Majdal Shams has long been a heartbreaking place. Since June 1967, when Israel launched its blitz on the Golan Heights as part of the shock-and-awe campaign of the Six Days War, the village has been split in two. During the Naksa, thousands of local civilians were pushed north by the invading Israeli soldiers; the remainder steadfastly remained. As a consequence, today half of the community live, displaced, under unchallenged Syrian sovereignty, north of the 1967 ceasefire line; the other half of the community live just
Read More »
Julie Billaud, Geneva Graduate Institute Antonio De Lauri, Chr. Michelsen Institute Abstract : International law has historically been manipulated to render acceptable the suspension of liberal normative standards when it comes to violence and suffering perpetrated against non-Western populations. Yet the litigation initiated by South Africa against Israel at the International Court of Justice illustrates the Global South’s unwavering commitment to challenge the international world order through legal means. Can the case of Palestine propel the ‘return’ of the political project of the Third
Read More »
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.” Frederick Douglass – “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” When the absurd is sustaining a slaughterhouse and we are witnesses. When our collective will to stop the slaughterhouse is met with imaginary structures built for us to fight with. A part
Read More »
Speaking to a group of Israeli high school students in 2022, Deputy Religious Services Minister Matan Kahana commented: “If there was a sort of button you could push that would make all the Arabs disappear, send them on an express train to Switzerland, I would press that button.” It has long been obvious, and has become more obvious since Israel’s campaign of annihilation in Gaza began last October, that most Israelis and many in the West wish, with Minister Kehana, that Palestinians—or what some refer
Read More »
In the remarks that follow I want to focus on a few of the ways language is used to describe the violence unleashed by Israel on the Palestinians. We are all no doubt aware that language is related in complex ways to action – not only in describing and misdescribing reality but also in experiencing words and motivating action. I begin with a striking passage from an article by Brian Klug on the most recent Gaza massacre: “Sometimes it is better,” he writes, “to be
Read More »
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. It’s our pleasure to announce the winner of the 2023 Early Career Essay Prize for Humanity journal: Howie Rechavia-Taylor. Howie Rechavia-Taylor, “German Colonialism In The Courtroom — Law, Reparation, And The Grammars of the Shoah,” Humanity 14, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 212-229. Abstract: In the quest to address the
Read More »
Humanity Journal is inviting submissions that address the unfolding catastrophe we are witnessing in Gaza. Submissions can take different forms: 2000-3000 word essays, longer articles, poetry or experimental genres which speak to our devastating present. Shorter pieces will be featured on our blog on a rolling basis, and longer articles will go through an expedited review process to appear in our Fall 2024 issue. We are accepting longer submissions until 31 May — longer submissions must adhere to our Style Guide or face either significant
Read More »
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. It’s our pleasure to announce two winners of the 2022 Early Career Essay Prize for Humanity journal: Safiyah Rochelle and Emma Kluge. Safiyah Rochelle, “This Is What It Looks Like: Searching for Law’s Afterlife in Guantánamo” Humanity 13, no. 3 (Winter 2022): 381-401. Taking up a series of drawings
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. [I]rony [is employed] as a defense, . . . especially against the expression of intense affect . . . – M.H. Stein (1985) G.’s aspiration in his splendid new book[1] appears to be to rewrite international law as a vast novel, much as (another) G. sought to rewrite world history as a vast novel two centuries ago, in his
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Gerry Simpson has written what he is pleased to describe—tongue firmly placed in cheek—in the alternative as “the most useless book in the history of international law,” presumably saving any timid would-be-readers the trouble of checking for themselves. What the intrepid rest of us do get instead are six chapters showcasing in typical Simpsonian fashion what is possible in writing
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. The Sentimental Life of International Law approaches anew “our age-old longing for a decent international society” (1). In search for such decency, the book critiques international law’s disciplinary constitution by means of what it “forbids its practitioners to do.”[1] This inquiry is driven by an existential unease over the strictures international law places on our engagement with the ineffable violence
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law is a book for re-envisioning ways to think and feel against the grain of international law. A plea for practitioners of international law to become more responsive to their own political longings, the book defamiliarizes the depoliticizing routines of international law in order to re-enliven a sense of imaginative possibilities even within
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Having read several times Gerry Simpson’s 2015 article in the London Review of International Law by the same name, it was an absolute pleasure and delight to read this book. Behind every piece of writing is an author, a person with sentiments, thoughts, and unique experiences. And behind every reader is likewise a person with sentiments, thoughts, and unique experiences.
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Gerry Simpson’s The Sentimental Life of International Law. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. These wise and witty rejoinders to my book made me, as usual, want to write another book in response—perhaps, the original book, but heavily modified. Reading one’s reviews is often a fraught business. One carefully placed arrow and you’re dead. Generally speaking, no matter how laudatory, we only remember those stinging, accurate barbs. But reading these essays had the opposite
Read More »
This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. Paul Thomas Chamberlain The Cold War’s Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace New York: HarperCollins, 2018 Lorenz Lüthi Cold Wars: Asia, The Middle East, Europe Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020 Kristina Spohr Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World After 1989 New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020 Are we entering a new Cold War? Recent years have seen a deterioration of relations
Read More »
This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. At this point, we know a lot about the Cold War. In part, that has been the product of archival access. Across Eastern Europe, formerly communist states and ex-Soviet republics have flung open their archives, willing—indeed, eager—to share the closely-held secrets of the past. The passage of time, too, has brought mandatory declassifications and regular releases from national archives, foreign ministries, presidential
Read More »
This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. What is global history and how do we go about writing it? What does it mean for our understanding of the so-called Cold War, and for its historiography? These are the challenges that the books in this roundtable take up, as three regional specialists turn their hand to the telling of a century of simultaneous connections between far-flung regions of the world.
