"New Keywords: Migration and Borders" is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i)

After a period of decline in the early 1990s, East and Central European (ECE) textile and apparel production and trade grew rapidly (figure 1, see over). Textiles and apparel now account for between 10% and 25% of manufacturing employment in many of these countries and in 2004 apparel alone represented between 2% (Czech Republic) and 20% (Romania) of total national merchandise exports in the ECE6 (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia) (WTO, 2005). However, in the late 1990s increases in imports from China and the final phaseout of quotas established under the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (MFA) (1 January 2005) increased uncertainty in the industry. Contracts have been lost, contract prices have declined, and apparel exports (as a proportion of total exports) have fallen in all ECE accession and signatory countries except Bulgaria and Romania. (1) In this paper we focus on this meteoric renewal and retraction in an industry described in the early 1990s as dying or moribund, and consider the extent to which

Abstract. Introducing this Special Feature of the International Labour Review on “Decent work in global production networks” (GPNs), this article reviews the research challenges posed by GPNs, which are changing the structure of trade, production and employment in today's globalized economy. The authors define the concepts of social and economic upgrading/downgrading that are used in the following contributions to investigate the effects of GPNs. They conclude with a discussion of the initiatives that governments and non‐state actors have taken to address the “global governance deficit” and consequent decent work deficits that have emerged with the expansion of GPNs.

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This paper focuses on the recent emergence of regional production networks and border industrial zones, the labor migrations they are generating, and their consequences for “surplus populations” in the Greater Mekong Subregion (mainland Southeast Asia). In this region the textile and garment industry is employing increasing numbers of workers in border areas on flexible and highly precarious work “contracts”. To understand these emergent labor formations we focus on three scales of analysis through a case study from the Thailand–Burma border. We focus on initiatives led by the Asia Development Bank, accompanying subregional political groupings which aim to facilitate capital flows and trade by reducing transaction time and cost, and a case study of labor recruitment and employment practices in one border town. In examining these three scales, we question the value of characterizing such trans‐national, state‐led, authoritarian, and racialized labor formations as neoliberal.