'Rethinking precarity'

In this thesis, I think with precarity about the international regulation of labour. In doing so, I suggest that thinking with precarity requires us to critically think about precarity, which is otherwise presupposed as a lens that is readily available for application. Adopting a combination of critical discourse analysis and a ‘Third World Approaches to International Law’ theoretical lens, I show how the ILO has discursively produced a construct of ‘standard work’ that is historically and spatially contingent, which continues to normatively orient regulatory responses to precarity. By analysing the theoretical assumptions that have been taken for granted within the international legal discourse of the ILO, and in showing how its regulatory responses to precarity obscure the differentiated raced and gendered dynamics of precarity within the global South, I show how precarity has come to constitute a mode of governance in itself.