Nathan Hodge’s recent book provides important insights into the close relationship between development practice and modern warfare. After September 11, 2001, U.S. foreign policymakers and defense planners came to envision international development as a crucial objective in the pursuit of counterinsurgency and national security. Their efforts in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan also fell victim to false assumptions and serious fallacies. Hodge’s analysis exposes major flaws in U.S. policy, but the pattern he refers to has a much older history, rooted in longstanding visions of modernization and rapid social change.
In contrast to literature which emphasizes how camps render refugees silent by removing them from political life, Williams views camps as sites which produce voices as inhabitants claim belonging in a national community. Drawing from research on camps administered by the Namibian liberation movement SWAPO in exile, he demonstrates how Namibians have voiced claims in and through camps over time. Williams maintains that these voices reflect unique qualities of Southern Africa’s liberation movement camps and of the ethnographic/historical research methods through which one may study them today. They are, therefore, especially productive sites from which to rethink “the camp” and the humanitarian discourses through which camp inhabitants are consistently portrayed.
Guilhot takes stock of two recent publications, Didier Fassin’s La raison humanitaire and Erica Bornstein’s and Peter Redfield’s Forces of Compassion, to question the relationship between anthropology and humanitarianism. Increasingly, as the anthropologist’s field has been reconfigured by humanitarian intervention, humanitarianism has become a subject of critical anthropological inquiry. Guilhot focuses on the way in which the various authors under review negotiate the tension between ethnography and critique, and emphasizes the limits of the current critique of humanitarianism, which sees in humanitarianism a “de-historicizing” and “de-politicizing” force.
Bruce Jones of New York University was the lead author of the latest World Bank World Development Report. On July 27, 2011, Humanity coeditor Nils Gilman interviewed Jones about it. Jones spoke in his capacity as a scholar: the perspectives he voices are his own, not those of the Bank.
The World Bank Development Report 2011 addresses the developmental challenges of violent conflict and fragile states. Central to this analysis is the notion of war as development in reverse and recursive violence in a number of conflict-prone states. The costs of violence can be addressed through the optic of legitimate political institutions in which citizen rights and justice are central. Watts examines the Bank’s important analysis and the conceptual approach they adopt in their account of the development-conflict nexus. He explores the forms of violence (so-called “new conflicts”) and their dynamics, and how the policy prescriptions proposed stand in relation to the historical role and character of the multilateral and bilateral development institutions.
As an organizing concept, “visual citizenship” treats participation in political life as something operating and experienced beyond legal properties and pregiven juridical frames. After all, much of what we know about the relations between citizens—and between citizens and non-citizens—happens from a distance, among common strangers, audiovisually. What we see and hear, how we see and hear, according to whom, and where condition the way people in acute and everyday crises debate meaningfully about how they are governed. Rights talk beyond mere expressions of victimhood is an important theme.
Coundouriotis proposes that human rights history, which uses the frame of crimes against humanity, is shaped by stories of reading in which the author takes evidence previously ignored or misconstrued and uses it to renarrativize the events, providing a new story with a moral center inflected by human rights. This insight is applied to analyze the recurring motif of the “heart of darkness” in the literature about the Congo. The moral crusade, the redeemer witness and the democratizing movement represent three types of human rights history that attempts to write past this motif.
An exploration of the politics of living with and in a humanitarian condition. Rather than looking at humanitarian responses to moments of crisis, it considers the case of Palestinian refugees—who live in conditions of long-term displacement and who receive assistance from a long-standing humanitarian apparatus—to investigate the forms of political expression that emerge in these conditions. The article explores political values articulated both through rights claims and existential conditions and argue that even as humanitarianism can constrain action in certain ways it also provides mechanisms through which people are active in the world.
The civil awakening in the Middle East and all over the world reveals more and more facets of regime-made disasters, and the extent to which democracy itself, rather than being their foil, is one of the regime forms wherein such disasters actually take place. This museum, inspired by the Arendtian effort to analyze totalitarian regimes, adopts the widely accepted claim that totalitarian regimes of the kind analyzed by Arendt are a thing of the past, but insists on understanding the disasters afflicting various populations in the world as regime-made ones. The museum follows the way in which such disasters take place and are interlaced in a democratic fiber of life, while being perceived as external to the regime that generates them. This museum is a layout, an outline for visual studies of regime-made disasters and the condition for the emergence of the civil language of revolution.
Humanity coeditor Nils Gilman introduces the dossier.
