#sou

il est déjà sur les bons sites de torrent ;-)

et alors, c’est bien ?

ah je sais pas je l’ai pas téléchargé ; je répondais à « ça va pas être facile » :)

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#recordkicks #label #soul #funk

bé #musique tout de même

Migration, Humanitarianism, and the Politics of Knowledge —> An Interview with #Juliano_Fiori.

Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh: In this issue of Migration and Society we are interested in the overarching theme of “Recentering the South in Studies of Migration.” Indeed, it is increasingly acknowledged that studies of and policy responses to migration and displacement often have a strong Northern bias. For instance, in spite of the importance of different forms of migration within, across, and between countries of the “global South” (i.e., “South-South migration”), there is a significant tendency to focus on migration from “the South” to countries of “the North” (i.e., South-North migration), prioritizing the perspectives and interests of stakeholders associated with the North. Against this backdrop, what is your position with regard to claims of Eurocentrism in studies of and responses to migration?

Juliano Fiori: To the extent that they emerge from immanent critiques of colonialism and liberal capitalism, I am sympathetic toward them.1 Decentering (or provincializing) Europe is necessarily an epistemological project of deconstruction. But to contribute to a counterhegemonic politics, this project must move beyond the diagnosis of epistemicide to challenge the particular substance of European thought that has produced systems of oppression.

The idea of “decolonizing the curriculum” is, of course, à la mode (Sabaratnam 2017; Vanyoro 2019). It is difficult to dispute the pedagogical necessity to question epistemic hierarchies and create portals into multiple worlds of knowledge. These endeavors are arguably compatible with the exigencies of Enlightenment reason itself. But, though I recognize Eurocentrism as an expression of white identity politics, I am wary of the notion that individual self-identification with a particular body of knowledge is a worthy or sufficient end for epistemic decolonization—a notion I associate with a prevalent strain of woke post-politics, which, revering the cultural symbols of late capitalism but seeking to resignify them, surely produces a solipsistic malaise. Decolonization of the curriculum must at least aim at the reconstruction of truths.

Eurocentrism in the study of human migration is perhaps particularly problematic—and brazen—on account of the transnational and transcultural histories that migrants produce. Migrants defy the neat categorization of territories and peoples according to civilizational hierarchies. They redefine the social meaning of physical frontiers, and they blur the cultural frontier between Self and Other. They contribute to an intellectual miscegenation that undermines essentialist explanations of cultural and philosophical heritage. Migration itself is decentering (Achiume 2019).

And it is largely because of this that it is perceived as a threat. Let’s consider Europe’s contemporary backlash against immigration. The economic argument about the strain immigration places on the welfare state—often framed in neo-Malthusian terms—can be readily rebutted with evidence of immigrants’ net economic contribution. But concerns about the dethroning of “European values” are rarely met head-on; progressive political elites have rather responded by doubling down on calls for multiculturalism from below, while promoting universalism from above, intensifying the contradictions of Eurocentricity.

It is unsurprising that, in the Anglophone world, migration studies developed the trappings of an academic discipline—dedicated university programs, journals, scholarly societies—in the late 1970s, amid Western anxieties about governing increased emigration from postcolonial states. It quickly attracted critical anthropologists and postcolonial theorists. But the study of the itinerant Other has tended to reinforce Eurocentric assumptions. Migration studies has risen from European foundations. Its social scientific references, its lexicon, its institutional frameworks and policy priorities, its social psychological conceptions of identity—all position Europe at the zero point. It has assembled an intellectual apparatus that privileges the Western gaze upon the hordes invading from the barrens. That this gaze might be cast empathetically does nothing to challenge epistemic reproduction: Eurocentrism directs attention toward the non-Western Other, whose passage toward Europe confirms the centrality of Europe and evokes a response in the name of Eurocentrism. To the extent that Western scholars focus on South-South migration, the policy relevance of their research is typically defined by its implications for flows from South to North.

The Eurocentrism of responses to forced migration by multinational charities, UN agencies, and the World Bank is not only a product of the ideological and cultural origins of these organizations. It also reflects the political interests of their principal donors: Western governments. Aid to refugees in countries neighboring Syria has been amply funded, particularly as the European Union has prioritized the containment of Syrians who might otherwise travel to Europe. Meanwhile, countries like India, South Africa, and Ivory Coast, which host significant numbers of regional migrants and refugees, receive proportionally little attention and support.

It is an irony of European containment policies that, while adopted as a measure against supposed threats to Europeanness, they undermine the moral superiority that Eurocentrism presupposes. The notion of a humanitarian Europe is unsustainable when European efforts to deter immigration are considered alongside the conditions accepted for other regions of the world. A continent of more than half a billion people, Europe hosts just under 2.3 million refugees; Lebanon, with a population of six million, hosts more than 1.5 million refugees from Syria alone. It should be noted that, in recent years, European citizens’ movements have mobilized resources to prevent the death of people crossing the Mediterranean. Initiatives like Alarm Phone, Open Arms, Sea Watch, and SOS MEDITERRANEE seem to represent a politicized humanitarianism for the network age. But in their overt opposition to an emboldened ethnonationalist politics, they seek to rescue not only migrants and refugees, but also an idea of Europe.

EFQ: How, if at all, do you engage with constructs such as “the global North,” “the global South,” and “the West” in your own work?

JF: I inevitably use some of these terms more than others, but they are all problematic in a way, so I just choose the one that I think best conveys my intended meaning in each given context. West, North, and core are not interchangeable; they are associated with distinct, if overlapping, ontologies and temporalities. As are Third World, South, and developing world.

I try to stick to three principles when using these terms. The first is to avoid the sort of negative framing to which your work on South-South encounters has helpfully drawn attention (i.e., Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015, 2018; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2018). When we come across one of these terms being deployed negatively, it invariably describes that which is not of the West or of the North. As such, it centers Europe and North America, and it opens up an analytical terrain on which those residing beyond the imagined cultural bounds of these regions tend to be exoticized. When I need to frame something negatively, I try to do so directly, using the appropriate prefix.

Second, I try to avoid setting up dichotomies and continuities. Placing East and West or North and South in opposition implies entirely dissimilar bodies, separated by a definite, undeviating frontier. But these terms are mutually constitutive, and it is rarely clear where, or even if, a frontier can be drawn. Such dichotomies also imply a conceptual equilibrium: that what lies on one side of the opposition is ontologically equivalent to what lies on the other. But the concept of the West is not equivalent to what the East represents today; indeed, it is questionable whether a concept of the East is now of much analytical value. South, West, North, and East might be constructed dialectically, but their imagined opposites are not necessarily their antitheses. Each arguably has more than one counterpoint.

Similarly, I generally don’t use terms that associate countries or regions with stages of development—most obviously, least developed, developing, and developed. They point toward a progressivist and teleological theory of history to which I don’t subscribe. (The world-systems concepts of core, semiperiphery, and periphery offer a corrective to national developmental mythologies, but they are nonetheless inscribed in a systemic teleology.) The idea of an inexorable march toward capitalist modernity—either as the summit of civilization or as the point of maximum contradiction—fails to account for the angles, forks, and dead ends that historical subjects encounter. It also tends to be founded on a Eurocentric and theological economism that narrows human experience and, I would argue, mistakenly subordinates the political.

Third, I try to use these terms conceptually, without presenting them as fixed unities. They must be sufficiently tight as concepts to transmit meaning. But they inevitably obscure the heterogeneity they encompass, which is always in flux. Moreover, as concepts, they are continuously resignified by discursive struggles and the reordering of the interstate system. Attempts to define them too tightly, according to particular geographies or a particular politics, can give the impression that they are ahistorical. Take Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s definition of the South, for example. For Santos, the South is not a geographical concept: he contends that it also exists in the geographical North (2014, 2016). Rather, it is a metaphor for the human suffering caused by capitalism and colonialism. It is anticapitalist, anticolonialist, antipatriarchal, and anti-imperialist. According to this definition, the South becomes representative of a particular left-wing politics (and it is negative). It thus loses its utility as a category of macrosociological analysis.

Ultimately, all these terms are problematic because they are sweeping. But it is also for this reason that they can be useful for certain kinds of systemic analysis.

EFQ: You have written on the history of “Western humanitarianism” (i.e., Fiori 2013; Baughan and Fiori 2015). Why do you focus on the “Western” character of humanitarianism?

JF: I refer to “Western humanitarianism” as a rejoinder to the fashionable notion that there is a universal humanitarian ethic. Within both the Anglophone academy and the aid sector, it has become a commonplace that humanitarianism needs to be decolonized, and that the way to do this is to recognize and nurture “local” humanitarianisms around the world. In the last decade and a half, enthusiasm for global history has contributed to broader and more sophisticated understandings of how humanitarian institutions and discourses have been constructed. But it has also arguably contributed to the “humanitarianization” of different altruistic impulses, expressions of solidarity, and charitable endeavors across cultures.

