South Asia Citizens Web

I sent a tweet — intended as a commentary on Pakistan’s problem of political abductions — that sparked a violent backlash of gender-based slurs, slut-shaming and death threats. By the next day, #ArrestMarviSirmed_295C became the top trending Twitter hashtag in my country, with countless people suggesting my extrajudicial murder. They took their inspiration from Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy laws.

Women from India and Pakistan Appeal to our Governments to support Afghan women and protect their rights at the ‘intra Afghan talks in Doha so as to build a stable peace in Afghanistan and for all of us in the region.

Today, in 2020, some of you receive death threats on the social media when you express certain opinions. Certain media are openly targeted by international terrorist organisations. States exercise pressure on French journalists “guilty” of having published critical articles.

In a matter of three or four hours of parliamentary time, labour rights won by workers over a century and a half were wiped away and replaced by the Codes on Industrial Relations, on Social Security and on Occupational Health, Safety and Working Conditions. The BJP’s ‘maximum governance’ comes with a brutality that turns over labour rights entirely in favour of capital.

Writing about global labor at a time of escalating nationalism, trade wars, and anti-immigration policies seems like bad timing, unlike during the heyday of neoliberal globalization when some currents in unions and pro-labor academics pondered about labor’s possible contributions to an alternative globalization. Many contributions to this debate saw globalization as the trigger of a race to the bottom in which nation-states lost their ability to intervene on the side of workers.