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Migration: A View From Below

Against both the catastrophist and ‘win-win’ perspectives on immigration, this class-based examination shows that in-country and in-region movement far outstrips the traffic on the ‘migratory corridors’ joining poor countries to rich. Fieldwork from India and Indonesia reveals the social determinants shaping the conditions of departure.

Development’s Shadow

Jan Breman on Michael Levien, Dispossession without Development. India’s real-estate development through the eyes of its excluded.

A Footloose Scholar

The descendant of Dutch bargees, Jan Breman has been investigating workers’ lives for half a century, travelling from rural Gujarat to the Javanese uplands and now coastal China. The social relations patterning control of land and labour framed in historical perspective, from colonial plantations to the globalized informal economy.

A Bogus Concept?

Jan Breman on Guy Standing, The Precariat. Emergence of a global ‘dangerous class’?

Life and Death in Annawadi

Jan Breman on Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Close-quarters chronicle of life in a Mumbai slum-settlement.

The Undercities of Karachi

Pakistan’s turbulent metropolis as battleground for gangsters and politicians, and the iniquitous rural order that propels impoverished haris to its slums.

Myth of the Global Safety Net

Report from the lower depths of the global employment hierarchy, as the economic crisis multiplies the effects of informalization and agrarian decline on the billion-strong reserve army of labour.

Slumlands

Jan Breman on Mike Davis, Planet of Slums. Panorama of the epochal shift to a majority urban world, with the vast mass of the destitute driven to subsistence tactics in their villas miseria.