The Human Community of Fate: A Conceptual History of China’s Ordoglobal Idea

September 27, 2022 by
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Abstract: Since 2012, advocacy of a “community of shared future for mankind” or “human community of fate” (人类命运共同体) has become China’s most important foreign relations principle. The platform has become synonymous with Beijing’s positions on global governance, along with its related initiatives. This article traces the concept’s genealogy from the early twentieth-century European notion of Schicksalsgemeinschaft, through its varying invocations in corporatist as well as ordoliberal discourse in Europe and East Asia, and into the present. Pairing stable market order with insulation from democratic pressures, Continue reading → Continue reading →

Counting Conflict: Quantifying Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan

September 27, 2022 by and
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Abstract: Civilian casualty counts are products of specific methods, epistemologies, standards of proofs, and definitions. This article analyzes how the US military and the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan assess civilian casualties. These counts are based on different and contestable concepts of who counts as a civilian, what counts as conflict violence, and what counts of evidence of civilian casualties. We illustrate this argument with four examples: the distinction between direct and indirect deaths, the boundary between civilians and non-civilians, the boundary between conflict Continue reading → Continue reading →

Coordinating Care and Coercion: Styles of Sovereignty and the Politics of Humanitarian Aid in Lebanon

September 27, 2022 by
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Abstract: This article explores how participatory planning on the Syrian refugee response in Lebanon has transformed the localized relationship between humanitarian care and state coercion. I argue that the Lebanese Crisis Response Plan (LCRP) has yielded a form of practical coordination between state and humanitarian actors that unintentionally increases the vulnerability of the country’s Syrian population. As the Lebanese government uses legal means to crack down on and re-displace impoverished refugees––most notably through mass evictions and business closures that began in 2017––they generate repeated small Continue reading → Continue reading →

Human Rights Populism

September 27, 2022 by
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Abstract: Human rights are typically thought of as the anti-thesis of populism, a precarious bulwark against majoritarian political passions and their sometimes toxic brand of anti-elitist demagoguery. This tends to neglect the extent to which certain Western populist movements have themselves increasingly instrumentalized human rights to better feed into racist and xenophobic discourses. This raises uncomfortable questions for the human rights movement and has a tendency to radicalize unresolved tensions that go to its very intellectual foundation. The article suggests that the human rights response Continue reading → Continue reading →

Doc Savage Saves the World: A Pop Culture Origin Story for US Modernization and Development, 1933–1949

June 9, 2022 by
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Abstract: This article contends that important scripts for US-led modernization were trademarked not by political and academic elites of the Cold War era, but rather by low-brow cultural producers of the New Deal period. It pinpoints key characterizations, motivations, plotlines, and settings associated with international development in the long-running pulp magazine series starring “Doc Savage” (1933–1949). Through historical analysis and close readings, the article offers a fresh account of how US audiences came to imagine technical assistance as a proper course for American power while Continue reading → Continue reading →

Drug Prohibition and the Policing of Warfare: The War on Drugs, Globalization, and the Moralization of Perpetual Violence

June 9, 2022 by
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Abstract: This article examines the shifting dynamics between policing and warfare as reflected in the War on Drugs over the twentieth century. Despite the UN’s international drug control treaties being written in language of humanitarianism, the drug prohibition that emerged from these laws exemplifies the growth of “New War.” The drug war, with its violent methods of armed combat, lethal force, incarceration, asset seizure, and land dispossession, was a continuation of familiar warfare. But it also marks a shift away from the traditional structure of Continue reading → Continue reading →

Agents of Sacrifice: Victims and Human Rights in North India

June 9, 2022 by
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Abstract: This article identifies a kind of victim-subject in North India that defies what is known about victimhood. On one hand, human rights literature offers a victim who negotiates narratives into a coherent biography of victimization. On the other, are helpless victims who cannot do the same. “Rita,” however, lies outside both understandings. The role of kinship and family, combined with her community’s status as both tribe and caste, create a context in which Rita’s decision to engage in sex work becomes an act of Continue reading → Continue reading →

Introduction: Shaping a Global Horizon, New Histories of the Global South and the UN

June 9, 2022 by and
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Abstract: This introduction lays out the agenda for this special issue. We argue for more inclusive histories of the UN system which incorporate the role of the Global South in shaping its past and present. In general, we ask: how have the Global South actors and coalitions/formations critiqued, interrogated, nuanced, and advanced the principles and practice of liberal world order? In order to set up the conceptual context for the essays in the collection, we argue that the “Global South” is neither a place nor Continue reading → Continue reading →

A New Agenda for the Global South: West Papua, the United Nations, and the Politics of Decolonization

June 9, 2022 by
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Abstract: This article examines the West Papuan campaign for independence in the lead up to the agreement signed between Indonesia and the Netherlands in 1962, leading to the recolonization of West Papua. West Papuan leaders argued for decolonization separate from Indonesia, based on their interpretations of United Nations principles and claims to a distinct ethnic identity. However, West Papuan claims were rejected because their understanding of self-determination clashed with international norms as well as Cold War and Afro-Asian political imperatives. This case study reveals the Continue reading → Continue reading →

Fighting an Illiberal World Order: The Latin American Road to UNCTAD, 1948–1964

June 9, 2022 by
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Abstract: Even though Latin American diplomats and economists played a crucial role in the formulation and the theorizing of development economics, Latin American contributions to development debates in the United Nations have often been relegated to the margins. Based on sources from Brazilian and Cuban archives, the Organization of American States, as well as the UN archive, the paper relates the Latin American road to the creation of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, in a struggle to fight what they perceived as 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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