Ensuring the Rights of Women Migrant Workers – Analysis and Practice from Viet Nam

Women migrant workers, who make up almost half of the migrant population in Vietnam, have been seeking employment opportunities in order to strengthen their standing both economically and socially. Nevertheless, women migrant workers are exposed to more risks and human rights violations than their male counterparts owing to their binary susceptibility as migrants and women. Compounding this, the existing international (human rights) treaties have yet to afford sufficient legal protection to them. Coming from a third world nation, Vietnamese female migrant workers face a multitude of risks arising from their status. Given the risks that they face, further actions by the Vietnamese Government to comprehensively address the problems related to the protection of migrant workers’ rights are needed. Cooperation amongst States in establishing a dialogue and reaching solutions to effectively tackle issues related to women migrant workers is essential.

Religion, Religious Textbooks and Territorialisation of Sinhala Buddhist Ethno-nationalism in Sri Lanka

The idea of ‘homelanď performed a central role in nationalist debates, and particularly majority/ minority societies exercise the concept of the homeland, religion and religious texts to shaped their nationalist discourse and claimed their rights over a given territory. In this context, nationalism and religion can be understood as contested terms, particularly in third world nation-states including countries like Sri Lanka, which has suffered from the three-decades-long civil war between Sinhala-Buddhist majoritarian government and minority-Tamil community based separatist movement of LTTE. The formation of Sinhala- Buddhist nationalism carries interesting links with the religion and religious textbooks and based on these Buddhist religious and historical claims the majoritarian political mindset of the Sinhala community believes Sri Lanka is their homeland, and other minority communities are alien for the society. The contemporary, political and security discourse of Sri Lanka has strongly brought these Buddhism and religious texts to claim rights over the territory and galvanised ‘Sinhala-Buddhist rights’ over the popular nationalist movement. In this context, the paper discusses ‘how and why Sinhala nationalist movement strongly shaped by the Buddhist religious values and books’ and the rationale behind the link between Sinhala nationalism and Buddhist religion based on the conceptual framework of “Geopiety.”

Coronavirus Disease-19 (COVID-19): Systematic analysis of situation in Pakistan-Responses and potential advancements

: Coronavirus Disease-2019 (COVID-19), emerged in Wuhan (China) during December 2019 has now grown into a global scale pandemic that is influencing the civilization of the whole world. As of 25th March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) has released 65 situation reports starting from 23rd January 2020 to 26th March 2020 regarding this new disease. The virus has now been identified and named as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV2). Total confirmed cases documented across the globe have reached up to 462,684 including 20,834 confirmed deaths from this disease as of 26th March 2020. This study focuses on the essential developments or response procedures opted by the various countries and present an elaborative account of the various steps taken by the Pakistan government to respond to this dynamic situation. As a third world country, the fall out of these actions can have severe repercussions. This study attempted to highlight some of the peculiar trials Pakistan is facing in these challenging times and discusses the effect of COVID-19 from the perspective of the third world nation. We believe that this study will provide a realistic picture of the current scenario taking place in Pakistan and will assist the government and concerned institutions/agencies in developing better plans for effectively dealing with this COVID-19 virus.

The Queer Third World

This chapter assesses the relationship between the concepts of “queer” and “Third World,” and attempts to group them in their common inheritance of subjugation and disparagement and their shared allegiance precisely to nonalignment and a radical politics (of development). In assembling both terms one is struck by how, in the mainstream discourse of international development, the Third World comes off looking remarkably queer: under Western eyes, it has often been constructed as perverse, abnormal, and passive. Its sociocultural values and institutions are seen as deviantly strange — backward, effete, even effeminate. Its economic development is depicted as abnormal, always needing to emulate the West, yet never living up to the mark. For their part, post-colonial Third World nation-states have tended to disown and purge such queering — by denying their queerness and, in fact, often characterizing it as a “Western import” — yet at the same time imitating the West, modernizing or Westernizing sociocultural institutions, and pursuing neoliberal capitalist growth. The chapter claims that the Western and Third World stances are two sides of the same discourse but, drawing on Lacanian queer theory, also suggests that a “queer Third World” would better transgress this discourse by embracing queerness as the site of structural negativity and destabilizing politics.

