Humanity Journal

Suame Magazine is a twenty-mile informal industrial area in Kumasi, Ghana’s second city. Over 200,000 skilled workers fill the open-air production lines, wooden stalls, and concrete factories here, churning out everything from nuts and bolts to refurbished trucks. The area is a labyrinth of paths marked by towering heaps of truck cabs, spare parts for heavy machinery, and huge old trucks that are slowly, lovingly coaxed back to life by mechanics. Around a million dollars passes daily through the hands of the 12,000 small businesses Continue reading → Continue reading →

It is exactly half a century since I first entered Ghana. I was twenty-two years old, and I stayed there for over two years, mostly in Nima, a sprawling slum on Accra’s outskirts. My research project was initially political: how would the newly independent country absorb a flood of migrants from the interior as citizens—through party politics, voluntary associations, and public education? Unfortunately, Ghana was then a police state and no one wanted to talk about politics, least of all to me. I rented rooms Continue reading → Continue reading →

The neoliberal ascendancy of the 1980s, combined with the unraveling of the Cold War at the end of the decade, ushered in a period of prolonged crisis and skepticism about “development” as a global project. It was at this watershed moment that development as history was envisaged by a critical mass of scholars, most of whom understood what they were studying primarily in terms of discourse. The fixation with discourse shaped the parameters of the emerging field in crucial ways. The importance of ideas, particularly Continue reading →

Allow me to begin with two contemporary parables of conscience. The first is fictional. In Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005), a well-heeled Parisian, Georges, finds himself subject to anonymous surveillance, sparking a series of events that lead him to reflect on his past. Specifically he is prompted to recall his jealous response, as a child in rural France, to the arrival in his home of an Algerian boy orphaned when his parents were killed in the 1961 “Paris Massacre.” 1 Georges dissembled and lied to ensure that the boy, Continue reading → Continue reading →

In this essay, “commoditization” and “commodification” refer to two distinguishable aspects of the relationship between human rights knowledge and the commodity form. Commoditization happens when human rights is marketed like a commodity, whether by packaging information in standardized and easily consumed numbers, icons, and graphics or “branding” human rights–monitoring organizations and their campaigns. Commodification happens when human rights information actually becomes a commodity, such as when rights investigations are done under contract, at times through international information supply chains, while possibly also subject to intellectual property restrictions. While commoditization is an Continue reading → Continue reading →

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. . . technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original in itself . . . the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition . . . And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced . . . Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that Continue reading → Continue reading →

Today . . . the idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape. Delusion and disappointment, failures and crimes have been the steady companions of development and they tell a common story: it did not work. Moreover, the historical conditions which catapulted the idea into prominence have vanished: development has become outdated. But above all, the hopes and desires which made the idea fly, are now exhausted: development has grown obsolete . . . It is time to dismantle this mental structure Continue reading → Continue reading →