Read More »
This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. In 2005, in his book The Global Cold War, Odd Arne Westad formulated an innovative intellectual blueprint for writing new international histories of the Third World through the prism of three southern continents’ shared struggle for postcolonial forms of political and economic sovereignty. This has given rise to new projects on the Global Cold War, particularly in its regional iterations, as these three
Read More »
This essay is part of a forum on new histories of the Cold War. All contributions to the forum can be found here. Thanks again to Drs. Colbourn, El-Fadl, and Krepp for taking part in this conversation. I sincerely look forward to discussing these books with the three of you. I’d also like to thank the editorial assistant for Humanity, Matthew Liberti, for proofreading this initial exchange. There are so many potential areas I’d like to touch on in our discussion: how these books build
Read More »
Interview with Lori Allen (SOAS) on her recent book A History of False Hope: Investigative Commissions in Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2020). The interview was conducted via email by Tobias Kelly, member of the Humanity editorial collective. Tobias Kelly (TK): Can you tell us how you came to this project and how it relates to your previous work? Lori Allen (LA): I see this book as being a prequel to my first book, The Rise and Fall of Human Rights: Cynicism and Politics in Occupied Palestine
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields is arranged as a composition of twenty two tableaux. Each vividly explores distinctive practices of human shielding by excavating diverse types of archival sources—official documents, personal correspondence, memoirs, news media, scholarly works, novels, videogames, and more. The succession of these tableaux occurs mostly in chronological order beginning with the American Civil War, and its
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. My first encounter with the concept of human shielding was in an interview I conducted with Majdi Abed Rabbo in Jabaliya, a neighborhood in Gaza City in February 2009. I was a member of the National Lawyers’ Guild fact-finding mission to Gaza following Israel’s first large scale offensive against the tiny coastal enclave—also known as “Operation Cast Lead.” Atop a pile
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire starts with the story of student Rachel Corrie, crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer as she tried to prevent the demolition of houses in the West Bank by putting herself in the way. Corrie, a civilian, was killed in a manner that many of us will find difficult
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire, is a detailed and effective mapping exercise introducing the reader to a growing field of legal and political interactions that center on the unstable dichotomy between killing and protecting civilians in war. Each of its 22 short chapters meticulously contextualizes a particular incident, a set of stories or an interface
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. It is a real pleasure to comment on this excellent book on the history, law, and politics of human shields. Throughout the book, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini argue that the human shield brings into relief many of the political and social dynamics of our societies. The book throws light on a humanity that is always internally-riven and hierarchically-ordered. Humans, the
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. A few minutes before midnight on May 1, 2011, President Barak Obama went on television to announce that the nation’s most wanted man was dead. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who orchestrated the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that killed almost three thousand people, now lay in a watery grave in an undisclosed location. “Justice has been done,” Obama said.
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. We are honoured by Noura Erakat’s, Lisa Hajjar’s, Pablo Kalmanovitz’s, Karin Loevy’s, Jessica Whyte’s, and Maja Zehfuss’s engagement with our book. We would like to begin by thanking them all for taking the time to read the manuscript and for offering really insightful criticism which has, in many respects, helped us to further articulate the book’s arguments. Noura Erakat asks why
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In his now classic essay published in NLH in 1976, “The Origin of Genres,” Tzvetan Todorov famously articulated the following: “It is because genres exist as an institution that they function as ‘horizons of expectation’ for readers, and as ‘models of writing’ for authors.” He goes on to argue that “Genres communicate with the society in which they flourish by means of institutionalization,” and
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Which forms are most amenable for narrating the afterlives of slavery and why? Which configurations of race and power come to the fore and which recede when contemporary Afro-diasporic writers take up the slave narrative to address contemporary human-rights violations in Africa? What happens to the mutually constitutive relationship between race and form across different spaces and times? These are the questions that animate
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present, and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once? Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing[2] “It’s all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once. Jesmyn
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery, Yogita Goyal traces the translation of sentimental narrative structures and tropes from nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary narrative accounts of human rights abuses and the global (re)production of race. “In exploring the contradictory uses of historical violence for contemporary politics,” she argues, “we need to not only return to the question of what slavery itself means
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Every great book has its shadow books. Sometimes we sense them as the submerged iceberg of all the research that stands behind but does not get integrated into the text at hand; sometimes they linger like a specter of paths-not-taken in the book’s long gestation; and sometimes they are the imaginary book that we begin to conceptualize under the tutelage of the book we
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In its dynamic charting of the American slave narrative’s multi-pronged evolution, Runaway Genres could easily expand in any number of further directions. Most would pursue American and markedly “global” modes of expression; writing, that is, that bears a clear transatlantic imprint, even where it is best described as sidestepping or rejecting transatlanticism’s primacy in thinking through Black self-formations. As Goyal’s book shows, the sheer
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery examines the emergence of “slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood in order to rethink race in a global frame” (2). The book thus concerns itself with the implications of new definitions of slavery and Blackness for American publics. Specifically, Yogita Goyal rethinks current literary frameworks for
Read More »
This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. The core question animating my explorations in Runaway Genres was the relation between slavery and freedom across past and present landscapes. The project started with noting the resurgence and proliferation of neo-slave narratives by African American writers in the last four decades; it moved on to track how the slave narrative’s peculiar features repeat today in narratives of capture and violence from the Global
Read More »
Li Wenliang, Liu Zhiming, Xu Depu, Peng Yinhua, Xia Sisi: these are the names of some of the doctors that have died while treating COVID-19 patients in Hubei Province in China, according to media reports. As of late February, 3,387 health workers in China have reportedly been infected; at least 18 of these have died. Some of the earliest cases of community transmission of the disease in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia have likewise afflicted frontline health workers. Images circulating in the
Read More »
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
