Humanity Journal

An interview with Salomón Lerner Febres, president of Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

This article explores the trajectory of international human rights organizations between the 1940s and the 1970s. Providing detailed case studies of the International League for the Rights of Man and Amnesty International, it argues that the field of human rights NGOs underwent profound changes during this period. The League never moved beyond a marginal role because of its weak institutional structures, its focus on the United Nations, and because its work placed it at odds with the political scene in the U.S. Amnesty, by contrast, reinvented the techniques of human rights advocacy and saw its endeavors fuelled by a generation of activists eager to transcend earlier forms of civil protest. In the process, human rights NGOs began to have a much larger impact on international relations. This happened only in the 1970s, however, and produced new political dilemmas and contradictions.

Humanitarian aid has often been a malleable concept covering a broad range of activities. This article focuses primarily on emergency relief. It discusses existing narratives of international humanitarian aid and identifies crucial historical conjunctures during the twentieth century. It argues that neither the history of humanitarian organizations, nor aid as function of political economy, nor the evolution of global humanitarian governance provides a satisfactory historical explanation for the development of humanitarian aid during the twentieth century. Rather than such long-term narratives, the explanation is to be found in the turning points themselves, in historical conjunctures and contingencies. Three such conjunctures are explored: the post-World War I moment, the moment of postcolonial mobilisation, and the global interventionist moment.

This article explores the intersection between debates about the meaning of human rights and self-determination claims and movements in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that the human rights politics of the period were an ongoing contest in which alternative conceptions of rights, especially the right of self-determination, emerged from political, ideological, and sometimes even military conflict within and between state bureaucracies, international forums, and NGO boardrooms, with a multiplicity of actors seeking to enlarge or constrain them to suit their own purposes.

The idea that the First Asian-African Conference in Bandung in 1955, in which the majority of 29 states were outspokenly aligned, was a conference of the non-aligned states or “gave birth” to non-alignment is a kind of Paul Revere’s ride of our postcolonial age. And most of the men representing those states would likely have responded to claims of a unity or alliance of color with blank or uncomprehending stares or else would have smiled politely and moved on. No delegate ever seriously argued that what united peoples of disparate religions, regions, and commitments was race. Color was a fact for some, not for some others, but for no one was it what united them. To the contrary, many rejected the idea. They called it racialism and warned against appealing to it as a dangerous and retrograde step.

Despite a burgeoning literature on the macropolitics of social memory, remarkably little is known about the diversity of mnemonic practices in small-scale, living, breathing contexts where violent pasts are to be contended with. The dozen empirical vignettes at the heart of this photo essay provide glimpses of these spheres. Focusing on everyday life in post-genocide Rwanda, we single out tropes of memory that merit careful investigation in situ, there and elsewhere. The empirical vignettes complement what is primarily a methodological argument with closely observed impressions from a country that all too often is rendered in an undifferentiated hue.

This essay assesses the resurgent intellectual interest in “dignity,” reviewing recent treatments by four liberal legal and political theorists. The article notes the origins of dignity as “high standing” in Roman, Catholic, and aristocratic discourses, along with its transformation by liberal theorists into a rational tool for accommodating the equality of rights and the hierarchies of virtue for the political ethics of Western societies. The author faults these rehabilitations of “dignity” for minimizing how worldly power in history constitutes ethical prospects and how emphasis upon “dignity” elevates the passivity of moral standing over and against the activity of politics.

Recent literature on humanitarianism, which relies heavily on political theory, portrays it as an almost totalitarian means of governing society that reduces its beneficiaries to mere biological life. This vastly overestimates the reach and power of humanitarian governance. Using a case study from the Republic of Georgia, Dunn argues that humanitarianism functions not as well-planned totalitarianism, but as an adhocracy, a form of government based on guesswork, improvisation, and “satisficing.” This not only makes humanitarian regimes far less capable of relieving suffering than their proponents claim, but also makes them far less capable of establishing sovereignty than their critics suggest.

In 2008, 28,000 people were ethnically cleansed from the breakaway province of South Ossetia during a brief but brutal war between Georgia and Russia. Their villages were bombed, burned, and in some cases bulldozed to ensure they could never return, and the entire province was occupied by Russia's 58th Army. Because return soon was unlikely, the Georgian government, acting in concert with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and more than ninety-five nongovernmental organizations and donor governments, chose to resettle them in thirty-six hastily built settlements in which they were to rebuild their lives. However, because the aid system was so chaotic, and because most aid agencies were acting in improvised ways, the internally displaced persons were housed in bleak and isolated settlements, unemployed and left to sit in poorly built homes that soon began to decay. Hannah Mintek's photographs offer a window into this scenario.

During the 1950s, European colonial powers invented new types of warfare, combining military violence, social engineering, and forced “modernization” in the so-called battles for hearts and minds. Feichtinger and Malinowski explore the rediscovery of such techniques, and the subsequent emergence of refined and partly tamed versions of counterinsurgency warfare, in Afghanistan and Iraq during the last decade. The systematic application of anthropological knowledge, a new type of “warrior intellectual” among military leaders, and the representation of war as a necessarily armed form of developmental aid and way to enforce human rights represent a remarkably open appropriation of large parts of Europe’s violent late-colonial heritage.