The term “humanitarian” was popularized in English and French in the first half of the nineteenth century, and it soon became associated with humanistic religion. It thus connoted the existence of an ideal humanity within every individual and, as Didier Fassin (2012) has argued, it has come to represent the secularization of the Christian impulse to life. It was used to describe a wide range of campaigns, from abolition and temperance to labor reform. But all promoted a rationalist conception of humanity derived from European philosophy. That is, an abstract humanity, founded upon a universal logos and characterized by the mind-body duality. What is referred to today as the “humanitarian system”—of financial flows and liberal institutions—has been shaped predominantly by Western power and political interests. But the justification for its existence also depends upon the European division between the reasoned human and the unreasoned savage. The avowed purpose of modern humanitarianism is to save, convert, and civilize the latter. To cast modern humanitarian reason as a universal is to deny the specificity of ethical dispositions born of other conceptions of humanity. Indeed, the French philosopher François Jullien (2014) has argued that the concept of “the universal” itself is of the West.

Of course, there are practices that are comparable to those of Western humanitarian agencies across different cultures. However, claiming these for humanitarianism sets them on European foundations, regardless of their author’s inspiration; and it takes for granted that they reproduce the minimalist politics of survival with which the Western humanitarian project has come to be associated.

So why not refer to “European humanitarianism”? First, because it must be recognized that, as a set of evolving ethical practices, humanitarianism does not have a linear intellectual genealogy. European philosophy itself has of course been influenced by other traditions of thought (see Amin 1989; Bevilacqua 2018; Hobson 2004; Patel 2018): pre-Socratic Greek thinkers borrowed from the Babylonians, the Persians, and the Egyptians; Enlightenment philosophes had exchanges with Arab intellectuals. Second, reference to the West usefully points to the application of humanitarian ideas through systems of power.

Since classical antiquity, wars and ruptures have produced various narratives of the West. In the mid-twentieth century, essentialist histories of Western civilization emphasized culture. For Cold War political scientists, West and East often represented distinct ideological projects. I refer to the West as something approaching a sociopolitical entity—a power bloc—that starts to take form in the early nineteenth century as Western European intellectuals and military planners conceive of Russia as a strategic threat in the East. This bloc is consolidated in the aftermath of World War I, under the leadership of the United States, which, as net creditor to Europe, shapes a new liberal international order. The West, then, becomes a loose grouping of those governments and institutional interests (primarily in Europe and North America) that, despite divergences, have been at the forefront of efforts to maintain and renew this order. During the twentieth century, humanitarians were sometimes at odds with the ordering imperatives of raison d’état, but contemporary humanitarianism is a product of this West—and a pillar of liberal order.2

EFQ: With this very rich historically and theoretically grounded discussion in mind, it is notable that policy makers and practitioners are implementing diverse ways of “engaging” with “the global South” through discourses and practices of “partnership” and supporting more “horizontal,” rather than “vertical,” modes of cooperation. In turn, one critique of such institutionalized policy engagement is that it risks instrumentalizing and co-opting modes of so-called South-South cooperation and “hence depoliticising potential sources of resistance to the North’s neoliberal hegemony” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2018: 2). Indeed, as you suggested earlier, it has been argued that policy makers are strategically embracing “South-South migration,” “South-South cooperation,” and the “localisation of aid agenda” as efficient ways both “to enhance development outcomes” and to “keep ‘Southerners’ in the South,” as “part and parcel of Northern states’ inhumane, racist and racialised systems of border and immigration control” (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Daley 2018: 19). What, if any, are the dangers of enhancing “policy engagement” with “the South”? To what extent do you think that such instrumentalization and co-option can be avoided?

JF: The term “instrumentalization” gives the impression that there are circumstances under which policy engagement can be objectively just and disinterested. Even when framed as humanitarian, the engagement of Western actors in the South is inspired by a particular politics. Policy engagement involves an encounter of interests and a renegotiation of power relations; for each agent, all others are instruments in its political strategy. Co-option is just a symptom of negotiation between unequal agents with conflicting interests—which don’t need to be stated, conscious, or rationally pursued. It is the means through which the powerful disarm and transform agendas they cannot suppress.

The “localization agenda” is a good example. Measures to enable effective local responses to disaster are now discussed as a priority at international humanitarian congresses. These discussions can be traced at least as far back as Robert Chambers’s work (1983) on participatory rural development, in the 1980s. And they gathered momentum in the mid-2000s, as a number of initiatives promoted greater local participation in humanitarian operations. But, of course, there are different ideas about what localization should entail.

As localization has climbed the humanitarian policy agenda, the overseas development divisions of Western governments have come to see it as an opportunity to increase “value for money” and, ultimately, reduce aid expenditure. They promote cash transfer programming as the most “empowering” aid technology. Localization then becomes complementary to the integration of emergency response into development agendas, and to the expansion of markets.

Western humanitarian agencies that call for localization—and there are those, notably some branches of Médecins Sans Frontières, that do not—have generally fallen in line with this developmental interpretation, on account of their own ideological preferences as much as coercion by donor governments. But they have also presented localization as a moral imperative: a means of “shifting power” to the South to decolonize humanitarianism. While localization might be morally intuitive, Western humanitarians betray their hubris in supposing that their own concessions can reorder the aid industry and the geostrategic matrix from which it takes form. Their proposed solutions, then, including donor budgetary reallocations, are inevitably technocratic. Without structural changes to the political economy of aid, localization becomes a pretext for Western governments and humanitarian agencies to outsource risk. Moreover, it sustains a humanitarian imaginary that associates Westerners with “the international”—the space of politics, from which authority is born—and those in disaster-affected countries with “the local”—the space of the romanticized Other, vulnerable but unsullied by the machinations of power. (It is worth stating that the term “localization” itself implies the transformation of something “global” into something local, even though “locals”—some more than others—are constitutive of the global.)

There are Southern charities and civil society networks—like NEAR,3 for example—that develop similar narratives on localization, albeit in more indignant tones. They vindicate a larger piece of the pie. But, associating themselves with a neomanagerial humanitarianism, they too embrace a politics incapable of producing a systemic critique of the coloniality of aid.

Yet demands for local ownership of disaster responses should also be situated within histories of the subaltern. Some Western humanitarian agencies that today advocate for localization, including Save the Children, once faced opposition from anticolonial movements to their late imperial aid projects. More recently, so-called aid recipient perception surveys have repeatedly demonstrated the discontent of disaster-affected communities regarding impositions of foreign aid, but they have also demonstrated anguish over histories of injustice in which the Western humanitarian is little more than an occasional peregrine. It is the structural critique implicit in such responses that the localization agenda sterilizes. In the place of real discussion about power and inequalities, then, we get a set of policy prescriptions aimed at the production of self-sufficient neoliberal subjects, empowered to save themselves through access to markets.

While some such co-option is always likely in policy engagement, it can be reduced through the formation of counterhegemonic coalitions. Indeed, one dimension of what is now called South-South cooperation involves a relatively old practice among Southern governments of forming blocs to improve their negotiating position in multilateral forums. And, in the twenty-first century, they have achieved moderate successes on trade, global finance, and the environment. But it is important to recognize that co-option occurs in South-South encounters too. And, of course, that political affinities and solidarity can and do exist across frontiers.

EFQ: You edited the first issue of the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, which focused on “humanitarianism and the end of liberal order” (see Fiori 2019), and you are also one of the editors of a forthcoming book on this theme, Amidst the Debris: Humanitarianism and the End of Liberal Order. New populisms of the right now challenge the liberal norms and institutions that have shaped the existing refugee regime and have promoted freer movement of people across borders. Can decolonial and anticolonial thinking provide a basis for responses to displacement and migration that do more than resist?

JF: Any cosmopolitan response to migration is an act of resistance to the political organization of the interstate system.4 As blood-and-soil politicians now threaten to erect walls around the nation-state, the political meaning and relevance of cosmopolitan resistance changes. But if this resistance limits itself to protecting the order that appears to be under threat, it is likely to be ineffective. Moreover, an opportunity to articulate internationalisms in pursuit of a more just order will be lost.

In recent years, liberal commentators have given a great deal of attention to Trump, Salvini, Duterte, Orbán, Bolsonaro, and other leading figures of the so-called populist Right. And these figures surely merit attention on account of their contributions to a significant conjunctural phenomenon. But the fetishization of their idiosyncrasies and the frenzied investigation of their criminality serves a revanchist project premised on the notion that, once they are removed from office (through the ballot box or otherwise), the old order of things will be restored. To be sure, the wave that brought them to power will eventually subside; but the structures (normative, institutional, epistemological) that have stood in its way are unlikely to be left intact. Whether the intention is to rebuild these structures or to build new ones, it is necessary to consider the winds that produced the wave. In other words, if a cosmopolitan disposition is to play a role in defining the new during the current interregnum, resistance must be inscribed into strategies that take account of the organic processes that have produced Trumpism and Salvinism.

French geographer Christophe Guilluy offers an analysis of one aspect of organic change that I find compelling, despite my discomfort with the nativism that occasionally flavors his work. Guilluy describes a hollowing out of the Western middle class (2016, 2018). This middle class was a product of the postwar welfarist pact. But, since the crisis of capitalist democracy in the 1970s, the internationalization of capital and the financialization of economies have had a polarizing effect on society. According to Guilluy, there are now two social groupings: the upper classes, who have profited from neoliberal globalization or have at least been able to protect themselves from its fallout; and the lower classes, who have been forced into precarious labor and priced out of the city. It is these lower classes who have had to manage the multicultural integration promoted by progressive neoliberals of the center-left and center-right. Meanwhile, the upper classes have come to live in almost homogenous citadels, from which they cast moral aspersions on the reactionary lower classes who rage against the “open society.” An assertion of cultural sovereignty, this rage has been appropriated by conservatives-turned-revolutionaries, who, I would argue, represent one side of a new political dichotomy. On the other side are the progressives-turned-conservatives, who cling to the institutions that once seemed to promise the end of politics.

