This forum revisits a Special Issue on International Financial Institutions and Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Review of International Political Economy (RIPE) edited by Aida A. Hozić and Jacqui True and first published online in April 2020. While the focus of the special issue was on gendered effects of economic recovery in post-conflict spaces, in this series of blog posts, contributing authors re-examine their articles in light of the COVID-19 global crisis and explore their implications for the world, post-COVID recovery. Their key message is clear: If attempts to stimulate recovery and growth follow the, by now, well-trodden blueprints of post-conflict policies promoted by the World Bank and IMF, the future of gender equality and women’s freedom from violence and want – which has taken devastating hits in every country, during and under the guise of the pandemic – is not promising. The Bank itself estimates 47 million women worldwide will fall into extreme poverty this year because they are overrepresented in the hardest hit sectors. The world has never been more in dire need of structural changes which would prioritise economies of care and justice as opposed to extraction, depletion, indebtedness and accumulation. Women’s economic inclusion is crucial for sustaining peace, health and wellbeing, and our planet. The pandemic has created widespread female unemployment, income loss, and gender-based violence that is destabilising in the context of transnational capitalism and crime. And it is most destabilising in those fragile places most affected by climate change and conflict.
Featuring the posts from:
My article for the Review of International Political Economy Special Issue on International Financial Institutions and Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence investigates the gendered circuits of violence that create and sustain economic insecurities in Ukraine. In the article I argue that [...]
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It is all about the taxes these days, whether in discussions among G7 leaders about the global tax rate, in tax reforms sparking protests in Colombia, or in President Biden’s attempts to reverse Trump’s tax cuts in the United States. But when it comes to gendered inequalities, we argue, it is [...]
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It was almost inevitable that microfinance would be proposed as a solution to COVID-19 related financial problems of the poor. But COVID-19 has plunged the incomes of the poor into free-fall, and as a result, many microfinance institutions are in dire straits. As sub-prime lenders, microfinance [...]
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The COVID19 pandemic is not a war and we should resist the temptation of using securitising language that is easily deployed by elites to avoid scrutiny and accountability for their actions. And yet, thinking through the arguments and research behind my article on gender and the political [...]
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When we wrote our article Whose Recovery?: IFI Prescriptions for Postwar States, the “recovery” we had in mind was recovery from war, not recovery from a pandemic. Yet now, after 18 months of Covid-19, the extent to which our arguments apply to the need to recover from the global Covid crisis [...]
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This series of blog posts builds upon a Special Issue on International Financial Institutions and Gendered Circuits of Labour and Violence in Review of International Political Economy (RIPE). The issue was first published online in April 2020, at the peak of the initial wave of the COVID-19 [...]
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