Locations of Depletion

It is a great pleasure and a privilege to engage closely with Shirin Rai's Depletion: The Human Costs of Caring (Oxford University Press, 2024)."Depletion" in relation to social reproduction is a key concept upon which I have built my research on gendering and racializing economic/financial sanctions on Iran.Building on this concept, I have theorized sanctions as tools of economic warfare whose coercive power largely relies on depleting social reproduction resources in targeted countries in complex, multiscale, and sometimes contradictory ways (Abdi 2025).The book powerfully and in novel ways traverses the usual boundaries-social and geopolitical-that often demarcate the limits of inquiry into social reproduction and care.Instead of examining the questions of care, depletion, and social reproduction from a single social or national boundary, the book interrogates these questions from multiple social, geopolitical, and embodied locations.This includes various gendered, racialized, classed, and generational locations across both the North and South, encompassing women of various classes in India, children of diverse genders "who care" in the city of Coventry in the United Kingdom, and the rural community of Xolobeni in South Africa.Through this diverse examination, the book also locates the questions of care and depletion in multiple political economy landscapes: the austerity-driven political economy of the United Kingdom, the sect-and class-divided economy in India, and the extreme extractivism that is proposed in the Eastern Cape.Locating social reproduction in these diverse political economy landscapes and locations does significant conceptual work in the book, with important implications not only for how we may understand and conceptualize depletion and social reproduction, but also for how we might imagine alternatives, and build solidarities for transforming the current unjust institutions and cultures of care.Hence, the book is a great example of what Eric Olin Wright has termed an "emancipatory social science" (Wright 2010, 10) which is concerned not only with diagnosis and critique, but also with envisioning viable alternatives and providing pathways for transformation.