Resistance or Damp Squibs? Challenges to Colonial Power in Contemporary German Development Interventions in the Area of Reproductive Health in Tanzania

During the past decade there has been an increased level of activity surrounding the governance, at the global level, of worker migration. One of the discursive frameworks under which much migration policy is discussed is the migration-development nexus. Parallel to state-led efforts such as international commissions and fora, has been the formation of migrant rights activist networks. They have begun to voice their resistance against the dominant migration policy paradigm, which is based on very little concern for the rights of migrant workers and their families. We thus argue for a theory of resistance rooted in transformative justice that occurs in the form of institutional change pushed from below (i.e. sub-state or transnational). We then offer a critique of the management discourse for having led to an instrumentalisation of the migration-development-nexus through its focus on remittances. The final section outlines and analyses the strategies of the two main activist networks in Asia. Their different tactics notwithstanding, both groups focus their resistance on the discursive level by challenging the dominant paradigms of migration and development and by promoting more inclusive concepts of human development and migrants rights as human rights.

This article discusses social resistance to the austerity packages imposed on Greece from 2010 onwards, in the light of Polanyi’s concept of the ‘double movement’. Two further aspects, noted by Polanyi, are typical of the Greek case: the role of the speed with which specific policies were implemented and the way these policies were justified. Although official data show that Greece has achieved the highest speed of ‘structural reforms’ worldwide, domestic and international elites that promote austerity policies attribute the programme’s downturns to delays in its implementation and to all those who resist the measures (trade unions, citizen groups etc.), who are considered as ‘obstacles’ to the reform. This way of appealing to such ‘obstacles’ to explain failures of specific policies is in direct analogy with early liberal views about self-regulating markets, as already described by Polanyi. Finally, it is argued that the heterogeneous and often fragmented forms of resistance that appeared in the course of the Greek crisis constitute instances of what Polanyi characterised as the “realistic self-protection of society” against liberalisation and marketisation.