Suchergebnisse

Empowerment, resilience and poverty reduction strategies seem to be bound by mutual exclusion. Through poverty reduction and empowerment, people escape poverty and precarization processes by acquiring capabilities that give them both economic and existential stability; in a word, they acquire human resilience. Nevertheless, the relationship between the three concepts and their corresponding practices is characterized by a complementary link that works as a matrix of neoliberal subjectivation processes that involve both men and women on a global level. Said link is a broad and diverse one where other practices and concepts interact: i.e. vulnerability, securitization, care, responsibility and self-reliance. After introducing some elements of the current conceptualization of empowerment and resilience, I will deal with the verification of the impact that empowerment and resilience strategies are producing in the global South in forms introduced by neo-liberal poverty reduction policies such as the Conditional Cash Transfers program, especially in Brazil.

Post and de-colonial studies define a huge and heterogeneous field of research, crossing several disciplines and territories. Their interdisciplinary interaction produces a fruitful and open space with vague boundaries. Divergent positions, sometimes even contradictory, different ways of being postcolonial prevent us from considering them as a homogeneous entity. However, the heterogeneity of the positions inside and across postcolonial and decolonial studies cannot be separated from a common basis, a core of concepts that move the analysis from the same starting point: the event of colonization.