significant relationship exists between climate change perception and the prevalence of migrants in the household. Overarchingly, the article challenges efforts to infer direct linkages between climate data and human behavior, arguing instead for a more subjectively attuned understanding of the impacts of climate change on migration, to account for the multiple factors that influence perceptions of and responses to climate change.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Despite the increasing preponderance of non‐farm work in Cambodia, labour migrants across a range of working conditions remain linked to their rural homesteads through durable financial and social ...arrangements. This article explores this phenomenon through the case of debt‐bonded brick kiln workers in Phnom Penh, formerly smallholder farmers in villages. Drawing on the field of labour geography, the article first examines the process by which labourers became debt‐bonded, thus situating them within the country’s broader agrarian transition and recasting peasants as rural labour. It then explores workers’ perceptions of rural life, suggesting that the unfreedom of kiln work, contrasted with the fixedness and potential for mobility in rural life, makes workers aspire to return to their land. The article ultimately highlights how the persistence of smallholder farmers can be understood as an issue of poor work under neoliberalism in Cambodia, and draws light on the agency of labour in understanding this.
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BFBNIB, DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
This article uses evidence from Cambodia to explore the role of remittances in replicating rural inequalities in urban areas. In doing so, it uses a mixed methodology, incorporating social network ...analysis, household surveys and qualitative interviews, to highlight the role of familial remittance commitments in determining urban migrant livelihoods via their influence on both social and financial resources. It argues that those migrants who are compelled to remit a higher proportion of their salaries behave differently in their destination from those who remit less or none, changing jobs more frequently, but failing to build productive social networks or advance in terms of income or conditions. In this way, remittances constitute a key mechanism by which rural inequalities are structurally replicated in the urban space.
This paper uses the concept of viscosity to highlight how structural impediments to movement affect not only populations and individuals characterised by low (or no) mobility but also highly mobile ...groups. Using the 'cyclo' riding paratransit workers of Phnom Penh as a lens, it is suggested here that groups of this sort are trapped in high-mobility cycles by a combination of structural factors and the discourse of their livelihoods. Specifically, cyclo riders are bound to their livelihoods by three overlapping forces: the evolution of Cambodia's paratransit system during the past 20 years leading to diminishing demand for their services; shifts in agricultural production practices; and the changing narrative meaning of the occupation in the eyes of its customers. By combining a migration systems perspective with insights from previous work on the cultural discourse of mobility, it is argued here that this combination of pressures impels cyclo riders movement - and prevents its cessation - in such a way as to constitute the components of a circular, or mobile, viscosity.
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BFBNIB, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
•Reliance on microfinance for everyday survival will be deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic.•The majority of microfinance borrowers globally are women.•Servicing microfinance loans will heighten ...burdens of (un)-paid work that women undertake as part of social reproduction.•Over-indebtedness leads to women’s bodily and emotional ‘depletion’.•The global public health crisis of COVID-19 represents a major challenge to gender equality and sustainable development.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit at a time when microfinance is at its historical peak, with an estimated 139 million microfinance customers globally. Cambodia’s microfinance sector is one of the fastest growing, and like others in the Global South has moved from offering entrepreneurial capital to everyday liquidity, and even disaster relief. In this Viewpoint, however, we argue that the promotion of microfinance as market-based relief and recovery from the pandemic should be a source of concern, not comfort. We firstly suggest that as a result of the health and economic impacts associated with COVID-19, credit-taking is likely to escalate further in terms of the number of borrowers and loan amounts. Second, we contend that a growing reliance on MFIs will leave households undernourished, and further vulnerable to its disciplining and extractive impulses. Third, we argue that the interplay between over-indebtedness, pre-existing malnutrition challenges, and the global public health crisis of COVID-19 represents a major challenge to gender equality and sustainable development. Coordination between the Cambodian government, microfinance lenders, international investors, and development partners is vital to offer debt relief. Furthermore, to reverse the reliance of so many households on the microfinance industry for survival, inclusive socio-economic policies and public welfare services must be prioritised.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
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