Beyond States and Markets: The Challenges of Social Reproduction

Seeking to extend our understanding of the contemporary global political economy, this book provides an important and original introduction to the current theoretical debates about social reproduction and argues for the necessity of linking social reproduction to specific contexts of power and production.
It illustrates the analytic value of the concept of social reproduction through a series of case studies that examine the implications of how labor power is reproduced and how lives outside of work are lived. The issues examined in countries including the Ukraine, Chile, Spain, Nepal, India and Indonesia, consist of:

Human trafficking and sex work
Women and work
Migration, labor and gender inequality
Micro-credit programs and investing in women
Health, biological reproduction and assisted reproductive technologies

The book lends a unique perspective to the understandings of transformation in the global political economy precisely because of its simultaneous focus on the caring and provisioning of the everyday and its relationships to policies and decisions made at the national and international levels of both formal and informal institutions.
With its multi-disciplinary approach, this book will be indispensable to students and scholars of International Political Economy, Development Studies, Gender or Women’s Studies, International Studies, Globalization and International Relations.

Isabella Bakker is Professor of Political Science and Womens Studies at York University in Toronto, Canada.
Rachel Silvey is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Programme in Planning at the University of Toronto, Canada.

Introduction Part 1: Social Reproduction and Economic Globalization 1. New Constitutionalism and Social Reproduction2. Towards Globalization with a Human Face 3. Global Integration of Subsistence Economies and Women’s Empowerment 4. Limits to Empowerment: Women in Microcredit Programs, South India 5. Human Trafficking as a Manifestation of Globalization Part 2: Transnational Social Reproduction and the Crisis of Biological Reproduction 6. Working Women, the Biological Clock and Assisted Reproductive Technologies 7. Reproduction, Re-Reform and the Reconfigured State: Feminists and Neoliberal Health Reforms in Chile 8. States, Work, and Social Reproduction through the Lens of Migrant Experience: Ecuadorian Domestic Workers in Madrid 9. Managing Migration: Reproducing Gendered Insecurity at the Indonesian Border 10. Afterword