Abstract: This paper considers a case study of Survival International’s campaign in support of the Dongria Kondh adivasi community of Odisha, India, and that community’s ultimately successful struggle to prevent mining company Vedanta from acquiring their sacred mountain, Niyamgiri. I argue this case presents an ethical conundrum for those of us interested in decolonizing solidarity: politically effective work rewards relationships and representations that shore up the making of radical Otherness, its valorization, and desires to know and help the radical Other. Rather than simply condemn or applaud Survival’s problematic work, I explore the role of scale and temporalities to better understand the ethical terrain in which they operated.
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In our new issue we feature Samantha Balaton-Chrimes’s essay on decolonizing global solidarity. Also in this issue are essays on the Cold War history of human rights, humanitarian governance, human rights and population control, and the visual politics of maternal mortality. We end with review essays on human rights in Colombia and the political ethics of doing good.
Recent Blog Posts
The Political Imaginary of the World Tribunal on Iraq
The following speech was delivered at the plenary—“Political and Revolutionary Imaginaries from Past to Present”—of the 16th Annual Historical Materialism conference held in London on November 9, 2019. When the conference organizers invited me to participate in this plenary some moons ago, I agreed rather hesitantly. What revolutionary imaginaries had the World Tribunal on Iraq developed at the turn of the twenty-first century? Which of the tribunal’s many aspirations, inspirations, and implications could I convey? Did the World Tribunal on Iraq deserve to be called Continue reading →
The Right to Remedies: On Human Rights Critiques and Peoples’ Recourses
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