Impact of COVID-19 on the perception of Indian investors towards investment in equity fund

During the post demonetization and GST, Indian economy was struggling continuously to recover from the economic crisis. In the financial year 2019–2020, GDP rate fell from 7% to 5.4% which is about 18.20%. BSE Sensex index was 42273 as on January 20th of 2020 but on April 8, 2020, it was 29894. During the Financial year 2019–2020, a reduction of 26% in mid cap index was observed, but at the same time, sensitive index reduced by 22%. These things affect the share market and financial stability of people. The stock market over the last one-year became volatile and crashed. To handle the downwards economy, Government took the initiative and announced deep tax cuts for businesses in the month of August 2019. But in the beginning of the year 2020, there was another sluggish phase which stubborn the economy. This time, it was a virus, named as COVID-19(coronavirus), which created a pandemic situation and spread all over the world. Nation-wide lock down was announced to fight with COVID-19 as there was no vaccine introduced. Starting from agriculture to textile, apparel, automotive, aviation, hotels and restaurants, poultry, chemicals, consumer durables, entertainment, sports, FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), pharmaceutical, ecommerce, IT and moreover corporate sectors were adversely affected due to this pandemic and lock down rules. Therefore, this paper focuses on the impact of corona on the perception of Indian investors towards investment in equity fund.

INDONESIAN LITERATURE POSITION IN WORLD LITERATURE

This research studies the position of Indonesia literature as a component of literature which can also be categorized as world literature. Due to the fact that Indonesian is sometimes underestimated because its identity as third world nation and this sometimes impacts the way of how foreign researchers value Indonesian’s intellectual products such as Indonesian literature, it is necessary to evaluate Indonesian position in world literature. This research is a qualitative study since it has conducted a library research and it has been completed through document analysis. This study uses Damrosch’s theory of world literature’s characteristics in order to check and to find out whether Indonesian literature can be categorized as world literature or not. Indonesian literary works that have been used as the objects of analysis for this study are Sangkuriang, Mahabharata, and literary works that have been written by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. At the end of this study, it has concluded that Indonesian literature fulfilled the three main characteristics of world literature that have been classified by Damrosch and is able to be categorized as world literature. This clearly demonstrates Indonesian clear position in world literature and also shows that Indonesian literature deserves to be categorized as world literature.

Biomedicalization and Globalization

This chapter presents a discussion of the book’s theoretical framework and central argument, arguing that the everyday practice of biomedicine and the social process of biomedicalization rest on the foundations of relatively widely shared narratives within communities. As these narratives and narrative fragments are accessed selectively and deployed with creativity and contradiction, the transformations social scientists call biomedicalization are necessarily inflected and informed by their sociocultural context through what is available from the cultural repertoire or “tool kit” and how those cultural materials are deployed. As a result, biomedicalization does not eradicate diversity in “things medical,” but rather produces it. The following chapters explore this argument empirically, organized in descending order of imagined social space: world, nation, exam room, and home. Each is a site at which the meaning of the diabetes epidemic is imagined, negotiated, contested, and reimagined.

A Loss of National Pride

In a similar manner to the United Nations, the Panama Canal was an image that represented a powerful reminder of America’s great historical legacy. However, a large number of Americans believed the international waterway symbolized much more. Those that supported the American Right saw President Jimmy Carter’s decision to return the canal in 1977 as another example of the decline of American power in the world. Conservatives were upset that the United States was acquiescing to the demands of another emerging Third World nation that, like those within the General Assembly, appeared unwilling to appreciate America’s past generosity. The loss of the canal also reverberated with the US defeat in Vietnam. In the wake of the loss of American military prestige, conservatives were irate that a significant reminder of the country’s industrial greatness was now on the verge of being given away.