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Amy Kapczynski’s essay “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Across the Americas, peoples (let’s keep them multiple) live in exhausted worlds. Worlds on the edge of autocracy, of financial collapse, of infrastructural breakdown and environmental tipping points—mediated by extreme populism and state and corporate efforts to dismantle piecemeal, though meaningful, agendas of socioeconomic rights. Violence and deadly health disparities are persistent realities that, time and
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Amy Kapczynski’s essay “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Amy Kapczynski’s essay, “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism,” is a persuasive and provocative retort to recent claims by Naomi Klein and others that human rights discourse is an impotent weapon against neoliberalism, if not a complement to it. Through the specific example of the human right to medicines guaranteed by law in
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Amy Kapczynski’s essay “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Introduction Amy Kapczynski’s article presciently points out the weaknesses of the judicialization of the right to medicines, and its failure “to engage a foundational aspect of [these cases]: the political economy of medicines that they assume.”[1] Kapczynski argues that these cases suggest that a right to medicines “imbricated” within the prevailing neoliberal regime is plausibly regressive:
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Amy Kapczynski’s essay “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Amy Kapczynski’s essay “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism” is part of a growing scholarship on the apparently paradoxical situation where human rights are mainstreamed globally as the lingua franca to discuss issues of justice while inequalities increase and the capacity of states to provide social protection and promote redistribution is reduced. Some
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Amy Kapczynski’s essay “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. It is refreshing to read a critique of human rights that is neither overly deterministic nor overly grounded in the experience and concerns of the Northwest quadrant of the globe. Amy Kapczynksi’s call for an approach to human rights that attacks the political economy of a problem is an excellent contribution to the current debate about
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Amy Kapczynski’s essay “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. The most elemental claim I make in “The Right to Medicines in an Age of Neoliberalism” is that questions of political economy should be central to the analysis and practice of contemporary human rights. I read this superb set of responses as essentially in agreement, and I will focus here on how they speak to a
Read More »
Last December the United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights, Kate Gilmore, commissioned an ethnographic consultancy of the organizational culture of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). The consultancy was assigned to a team consisting of Agathe Mora, Julie Billaud, and myself, three political and legal anthropologists who combined have extensive experience in the ethnography of human rights and international organizations. The call for the consultancy outlined as its motivations the desire to “identify remaining barriers and obstacles to,
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. “Literature is put to all kinds of political uses, public and private,” Philip Roth once observed, “but one oughtn’t confuse those uses with the hard-won reality that an author has succeeded in realizing in a work of art.” After reading Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (2018), I wonder if Lyndsey Stonebridge would disagree. Works of literature that deal with human rights issues are
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees offers a historically rich, theoretically compelling, and literarily nuanced account of a question that has long underpinned scholarship on human rights: what is the relationship between literature and human rights? Several aesthetic forms are typically foregrounded when considering this question: sentimentalism as a mode of empathizing with the suffering other; the Bildungsroman as a genre that
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Placeless People cements Lyndsey Stonebridge’s position as one of the most committed and perceptive chroniclers of the Euro-U.S. intellectual milieu of the mid-twentieth century. Like her brilliant previous book, The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremburg, Placeless People returns to this historical juncture to recover critiques of humanitarian thinking that were articulated at the time of human rights law’s formalization. Stonebridge describes this book as
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Although inequality continues to skyrocket in the United States—whether in income, wealth, education, or healthcare outcomes—and the much-heralded revitalization of national infrastructure has yet to materialize, the current administration has placed its electoral wager on a loud and very public demand for $12.2 billion to extend the border wall with Mexico under the pretext of a national emergency.[1] While such a wall would not
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. It is always a special act of scholarly good faith to take time to read, respond, and write about one another’s work; I thank my colleagues for their generous care, attention, and criticism, and the editors of Humanity for creating this space for dialogue and future thinking. Two themes emerge from these responses to Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees, one methodological, the other
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Jessica Whyte’s essay “The ‘Dangerous Concept of the Just War.’” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In her essay Jessica Whyte makes a fascinating intervention in the age-old debate on the origins of international humanitarian law (IHL) and its relationship with just war theory. In challenging Western-centered explanations, Whyte’s essay offers an intriguing perspective on the role of anti-colonial actors in IHL’s making, which is the focus of this review of her work. Unlike
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Jessica Whyte’s essay “The ‘Dangerous Concept of the Just War.’” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In her essay, Jessica Whyte persuasively refutes what she takes to be a hegemonic narrative of the development, and triumph, of ideas of just war. Reading together Walzer, O’Brien, and the 2015 United States Law of War Manual, she shows what a revisionist story they collectively offer, in part because of their reliance on a narrative in which
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Jessica Whyte’s essay “The ‘Dangerous Concept of the Just War.’” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. While Jessica Whyte’s brilliant essay focuses on a particular historical moment, it also addresses a longstanding puzzle. She ponders why, in their effort to frame violence as ethical, some actors invoke the just war tradition and others the laws of war. She also asks why an actor who in the past has appealed to the laws of war
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Jessica Whyte’s essay “The ‘Dangerous Concept of the Just War.’” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Jessica Whyte’s essay sets itself the timely and ambitious goal of revealing the hidden history of just war thinking in the late 20th Century.[1] While several scholars have been pursuing the broader project of revisiting the dominant historiography, Whyte’s approach is highly original due to its detailed analysis of the concrete circumstances in which the Additional Protocols to
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Jessica Whyte’s essay “The ‘Dangerous Concept of the Just War.’” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Jessica Whyte has written a compelling and erudite critique of claim in the 2015 United States Law of War manual that the laws of war are “rooted in the Just War tradition” (314). She convincingly demonstrates that this seemingly innocuous statement is completely at odds with those made by U.S. officials during the negotiations of the Additional Protocols