This social polarization would appear to be of significant consequence for humanitarian and human rights endeavors, since their social base has traditionally been the Western middle class. Epitomizing the open society, humanitarian campaigns to protect migrants deepen resentment among an aging precariat, which had imagined that social mobility implied an upward slope, only to fall into the lower classes. Meanwhile, the bourgeois bohemians who join the upper classes accommodate themselves to their postmodern condition, hunkering down in their privileged enclaves, where moral responses to distant injustices are limited to an ironic and banalizing clicktivism. The social institutions that once mobilized multiclass coalitions in the name of progressive causes have long since been dismantled. And, despite the revival of democratic socialism, the institutional Left still appears intellectually exhausted after decades in which it resigned itself to the efficient management of neoliberal strategies.

And yet, challenges to liberal order articulated through a Far Right politics create a moment of repoliticization; and they expose the contradictions of globalization in an interstate system, without undermining the reality of, or the demand for, connectivity. As such, they seem to open space for the formulation of radical internationalisms with a basis in the reconstruction of migrant rights. In this space, citizens’ movements responding to migration have forged a politics of transnational solidarity through anarchistic practices of mutual aid and horizontalism more than through the philosophizing of associated organic intellectuals. Fueled by disaffection with politics, as much as feelings of injustice, they have attracted young people facing a precarious future, and migrants themselves; indeed, there are movements led by migrants in Turkey, in Germany, in Greece, and elsewhere. They construct social commons with a basis in difference, forming “chains of equivalence.” Decolonial and anticolonial thinking is thus more likely to influence their responses to migration and displacement than those of Western governments and conventional humanitarian agencies. Indeed, beyond the political inspiration that horizontalism often draws from anticolonial struggles, decolonial and postcolonial theories offer a method of deconstructing hierarchy from the inside that can transform resistance into the basis for a pluralist politics built from the bottom up. But for this sort of internationalism to reshape democratic politics, the movements promoting it would need to build bridges into political institutions and incorporate it into political strategies that redress social polarization. To the extent that this might be possible, it will surely dilute their more radical propositions.

I rather suspect that the most likely scenario, in the short term at least, involves a political reordering through the reassertion of neoliberal strategies. We could see the development of the sort of political economy imagined by the early neoliberal thinker Gottfried Haberler (1985): that is, one in which goods, wages, and capital move freely, but labor doesn’t. This will depend on the consolidation of authoritarian states that nonetheless claim a democratic mandate to impose permanent states of emergency.

▻https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/migration-and-society/3/1/arms030114.xml

#migrations

Conceptualising the global South and South–South encounters

https://southernresponsesorg.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/img_2425.jpg?w=1400#.jpg

Long before the institutional interest in ‘engaging with’, and ostensibly mobilising and co-opting actors from across the global South, rich, critical literatures have been published in diverse languages around the world, demonstrating the urgency of developing and applying theoretical and methodological frameworks that can be posited as Southern, anti-colonial, postcolonial and/or decolonial in nature.[1] These and other approaches have traced and advocated for diverse ways of knowing and being in a pluriversal world characterised (and constituted) by complex relationalities and unequal power relations, and equally diverse ways of resisting these inequalities – including through historical and contemporary forms of transnational solidarities.

Of course, the very term ‘South’ which is included not once but twice in the title of the Handbook of South-South Relations, is itself a debated and diversely mobilised term, as exemplified in the different usages and definitions proposed (and critiqued) across the Handbook’s constituent chapters.

For instance, a number of official, institutional taxonomies exist, including those which classify (and in turn interpellate) different political entities as ‘being’ from and of ‘the South’ or ‘the North’. Such classifications have variously been developed on the basis of particular readings of a state’s geographical location, of its relative position as a (formerly) colonised territory or colonising power, and/or of a state’s current economic capacity on national and global scales.[2]

In turn, Medie and Kang (2018) define ‘countries of the global South’ as ‘countries that have been marginalised in the international political and economic system’. Indeed, Connell (2007) builds upon a long tradition of critical thinking to conceptualise the South and the North, respectively, through the lens of the periphery and the metropole, as categories that transcend fixed physical geographies. And of course, as stressed by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Kenneth Tafira in their contribution to the Handbook, such geographies have never been either static or defined purely through reference to physical territories and demarcations:

‘imperial reason and scientific racism were actively deployed in the invention of the geographical imaginaries of the global South and the global North.’

Through conceptualising the South and North through the lenses of the periphery and metropole, Connell argues that there are multiple souths in the world, including ‘souths’ (and southern voices) within powerful metropoles, as well as multiple souths within multiple peripheries. As Sujata Patel notes in her chapter in the Handbook, it is through this conceptualisation that Connell subsequently posits that

‘the category of the south allows us to evaluate the processes that permeate the non-recognition of its theories and practices in the constitution of knowledge systems and disciplines’.

It enables, and requires us, to examine how, why and with what effect certain forms of knowledge and being in the world come to be interpellated and protected as ‘universal’ while others are excluded, derided and suppressed ‘as’ knowledge or recognisable modes of being.[3] Indeed, in her chapter, Patel follows both Connell (2007) and de Sousa Santos (2014) in conceptualising ‘the South’ as ‘a metaphor’ that ‘represents the embeddedness of knowledge in relations of power’.

In turn, in their contribution to the Handbook, Dominic Davies and Elleke Boehmer centralise the constitutive relationality of the South by drawing on Grovogu (2011), who defines ‘the term “Global South” not as an exact geographical designation, but as “an idea and a set of practices, attitudes, and relations” that are mobilised precisely as “a disavowal of institutional and cultural practices associated with colonialism and imperialism”’ (cited in Davies and Boehmer). Viewing the South, or souths, as being constituted by and mobilising purposeful resistance to diverse exploitative systems, demonstrates the necessity of a contrapuntal reading of, and through, the South.

As such, as Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Tafira powerfully argue in their chapter,

‘the global South was not only invented from outside by European imperial forces but it also invented itself through resistance and solidarity-building.’

In this mode of analysis, the South has been constituted through a long history of unequal encounters with, and diverse forms of resistance to, different structures and entities across what can be variously designated the North, West or specific imperial and colonial powers. An analysis of the South therefore necessitates a simultaneous interrogation of the contours and nature of ‘the North’ or ‘West’, with Mignolo arguing (2000) that ‘what constitutes the West more than geography is a linguistic family, a belief system and an epistemology’.

Indeed, the acknowledgement of the importance of relationality and such mutually constitutive dynamics provides a useful bridge between these rich theoretical and conceptual engagements of, with and from ‘the South’ on the one hand, and empirically founded studies of the institutional interest in ‘South–South cooperation’ as a mode of technical and political exchange for ‘international development’ on the other. In effect, as noted by Urvashi Aneja in her chapter, diverse policies, modes of political interaction and ‘responses’ led by political entities across the South and the North alike ‘can thus be said to exist and evolve in a mutually constitutive relationship’, rather than in isolation from one another.

An important point to make at this stage is that it is not our aim to propose a definitive definition of the South or to propose how the South should be analysed or mobilised for diverse purposes – indeed, we would argue that such an exercise would be antithetical to the very foundations of the debates we and our contributors build upon in our respective modes of research and action.

Nonetheless, a common starting point for most, if not all, of the contributions in the Handbook is a rejection of conceptualisations of the South as that which is ‘non-Western’ or ‘non-Northern’. As noted by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (here and in the Handbook), it is essential to continue actively resisting negative framings of the South as that which is not of or from ‘the West’ or ‘the North’ – indeed, this is partly why the (still problematic) South/North binary is often preferred over typologies such as Western and non-Western, First and Third World, or developed and un(der)developed countries, all of which ‘suggest both a hierarchy and a value judgment’ (Mawdsley, 2012).

In effect, as Fiddian-Qasmiyeh argues in the Handbook (drawing on Brigg), such modes of negative framing risk ‘maintaining rather than disrupting the notion that power originates from and operates through a unidirectional and intentional historical entity’. She – like other contributors to the Handbook addressing the relationships between theoretical, conceptual and empirical dynamics and modes of analysis, response and action – advocates for us to ‘resist the tendency to reconstitute the power of “the North” in determining the contours of the analysis’, while simultaneously acknowledging the extent to which ‘many Southern-led responses are purposefully positioned as alternatives and challenges to hegemonic, Northern-led systems’.

This is, in many ways, a ‘double bind’ that persists in many of our studies of the world, including those of and from the South: our aim not to re-inscribe the epistemic power of the North, while simultaneously acknowledging that diverse forms of knowledge and action are precisely developed as counterpoints to the North.

As noted above, in tracing this brief reflection on conceptualisations of the South it is not our intention to offer a comprehensive definition of ‘the South’ or to posit a definitive account of Southern approaches and theories. Rather, the Handbook aims to trace the debates that have emerged about, around, through and from the South, in all its heterogeneity (and not infrequent internal contradictions), in such a way that acknowledges the ways that the South has been constructed in relation to, with, through but also against other spaces, places, times, peoples, modes of knowledge and action.

