The Hidden Assembly Line demonstrates how changing production patterns, dictated by multinational corporations and IMF-influenced macroeconomic policies, form the social and economic reality of women workers. The contributors explore the unique and shared responses of national governments and domestic businesses, and present multiple perspectives on the emergence of women’s subcontracted labour.

Presenting case studies from India, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, the contributors analyse household-level changes in women’s financial security and work opportunities, provide examples of strategic responses from NGOs, unions and activists seeking to strengthen the bargaining positions of subcontracted workers, and debate the wide-ranging implications for women’s empowerment and changing relations of production.

ISBN: 1 56549 139 4
Price: US$21.95
Contact: Tel: 860-243-2098
Fax: 860-243-2867
Email: sales@kpbooks.com

The Poverty of Rights: Human Rights and the Eradication of Poverty
By Willem van Genugten & Camilo Perez-Bustillo, Editors

Published by International Studies in Poverty Research, 2001

In her latest work, Arundhati Roy explores the politics of writing and the human and environmental costs of development. In Power Politics, Roy challenges the idea that only experts can speak out on such urgent matters as nuclear war, the privatisation of India’s power supply by Enron, and the construction of monumental dams in India, which will dislocate millions of people. She also questions whether globalisation, using India as an example, is about the “eradication of poverty” or is instead “a mutant variety of colonialism”.

When the US responded to the unconscionable attacks of September 11 by preparing to wage a war on Afghanistan, Roy wrote an internationally acclaimed essay, “The Algebra of Infinite Justice,” calling on the world not to use violence against innocent people in Afghanistan. After the war began, she wrote another powerful challenge to the war called “War is Peace”. The expanded edition of Power Politics includes the fully annotated versions of “The Algebra of Infinite Justice” and “War is Peace”.

ISBN: 089608 668 2
Price: US$12.00
Contact: Tel: 1-800-533-8478 or outside US: 651-917-3977
Fax: 617-547-1333
Email: southend@southendpress.org

What happens to women in the aftermath of war? This book asserts that for women there is no aftermath – a truce does not end gendered violence. It asks how transitions from war to peace and from authoritarian to democratic regimes can become opportunities for real social transformation. It presents an honest accounting of what women lose and gain in wartime and how they organise, and analyses why they fail to consolidate their gains.

It reflects on how war changes identities, on the myths that men and women invent about each other in wartime, and on the problems of reconciliation and women's solidarity. It focuses on shifts in gender relations during post-conflict reconstruction and transformation. The contributors consider the relation of the state to society in the aftermath, searching for a vision of the transformed society. The second part documents the varied nature of war and post-war situations. The book includes original case studies from Haiti, the Balkans, and a number of African and Asian conflict zones.

ISBN: 1 84277 067 5 (Paperback)
Price: US$22.50 and GBP14.95
Contact: Tel: 44 (0)207 837 4014
Fax: 44 (0)207 833 3960
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More than 40,000 children die daily in the developing world from avoidable sickness and disease, and tens of millions of children labour in factories, mines, mills and sweatshops, or scavenge for a living on city streets and dumps. In the so-called developed world, children's lives are similarly blighted by drugs, alcohol, sexual abuse and violence. The children of the rich are tormented by unappeasable market-led hungers, while the children of the poor are wasted by insufficiency. The global market is responsible for both of these ills.

In Children of Other Worlds, Jeremy Seabrook examines the international exploitation of children and exposes the hypocrisy, piety and moral blindness that have informed so much of the debate in the West on the rights of the child. Seabrook insists that the whole question of protecting children's rights, North and South, must take into consideration the structural abuses of humanity that are part and parcel of a global system. Seabrook addresses the key question of whether the West can turn its “benevolent” attention to the evils of child labour in the rest of the world without first understanding that gross forms of poverty anywhere are part of the same global pathology.

ISBN: 0745313914
Price: US$17.95, GBP 10.99
Contact: Tel: +44 (0)20 8348 2724
Fax: +44 (0)20 8348 9133
Email: pluto@plutobooks.com

Advocacy for Social Justice –
A Global Action and Reflection Guide
By David Cohen, Rosa de la Vega and Gabrielle Watson for Oxfam

America and the Advocacy Institute Published by Kumarian Press, Inc., 2001

Building civil society and nurturing democracy has become part of mainstream development discourse. But while some NGOs are taking the lead in this work, others still lack the skills needed to assume new roles in policy advocacy for social and economic justice. Advocacy for Social Justice is a direct and interactive response to this growing need. Based on a legacy of experience from the Advocacy Institute and Oxfam America, this volume is the first comprehensive guide for worldwide social and economic justice advocates. Intended for the practitioner, trainer and student of activism, it explores the elements of advocacy and offers a toolkit for taking action, comprehensive case studies, as well as hundreds of resource listings.

ISBN: 1565491319
Price: US$49.95
Contact: Tel: 860-243-2098
Fax: 860-243-2867
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The continent of Africa is in crisis, yet it was not always so. Following the decade of independence in the 1960s there was widespread optimism, but this almost totally disappeared in the 1980s and 1990s. As the millennium unfolds, Africa is faced with seemingly insurmountable problems: economic marginalisation from the global market; a major health crisis stemming from the destructive effects of malaria and HIV/AIDS; and chronic political instability after a string of devastating civil wars. This book argues that the decline in Africa's fortunes as a whole can be dated from the oil crisis and subsequent economic unrest of the late 1970s. Economic mismanagement and political authoritarianism sowed the seeds for the devastating problems of the following decades. International financial institutions imposed structural adjustment programmes over most of sub-Saharan Africa that led to the wholesale privatisation of state functions.

This lucidly detailed account pinpoints the root causes of the crisis, and asks what lies ahead for the continent in the future. Chapters cover key issues in African development, the pitfalls of democratisation, political economy and international relations.

ISBN: 0745316476
Price: US$25.00 and GBP15.99
Contact: Tel: +44 (0)20 8348 2724
Fax: +44 (0)20 8348 9133
Email: pluto@plutobooks.com