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Jessica Whyte’s essay “The ‘Dangerous Concept of the Just War.’” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. It is wonderful to have the opportunity to engage with the questions posed by these astute and thoughtful responses to my work. Those questions are as numerous as they are provocative, and here I focus on several themes that allow me to bring into sharper focus and extend the claims of my original essay. That essay challenges moralizing
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Joseph Massad’s essay “Against Self-Determination.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Self-determination has been impressively well studied by international jurists, political philosophers, and, more latterly, as a renascent source of inquiry for historians.[1] Joseph Massad’s work contributes to what is a daunting field, and also, interacts with the more austere scholarly terrain on the subversive functioning of the discourse.[2] It also, more obliquely, confirms the salience of the recent pursuit of more globally oriented
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Joseph Massad’s essay “Against Self-Determination.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Joseph Massad’s article “Against Self-Determination” offers a passionate, even polemical critique of what he calls the Wilsonian vision of self-determination. This is not the Wilsonian vision as laid out by Erez Manela, however, but rather a legitimizing ideology for the “right of conquest” of settler-colonial nations and peoples, as against the more emancipatory vision of Lenin and like-minded anticolonial nationalists. “Settler-colonists would only
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Joseph Massad’s essay “Against Self-Determination.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In his essay, Massad argues that the dominant form of self-determination has actually been used to reject various nations’ claims to self-determination. States only became open to the recognition of the right of self-determination, Massad claims, when such recognition would not include independence. Massad draws analogies between the Palestinian case and the cases of indigenous peoples around the world and discusses how colonisers
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Joseph Massad’s essay “Against Self-Determination.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In his trenchant essay, “Against Self-Determination,” Joseph Massad deftly argues that colonizing states crafted the dominant form of self-determination to limit the claims of anticolonial nationalism and enhance the claims of colonialism. He further zones in on the ways in which these structural limitations have served settler colonial states in ways that constrain indigenous peoples’ claims and access to their traditional territories—lands that
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Joseph Massad’s essay “Against Self-Determination.” All contributions to the symposium can be found here. I am most grateful for these four serious engagements with my essay. I had already learned much from the scholarship of all four respondents when I wrote my essay, which cites their important work. The essay, which is a short version of a much larger chapter that constitutes one third of my current book project, sought to provide a genealogy of the political
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Attempting the Impossible, Doing the Necessary Sometimes, in trying to think through the history of the present, it’s helpful to begin at the end and work your way back. The reader who takes this approach to Ayça Çubukçu’s For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq will be
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. For the Love of Humanity tells the story of the global anti-war movement’s efforts to put the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies on trial for crimes committed during the invasion and occupation of Iraq. It is an intensely creative and also a vexing book. How it troubles
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Much as its liberal cosmopolitan advocates might wish otherwise, “human rights” are a floating signifier. Small libraries have been built on the effort to give “human rights” settled and permanent philosophical and legal meaning, as well as cultural and historical grounding in a variety of genealogies of moral progress, but
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. When Bertrand Russell organized an International War Crimes Tribunal in 1966 to investigate and condemn United States imperialism in Vietnam, the institutional form chosen was highly original. Backed by no state and unable to compel individuals to stand accused or to impose sanctions, the tribunal would nonetheless use the model
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Ayça Çubukçu’s original and insightful book is an exemplary work of critical scholarship for our times. This ethnography of the 2003–2005 World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), of which she was an organizer, boldly relates theory to practice as well as scholarship to activism. Her method, which she calls “political philosophy
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium on Ayça Çubukçu’s book For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). All contributions to the symposium can be found here. I would like thank the remarkable scholars gathered in this book symposium from the fields of anthropology, history, international law, international relations, and English literature, who have responded in challenging ways to my book, For the Love of Humanity: The World Tribunal on Iraq, and to what the book describes,
Read More »
The journal Humanity was founded in 2010 to examine the politics of “humanity” found in the convergence of human rights, humanitarianism and development. This was a period when a critique of human rights and the entanglements of humanitarianisms with empire was also gaining momentum. The current editorial collective affirms Humanity’s founding mission while attuning to new challenges. A complex dynamic of old problems and emerging obstacles has occasioned a chastened turn to human rights and humanitarianism: a renewed call to humanity has gained traction in
Read More »
Edinburgh, October 2018 From migrants facing death at borders around the world, to the different chapters of the “War on Terror,” to the politics of post-genocide, our era seems to be marked by the constant politicisation of death. Social and physical death are increasingly intertwined in various spectacles of horror. Clearly, not all deaths are treated equally. Trenchant questions remain over what kinds of death are deemed morally, political and legally significant; and what kinds of death are rendered visible or invisible, and with what
Read More »
This post is part of a series on politics in the face of death. For an introduction and links to the other posts, please see here. From the Mediterranean Sea to the US-Mexico border and all the way to the Australian coast line, for some years now states have been deploying military forces to arrest migration and refugee flows. In several countries, the humanitarian approach used to manage the influx of migrants has been increasingly combined with a military one, with some governments waging a
Read More »
This post is part of a series on politics in the face of death. For an introduction and links to the other posts, please see here. I want to address, here, the dead body itself. Not just any dead body, but the mass dead victims of politically animated atrocity, some of which, sometimes, become the subject of large-scale justice processes, such as those in Argentina, Rwanda and Bosnia. These dead are not only the objects of humanitarian concern and legal action, but also the site
Read More »
This post is part of a series on politics in the face of death. For an introduction and links to the other posts, please see here. In the mid-1990s an extremist political faction within the Hutu-dominated Rwandan government successfully mobilised a large militia and many ordinary citizens in the organised extermination of Rwandans identified as ethnic Tutsi, as well as Hutu who resisted the regime’s genocidal intention. Few escaped, with Rwandans of both determined and ambiguous ethnic identity and political affiliation drawn into the conflict.
