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ABSTRACT
The state-sponsored recruitment of migrant healthcare workers from the global South into the global North is a contemporary practice that requires critical engagement. Germany, like many other like-minded countries, has developed its own recruitment program Triple Win which aims to sustainably and ethically secure its national health care system through the use of foreign labor. Absent from Triple Win is an awareness of the ongoing colonial power relations that reproduce the program as a practice in neocolonial care extractivism. This lack of awareness is set against the country’s promotion of a feminist foreign and development policy, which seeks to transform international politics through a gender centred approach. Locating Triple Win within the context of feminist foreign policy we analyse how Germany’s feminist foreign and development policy makes visible, addresses and changes the colonial power relations that sustain care work migration programs. In doing so, we seek to build on existing studies of care work migration as a gendered and racial phenomenon. To do this we adopt a postcolonial feminist approach that is grounded in an ethics of care in order to remap the local and the global through a critical analysis of care work migration as a neocolonial development practice.
ABSTRACT IN GERMAN
Die staatlich unterstützte Rekrutierung von (Gesundheits-)Pflegekräften aus dem globalen Süden für den globalen Norden ist eine weit verbreitete Praxis, die einer kritischen Reflexion bedarf. Deutschland hat, wie viele andere Länder mit ähnlichen Absichten, sein eigenes Anwerbeprogramm namens “Triple Win” entwickelt. Das Ziel von Triple Win besteht darin, das nationale Gesundheitssystem durch den Einsatz ausländischer Pflegekräfte nachhaltig und ethisch zu stärken. Allerdings fehlt es Triple Win an einem Bewusstsein für die fortbestehenden kolonialen Machtstrukturen, die das Programm als eine Form des (neo-)kolonialen Pflege-Extraktivismus reproduzieren. Dies steht im Kontrast zu Bestrebungen einer feministischen Außen- und Entwicklungspolitik, die darauf abzielen, die internationale Politik durch einen geschlechtszentrierten Ansatz zu transformieren. In diesem Artikel untersuchen wir, ob und wie die feministische Außen- und Entwicklungspolitik Deutschlands die zugrunde liegenden kolonialen Machtverhältnisse solcher Migrationsprogramme sichtbar macht und verändert. Theoretisch stützen wir uns dabei auf bestehende Forschung zur Pflegearbeitsmigration als geschlechtsspezifisches und rassistisches Phänomen. Dabei wenden wir einen postkolonialen feministischen Ansatz an, der auf einer Ethik der Fürsorge basiert, um das Lokale und das Globale durch eine kritische Analyse von Care Work Migration als neokoloniale Entwicklungspraxis neu zu gestalten.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 “Global care chains” are “a series of personal links between people across the globe based on the paid or unpaid work of caring” (Hochschild, Citation2014, p. 250).
2 We are aware of the debate and discussion surrounding post/decolonial perspectives as different forms of anticolonial scholarship (Asher & Ramamurthy, Citation2020; Ruíz, Citation2021). However, within the context of this paper we have not delved into this discourse as it does not directly impact our analysis.
3 In October 2022 Sweden abandoned its FFP.
4 The idea of the “care chain” and/or the “international division of reproductive labour” refers to the “commodification of household work among women” whereby “a privileged woman pays a migrant woman to perform her housework, and she in turn passes on her own household work to a woman left behind in her country of origin” (Parreñas, Citation2012, p. 269).
5 We are attentive to the fact that we have not fully engaged with the perspectives of care workers and their experiences. Originally, we had endeavoured to conduct interviews and use these interviews to inform our paper. However, time restraints and word restrictions prevented the inclusion of important and crucial perspectives. In the absence of these first-hand accounts, we felt it would be problematic to “speak for” migrant healthcare workers and/or recite other individual stories out of context. Consequently, we have focused our analysis on critiquing Germany and its feminist foreign and development policy in relation to its Triple Win program.
6 The following policy documents, available on the websites of the German Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) and the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), were selected for analysis: “Shaping Feminist Foreign Policy—Federal Foreign Office Guidelines” (Citation2023), “Feminist Development Policy for Just and Strong Societies Worldwide” (Citation2023), BMZ website entry on “Migration” (Citation2023).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jessica Cheung
Jessica CHEUNG is a PhD candidate at the Graduate School of North American Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research interests include feminist foreign policy, anti-colonialism, transnational feminism, femonationalism and homonationalism. Prior to starting her PhD, she worked at UN Women in Beijing and ATGENDER in Utrecht. Most recently, she has worked with the Foundation for European Progressive Studies (FEPS) to publish a chapter on imagining a new gender equality contract for foreign policy. Email: [email protected]
Victoria Scheyer
Victoria SCHEYER is a PhD student at the School of Social and Political Science and ARC Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence Against Women of Monash University Melbourne. Her research interests include feminist peace research, feminist foreign policy and global resistances to gender equality. She is the director of the German Association of Peace and Conflict Studies and a associated researcher at Peace Research Institute Frankfurt. From 2021–2023, she was co-president of the German section of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Email: [email protected]