Force-Feeding and “The Right to Maim”: Hunger Strikes at Guantánamo Bay

July 22, 2023 by
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Abstract: This article explores how “involuntary enteral feeding” at the Joint Task Force – Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) allows for the United States to thwart the hunger striking protests of detainees resisting grave mistreatment and unlawful incarceration. Involuntary enteral feeding, also referred to as force-feeding in this article, is presented in the JTF-GTMO’s standard operating procedure as a necessary medical intervention used to rescue the frail hunger striker, but in fact uses excessive violence and causes further injury to the ailing detainee. This purportedly lifesaving protocol enables Continue reading → Continue reading →

2022 EARLY CAREER SCHOLAR PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT

April 12, 2023 by
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Humanity is pleased to announce a prize for the best essay published in the journal in a calendar year. The prize is open to graduate students or those without tenure track jobs at the time of submission. It’s our pleasure to announce two winners of the 2022 Early Career Essay Prize for Humanity journal: Safiyah Rochelle and Emma Kluge. Safiyah Rochelle, “This Is What It Looks Like: Searching for Law’s Afterlife in Guantánamo” Humanity 13, no. 3 (Winter 2022): 381-401. Taking up a series of drawings Continue reading →

The Major Humanitarian Dilemma of Neutrality: The International Committee of the Red Cross and Prisoners of War in Korea, 1950–1953

January 18, 2023 by
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Abstract: This article examines how the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) addressed the complex issue of the 150,000 North Korean and Chinese prisoners of war (POW) detained by the US-led United Nations Command (UNC) during the Korean War (1950–1953). Based on the 1949 Geneva Convention, the treatment of POWs raised serious concerns regarding one of ongoing challenge for the ICRC: neutrality. As suggested in this article, delegates faced a major dilemma in providing humanitarian aid and protection to prisoners while preserving their neutrality. Continue reading → Continue reading →

A Managerial Humanitarianism: The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Risk Management of Armed Violence in Greater Rio de Janeiro

January 18, 2023 by
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Abstract: This paper analyzes an International Committee of the Red Cross program that instructs public service workers, and the municipal bureaucracies overseeing them, on how to assess and mitigate risks related to armed violence in their daily work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I argue that this initiative represents a form of managerial humanitarianism primarily concerned with shaping the state’s management of lives and with preparing groups of people to protect themselves. Here, armed violence is turned into an object of (risk) management, something to Continue reading → Continue reading →

Epistemics of Aid: Toward a Liminal Critique of Resilience in the Syrian Crisis

January 18, 2023 by
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Abstract: Humanitarian actors since the Syrian crisis have acknowledged that traditional emergency relief cannot meet the growing challenges of mass displacement. This article traces the political contradictions of the Resilience Agenda, a novel approach to humanitarian aid which claims to offer an integrated developmental solution to the needs of both Syrian refugees and vulnerable host communities in Jordan and Lebanon. The article shows how resilience draws aid organizations into paradoxical relationships of cooperation and conflict with the very asylum states that undermine Syrian resilience, intensifying Continue reading → Continue reading →

Cultural Renditions of Guantánamo and the War on Terror

January 18, 2023 by
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Abstract: This essay examines the Guantánamo Bay detention facility as a site and subject of intellectual and cultural production which can address aspects of the war on terror foreclosed by law and politics. The essay begins with prisoner Abu Zubaydah’s recent petition to the US Supreme Court and arguments there about state secrets privilege to shield evidence of the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI) program (2002–2009) from disclosure. Drawing on Bonnie Honig’s theory of democratic deliberative processes and “public things,” the essay then turns Continue reading → Continue reading →

The Beautiful Guantánamo

January 18, 2023 by
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Abstract: In “The Beautiful Guantánamo,” Mansoor Adayfi, who was imprisoned for fourteen years there without charge, refutes the narratives and images carefully curated by the US government about its captives. Adayfi describes how men and boys speaking eighteen different languages and representing fifty nationalities shared their different cultures with one another and, through communal experiences, generated their own distinctive Guantánamo culture from 2002 to 2010. Beginning with the fear, estrangement, and abuse prisoners experienced upon their arrival, the author details how forming a common language Continue reading → Continue reading →

The Detainee’s Two Bodies: Intellectual Property and Fugitivity at Guantánamo Bay

January 18, 2023 by
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Abstract: The article argues that the denial of detainee intellectual property rights at Guantánamo Bay calls attention to new modalities of fugitivity and postcolonial citizenship. Examining paintings created by current and former detainees as well as Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s redacted memoir Guantánamo Diary (2015/2017), the article poses two key questions: How do we understand the status of post-9/11 art made in captivity? And what is the significance of the claim of US state ownership over such art? Following Stephen Best’s argument that US intellectual property Continue reading → Continue reading →

From Guantánamo to the Global South: Mohammed el-Gharani in Literature and Art

January 18, 2023 by
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Abstract: This article discusses a poem, a performance, and a comic book related to the life of Mohammed el-Gharani, a Black Muslim citizen of Chad held at Guantánamo for seven years beginning at the age of fourteen. It argues that while the fragmented authorship and dispersal of these creative pieces distinguishes them from a more established corpus of detainee memoirs, they perform important work alongside this corpus in highlighting solidarities between detainees and residents of Cuba, on the one hand, and Black members of the Continue reading → Continue reading →

This Is What It Looks Like: Searching for Law’s Afterlife in Guantánamo

January 18, 2023 by
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Abstract: This article considers the role of visual materials in the afterlife of extraordinary state violence. It locates a series of drawings by Guantánamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah as embedded within and counter to the camp’s existing visual grammar, where images of the camp and detainees work alongside state and legal violence to form the complex of forces that mark detainees as subjects to and subjects of (legal) death. Within these relations, detainee-produced drawings are vivid reminders of the tortured and forgotten bodies of state Continue reading → Continue reading →

Current Issue

Our long-awaited issue of Humanity journal is out! Its special dossier, Iran under Sanctions, examines the myriad and devastating impacts of international sanctions on society, culture, and politics. The issue includes an essay on the legal case Herero and Nama v. The Federal Republic of Germany to theorize reparations for German colonialism and slavery as they became linked with the aftermath of the Shoah. It also includes essays on T.H. Marshall and the right of access to justice; visual representations of Armenian genocide survivors; and, the concept of radical friendship in relation to the Farmers’ Protests in India.

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