Such processes are, precisely, modes of construction that resist dependence upon hegemonic frames of reference; indeed, the Handbook in many ways exemplifies the collective power that emerges when people come together to cooperate and trace diverse ‘roots and routes’ (following Gilroy) to knowing, being and responding to the world – all with a view to better understanding and finding more nuanced ways of responding to diverse encounters within and across the South and the North.

At the same time as we recognise internal heterogeneity within and across the South/souths, and advocate for more nuanced ways of understanding the South and the North that challenge hegemonic epistemologies and methodologies, Ama Biney’s chapter in the Handbook reminds us of another important dynamic that underpins the work of most, perhaps all, of the contributors to the Handbook. While Biney is writing specifically about pan-Africanism, we would argue that the approach she delineates is essential to the critical theoretical perspectives and analyses presented throughout the Handbook:

’Pan-Africanism does not aim at the external domination of other people, and, although it is a movement operating around the notion of being a race conscious movement, it is not a racialist one … In short, pan-Africanism is not anti-white but is profoundly against all forms of oppression and the domination of African people.’

While it is not our aim to unequivocally idealise or romanticise decolonial, postcolonial, anti-colonial, or Southern theories, or diverse historical or contemporary modes of South South Cooperation and transnational solidarity – such processes are complex, contradictory, and at times are replete of their own forms of discrimination and violence – we would nonetheless posit that this commitment to challenging and resisting all forms of oppression and domination, of all peoples, is at the core of our collective endeavours.

With such diverse approaches to conceptualising ‘the South’ (and its counterpoint, ‘the North’ or ‘the West’), precisely how we can explore ‘South–South relations’ thus becomes, first, a matter of how and with what effect we ‘know’, ‘speak of/for/about’, and (re)act in relation to different spaces, peoples and objects around the world; subsequently, it is a process of tracing material and immaterial connections across time and space, such as through the development of political solidarity and modes of resistance, and the movement of aid, trade, people and ideas. It is with these overlapping sets of debates and imperatives in mind, that the Handbook aims to explore a broad range of questions regarding the nature and implications of conducting research in and about the global South, and of applying a ‘Southern lens’ to such a wide range of encounters, processes and dynamics around the world.[4]

[…]

From a foundational acknowledgement of the dangers of essentialist binaries such as South–North and East–West and their concomitant hierarchies and modes of exploitation, the Handbook aims to explore and set out pathways to continue redressing the longstanding exclusion of polycentric forms of knowledge, politics and practice. It is our hope that the Handbook unsettles thinking about the South and about South–South relations, and prompts new and original research agendas that serve to transform and further complicate the geographic framing of the peoples of the world for emancipatory futures in the 21st century.

This extract from Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Patricia Daley’s Introduction to The Handbook of South-South Relations has been slightly edited for the purposes of this blog post. For other pieces published as part of the Southern Responses blog series on Thinking through the Global South, click here.

References cited

Anzaldúa, G., 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute.

Brigg, M., 2002. ‘Post-development, Foucault and the Colonisation Metaphor.’ Third World Quarterly 23(3), 421–436.

Chakrabarty, D., 2007. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Connell, R., 2007. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. London: Polity.

Dabashi, H., 2015. Can Non-Europeans Think? London: Zed Books.

de Sousa Santos, B., 2014. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.

Dussel, E., 1977. Filosofía de Liberación. Mexico City: Edicol.

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E., 2015. South-South Educational Migration, Humanitarianism and Development: Views from the Caribbean, North Africa and the Middle East. Oxford: Routledge.

Gilroy, P., 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.

Grosfoguel, R., 2011. Decolonizing Post-Colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political-Economy: Transmodernity, Decolonial Thinking, and Global Coloniality. Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1(1). Available from: ▻https://escholarship.org/uc/item/21k6t3fq [Accessed 7 September 2018].

Grovogu, S., 2011. A Revolution Nonetheless: The Global South in International Relations. The Global South 5(1), Special Issue: The Global South and World Dis/Order, 175–190.

Kwoba, B, Nylander, O., Chantiluke, R., and Nangamso Nkopo, A. (eds), 2018. Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire. London: Zed Books.

Mawdsley, E., 2012. From Recipients to Donors: The Emerging Powers and the Changing Development Landscape. London: Zed Books.

Medie, P. and Kang, A.J., 2018. Power, Knowledge and the Politics of Gender in the Global South. European Journal of Politics and Gender 1(1–2), 37–54.

Mignolo, W.D., 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mignolo, W.D., 2015. ‘Foreword: Yes, We Can.’ In: H. Dabashi, Can Non-Europeans Think? London and New York: Zed Books, pp. viii–xlii.

Minh-ha, Trinh T., 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, S.J., 2013. Empire, Global Coloniality and African Subjectivity. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Quijano, A., 1991. Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad. Perú Indígena 29, 11–21.

Said, E., 1978. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. New York: Vintage Books.

Spivak, G.C., 1988. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge.

Sundberg, J., 2007. Reconfiguring North–South Solidarity: Critical Reflections on Experiences of Transnational Resistance. Antipode 39(1), 144–166.

Tuhiwai Smith, L., 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books.

wa Thiong’o, N., 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann Educational.

Wynter, S., 2003. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument. The New Centennial Review 3(3), 257–337.

* Notes

[1] For instance, see Anzaldúa 1987; Chakrabarty 2007; Connell 2007; de Sousa Santos 2014; Dussell 1977; Grosfoguel 2011; Kwoba et al. 2018; Mignolo 2000; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013; Quijano 1991, 2007; Said 1978; Spivak 1988; Sundberg 2007; Trinh T. Minh-ha 1989; Tuhiwai Smith 1999; wa Thiong’o 1986; Wynter 2003.

[2] Over 130 states have defined themselves as belonging to the Group of 77 – a quintessential South–South platform – in spite of the diversity of their ideological and geopolitical positions in the contemporary world order, their vastly divergent Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and per capita income, and their rankings in the Human Development Index – for a longer discussion of the challenges and limitations of diverse modes of definition and typologies, see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2015.

[3] Also see Mignolo 2000; Dabashi 2015.

[4] Indeed, Connell notes that ‘#Southern_theory’ is a term I use for social thought from the societies of the global South. It’s not necessarily about the global South, though it often is. Intellectuals from colonial and postcolonial societies have also produced important analyses of global-North societies, and of worldwide structures (e.g. Raúl Prebisch and Samir Amin).

▻https://southernresponses.org/2018/12/05/conceptualising-the-global-south-and-south-south-encounters
#développement

Exploring refugees’ conceptualisations of Southern-led humanitarianism

https://southernresponsesorg.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/school-mural-2-for-the-conversation1.jpg?w=1400#.jpg

By Prof Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Principal Investigator, Southern Responses to Displacement Project

With displacement primarily being a Southern phenomena – circa 85-90% of all refugees remain within the ‘global South – it is also the case that responses to displacement have long been developed and implemented by states from the South (a construct we are critically examining throughout the Southern Responses to Displacement project – see here). Some of these state-led responses to displacement have been developed and implemented within the framework of what is known as ‘South-South Cooperation’. This framework provides a platform from which states from the global South work together to complement one another’s abilities and resources and break down barriers and structural inequalities created by colonial powers. It can also be presented as providing an alternative mode of response to that implemented by powerful Northern states and Northern-led organisations (see here).

An example of this type of South-South Cooperation, often driven by principles of ‘internationalism,’ can be found in the international scholarship programmes and schools established by a number of Southern states to provide primary, secondary and university-level education for refugees from across the Middle East and North Africa. In particular, since the 1960s, Cuba has provided free education through a scholarship system for Palestinian refugees based in camps and cities across the Middle East following the Nakba (the catastrophe) and for Sahrawi refugees who have lived in desert-based refugee camps in Algeria since the mid-1970s.

In line with the Southern Responses to Displacement project, which aims to purposefully centralise refugees’ own experiences of and perspectives on Southern-led initiatives to support refugees from Syria, throughout my previous work I have examined how Palestinian and Sahrawi refugees have conceptualised, negotiated or, indeed, resisted, diverse programmes that have been developed and implemented ‘on their behalf.’ While long-standing academic and policy debates have addressed the relationship between humanitarianism, politics and ideology, few studies to date have examined the ways in which refugee beneficiaries – as opposed to academics, policymakers and practitioners – conceptualise the programmes which are designed and implemented ‘for refugees’. The following discussion addresses this gap precisely by centralising Palestinian and Sahrawi graduates’ reflections on the Cuban scholarship programme and the extent to which they conceptualise political and ideological connections as being compatible with humanitarian motivations and outcomes.

This blog, and my previous work (here and here) examines how Palestinian and Sahrawi refugees have understood the motivations, nature and impacts of Cuba’s scholarship system through reference to identity, ideology, politics and humanitarianism. Based on my interviews with Palestinians and Sahrawis while they were still studying in Cuba, and with Palestinian and Sahrawi graduates whom I interviewed after they had returned to their home-camps in Lebanon and Algeria respectively, this short piece examines the complex dynamics which underpin access to, as well as the multifaceted experiences and outcomes of, the scholarship programme on both individual and collective levels.
Balancing ‘the humanitarian’

Although both Palestinian and Sahrawi interviewees in Cuba and Sahrawi graduates in their Algeria-based home-camps repeatedly asserted the humanitarian nature of the Cuban scholarship programme, precisely what this denomination of ‘humanitarianism’ might mean, and how compatible it could be given the ideological and political links highlighted by Palestinian graduates whom I interviewed in a range of refugee camps in Lebanon, requires further discussion.