Read More »
This post is part of a series on politics in the face of death. For an introduction and links to the other posts, please see here. The ongoing, large-scale death of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea has come to play a central role in the politics of migration and borders. The disturbing presence of bodies washed ashore after a shipwreck, as well as the haunting absence of those who have been swallowed by the depths of the sea, have crystallized ongoing political debates in ambivalent
Read More »
Call for Papers: Special Issue of the Canadian Journal of Development Studies on ‘Law, Governance and Development: Critical and Heterodox Approaches’ (co-edited by Mark Toufayan and Siobhan Airey) The myriad legal and policy instruments in the governance of development have shifted and evolved in significant ways in recent years, posing challenges to scholars, historians, policy-makers and practitioners on how to effectively map, analyse and critique their nature and effects. Contributions are being sought (in French and English) for a bilingual Special Issue of the Canadian
Read More »
This is part two of a two-part post. Part one is available here. Abstract: Much controversy has arisen around leftist attempts to curb provocative expression, particularly hate speech directed at certain vulnerable social groups. That coupling of leftism with censorship is, however, historically recent. For Marx, controls on speech serve more to hamper human emancipation than to promote it. In this essay it is argued that Marx’s critiques of rights are not as categorical as is sometimes thought. The “property right” paradigm does indeed represent
Read More »
This is part one of a two-part post. Part two will be available here. Abstract: Much controversy has arisen around leftist attempts to curb provocative expression, particularly hate speech directed at certain vulnerable social groups. That coupling of leftism with censorship is, however, historically recent. For Marx, controls on speech serve more to hamper human emancipation than to promote it. In this essay it is argued that Marx’s critiques of rights are not as categorical as is sometimes thought. The “property right” paradigm does indeed
Read More »
The founding editorial collective of Humanity—Nehal Bhuta, Nils Gilman, Nicolas Guilhot, Samuel Moyn, Joseph Slaughter, and Miriam Ticktin—is pleased to announce that, after ten years, its members are stepping down. To take the journal into the future, a new editorial collective has formed. Our transition has already begun, and the official switchover from one collective to the other takes place in the new year. We congratulate and welcome the members of the new editorial collective, who are already open to contact and open for consultation:
Read More »
Over the course of this week, the Turkish government will be called to account for some of the most heinous human rights violations ever to be witnessed. This demand for justice won’t address the state’s reported crimes against the population of Afrin in the name of national security. And it will undoubtedly entail little, if any, scrutiny regarding the country’s current repressive measures against pro-democratic constituents. Indictments will not be made in international criminal courts or special tribunals. And the victims and perpetrators will not
Read More »
My trip to Lviv/Lwów/Lemberg did not begin smoothly. I flew overnight from New York to Frankfurt, and from there to Vienna; boarding the third and last flight from Vienna to Lviv on Thursday afternoon, the computer beeped at my boarding pass. “Australians need a visa.” “I know; we buy it at the airport.” Not at Lviv airport, it turns out. Kiev? Sure. Or Odessa – no problem. But not Lviv. The security official remained unmoved by the fact that I had to give a conference
Read More »
This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 5. The interwar period was a time of heightened confusion about the boundary between war and peace. The meaning of both terms became thoroughly destabilized by political events. In this context the legal effort to end war through outlawry had unexpected and counterproductive effects.[1] For by removing war from the realm of acceptable
Read More »
This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 4. Hathaway and Shapiro claim that “the outlawry of war in 1928—and the broader legal transformation that it unleashed—made it safer to trade” (344). By introducing a safeguard against conquest, Kellogg-Briand released the energies of free trade and colonial nationalism, resulting in a globalized world economy and a quadrupling of the number of
Read More »
This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 3. The Internationalists compellingly shows how the multi-layered nature of Old World Order made it difficult to undo all its principles at once. One of these principles was neutrality. Hathaway and Shapiro are not fans of it. They regard it as an “excuse” not to take action against aggressors and as a way
Read More »
This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. This is part 2. Hathaway and Shapiro announce in their introduction that “this book is, at its core, a work of intellectual history” (xx). I am not sure that this does justice to the ambition of their project, which is much larger. In their conclusion, they summarize its essential point as the insight that “the choice
Read More »
This post is an advance version of a review essay that will appear in Humanity volume 10. It will be posted in five parts: one each day this week. The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World Oona A. Hathaway and Scott J. Shapiro New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. xxii + 430 pp. If one asked a group of historians, political scientists, and lawyers what they would consider the most important single treaty or international agreement of the last two
Read More »
A number of the world’s political leaders are currently making a lot of fuss about their business credentials. The President of the United States is a “dealmaker.” The Prime Minister of Australia tells him on the phone that because they are both “businessmen” they understand each other and their “transactional” instincts. In other words, political exchange is not driven by any underlying ideal, but merely a quid pro quo. Although, to tell the truth, Malcolm Turnbull is less a businessman, and more, like the President
Read More »
Dedicated to interdisciplinary and critical dialogue on international human rights law and discourse, the Rapoport Center’s Working Paper Series (WPS) publishes innovative papers by established and early-career researchers as well as practitioners. The goal is to provide a productive environment for debate about human rights among academics, policymakers, activists, practitioners, and the public. Authors from all disciplines and institutions are welcome to submit papers on any topic related to human rights. For the 2017-2018 series, we particularly encourage papers that explore the relationship between labor,
Read More »
For more information, download the call for applications. Save
Read More »
This post appears in conjunction with a dossier on transformative occupations in Humanity issue 8.2 There are two schools of thought on transformative occupations. Adam Scheffer narrowly contrasts it with the international humanitarian law (IHL) concept of belligerent occupation, whose main hallmark is its temporary character.[1] Nehal Bhuta offers a broad historical version, running the gamut from the occupatio bellica of the post-Napoleonic settlement to transformative humanitarian interventions both in the post-WWII and the post-Cold War era, and more recently in Iraq. The 20th century
Read More »
This post appears in conjunction with a dossier on transformative occupations in Humanity issue 8.2 In any attempt to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 war, it is inevitable to reflect on the meaning of Israel’s phenomenal victory and the transformations it brought about to the Middle East. In this regard, much has been written about the profound implications of the 1967 war on Arab world; the fall of Arab nationalism; the rise of Islamic politics; and the consolidation of authoritarian regimes as a way
Read More »
As guest editors of the dossier on “Transformative Occupations in the Modern Middle East” in the current issue of Humanity, we are delighted that Leila Farsakh and Gershon Shafir each agreed to contribute an introductory meditation on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War and the history of the transformative Israeli occupation in Palestine. The dossier, as a unit, builds on the work of the critical legal scholars who have done so much to develop the concept of transformative occupation in the years since
