- Convenors:
-
Arbie Baguios
(London School of Economics and Political Science)
Claudia Rodríguez-Castellanos (London School of Economics)
Send message to Convenors
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Economics of development: Finance, trade and livelihoods
Short Abstract
This panel will discuss resistance economies which represents how marginalised groups – such as indigenous peoples, racialised communities, and refugees – challenge their domination and pursue an alternative vision of development within – and through – production, exchange and distribution.
Description
This panel will discuss resistance economies, which was initially conceptualised in the context of Palestinian economic subjugation (Tartir, Bahour & Abdelnour 2012; Dana 2014), and which represents how marginalised groups – including indigenous peoples, racialised communities, and social/political identities such as refugees – challenge their domination and pursue an alternative vision of development. While much of the scholarship on resistance has focused on legal and political change (such as winning rights or toppling governments) via electoral and contentious politics, there has been comparably little attention paid on its manifestation and consequences within the economic domain. Yet there are various examples across time and place where people have exercised their agency and struggled against their oppression within – and through – production, exchange and distribution. Resistance economies can manifest as “diverse economies” (Graham-Gibson 2008) that serve as non-capitalist alternatives, moral economies disrupting the power dynamics of the status quo, “commoning" (Fournier 2013) of public goods and natural resources, re-embedding of market exchange reflecting social values, de-commodifying care and social reproduction, or the emergence of informal institutions that transform relations of domination. This inter- and multi-disciplinary panel aims to advance scholarship on resistance and (social, political and economic) change, as well as offer policy insights for development policymakers and practitioners working in service of people and communities in the margins.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper draws on feminist ethnography at a women-only labor chowk in Delhi NCR to examine how migrant working-class women navigate informal work, gendered space, and urban precarity. It conceptualizes the labor chowk as a feminist counter-common shaped by collective waiting, care, and survival.
Paper long abstract
This paper draws on feminist ethnographic fieldwork conducted at Peer Baba Labor Chowk*, an exclusive women’s informal labor market located in the urban village of Kapashera, though which women seek work in the nearby factories in Udyog Vihar, Delhi NCR. It explores how migrant working-class women, navigate the intersecting precarities of informal work, gendered space, and urban marginality, while simultaneously asserting forms of collective agency, dignity, and survival.
This paper endeavors to conceptualize Labor Chowk as a liminal space which is neither home nor workplace, neither wholly public nor entirely private. It is in this in-between space that women carve out forms of presence, refusal, and mutual care. The paper builds on this conceptualization to argue that the labor chowk operates as a feminist counter-common: a space sustained not by ownership or legality but through embodied co-presence, shared routines, and relational survival. In this ephemeral common, the act of waiting becomes more than economic necessity; it is transformed into a collective social and affective infrastructure.
This study contributes to the conference theme in four interlinked ways. First, it offers an empirical account of informal labor that attends to the everyday, affective dimensions of work. Second, it speaks to decolonial and intersectional approaches by foregrounding the voices, bodies, and spatial strategies of women who are simultaneously marginalized and agentic. Third, it rethinks “women and work” not as narrow economic participation but as a terrain of spatial politics and collective life.
* labor chowk is an informal street-side hiring space
Paper short abstract
I argue civilians in former FARC strongholds coproduce wartime governance via Community Action Boards engaging in both: resistance and collaboration with armed groups and the government. I use the concept of convivencia, a locally grounded measure of social order, to track insitutional change.
Paper long abstract
Wartime governance scholarship has shown how armed groups build institutions that regulate civilian life, provide order, and shape local authority in conflict settings. Yet this literature often treats armed actors as the primary architects of rule and depicts civilians in a binary: they either resist rebel rule or accept it.
Based on research in former FARC-EP strongholds in rural Colombia, I argue that civilians in conflict settings can be active institutional actors who coproduce wartime governance who have a voice amidst the conflict. Community organisations helped build and maintain institutions of local order by contributing resources, labour, and time to sustain public goods, organise collective work, enforce community rules, and resolve disputes over land, debts, and everyday harms. These practices were essential to the social and economic development of the villages and did not simply operate “under” armed rule or coercion: there were instance of both, resistance and cooperation.
I evaluate the evolution of these institutions after the demobilisation of the FARC using the concept of convivencia as an empirical locally grounded measure of order. The Spanish term means the ability to live with one another in harmony, and I operationalise it through observable practices such as compliance with community rules, participation in collective work, dispute-resolution outcomes, and everyday norms of mutual support. The findings re-centre civilian agency in wartime governance and clarify how local institutions can persist and adapt when armed enforcement recedes or changes form.
Paper short abstract
How did a refugee economy emerged in Kakuma camp in Kenya, a country that had one of the most economically restrictive policies? My paper argues that markets emerged through refugees’ everyday politics, which can be understood as their resistance within the context of economic repression.
Paper long abstract
For much of its existence, refugees in Kakuma camp were not permitted to own property, set-up businesses or take up employment. And yet, after over 30 years since it was established in 1992, the camp is now the site of sizeable market economy providing essential goods and services as well as livelihoods to refugees and host community members alike. How did this happen? Mainstream thinkers claim that informal markets emerge when refugees with an entrepreneurial drive reconfigured their institutional context. Meanwhile, critical scholars argue that capitalism’s “spatial fix” means refugees in camps become an exploitable surplus population from whose labour a “destitution economy” runs. My paper, which looks at two sub-cases – vegetable farmers and digital workers – proposes a constructive view: markets emerged through refugees’ everyday politics, which can be understood as their resistance within the context of economic repression. Thus, neither merely an informal economy nor “capitalist frontier,” it’s possible to understand Kakuma’s refugee economy as a resistance economy.
Paper short abstract
This research analyses diverse market arrangements as forms of resistance developed by mango producers to gain autonomy in response to the agro-export boom, in Oaxaca, Mexico, which has transformed local market channels into a competitive and complex system and created power asymmetries.
Paper long abstract
As the world’s leading mango exporter, Mexico accounts for 21% of global trade, with 99% of its exports directed toward the United States and Canada (FAO, 2024). The current mango production chain has developed a complex structure in which producers have had to develop a series of organisational, productive, and commercial strategies (Ordóñez-Trujillo et al., 2023). The unequal power relations behind this structure mean that producers have limited capacity to shape the terms on which they produce and trade (Henderson, 2019). Within this scenario, power asymmetries among producers have deepened through differentiated access to market integration. Therefore, this research analyses the everyday forms of resistance (Scott, 1985) that producers develop to gain Relative Autonomy (Henderson, 2017). Using qualitative methods, 45 semi-structured interviews were conducted in Oaxaca, Mexico, during the 2025 harvesting season, with mango producers and intermediaries. The findings illustrate how the emergence of intermediaries, particularly packinghouses, has transformed local market channels into a competitive and complex system by adding more people to transactions, reducing producers' incomes, and blurring the distinction between domestic and export market channels. Producers have built forms of resistance by manoeuvring to gain control over their production process and applying their agency in the selection of a market arrangement, defined as a unique combination of market channels that they select and manage to access. This means that there is a network of actors following the formal rules of the market, but also a network of people creating a variety of economic transactions to sustain their livelihoods.