The contemporary international humanitarianism regime is habitually equated with the principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence (Ferris 2011: 11), and a strict separation is firmly upheld by Western humanitarian institutions between morality and politics (as explored in more detail by Pacitto and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013). However, many critics reject the assertion that humanitarianism can ever be separated from politics, since ‘“humanitarianism” is the ideology of hegemonic states in the era of globalisation’ (Chimni 2000:3). Recognising the extent to which the Northern-led and Northern-dominated humanitarian regime is deeply implicated in, and reproduces, ‘the ideology of hegemonic [Northern] states’ is particularly significant since many (Northern) academics, policymakers and practitioners reject the right of Southern-led initiatives to be denominated ‘humanitarian’ in nature on the basis that such projects and programmes are motivated by ideological and/or faith-based principles, rather than ‘universal’ humanitarian principles.

Palestinians who at the time of our interviews were still studying in Cuba, in addition to those who had more recently graduated from Cuban universities, medical and dentistry schools and had ‘returned’ to their home-camps in Lebanon, repeatedly referred to ‘ideology’, ‘politics’, ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘human values’ when describing the Cuban scholarship programme. Yet, while they maintained that Cuba’s programme for Palestinian refugees is ‘humanitarian’ in nature, Palestinian graduates offered different perspectives regarding the balance between these different dimensions, implicitly and at times explicitly noting the ways in which these overlap or are in tension.

Importantly, these recurrent concepts are to be contrasted with the prevalent terminology and frames of reference arising in Sahrawi refugees’ accounts of the Cuban educational programme. Having also had access to the Cuban educational migration programme, Sahrawi graduates’ accounts can perhaps be traced to the continued significance of Spanish – the language learned and lived (following Bhabha 2006:x) in Cuba – amongst graduates following their return to the Sahrawi refugee camps, where Spanish is the official language used in the major camp-based Sahrawi medical institutions.

As such, in interviews and in informal conversations in the Sahrawi camps, Cuban-educated Sahrawis (commonly known as Cubarauis) consistently used the Spanish-language term solidaridad (solidarity) to define both the nature of the connection between the Sahrawi people and Cuba, and the nature of the scholarship programme; they also regularly cited Cuban revolutionary figures such as José Martí and Fidel Castro. In contrast, no such quotes were offered by the Palestinian graduates I interviewed in Lebanon, even if the significance of Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara was noted by many during our interviews in Cuba.

Explaining his understanding of the basis of the scholarship programme for Palestinians, Abdullah elaborated that this was:

‘mainly prompted because Cuban politics is based upon human values and mutual respect, and in particular upon socialism, which used to be very prominent in the Arab world during that time.’

In turn, referring to the common visions uniting both parties and facilitating Cuba’s scholarship programme for Palestinian refugees, Hamdi posited that:

‘Certain ideological and political commonalities contributed to this collaboration between the Cuban government and the PLO. However, the humanitarian factor was present in these negotiations.’ (Emphasis added)

These accounts reflect the extent to which ideology and humanitarianism are both recognised as playing a key role in the scholarship programme, and yet Hamdi’s usage of the term ‘however’, and his reference to ‘the humanitarian factor’, demonstrate an awareness that a tension may be perceived to exist between ideology/politics and humanitarian motivations.

Indeed, rather than describing the programme as a humanitarian programme per se, eight of my interviewees offered remarkably similar humanitarian ‘qualifiers’: the Cuban education programme is described as having ‘a humanitarian component’ (Marwan), ‘a humanitarian dimension’ (Younis), a ‘humanitarian aspect’ (Saadi), and ‘humanitarian ingredients’ (Abdel-Wahid); while other interviewees argued that it is ‘a mainly humanitarian system’ (Nimr) which ‘carr[ies] humanitarian elements’ (Hamdi) and ‘shares its humanitarian message in spite of the embargo [against Cuba]’ (Ibrahim).

As exemplified by these qualifiers, Palestinians who participated in this programme themselves recognise that humanitarianism was not the sole determining justification for the initiative, but rather that it formed part of the broader Cuban revolution and a particular mode of expressing support for other liberation movements, including the Palestinian cause.

In terms of weighting these different motivating and experiential elements, Mohammed argued that the ‘humanitarian aspect outweighs the ideological one’, emphasising the ‘programme’s strong humanitarian aspect’. In turn, Ahmed and Nimr declared that the Cuban scholarships were offered ‘without conditions or conditionalities’ and without ‘blackmailing Palestinians to educate them’.

These references are particularly relevant when viewed alongside critiques of neoliberal development programmes and strategies which have often been characterised by ‘tied aid’ or diverse economic, socio-political and gendered conditionalities which require beneficiaries to comply with Northern-dominated priorities vis-à-vis ‘good governance’ – all of which are, in effect, politically and/or ideologically driven.

Concurrently, Khalil argued that the programme is ‘humanitarian if used correctly’, thereby drawing attention to the extent to which the nature of the programme transcends either Cuba’s or the PLO’s underlying motivating factors per se, and is, rather, characterised both by the way in which the programme has been implemented since the 1970s, and its longer-term impacts.

With reference to the former, claims regarding the absence of conditionalities on Cuba’s behalf must be viewed alongside the extent to which Palestinians could only access the scholarships if they were affiliated with specific Palestinian factions (as I explore in the book): can the programme be ‘truly’ humanitarian if individual participation has historically been contingent upon an official declaration of ideological commonality with a leftist faction and/or the Cuban internationalist project?

With universality, neutrality and impartiality being three of the core ‘international’ humanitarian principles, a tension is apparent from the perspective of ‘the Northern relief elite’ who arguably monopolise the epithet humanitarian (Haysom, cited in Pacitto and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh 2013: 6). Indeed, although José Martí’s humanitarian principle to ‘compartir lo que tienes, no dar lo que te sobra’ (‘to share what you have, not what is left over’) has historically guided many of the Cuban state’s revolutionary programmes on national(ist) and international(ist) levels, precisely who Cuba should share with (on a collective) has often been geopolitically framed. Whilst designed to overcome the historical legacy of diverse exclusionary processes in Cuba, the programme could itself be conceptualised as being guided by an ideological commitment to inclusion with exclusionary underpinnings.

The imposition of a hegemonic discourse leaves people out, primarily on ideological grounds. Ideological repression means that everybody who questions the regime in a fundamental way is basically left out in the dark. There is a creation of boundaries between Self and Other that leaves very little room for fundamental critique. However, the existence of a hegemonic discourse, and demands for students to publicly assert their affiliation to an official ideological stance, whether this refers to Cuban or Palestinian discourses, should not necessarily be equated with the exclusion of individuals and groups who do not share particular opinions and beliefs.

In the case explored in this blog and in the book it is based on, a distinction can therefore perhaps be usefully made between the collective basis of scholarships primarily being offered to groups and nations with political and ideological bonds to Cuba’s revolutionary project, and the extent to which individual Palestinian students have arguably negotiated the Cuban system and the factional system alike to maximise their personal, professional and political development. To achieve the latter, individuals have developed official performances of ideological loyalty to access and complete their university studies in Cuba, whilst ultimately maintaining or developing political and ideological opinions, and critiques, of their own.

With reference to the broader outcomes of the programme, is it sufficient to announce, as seven Palestinian graduates did, that the project was ‘humanitarian’ in nature precisely because the beneficiaries of the scheme were refugees, and the overarching aim was to achieve professional self-sufficiency in refugee camps?

In effect, and as explored in my other research (here) Cuba’s programme might appear to fall under the remit of a developmental approach, rather than being ‘purely’ humanitarian in nature, precisely due to the official aim of maximising self-sufficiency as opposed to addressing immediate basic needs in an emergency phase (with the latter more readily falling under the remit of ‘humanitarian’ assistance).

Nonetheless, Cuba’s aim to enhance refugees’ self-sufficiency corresponds to the UNHCR’s well-established Development Assistance to Refugees approach, and programmes supporting medium- and long-term capacity building are particularly common in protracted refugee situations. At the same time, it could be argued that the distinction between humanitarianism and development is immaterial given that the rhetoric of solidarity underpins all of Cuba’s internationalist projects, whether in contexts of war or peace, and, furthermore, since Cuba has offered scholarships not only to refugees but also to citizens from across the Global South.

Related to the programme’s reach to citizens and refugees alike, and simultaneously to the nature of the connection between humanitarianism and politics, Younis drew attention to another pivotal dimension: ‘although the educational system had a humanitarian dimension, I don’t think it is possible to separate the human being from politics’. Cuba’s political (in essence, socialist) commitment to the ‘human being’ was reasserted throughout the interviews, with Saadi, for instance, referring to Cuba’s prioritisation of the ‘relationship between a human being and a fellow human being’, and Khalil explaining that Cuba had adopted ‘the cause of the human being, and that’s why it supported Palestinians in their struggle’.

While critiques of Northern-led human rights discourses have been widespread, and such critiques have often paralleled or influenced critical analyses of humanitarianism (as I explore elsewhere), in their responses Palestinian graduates invoked an alternative approach to supporting the rights of human beings.

