One of the interesting features of the current events in Egypt is that they have driven Barack Obama and his administration to a far more significant embrace of human rights language than ever before. Recall that during the last outburst of Middle Eastern protest, in Iran in the summer of 2009, Obama -- having suggested he had learned the lessons of neoconservative universalism -- relied on religious language of "bearing witness" to what happened as repression abroad happened. We might stand idly by, he implied, as repression beckoned, but we should shed a tear and remember the victims.
In his impressive review article, Jan Eckel develops a detailed survey of the interaction between human rights and decolonization. Most of all, he argues that the place of human rights in decolonization was both more complex and more ambiguous than has been suggested in the works under review, both my own and Fabian Klose’s German-language monograph.
In his review essay “Human Rights and Decolonization: New Perspectives and Open Questions,” Jan Eckel raises many important questions concerning this important topic which only recently has received much attention yet will stay on the research agenda for quite a while. His notion that the history of human rights in decolonization is complex and ambiguous is well taken and hardly contested.
Congrats to our coeditor Miriam Ticktin on the publication of her coedited volume (with Ilana Feldman), In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care (Duke University Press).
Here's the book description:
Congrats to our executive editor Nicolas Guilhot on the publication of his new edited volume, The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the 1954 Conference on Theory (Columbia University Press).
Here's the book description:
What does tracking bushmeat do for humanity?
Against the "liberalism of fear" argument.
Brief note on the 2011 World Development Report of the World Bank.
It strikes me that one of the purposes of the elision is to facilitate the extension of (yes, biomedical, but perhaps not just biomedical) surveillance technologies of the Global North into the Global South, for reasons that primarily benefit the Global North, but that come cloaked with the moral aura of benefiting the South (even though, as you point out, it's not so clear that these surveillances really do help the South much).
If the danger for biomedical humanitarianism is that neglect will return as soon as the visible emergency moves to a different place (as Peter Redfield has argued), the danger for global health security may be one of over-preparedness – that its credibility is damaged when it responds to an event that turns out not to be as catastrophic as promised.
