Academic articles

In an age of globalisation marked by technological advancement and expanding markets, the movement of capital has become increasingly abstract and fluid. This abstraction renders capital flows difficult to regulate and their socio-economic effects difficult to trace, with particularly destabilising consequences for economies in the Global South. Women and men are affected asymmetrically by volatile capital movements during processes of economic development; in many contexts, marginalised groups become risk absorbers within these systems. This essay argues that the shift from net official flows to unregulated private capital inflows has restructured debt and trade regimes in ways that feminise development and responsibility, producing gendered disparities in welfare outcomes and economic returns in the Global South.

This study explores the contributions of Pakistani stay-at-home mothers to their daughters' educational attainment through unpaid care work. Using a mixed-method approach, survey data is quantified and visualised to identify trends, followed by thematic analysis of qualitative interviews to understand daughters' perceptions of their mothers' unpaid care work. The results show a strong correlation between mothers' emotional and physical labour, financial, personal and social sacrifices, and their daughters' educational success. Additionally, external factors such as siblings, family structures, societal pressures and community involvement are found to be impacting these contributions as well. This study challenges traditional economic narratives that undervalue unpaid care work by showing its impact from the perspective of its beneficiaries, arguing that the unpaid care work of stay-at-home mothers should be recognised as essential to both the economy and society.

Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) have become a widely adopted social protection programme aimed at poverty alleviation in Latin America. Despite their widespread implementation, the long-term effects of CCTs on welfare and poverty reduction remain unclear. This essay critically analyses gendered assessments of CCT programmes in Peru, Mexico and Nicaragua, focusing on women's empowerment and inclusion. While CCTs were designed to empower women by channelling funds to them and encouraging investment in human capital, their implementation often reinforced traditional gender roles and responsibilities. Despite improvements in child health and education, women's social and economic status within households remained largely unchanged. In some cases, CCTs exacerbated gender inequalities by increasing women's unpaid labour and limiting their agency. By examining the contradictions in CCT outcomes, this essay highlights the tension between the theoretical goals of empowerment and the practical realities of programme implementation, questioning the inclusivity and effectiveness of these interventions.

France's hijab and veil ban, introduced in 2004 and extended repeatedly, most recently through active legislative proposals in 2025, remains a live and urgent site of contestation between secularism, gender equality and religious freedom. Yet the debate has rarely examined how international human rights law (IHRL) itself is implicated in sustaining the colonial logic underpinning such bans, particularly at the intersection of gender, race and religion. This essay addresses that gap by analysing the French ban through a decolonial framework, drawing on Mignolo's colonial matrix of power, Wynter's coloniality of being, Lugones' coloniality of gender and Farris's concept of femonationalism. It finds that IHRL has not merely failed to challenge this logic but has actively institutionalised it, most visibly in S.A.S. v. France. Nevertheless, the same legal instruments, reframed to centre marginalised communities in knowledge production, hold meaningful potential for decolonial resistance.

A cross-sectional study reconceptualising human capital development by integrating unpaid care work as a structural determinant of educational attainment. Applies a feminist economic framework and a mixed-methods design to intergenerational educational mobility, centring maternal labour (historically excluded from econometric models) as a measurable driver of daughters' schooling outcomes.