By conceptualising Cuba’s commitment to human beings as being inherently connected to politics, graduates, by extension, also highlighted that politics cannot be separated from approaches geared towards supporting humanity, whether external analysts consider that such approaches should be labelled ‘development’ or ‘humanitarianism’. Whilst absent from the terminology used by Palestinian graduates, it can be argued that the notion of solidarity centralised in Cubaraui (and Cuban) accounts captures precisely these dimensions of Cuba’s internationalist approach.
Moving Forward

These dynamics – including conceptualisations of the relationship between politics, ideology, and humanitarianism; of short-, medium- and long-term responses to displacement; and how refugees themselves negotiate and conceptualise responses developed by external actors ‘on their behalf’ – will continue to be explored throughout the Southern Responses to Development from Syria project. This ongoing research project aims, amongst other things, to examine how people displaced from Syria – Syrians, Palestinians, Iraqis, Kurds … -, experience and perceive the different forms of support that ‘Southern’ states, civil society groups, and refugees themselves have developed in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011. This will include reflections on how refugees conceptualise (and resist) both the construct of ‘the South’ itself and diverse responses developed by states such as Malaysia and Indonesia, but also by different groups of refugees themselves. The latter include Palestinian refugees whose home-camps in Lebanon have been hosting refugees from Syria, but also whose educational experiences in Cuba mean that they are amongst the medical practitioners who are treating refugees from Syria, demonstrating the complex legacies of the Cuban scholarship programme for refugees from the Middle East.

*

For more information on Southern-led responses to displacement, including vis-à-vis South-South Cooperation, read our introductory mini blog series here, and the following pieces:

Carpi, E. (2018) ‘Empires of Inclusion‘

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2019) ‘Looking Forward. Disasters at 40′

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2018) Histories and spaces of Southern-led responses to displacement

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2018) Internationalism and solidarity

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2018) Refugee-refugee humanitarianism

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2014) The Ideal Refugees: Islam, Gender, and the Sahrawi Politics of Survival

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. and Daley, P. (2018) Conceptualising the global South and South–South encounters

Featured Image: A mural outside a school in Baddawi camp, N. Lebanon. Baddawi has been home to Palestinian refugees from the 1950s, and to refugees from Syria since 2011 (c) E. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2017

▻https://southernresponses.org/2019/04/08/exploring-refugees-conceptualisations-of-southern-led-humanitaria

#réfugiés #post-colonialisme #ressources_pédagogiques

U-Roy, legendary reggae #toaster, dies aged 78
▻https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/feb/18/u-roy-legendary-reggae-toaster-dies-aged-78
‘The originator’ of toasting on record helped revolutionise soundsystem culture in Jamaica – and inspire the birth of hip-hop

U Roy ne toastera plus
▻https://pan-african-music.com/u-roy-ne-toastera-plus

Le coup d’éclat qui le révèle a lieu en 1969, lorsqu’il inaugure une nouvelle collaboration avec King Tubby, producteur fou de sons et patron du sound system Home Town Hifi. Ce soir là, comme le raconte Sebastien Broquet sur le site le Petit Bulletin, King Tubby a récupéré en douce les masters du label Treasure Isle où il travaille pour en faire les premières dubplates. Et après avoir joué un des morceaux en version originale, il en envoie la version instrumentale, où les voix passent au second plan et libèrent des espaces que le deejay U Roy, avec son style reconnaissable entre tous (et son fameux cri), va remplacer par propres ses textes, toastés en rythme sur le riddim du disque. King Tubby et U Roy associés font un tel malheur, et enregistreront dès 1970 les premiers titres (« Wake the Town », « Wear You to The Ball ») de ce qu’il faut bien appeler un nouveau genre sur Treasure Isle, le label de Duke Reid.

R.I.P. U-Roy, September 21, 1942 – February 17, 2021. Here he is performing “Version Galore” at the Treasure Isle recording studio in Kingston in 1970.
▻https://twitter.com/dusttodigital/status/1362512173625454599

Avec Runaway Girl (Just Another Girl), #U-Roy toaste sur #Ken_Boothe...

Il toaste aussi sur #John_Holt avec Wear You To The Ball:
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FroBj_-k2xA

Et sur #Bob_Marley avec Natty Rebel (Soul Rebel):
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pd7uWjs_8w

#reggae #dub #DJ #toast #toaster #Sound_System #Jamaïque #Musique

On en profite aussi pour saluer la mémoire de #Tonton_David

Peuples du Monde (1990)
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZEATvUkhd8

On vous dira haut et fort que le pape est un imposteur
Que Christophe Colomb n’était qu’un menteur
Que le respect des personnes âgées doit être de rigueur

Sûr et Certain (1994)
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SWckNTgvcs

Nous sommes dans la zone rouge, le système nous assomme
Maquillage des bavures policières
Falsification de l’Histoire

#raggamuffin #Musique_et_politique #violences_policières

On en profite aussi pour saluer la mémoire de Tonton David ?

Emission spéciale sur RFI en hommage à Tonton David
▻https://www.rfi.fr/fr/podcasts/couleurs-tropicales/20210218-emission-sp%C3%A9ciale-hommage-%C3%A0-tonton-david
avec une ombre au tableau tout de même :

Sur scène, il regoûte volontiers aux sound systems quand l’occasion se présente, pratique les petites salles, se recycle dans les concerts programmés par les collectivités locales. En 2020, il est aussi à l’affiche du Bal des quenelles de l’humoriste polémiste Dieudonné , condamné à plusieurs reprises pour ses propos antisémites. En parallèle, il travaille sur un nouvel album.

▻https://musique.rfi.fr/reggae/20210217-tonton-david-lhomme-mis-le-reggae-francais-lumiere

U-Roy - Ariwa / bandcamp
▻https://u-roy.bandcamp.com/merch
▻https://u-roy.bandcamp.com/track/black-man

U-Roy obituary
▻https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/feb/23/u-roy-obituary

Of the many innovations Jamaican music has offered to the world over the past 50 years, the lyrical art of “toasting” has had perhaps the most profound and long-lasting impact. A stylised, poetical form of chatting and scatting, it was brought to prominence in the early 1970s by the reggae deejay U-Roy, who has died aged 78, and has fed into many musical forms, from hip-hop to grime.

Le #coût fixe du MOOC, à la différence du coût croissant du cours classique en fonction du nombre d’étudiants, suffit à prouver la « #rentabilité » de l’enseignement numérique.

mais non ! Si la création du MOOC est effectivement un coût fixe, son fonctionnement ne devrait pas l’être : à priori un cours en ligne décemment conçu nécessite des interactions de l’enseignant avec ses étudiants...

je ne sais pas si c’est la fatigue, ou je suis trop sensible en ce moment, mais le premier clip moi ça m’a fait pleurer l’ambiance, les gens qui sont bien ensemble, la vie qui pourrait être belle, etc, en regard de toutes les merdes qui s’annoncent et après avoir lu le début de L’Onde hier soir… ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/901815

mais merci pour la découverte :)

#merci !

Jesus wayne - The Chicago Party Theme
Générique
Johnny Davis - You’ve got to crawl to me
Otis Brown - whatever you do do it good
Nate Evans - Main Squeeze
The dynamic Tints - Fallin in love
Syl johnson - I feel an urge
Skip drake - Wrapped around your finger
Little ben and the cheers - I’m gonna get even with you
Jerry townes - Just say the word
Harlem Meat Company - I din’t now why
The Notations - A new day
Linda balintine - glad about that
Iron jaw harris - all ready to go
Matta baby - do the pearl girl
Harrison and the majestic kind - tearing me inside
The majestic arrows - Love is all i need
South shore comission - Shadows
The Schiller street gang - Remind me
NTM - Soul soul

#musique #radio #radio_panik

Super, merci, playlist impeccable et super originale !

Pour les maladies chroniques, est-ce qu’on peut prolonger le traitement ?

L’athlète française appartenant à l’armée française qui avait témoignése en ce sens en début d’année 2020, avait été contrainte de se dédire lamentablement.

Quelle info surprenante !

Les Italiens on utilisé des échantillons d’eaux usées congelés (apparemment il y a un archivage) et ont identifié la présence du virus vers septembre (de mémoire) 2019 en Italie dans la région de Bergame (de mémoire aussi).

Je n’ai pas vu passer d’info de ce genre (étude des eaux usées archivées) en France.

#audio (35 mn)

#Renaissance
#force #faiblesse #raport_de_force #domination
#liberté #divertissement #plaisir #désobéissance

▻https://www.le-precepteur.fr/qui-suis-je

▻https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_de_La_Bo%C3%A9tie

[...]

Discours de la servitude volontaire.

Lorsqu’il écrit ce texte, vers 1548, Étienne de La Boétie est un étudiant en droit de 18 ans, à l’université d’Orléans, qui se prépare à une carrière dans la magistrature. Sans doute marqué par la brutalité de la répression d’une révolte antifiscale en Guyenne en 1548, il traduit le désarroi de l’élite cultivée devant la réalité de l’absolutisme.