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium, Doing Justice to Truth in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals. All currently available contributions to the symposium can be found here. A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. The idea that we are in a “post-truth” era is lately on everyone’s lips. The popular, scholarly and comedic analyses of Donald Trump’s ambivalent relationship to facticity would already fill volumes.[1] Yet the instability of meaning and the uncomfortable fit between denotational content and interpretive frameworks are not
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium, Doing Justice to Truth in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals. All currently available contributions to the symposium can be found here. A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. In December 2014, after twenty years of operation, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) delivered its last appeal judgment. Established in November 1994 by the United Nations Security Council, the ICTR was tasked with putting on trial any person accused of committing the following in Rwanda in
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium, Doing Justice to Truth in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals. All currently available contributions to the symposium can be found here. A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. Truth and justice are distinct concepts. Yet, recent years have witnessed the emergence and gradual recognition of the right to the truth. If it first was invoked in connection with the crime of enforced disappearances, this right is progressively becoming generic and self-standing. It has been defined by
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium, Doing Justice to Truth in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals. All currently available contributions to the symposium can be found here. A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. This post briefly summarizes a full-length law review article that will appear in volume 75 of the Washington & Lee Law Review. International criminal law faces unprecedented challenges. Some of these challenges generate widespread publicity whereas others are less well-publicized but just as concerning. The not-very-well-publicized challenge that
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium, Doing Justice to Truth in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals. All currently available contributions to the symposium can be found here. A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. As the Ongwen trial has made clear, the significance that international criminal trials have for the production of truth resides not only in the narratives forged within the courtroom but also in the impact trials have on the political discourses and practices around the trial. In the Uganda
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium, Doing Justice to Truth in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals. All currently available contributions to the symposium can be found here. A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. The trial of former Lord’s Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen at the International Criminal Court has thrown into relief the difficulties of seeking truth through international criminal trials. The ICC prosecution has constructed a series of narratives in order to establish the legitimacy of Ongwen’s trial, narratives that
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium, Doing Justice to Truth in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals. All currently available contributions to the symposium can be found here. A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. Introduction[1] International criminal tribunals (ICTs) are epistemic engines. That is, they are institutions that systematically produce knowledge or find truths. And they do so not only in the way usually recognised in doctrinal scholarly works on international criminal law, i.e. in the sense emphasized, e.g., by the ICTR
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium, Doing Justice to Truth in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals. All currently available contributions to the symposium can be found here. A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. Archives are sites of power, contestation, and control. The very term archive derives from the ancient Greek word arkeion, which referred to the magistrates (archons) house where official records were kept and protected. The magistrate drew their power through protecting, controlling and interpreting these records in order to
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium, Doing Justice to Truth in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals. All currently available contributions to the symposium can be found here. A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. International crimes such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are manifestations of large-scale serious violations of human rights, which have been defined as the most serious crimes of international concern. They constitute a prime example of collective, systematic criminality. Usually, they are committed by a multiplicity
Read More »
This post is part of a symposium, Doing Justice to Truth in International Criminal Courts and Tribunals. All currently available contributions to the symposium can be found here. A PDF of this post can be downloaded here. As the field of international criminal justice has institutionalized over the course of the past 70 years, communities—both local and international—have increasingly turned to international criminal courts and tribunals (ICTs) to serve as arbiters of truth in the aftermath of mass atrocities. In turn, ICTs have acted as
Read More »
This post first appeared at Small Precautions. What would a fully integrated “global” history of development entail? It would require Considering all actors in the development process: from the subaltern “objects” of development at one end of the spectrum, to various NGOs and IFIs and transnational corporations in the middle layers, to state elites in the North at the other end – recognizing the politically negotiated nature of each project Looking across all geographies in which development has been deployed: including not just the
Read More »
This post originally appeared on Al-Jumhuriya. Deluge © Imranovi The following is a talk given by Kelly Grotke for Stanford University’s conference on the subject of ‘Cruelty’, in which the prominent academic examines friendship, universality, and cruelty between the European past and the Syrian present. States of Friendship Friendship, for Cicero, was a virtuous thing, sustained by love, respect, and sincerity – this is why “one does not live with a friend as one would with a dictator.”[2] Similarly, for Etienne la Boétie: “…a tyrant never either
Read More »
This review essay will appear in Humanity volume 9, issue 1. Advocacy in Conflict: Critical Perspectives on Transnational Activism Alex de Waal, editor Zed Books, 2015 Digital Humanitarians: How Big Data Is Changing the Face of Humanitarian Response Patrick Meier CRS Press, 2015 Dangerous Trade: Arms Exports, Human Rights, and International Reputation Jennifer Erickson Columbia University Press, 2015 On January 12, 2010, a devastating earthquake shook Haiti, leading to the collapse of much of its infrastructure, burying hundreds of thousands beneath the rubble. At a
Read More »
This post originally appeared at HistPhil, where Maribel Morey is co-editor. She discusses the Gunnar Myrdal symposium featured in Humanity’s latest issue. Americans generally remember Gunnar Myrdal (1898-1987) as the astute Swedish observer of American race relations who authored the monumental study of black Americans that had been commissioned and funded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Cataloguing the various ways that white Americans discriminated against black Americans, Myrdal argued in the two-volume manuscript that
Read More »
In nominating Judge Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, President Trump fulfilled a campaign pledge to nominate a person who followed in the tradition of “Originalism” espoused by Justice Antonin J. Scalia. In making this pledge, Mr. Trump affirmed the conventional association between an Originalist approach to legal interpretation and a well defined set of conservative political and social views. To be an Originalist, Trump implied and his supporters assumed, was to be anti-regulation, anti-abortion, anti-welfare, anti-immigrant, anti-minority rights; it was also to be
Read More »
