Humanity is continually seeking manuscripts for publication. The goal of the journal is to provide a single forum for the analytically focused examination of human rights, humanitarianism, and development, as well as the political transformations that have reshaped the terms of liberation and idealism along with practices of domination and control. To better understand the journal’s remit please read our editorial statement.
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Early Career Scholar Prize
Humanity is pleased to announce a prize for the best essay published in the journal in a calendar year. The prize is open to graduate students or those without tenure track jobs at the time of submission. The winner of the prize will be judged by the editorial collective and announced at the end of the year.
The 2021 prize has been awarded to Karin Loevy for her essay, “The Balfour Declaration’s Territorial Landscape: Between Protection and Self-Determination,” Humanity 12, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 138–158.
Famously declaring British support for the establishment of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, the Balfour declaration (November 1917) is commonly understood as the first international instrument recognizing the right to self-determination for the Jewish people in Palestine. But the territorial framework that the drafters of the declaration envisioned drew on nineteenth-century practices of imperial protection that sustained both rule and expansion in multi-national empires. Reframing the Balfour declaration as an instrument of protection, the article contributes to the study of the colonial context of international norms such as self-determination and illuminates the international law context of Palestinian dispossession that the declaration instigated.
Honorable Mention goes to Ria Kapoor for her essay, “Removing the International from the Refugee: India in the 1940s,” Humanity 12, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 1–19.
This essay explores the reasons why India’s leaders removed it from UNRRA, and refused to join the IRO, even before the refugees of the Partition of India and Pakistan were excluded from the definitions of the 1951 UN Convention on the Status of Refugees. As the world transitioned from war to a new peace in the 1940s, India passed the 1946 Foreigners Act, which dealt with all aliens including refugees in India. This essay places an Indian understanding of refugees within global currents of the transformation of the international order as the first wave of decolonization was taking place, highlighting the iron grip of self-determination in the discussion of all rights, including refugee-related ones, as the starting point for its alternative conception of the refugee.