Le Discours de la servitude volontaire constitue une remise en cause de la légitimité des gouvernants, que La Boétie appelle « maîtres » ou « tyrans ». Quelle que soit la manière dont un tyran s’est hissé au pouvoir (élections, violence, succession), ce n’est jamais son bon gouvernement qui explique sa domination et le fait que celle-ci perdure. Pour La Boétie, les gouvernants ont plutôt tendance à se distinguer par leur impéritie. Plus que la peur de la sanction, c’est d’abord l’habitude qu’a le peuple de la servitude qui explique que la domination du maître perdure. Ensuite viennent la religion et les superstitions. Mais ces deux moyens ne permettent de dominer que les ignorants. Vient le « secret de toute domination » : faire participer les dominés à leur domination. Ainsi, le tyran jette des miettes aux courtisans. Si le peuple est contraint d’obéir, les courtisans ne doivent pas se contenter d’obéir mais doivent aussi devancer les désirs du tyran. Aussi, ils sont encore moins libres que le peuple lui-même, et choisissent volontairement la servitude. Ainsi s’instaure une pyramide du pouvoir : le tyran en domine cinq, qui en dominent cent, qui eux-mêmes en dominent mille… Cette pyramide s’effondre dès lors que les courtisans cessent de se donner corps et âme au tyran. Alors celui-ci perd tout pouvoir acquis.

Dans ce texte majeur de la philosophie politique, repris à travers les âges par des partis de colorations diverses, La Boétie oppose l’équilibre de la terreur qui s’instaure entre bandits, égaux par leur puissance et qui se partagent à ce titre le butin des brigandages, à l’amitié qui seule permet de vivre libre. Le tyran, quant à lui, vit dans la crainte permanente : n’ayant pas d’égaux, tous le craignent, et par conséquent, il risque à chaque instant l’assassinat. Elias Canetti fera une peinture similaire du « despote paranoïaque » dans Masse et puissance.
Graffiti à Genève, 2007.

Si La Boétie est toujours resté, par ses fonctions, serviteur fidèle de l’ordre public, il est cependant considéré par beaucoup comme un précurseur intellectuel de l’anarchisme13 et de la désobéissance civile. Également, et surtout, comme l’un des tout premiers théoriciens de l’aliénation.

Pour comprendre les intentions qui conduisent Étienne de La Boétie à écrire le Discours de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr’un, il faut remonter au drame qui a lieu vers 1548. « En 1539, François Ier, roi de France, tente d’unifier la gabelle. Il impose des greniers à sel près de la frontière espagnole, dans les régions qui en sont dépourvues. En réaction de cette tentative des soulèvements ont lieu. Le premier en 1542, puis le plus grand en 1548 à Bordeaux ». Le connétable de Montmorency rétablit l’ordre de manière impitoyable. Si l’on s’en rapporte à l’écrivain Jacques-Auguste de Thou, ce serait sous l’impression de ces horreurs et cruautés commises à Bordeaux, que La Boétie compose le Discours de la servitude volontaire.

La Boétie s’attache à démontrer que de petites acceptations en compromis et complaisances, la soumission en vient à s’imposer à soi tel un choix volontaire fait dès les premiers instants. La question avec laquelle il interpelle ses lecteurs touche à l’essence même de la politique : « pourquoi obéit-on ? ». Il met en évidence les mécanismes de la mise en place des pouvoirs et interroge sur ceux de l’obéissance. Il en vient à observer qu’un homme ne peut asservir un peuple si ce peuple ne s’asservit pas d’abord lui-même par une imbrication pyramidale.

Bien que la violence soit son moyen spécifique, elle seule ne suffit pas à définir l’État. C’est à cause de la légitimité que la société lui accorde que les crimes sont commis. Il suffirait à l’homme de ne plus vouloir servir pour devenir libre ; « Soyez résolus à ne plus servir, et vous voilà libres ». À cet égard, La Boétie tente de comprendre pour quelles raisons l’homme a perdu le désir de retrouver sa liberté. Le Discours a pour but d’expliquer cette soumission.

Tout d’abord La Boétie distingue trois sortes de tyrans : « Les uns règnent par l’élection du peuple, les autres par la force des armes, les derniers par succession de race ». Les deux premiers se comportent comme en pays conquis. Ceux qui naissent rois, en général ne sont guère meilleurs, puisqu’ils ont grandi au sein de la tyrannie. C’est ce dernier cas qui intéresse La Boétie. Comment se fait-il que le peuple continue à obéir aveuglément au tyran ? Il est possible que les hommes aient perdu leur liberté par contrainte, mais il est quand même étonnant qu’ils ne luttent pas pour regagner leur liberté.

La première raison pour laquelle les hommes servent volontairement, c’est qu’il y a ceux qui n’ont jamais connu la liberté et qui sont « accoutumés à la sujétion ». La Boétie décrit dans son Discours : « Les hommes nés sous le joug, puis nourris et élevés dans la servitude, sans regarder plus avant, se contentent de vivre comme ils sont nés et ne pensent point avoir d’autres biens ni d’autres droits que ceux qu’ils ont trouvés ; ils prennent pour leur état de nature l’état de leur naissance ».

La seconde raison, c’est que sous les tyrans les gens deviennent « lâches et efféminés ». Les gens soumis n’ont ni ardeur ni pugnacité au combat. Ils ne combattent plus pour une cause, mais par obligation. Cette envie de gagner leur est enlevée. Les tyrans essaient de stimuler cette pusillanimité et maintiennent les hommes stupides en leur donnant du « pain et des jeux ».

La dernière raison est sans doute la plus importante, car elle nous dévoile le ressort et le secret de la domination, « le soutien et fondement de toute tyrannie ». Le tyran est soutenu par quelques hommes fidèles qui lui soumettent tout le pays. Ces hommes sont appelés par le tyran pour être « les complices de ses cruautés » ou se sont justement rapprochés du tyran afin de pouvoir le manipuler. Ces fidèles ont à leur tour des hommes qui leur sont obéissants. Ces derniers ont à leur dépendance d’autres hommes qu’ils élèvent en dignité. À ces derniers est donné le gouvernement des provinces ou « le maniement des deniers ». Ce maniement est attribué à ces hommes « afin de les tenir par leur avidité ou par leur cruauté, afin qu’ils les exercent à point nommé et fassent d’ailleurs tant de mal qu’ils ne puissent se maintenir que sous leur ombre, qu’ils ne puissent s’exempter des lois et des peines que grâce à leur protection ».

Tout le monde est considéré comme tyran. Ceux qui sont en bas de la pyramide, les fermiers et les ouvriers, sont dans un certain sens « libres » : ils exécutent les ordres de leurs supérieurs et font du reste de leur temps libre ce qui leur plaît. Mais « s’approcher du tyran, est-ce autre chose que s’éloigner de sa liberté et, pour ainsi dire, embrasser et serrer à deux mains sa servitude » ? En d’autres termes, ceux qui sont en bas de l’échelon sont bien plus heureux et en quelque sorte bien plus « libres » que ceux qui les traitent comme des « forçats ou des esclaves ». « Est-ce là vivre heureux ? Est-ce même vivre ? », se demande La Boétie. Ces favoris devraient moins se souvenir de ceux qui ont gagné beaucoup auprès des tyrans que de ceux qui, « s’étant gorgés quelque temps, y ont perdu peu après les biens et la vie ».

Par ailleurs il est impossible de se lier d’amitié avec un tyran, parce qu’il est et sera toujours au-dessus. « Il ne faut pas attendre de l’amitié de celui qui a le cœur assez dur pour haïr tout un royaume qui ne fait que lui obéir. Mais ce n’est pas le tyran que le peuple accuse du mal qu’il souffre, mais bien ceux qui le gouvernent. » Pour achever son Discours, La Boétie a recours à la prière. Il prie un « Dieu bon et libéral pour qu’il réserve là-bas tout exprès, pour les tyrans et leurs complices, quelque peine particulière ».

[...]

Sur PAM : Adrian Younge annonce le projet le plus important de sa carrière pour le Black History Month
▻https://pan-african-music.com/adrian-younge-american-negro

Je me sens comme un esclave : je travaille de longues heures chaque jour, sous les ordres d’une application, mais je n’ai pas de quoi me payer un salaire à la fin du mois. »

Guillaume* est chauffeur indépendant, ou « limousine » comme on dit chez Bruxelles Mobilité, où il a obtenu sa licence il y a un peu plus de deux ans. Depuis novembre 2018, il « collabore » avec Uber, qui organise le transport rémunéré de citadins dans la capitale et un peu partout dans le monde. À ce stade, il n’a « plus rien à perdre », nous explique-t-il. « Mais peut-être, quelque chose à gagner ». À savoir : devenir salarié de la multinationale.

Début juillet, Guillaume a introduit une demande de qualification de sa relation avec la plateforme d’origine américaine auprès de la Commission administrative de règlement de la relation de travail (CRT). Quand la nature de votre relation avec votre donneur d’ordre ou votre employeur vous apparaît comme suspecte, cet organe est là pour analyser votre cas et décider, si au regard de la législation locale, vous êtes salarié ou indépendant.

« Je ne gagne pas ma vie décemment »

Guillaume, sur papier, appartient à la seconde catégorie de travailleurs (les deux seules existant en droit du travail belge). Il a enregistré une société en personne physique, son véhicule lui appartient, il a obtenu seul les autorisations nécessaires pour exercer son métier. « Avec Uber, je ne connais que les inconvénients de ce statut, en aucun cas les avantages. Je ne gagne de toute façon pas ma vie décemment, donc j’ai décidé d’aller jusqu’au bout », poursuit le trentenaire.

