Nandini Krishnan

Female-to-male transgender people, or transmasculine people as they are called, are just beginning to form their networks in India. But their struggles are not visible to a gender-normative society that barely notices, much less acknowledges, them. While transwomen have gained recognition through the extraordinary efforts of activists and feminists, the brotherhood, as the transmasculine network often refers to itself, remains imponderable, diminished even within the transgender community. For all intents and purposes, they do not exist. In a country in which parents wish their daughters were sons, they exile the daughters who do become sons. In this remarkable, intimate book, Nandini Krishnan burrows deep into the prejudices encountered by India's transmen, the complexities of hormonal transitions and sex reassignment surgery, issues of social and family estrangement, and whether socioeconomic privilege makes a difference. With frank, poignant, often idiosyncratic interviews that braid the personal with the political, the informative with the offhand, she makes a powerful case for inclusivity and a non-binary approach to gender. Above all, she asks the question: what does manhood really mean?

Inside India's Transmasculine Networks

Invisible Men

The Modern Woman and Arranged Marriage

Hitched

Alexander Irwin

Daniel Gerszon Mahler

Paul Corral

Fragility and conflict pose a critical threat to the global goal of ending extreme poverty. Between 1990 and 2015, successful development strategies reduced the proportion of the world’s people living in extreme poverty from 36 to 10 percent. But in many fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS), poverty is stagnating or getting worse. The number of people living in proximity to conflict has nearly doubled worldwide since 2007. In the Middle East and North Africa, one in five people now lives in such conditions. The number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide has also more than doubled in the same period, exceeding 70 million in 2017. If current trends continue, by the end of 2020, the number of extremely poor people living in economies affected by fragility and conflict will exceed the number of poor people in all other settings combined. This book shows why addressing fragility and conflict is vital for poverty goals and charts directions for action. It presents new estimates of welfare in FCS, filling gaps in previous knowledge, and analyzes the multidimensional nature of poverty in these settings. It shows that data deprivation in FCS has prevented an accurate global picture of fragility, poverty, and their interactions, and it explains how innovative new measurement strategies are tackling these challenges. The book discusses the long-term consequences of conflict and introduces a data-driven classification of countries by fragility profile, showing opportunities for tailored policy interventions and the need for monitoring multiple markers of fragility. The book strengthens understanding of what poverty reduction in FCS will require and what it can achieve.

On the Front Lines of the Fight against Poverty

Fragility and Conflict

Ambar Narayan

Gabriel Lara Ibarra

Sailesh Tiwari

Tara Vishwanath

Perceptions of eroding living standards and low life satisfaction are widespread in the Middle East and North Africa region today, along with pessimism about prospects for economic mobility. Conventional measures of economic well-being offer little in the way of explanation †“ in most countries in the region, extreme poverty is low and declining and economic inequality is lower than in other parts of the world. This book investigates possible reasons for this disconnect, focusing on the role played by inadequate and unequal access to opportunities to realize one’s aspirations for economic mobility. The inability of most countries in the region to meet the aspirations of citizens is closely linked to persistent weaknesses in the labor markets where the pace of job creation has been chronically below levels required to absorb the growing and increasingly better educated population. A high degree of segmentation in the labor markets also puts the youth and women in the region at a particular disadvantage. While labor markets are critical for mobility, opportunities and life paths can diverge even earlier in life if access to basic services in health, education and infrastructure are unequally distributed among children in their formative years. This book documents sharp disparities in the quality of services available to children of varying birth circumstances in the region. Although the most intense debates in development coalesce around inequality of income or wealth, the notion of inequality of opportunity has an intuitive appeal that can bridge ideological differences. By drawing attention to the notion of equality of opportunity to create a level playing field for all sections of society, the book highlights the need to critically examine the social contract and governance structures that guide the delivery of services and are instrumental for implementing necessary reforms to make labor markets more dynamic and equitable.

Inequality of Opportunity in the Middle East and North Africa

Uneven Odds, Unequal Outcomes

Nandini Krishnan

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