The political economy of child servitude in Liberia, West Africa.

Child servitude is a form of economic exploitation of children around the world. We examine this phenomenon with local specificity, in Liberia, where it represents a perennial failure of the government to protect children, who are among its most vulnerable citizens. Despite its persistence and high prevalence, child servitude has not been the focus of academic research on Liberia. This paper explores the interplay of transmuted American chattel slavery and indigenous specific Liberian cultural practices of human subjugation against a backdrop of socio-economic inequalities, and their linkages to contemporary child servitude in postwar Liberia. We discuss the impacts of child servitude on victims and recommend policy measures to protect the rights of Liberian children. If postwar Liberia is to achieve its pro-poor developmental agenda, policies must be formulated that address child servitude and other forms of exploitation against Liberian children.

Global governmentality: Biosecurity in the era of infectious diseases.

This paper uses Foucault's concept of governmentality to examine relationships between globalisation, the threat of infectious diseases and biosecurity. It draws attention to forms of calculated practices which Foucault notes as technologies of power that aim to foster positive demographic and economic trends in societies through the apparatus of security. These practices are employed at the global level with similar ambitions; hence, we adopt the term global governmentality. We discuss the applications of global governmentality by actors in the global core through the apparatus of security and (neo)liberal economic practices. We then provide examples of resistance/contestation from actors mainly in the global periphery through discussions of viral sovereignty; access to essential medicines, including HIV drugs; and health for all as a human right. We conclude that despite the core-periphery power asymmetry and competing paradigms, these developments tend to complement and/or regulate the phenomenon termed global governmentality, which is made evident by the tremendous successes in global health.