Author Archives: Michal Givoni

About Michal Givoni

Michal Givoni teaches in the department of politics and government at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Her book The Care of the Witness: A Contemporary History of Testimony in Crises (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) examines the troubles of witnessing to genocide, war, and disaster in the twentieth century and looks at the practical ethics that the preoccupation with the problems of testimony has generated and at its contribution to nongovernmental politics.

Reluctant Cosmopolitanism: Perceptions Management and the Performance of Humanitarian Principles

This essay sets out to chart a new domain of humanitarian expertise: the study, monitoring, analysis, and management of the ways in which humanitarian actions are perceived in the disaster zones where they unfold. In recent years, a “growing cottage industry of perception studies” has cast the images that humanitarian interventions project as an indispensable object of empirical investigation.1 In several case-based studies produced by humanitarian organizations and research and consulting institutes, those images were not just mapped, explained, and reproduced but also delineated as Continue reading → Continue reading →