The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on livelihoods everywhere, but especially in the informal economy where crucial forms of protection and security are often absent. A detailed understanding of the impacts for informal workers, the public policy approaches that could most effectively respond to their needs, and the barriers to such policy, is urgently needed. This paper discusses the results of a 2021 street vendor survey in Cali, Colombia, focusing on (1) vendors’ socioeconomic circumstances and (2) their political engagement and attitudes on key policy and governance issues. It argues that while the pandemic and the government responses to it negatively impacted street vendors, there are steps that government could have taken, and can still take, to address vendors’ needs and priorities. To ensure a just, equitable, sustainable recovery, and to protect economically marginalized groups from future crises, informal workers must be more meaningfully included in decision-making processes.

Informal economic activity is often a defining feature of the political economy of conflict and post-conflict cities. Despite its prevalence, however, its implications for peacebuilding remain largely under-theorised. This article draws on the extensive literature on informal economic activity more generally, with a focus on cities, to outline three contrasting perspectives on its significance for peacebuilding: first, that informal economies can support peacebuilding efforts by providing crucial livelihood support and access to essential goods and services in the absence of functioning formal markets; second, that they are a manifestation of resistance to unpopular top-down peacebuilding processes that fail to cohere with local understandings of economic justice; and third, that they can reproduce the conditions that led to conflict by re-establishing socio-economic hierarchies and systems of marginalisation. It argues that each of these perspectives has important implications for the theory and praxis of peacebuilding and raises conceptual challenges that remain unresolved. It then claims that any effort to incorporate urban informal economies into peacebuilding processes must prioritise democratic inclusion, grassroots organisation and formal employment creation if they are to have a meaningful impact on the lives of the urban poor.

This article explores the recent history of Owino Market in Kampala, Uganda, to analyse the constraints to agency that exist in the informal economy. Detailing conflicts over market management and development in Owino, it argues that agency in the informal economy must be understood in reference to the economic divisions that exist within the informal sphere and the political divisions that characterise urban governance. The interaction of the two, as Owino illustrates, can severely circumscribe the ability of informal vendors to act in ways that allow them to participate in urban development. In this case, ongoing efforts by the ruling party and executive to monopolise power in Kampala solidified and politicised internal market hierarchies defined by vending location and ownership and employment status, leading to conflicts that threatened the majority of vendors’ livelihoods and the viability of their economic activities. For many in the informal economy, these structural constraints to agency may be impossible to overcome.

This report presents survey data about the socioeconomic conditions and governance of informal workers in Cali, Colombia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Conducted with 750 street vendors via telephone, the survey explores eight interrelated topics: demographics, households and children, economic activities, income and expenses, access to financial services and debt, institutional trust, health, and subjective wellbeing. These data are valuable for two reasons. First, they allow for an analysis of the social and economic consequences of the pandemic for a population group that remains understudied and neglected by social policy. Second, they allow for an understanding of the governance of informal work during crises and possible paths to promote greater inclusion. Taken together, the data presented here provide tools for conducting academic and policy-relevant analysis about informal workers, the long-term consequences of COVID-19 in the global South, and how recovery from the pandemic can be made more inclusive and sustainable.

Rapid urbanization and the transformations that it brings are raising urgent questions about understanding the African city. This article stresses the value of viewing urban development through a critical lens that focuses on questions surrounding neoliberalism and the state, highlighting how such an approach can provide important insights into the dynamics of informal economic activity. Examining the recent history of Kisekka Market in Kampala, Uganda, it argues that development processes in the informal economy, even when apparently neutral or ostensibly empowering for the urban poor, facilitate forms of accumulation and dispossession that result in the consolidation of political and economic power. The destruction and rebirth of Kisekka Market, despite its changing politics, has consistently benefitted wealthier vendors and external investors, threatened to displace poorer traders and served the interests of President Museveni, the National Resistance Movement (NRM) and their allies. Exploring these dynamics demands addressing traditional political economy questions that must serve as the foundation for analysing the institutions, structures and processes shaping contemporary African cities.

Long-established liberal democracies with histories of settler colonialism—from the United States and Canada to Australia and Scandinavia—are beginning to explore their histories of violence and dispossession. This, in many ways, is long overdue, but the desire to come to terms with past injustices should not obscure the challenges that still stand in the way of any reasonable effort to do so. We argue that transitional justice can be applied to colonial history in liberal democracies, but there are major conceptual and practical obstacles that need to be overcome if this is to happen in meaningful ways. We explore three of these obstacles here that are particularly significant: the doctrine of intertemporal law, the unequal power balance between the Global North and the Global South, and national identity. If these are to be overcome, it is important to tie historical to present injustices and to incorporate, beyond violations of physical rights, violations of economic and social rights that are particularly relevant for understanding continuities between past and ongoing violations. These rights are commonly neglected even by states that recognize a broad set of liberal rights and have the capacity to ensure that they are realized, and represent a promising avenue for pursuing a truly inclusive, equitable, and universal understanding of justice.