Pawns for Profits - Analysing the Plight of Bangladeshi Female Migrant

The aim of this paper by Ahmad Ibrahim is to recount this history of female migration into KSA from Bangladesh during the 2015-2018 period as an example of collusion between profit-oriented recruiters and the state apparatus, where women were used as a pawn for opening up the more lucrative male labour migration market. This paper argues that the state, in collusion with private recruiters, engaged in predatory identification and recruitment activities that ultimately put profits over the lives of female migrant workers. In doing so, the paper seeks to postulate an evental analysis of migration governmentality, whereby encounters between heterogenous forces such as the kafala system, a precapitalist mode of production, state complicity in private profiteering and the logic of neoliberal labour flow coincided to formulate a coercive, yet consensual, migration market.