This chapter demonstrates how young male Taiwanese elites turned to gendered masculinity in response to colonial redefinitions of women within the family and marriage from the 1920s onward. Taiwanese masculinity derived from the mixture of Han Chinese tradition and Japanese colonialism. Chinese men had developed their masculinity on sociocultural standings and power in and outside of the household. Meanwhile, male Taiwanese elites often received higher education in Japan, and they built Taiwanese nationalism on calls for regulating or ending the practices of bride prices, daughter adoption, and premarital sex among ordinary Taiwanese men and women. In those top-down calls, Taiwanese elites defined themselves as men in terms of their ability to facilitate individual willpower and liberalize society. Far from being personal, their masculinity made it necessary for the elites to work with the colonial authorities to materialize family reforms in the late 1920s. To shore up their sociopolitical standing, those elites held women responsible for obstructing family reforms and painted them in a negative light, constructing masculinity while assigning additional gendered burdens.

In June 2020, the largest democracy movement in a generation emerged in Thailand. The movement began with three demands: the current PM must resign, a new constitution must be drafted, and the state must stop threatening dissidents. In August 2020, a fourth demand was added: the monarchy must be reformed. This demand is where the transformative power of the movement came from, but also led to a swift crackdown in the form of police violence and prosecutions. This may appear to be a particularly egregious illustration of the rule-by-law regimes favored by autocrats, but close examination indicates that the law is being used to criminalize peaceful dissent and the mere questioning of how power is exercised. By examining several key cases, this chapter shows how the Thai regime aims to reshape both the rule of law and the polity through the arbitrary exercise of repressive power.

This chapter explores inclusions and exclusions embedded within the Omani economy as experienced by citizens and foreigners. The chapter shows, first, that contestations around labour market belonging and experiences emerge within the local structures of segmentation and the global nature of Oman’s labour market. Second, in order to understand economic belonging and citizenship in the Gulf, class has to take a central role. The production of difference and competing identities of local regionalism, tribal and community affiliation, religion, interior and coastal cultures, race, heritage, and gender all matter but need to be understood alongside the intervening variable of class. The subjectivity of experiences and perceptions of inclusion and exclusion exposes how the politics and practice of difference in global capitalism produces tensions, value, and forms of power that manifest in labour and class relations. These dynamics also generate resistance and contestation around the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.

The chapter introduces the book, its main claims, and arguments. It is concerned with setting the agenda for how to take labour seriously in Gulf development discourses and the value of centring labour from the margins. The book argues that Oman’s labour market is global and that Omani labour needs to be understood globally and relationally within and beyond the segmentations that divide the labour market. The chapter situates youth and their economic dreams and experiences at the heart of the story of development, discusses how to understand labour within the rentier state, and lays out the framework and empirical analysis to follow.

This chapter examines the promotion of entrepreneurship and business startups in Oman and its rhetorical targeting of youth and women. Although innovation is part of the promotion agenda, entrepreneurship is often focused on encouraging citizens to create their own private sector job. The chapter focuses on the experiences of young people in internalising entrepreneurship promotion discourses and in starting personal businesses. It illustrates two key tensions – first, the tension between rentierism embedded within authoritarian governing structures, on the one hand, and the logic of neoliberal capitalism, on the other; and second, the tensions between rhetoric and realities of youth and female empowerment narratives. Entrepreneurship is expressed and promoted as an empowering activity, and at times is experienced as such, but can also be used to legitimise or reconstitute patriarchal and authoritarian structures to accommodate the market. The space of entrepreneurship promotion is both a key tactic of labour market bandaging, and a distinct illustration of rentier neoliberalism

This chapter introduces the main arguments of the book by exploring the case of Kizito Mihigo, a well-known popular singer who was imprisoned, was released, and later died while in police custody. It discusses the idiom of the heart – or, more particularly, the need to transform the heart – as key to understanding post-genocide social life and urban young people’s attempts to navigate a difficult political terrain. Instead of reproducing theoretical binaries – resistance–domination, sound–silence, past–present – this chapter proposes looking to popular culture and Pentecostalism in order to understand the different ways young people in Kigali attempt to assert agency and make ‘noise’ despite a wider context of silence.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, collecting data online was the only option for many researchers. This chapter describes the barriers to, advantages of, and key lessons learned in conducting online interviews during the pandemic. We draw on a qualitative study focusing on employment experiences during the pandemic among youth with and without disabilities. Thirty interviews were conducted synchronously via Zoom. Barriers to conducting online interviews included technical difficulties and some challenges with building rapport. Benefits of conducting online interviews included greater efficiency and flexibility, technical advantages, and perceived anonymity and privacy. Key lessons learned in conducting online interviews included testing equipment in advance and having a back-up recorder, giving participants questions in advance or having it on the shared screen, and providing technical information to participants in an easy-to-understand format.

This chapter documents our experiences of pivoting research on sexual and gender minority youth towards an online protocol using digital methods. Digital diaries presented an opportunity to conduct virtual longitudinal qualitative research on how youth describe their experiences of living through the COVID-19 pandemic in Vancouver, Canada. Our digital diary process, supplemented with remote interviews, allowed us to capture shifting health-related patterns and trends, establish capacity to identify and explore unanticipated areas of inquiry, and evaluate participants’ impressions of the method itself. While going digital allowed us to overcome some immediate constraints to participation, it also introduced new uncertainties, including equity concerns and issues around consistent, secure and safe digital access for research participants. We describe how features of young people’s lives remain important factors associated with their ability to participate in digital and remote research. We offer solutions to the challenges and conclude that to counteract the inequities arising from the shift to digital methods, we need flexible, adaptive and population-tailored digital and remote approaches to data collection.