This piece has previously appeared in German translation in Heft 10 (Oktober 2016). When the global economic crisis erupted in 2008, it was not only historians who scurried in search of the lessons of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Nearly a decade later, as analysts of Britain’s departure from the EU diagnose the symptoms of an economic malaise called “globalization,” it is again worth considering what we can learn from the past. It might seem unimaginable—given the turn in present-day political rhetoric—but through the
Read More »
This is part three in a series. See here for parts one and two. Oath and language: In my third and final example, I come to probably the most important element in structuring humanitarian spaces: language. It is in language that the connection between the spheres of humanitarianism, power, and politics becomes clearest. Here, I will not look at the meanings of the words or programmes of humanitarians; I am interested in the function of humanitarian language within the political sphere. In his work on
Read More »
This is part two in a series. For part one, see here. Part three will follow tomorrow. Structuring knowledge: If the Maussian concept can help to see social spaces with dynamic and asymmetric power relations, theories developed by Foucault can sharpen the understanding of the institutionalization of knowledge as a strategy of governance. In the field of humanitarianism the example is the standardization and dissemination of knowledge.[1] Many books have been written on missions and operations, but little research has been done on the development
Read More »
This is the first post in a series of three. Parts two and three will be published on subsequent days. In his book Empire of Humanity, Michael Barnett outlines some of the strengths and contradictions of humanitarianism using the notion of “empires.” First, he applies this notion to the definition of humanitarianism: “What distinguishes humanitarianism from previous acts of compassion is that it is organized and part of governance, connects the immanent to the transcendent, and is directed at those in other lands.”[1] The question
Read More »
International Research Academy on the History of Global Humanitarianism Academy Leaders: Fabian Klose (Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz) Johannes Paulmann (Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz) Andrew Thompson (University of Exeter) in co-operation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (Geneva) and with support by the German Historical Institute London Venues: Leibniz Institute of European History, Mainz & Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva Dates: 10-21 July 2017 Deadline: 31 December 2016 Information at: http://ghra.ieg-mainz.de/, http://hhr.hypotheses.org/ and http://imperialglobalexeter.com/ The
Read More »
http://web2.uconn.edu/uconnjobs/faculty/schools_colleges/clas.php Job Posting Title: Assistant Professor, Human Rights Institute and Department of History The Human Rights Institute and the Department of History at the University of Connecticut invite applications for a tenure-track joint appointment in History and Human Rights at the assistant professor level beginning August 23, 2017. The research and teaching responsibilities of the successful candidate will be situated in the Human Rights Institute and the History Department (the tenure home of the appointment), both of which have thriving research communities and strong undergraduate
Read More »
This paper was first given at the Stockholm Conference on Human Rights, May 26, 2015. This concludes the post that appeared yesterday. For most of the critiques of human rights, the tragic flaw in the entire system, the serpent in the garden of universal rights, is the state. In theory, the state has no role in determining human rights, which pertain to the species rather than the polis. Indeed, modern human rights—the UDHR version—were conceived as a way of protecting individuals, and the “intermediate institutions,”
Read More »
This paper was first given at the Stockholm Conference on Human Rights, May 26, 2015. The second part will appear tomorrow. Like others here, I received a very kind invitation to participate in this conference. The letter noted that the concept of human rights, once limited to cases of torture and slavery, had acquired a wider applicability, and was now deployed in a wide range of situations. The concept of species-specific rights had, this letter said, brought into focus “innumerable examples” of “violations” that otherwise
Read More »
What follows is the rough draft of some thoughts on the topic prompted by an exciting upcoming conference at George Washington University. 1. The almost universal tendency is to conflate the two categories, and it is understandable that the minority and prophylactic response to this conflation has been to distinguish them for the sake of analytical clarity and historical propriety. Obviously, life is messy, and no set of distinctions is perfect, but it seems wiser to avoid conflation and to err on the side of
Read More »
This post is part of a roundtable discussion on two historiographic articles by Joseph Hodge published in recent issues of Humanity. For more about the roundtable and all currently available posts please see this page. Once again let me express my gratitude to the commentators, most of who appear to agree with the overall argument, analysis and historiographical arc I have sketched out in these essays. That said, as previously noted, several contributors also see the need to reflect more deeply about the study of
Read More »
This post is part of a roundtable discussion on two historiographic articles by Joseph Hodge published in recent issues of Humanity. For more about the roundtable and all currently available posts please see this page. I would like begin by expressing my gratitude to the Humanity editorial collective, and especially to Nils Gilman and Sam Moyn, for providing me with the opportunity to publish these two pieces. I would also like to thank the commentators – Tom Robertson, Corinna Unger, Robert Packenham, David Ekbladh, Steve
Read More »
This post is part of a roundtable discussion on two historiographic articles by Joseph Hodge published in recent issues of Humanity. For more about the roundtable and all currently available posts please see this page. Joseph Hodge offers us a richly detailed analysis of the making of a new academic subfield, anthropological and historical studies of development. Students will be mining his footnotes for years to come, and they will appreciate the intelligent—and sometimes severe—critiques he presents of the literature whose influence he has made
Read More »
This post is part of a roundtable discussion on two historiographic articles by Joseph Hodge published in recent issues of Humanity. For more about the roundtable and all currently available posts please see this page. My sincere thanks to Dr. Hodge for producing this remarkable review essay. It brilliantly captures the simultaneous appeal and challenge of exploring the history of development. As Hodge shows, development has embodied both disruption and creativity, engaging a wide range of historical actors in both aspects of the work within
Read More »
This post is part of a roundtable discussion on two historiographic articles by Joseph Hodge published in recent issues of Humanity. For more about the roundtable and all currently available posts please see this page. In early 2002, amid the growing optimism surrounding the United States’ Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, I heard on the radio an U.S. official claim that the United States’ nation-building efforts should strive to transform Kabul into Zurich. The statement struck me as preposterous and perplexing. How would the United
Read More »
This post is part of a roundtable discussion on two historiographic articles by Joseph Hodge published in recent issues of Humanity. For more about the roundtable and all currently available posts please see this page. I will admit surprise when asked to comment on a historiographical essay. These essays an interesting position in academic circles and do not usually rate debate. If we are frank, in the hierarchies we build in the historical profession they are not granted the esteem of articles grounded in primary
Read More »
This post is part of a roundtable discussion on two historiographic articles by Joseph Hodge published in recent issues of Humanity. For more about the roundtable and all currently available posts please see this page. This is a very ambitious article in terms of themes, historical periods, world regions, and types of writings. Its overall theme is development, an extremely broad idea. (So far as I know, Hodge never defines it explicitly in abstract terms, although it appears he means by it progress in nation-states.)
