Abstract 
of the speech at the conference on "Gender Budgets, Financial Markets, Financing for Development", February 19th and 20th 2002 at the Heinrich-Boell Foundation in Berlin.

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"The last decade has seen a growing presence of women in a variety of cross-border circuits. These circuits are enormously diverse but share one feature: they are profit- or revenue-making circuits developed on the backs of the truly disadvantaged. They include the illegal trafficking in people for the sex industry and for various types of formal and informal labor markets. And they include cross-border migrations, both documented and not, which have become an important source of hard currency for governments in home countries. The formation and strengthening of these circuits is in good part a consequence of broader structural conditions. Among the key actors emerging out of these broader conditions to give shape to these particular circuits are the women themselves in search of work, but also, and increasingly so, illegal traffickers and contractors as well as governments of home countries.

Saskia Sassen conceptualizes these circuits as countergeographies of globalization. They are deeply imbricated with some of the major dynamics constitutive of globalization: the formation of global markets, the intensifying of transnational and translocal networks, the development of communication technologies which easily escape conventional surveillance practices. The strengthening and, in some of these cases, the formation of new global circuits is embedded or made possible by the existence of a global economic system and its associated development of various institutional supports for cross-border money flows and markets. These counter-geographies are dynamic and changing in their locational features: to some extent they are part of the shadow economy, but it is also clear that they use some of the institutional infrastructure of the regular economy.

Her speech maps some of the key features of these countergeographies, particularly as they involve foreign-born women. The logic organizing this mapping is the possibility of systemic links between the growth of these alternative circuits for survival, for profit-making, and for hard-currency earning, on the one hand, and major conditions in developing countries that are associated with economic globalization, on the other. Among these conditions are a growth in unemployment, the closure of a large number of typically small and medium-sized enterprises oriented to national rather than export markets, and large, often increasing government debt. While these economies are frequently grouped under the label developing, they are in some cases struggling or stagnant and even shrinking. For the sake of briefness she uses developing as shorthand for this variety of situations.“  

Aktualisiert: 13.02.2005