Une démarche concluante puisque Le Soir a appris que la CRT lui avait donné raison à travers une décision longue de 12 pages rendue le 26 octobre dernier : Uber est bien, selon la Commission qui dépend du SPF Sécurité sociale, l’employeur de Guillaume. Précisément, la CRT conclut après un examen approfondi que « les modalités d’exécution de la relation de travail sont incompatibles avec la qualification de #travail_indépendant ».

Pour aboutir à cette conclusion – la question est épineuse et fait débat dans bon nombre de pays européens ainsi qu’aux États-Unis (lire ci-contre) –, plusieurs éléments contractuels ont été analysés. Notamment ceux qui concernent la #liberté_d’organisation_du_travail et d’organisation du #temps_de_travail de Guillaume, deux démarches inhérentes au #statut_d’indépendant. Deux leitmotivs aussi utilisés par Uber depuis son lancement : l’entreprise estime, en effet, que la #flexibilité de ses chauffeurs ainsi que leur #liberté de prester quand ils le souhaitent et pour qui ils le souhaitent est à la base de sa « philosophie ».

« Je ne peux pas refuser une course »

« La réalité est bien différente », détaille Guillaume. « Uber capte quasi tout le marché à Bruxelles et, si je suis connecté à l’#application, je n’ai pas le #droit_de_refuser une course. Si je le fais, Uber abaisse ma “#cotation”. Si je le fais trois fois de suite, Uber me vire », détaille Guillaume. Qui précise qu’il lui est également impossible de jongler entre plusieurs plateformes. « Si je suis sur deux applications et que j’accepte une course pour un autre opérateur et qu’Uber me demande d’être disponible, je suis obligé de refuser la course. Au final, comme expliqué, cela me porte préjudice. »

Guillaume, en outre, ne connaît pas son itinéraire avant d’accepter de prendre en charge un client. « On peut m’envoyer à 10 kilomètres. Soit un long trajet non rémunéré pour un trajet payé de 1.500 mètres. » S’il choisit de dévier du chemin imposé par la plateforme, par bon sens ou à la demande d’un client pressé, le chauffeur se dit également régulièrement pénalisé. Chez Uber, le client est roi. Quand ce dernier commande une course, l’application lui précise une fourchette de #prix. « Évidemment, si je prends le ring pour aller jusqu’à l’aéroport, le prix de la course augmente car le trajet est plus long, mais le client peut très facilement réclamer à Uber la différence tarifaire. Même s’il m’a demandé d’aller au plus vite. » Dans ce cas de figure, la différence en euros est immédiatement déduite de la #rémunération de Guillaume.

La CRT estime que le chauffeur ne peut pas influer sur la manière dont Uber organise un #trajet, qu’il « n’a aucune marge de manœuvre quant à la façon dont la prestation est exercée. (…) En cas de non-respect de l’#itinéraire, si le prix de la course ne correspond pas à l’estimation, il peut être ajusté a posteriori par Uber, le passager peut alors obtenir un remboursement mais le chauffeur ne sera payé que sur base du prix annoncé à ce dernier. (…) A aucun moment, un dialogue direct entre le chauffeur et le passager n’est possible. (…) De telles modalités obligent le chauffeur à fournir une prestation totalement standardisée. »

Un chantier dans le « pipe » du gouvernement

Guillaume n’est pas naïf, ses représentants qui l’ont accompagné dans la démarche administrative – le syndicat CSC via sa branche dédiée aux indépendants #United_Freelancers et le collectif du secteur des taxis – ne le sont pas non plus. Il sait que l’avis de la CRT est « non contraignant » pour Uber mais qu’elle a de lourdes implications pour son cas personnel. À moins d’être requalifié comme « salarié » par l’entreprise elle-même (un recommandé a été envoyé à ce titre aux différentes filiales impliquées en Belgique), il ne peut désormais plus travailler pour Uber.

De son côté, Uber explique qu’il « n’a pas encore pas encore reçu le point de la vue de la CRT » mais qu’il « estime que la justice bruxelloise a déjà tranché en 2019 le fait que ses chauffeurs étaient indépendants » (un procès a opposé l’entreprise au secteur des #taxis et lui a donné raison, mais ce dernier a fait appel et le jugement n’a pas encore été rendu). La société américaine pourrait d’ailleurs attaquer la décision en justice. L’anglaise #Deliveroo avait opté pour cette démarche en 2018 après que le même organe a acté en 2018 qu’un de ses #coursiers indépendants était en réalité salarié de la plateforme (l’audience aura lieu en septembre de cette année).

« Notre priorité est de faire réagir les autorités. Uber, comme d’autres plateformes, doit occuper ses travailleurs selon une qualification conforme à la réalité du travail. Soit les #prestataires sont véritablement indépendants et devraient, dès lors, pouvoir fixer leurs prix, leurs conditions d’intervention, choisir leurs clients, organiser leur service comme ils l’entendent… Soit Uber continue à organiser le service, à fixer les prix et les règles, à surveiller et contrôler les chauffeurs, et ceux-ci sont alors des travailleurs salariés », cadrent Martin Willems, qui dirige United Freelancers et Lorenzo Marredda, secrétaire exécutif de la CSC Transcom.

Au cabinet du ministre en charge du Travail Pierre-Yves Dermagne (PS), on confirme avoir déjà analysé les conclusions de la CRT et la volonté de débuter rapidement un chantier sur le sujet avec les partenaires sociaux. « Nous allons nous attaquer à la problématique des #faux_indépendants des #plateformes_numériques, comme décidé dans l’accord de gouvernement. L’idée est bien d’adapter la loi de 2006 sur la nature des #relations_de_travail. Cela pourrait passer par une évaluation des critères nécessaires à l’exercice d’une #activité_indépendante, par un renforcement des critères également. Mais il s’agit évidemment d’une matière qui doit être concertée », précise Nicolas Gillard, porte-parole.

* Le prénom est d’emprunt, les décisions de la CRT sont anonymisées quand elles sont publiées.

Des pratiques désormais similaires chez les taxis

A.C.

Selon le collectif des Travailleurs du taxi et la #CSC-Transcom, les problèmes constatés chez Uber sont actuellement également une réalité chez d’autres acteurs du secteur, en l’occurrence les #centrales_de_taxis. « Les taxis indépendants sont très dépendants des centrales. Et depuis leur #numérisation, il y a vraiment un glissement des pratiques. Les chauffeurs de taxi indépendants ne savent pas non plus où on les envoie avant d’accepter une course », explique Michaël Zylberberg, président du collectif. « La dernière version de l’application #Taxis_Verts est un clone de celle d’Uber. Au début, il y a cette idée de #concurrence_déloyale mais, comme le problème n’a pas été réglé, les centrales tendent à copier les mauvaises habitudes des plateformes. Cela est très inquiétant pour les travailleurs, qui perdent progressivement leur #autonomie », ajoute Lorenzo Marredda, secrétaire exécutif de la CSC-Transcom.

Des décisions dans d’autres pays

Mis en ligne le 13/01/2021 à 05:00

Par A.C.

Lors de son introduction en Bourse en 2019, Uber expliquait collaborer avec 3 millions de chauffeurs indépendants dans le monde. Fatalement, face à une telle masse de main-d’œuvre, qui se plaint souvent de #conditions_de_travail et de #rémunération indécentes, procès et interventions des législateurs ponctuent régulièrement l’actualité de l’entreprise. Ces derniers mois, trois décisions retiennent particulièrement l’attention.

En #Suisse

Plusieurs cantons sont en plein bras de fer avec la plateforme américaine. A #Genève et à #Zurich, les chauffeurs Uber sont désormais considérés comme des salariés. Les caisses d’#assurances_sociales réclament des sommes très importantes à l’entreprise, qui refuse jusqu’à présent de payer les #cotisations_sociales employeurs réclamées.

En #France

La# Cour_de_cassation a confirmé en mars dernier que le lien entre un conducteur et l’entreprise est bien un « #contrat_de_travail ». Les arguments utilisés se rapprochent de ceux de la CRT : la plus haute juridiction du pays a jugé que « le chauffeur qui a recours à l’application Uber ne se constitue pas sa propre clientèle, ne fixe pas librement ses tarifs et ne détermine pas les conditions d’exécution de sa prestation de transport ». Une #jurisprudence qui permet d’appuyer les demandes de #requalification des chauffeurs indépendants de l’Hexagone.

En #Californie

Une loi contraint, depuis le 1er janvier 2020, Uber et #Lyft à salarier ses collaborateurs. Les deux entreprises refusant de s’y plier ont investi environ 200 millions de dollars pour mener un référendum citoyen sur la question qu’ils ont remporté en novembre dernier, avec un texte baptisé « #proposition_22 ». Qui introduit pour les dizaines de milliers de chauffeurs concernés un #revenu_minimum_garanti et une contribution à l’#assurance_santé.

#néo-esclavage #ordres #Bruxelles_Mobilité #sous-traitance #travailleur_indépendant #salariat #salaire #Commission_administrative_de_règlement_de_la_relation_de_travail (#CRT) #Belgique #droit_du_travail

Take me with U
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVhNFNYnJRc

#soul #funk #Prince @tintin

en cohérence avec les actions déjà menées par nos collectivités pour l’accueil et l’intégration des personnes exilées

#sans_vergogne

Les signataires :
Anne Hidalgo, maire de Paris...

sans vergogne effectivement : cf Paris-Stalingrad ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/880254#message880351