Read More »
This post is part of a roundtable discussion on two historiographic articles by Joseph Hodge published in recent issues of Humanity. For more about the roundtable and all currently available posts please see this page. In comparatively little time, the history of development has become a highly popular and equally populated subject of scholarly research. It is characterized by lively debates and a high number of publications of all genres, and it might well be considered one of the most productive fields of research in
Read More »
This post is part of a roundtable discussion on two historiographic articles by Joseph Hodge published in recent issues of Humanity. For more about the roundtable and all currently available posts please see this page. Joe Hodge has done a great service with this insightful article. A good review should summarize, analyze, and situate existing literature but also point to new roads to walk down. This piece does exactly that. I find two of Hodge’s main points particularly important. The first is that “a more
Read More »
When Solon gave Athens her laws, he developed egalitarian citizenship by democratizing practices hitherto reserved to nobility. His gesture to the intermediate classes laid the groundwork for Athenian democracy, and anticipated a period of classical splendor to boot. But the idea of group equality – for all its historical instructiveness for understanding the legal position of individuals in society – has received surprisingly little attention in attempts to grasp the foundations of contemporary human rights law. This is especially puzzling considering that the recognition of
Read More »
This blog is a follow-up to the authors’ online symposium on the evolving ethics of qualitative research in fragile states For policymakers, fragility and conflict are one of the 21st century’s key development challenges. Fragility is by definition heterogeneous and contextual—which is why qualitative research is such a good tool to help us understand exactly why “there” is so messed up, and what we could or should do to fix it. And so, perhaps logically, we—primarily young, western, tertiary-educated men and women—are doing more and
Read More »
Download the podcastFeed | iTunes | Hipcast | SoundcloudThe First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire are defining moments in the political history of the modern Middle East. This narrative is usually told through the lenses of the breakup of empire, the successes and failures of national movements, and the colonial involvement of British and French Mandates in the region. In this episode, Keith Watenpaugh offers a different approach to this story through a critical look at the role of American humanitarian
Read More »
In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, Europeans have returned to the political rhetoric of times we might have long thought past. Late last year nostalgia and disorientation resonated through the French National Front’s victory-cry at elections, as Marie Le Pen declared the world no longer divided left against right, but patriotes against mondialistes. Given the combination of challenges making European headlines—from collapsing economies to borders—the rhetoric of the right echoes a sense of threat posed to nations by globalization (a tone particularly resonant
Read More »
Deluged in data for more than a decade, our reflex has been to articulate our fears and anxieties in the language of privacy. But it may be more appropriate—and useful—to think in terms of conscience. Etymologically, conscience is, of course, the “knowledge with” which we act, on which we are judged, and through which we achieve self-awareness. Today, this knowledge is produced in part through the steady streams of information we cede, emit and receive in the ceaseless data-flux that we now inhabit. We might
Read More »
Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. By Timothy Snyder. In his recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Corey Robin describes the position of the public intellectual as a dialectic: “On the one hand, he’s supposed to be called by some combination of the two vocations Max Weber set out in his lectures in Munich: that of the scholar and that of the statesman. Neither academic nor activist but both … On the other hand, the public intellectual is supposed to possess
Read More »
The world has done a remarkable job of feeding itself. Despite population growth, the Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the prevalence of hunger in most parts of the developing world has declined from 18.2 percent in 2002 to 13.5 percent in 2013. In part, this is because food itself has become more affordable. Prices of staple foods have declined (with occasional blips): in 1995 the average price for maize was about $350 per ton, in 1995 it was about $200 per ton, and last
Read More »
This is a pre-publication version of Patrick Weil’s essay, due to appear in Humanity this year. We post this version in light of pressing political developments in France that revolve around questions of citizenship, immigration, and sovereignty, precisely the themes explored here. Since the Rights of Man were proclaimed to be ‘inalienable’ irreducible to and undeducible from other right or laws, … man appeared as the only sovereign in matters of law as the people was proclaimed the only sovereign in matters of government. — Hannah Arendt
Read More »
The COP21 accord signed on Saturday represents a landmark achievement in the fight against global climate change. The negotiations in Paris produced a binding commitment by 195 nations to restrict their greenhouse gas emissions. Despite years of effort, such a sweeping agreement had eluded negotiators until now. COP21, however, was not entirely without historical precedent. In addition to earlier, less successful attempts to limit greenhouse gas emissions like the Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto, and Copenhagen agreements, the talks in Paris also evoked older debates about
Read More »
In this final post, Deval Desai and Rebecca Tapscott respond to comments by Lisa Denney and Pilar Domingo, Michael Woolcock, Morten Jerven, Alex de Waal, and Holly Porter. Our paper, Tomayto Tomahto, is in essence an exhortation and an ethical question. The exhortation: treat and unpack R4F (for we limit our observations to research conducted for policy-making about fragile and conflict-affected places) as an institution of global governance, a set of complex social processes and knowledge practices that produce evidence as part of policy-making. The ethical question:
Read More »
This post is a contribution to an online symposium on the changing nature of knowledge production in fragile states. Be sure to read other entries by Deval Desai and Rebecca Tapscott, Lisa Denney and Pilar Domingo, Michael Woolcock, Morten Jerven, and Alex de Waal. The piece is a welcome provocation to discussion, even if ultimately I am left with the thought: there is a rather fundamental difference between tomatoes on a supply chain and the pursuit of understanding human experience. I show that here, intentionally choosing to write from
Read More »
This post is a contribution to an online symposium on the changing nature of knowledge production in fragile states. Be sure to read other entries by Deval Desai and Rebecca Tapscott, Lisa Denney and Pilar Domingo, Michael Woolcock, Morten Jerven. There’s a commendable search for rigor in social science. But there’s also an illusion that numbers ipso facto represent rigor, and that sophisticated mathematical analysis of the social scientific datasets can expand the realm of explanatory possibilities. Social scientific researchers working in what the Justice and Security Research Programme
Read More »
This post is a contribution to an online symposium on the changing nature of knowledge production in fragile states. Be sure to read other entries by Deval Desai and Rebecca Tapscott, Lisa Denney and Pilar Domingo, and Michael Woolcock. In 2010 I was doing research for Poor Numbers: How we are misled by African development statistics and what to do about it. I was In Lusaka, Zambia on a Wednesday afternoon, and was having a free and frank conversation with a specialist working for the UK’s Department for
Read More »
This post is a contribution to an online symposium on the changing nature of knowledge production in fragile states. Be sure to read other entries by Deval Desai and Rebecca Tapscott and Lisa Denney and Pilar Domingo. My nomination for development’s ‘Most Insightful, Least Cited’ paper is Ariel Heryanto’s “The development of ‘development.'”[1] Originally written in Indonesian in the mid-1980s, Heryanto’s gem been cited a mere 79 times (according to Google Scholar), even in its carefully-translated English incarnation. For me, this paper is so wonderful because it makes, in
Read More »
This post is a contribution to an online symposium on the changing nature of knowledge production in fragile states. Be sure to read other entries, beginning with Deval Desai and Rebecca Tapscott‘s piece. While researchers (ourselves included) now consistently underline the importance of understanding the political economy of developing countries and donors that support them in order to achieve better aid outcomes, the research industry remains largely ambivalent about questions of our own political economy. Desai and Tapscott’s paper is therefore a refreshing attempt to start
Read More »
Aid in the 21st century is increasingly evidence-driven. Between 2000 and 2006, the World Bank spent a total of $630 million on research. By 2011 the World Bank was spending $606 million per year, or about a quarter of its country budgets. In September of this year, by signing up to the Sustainable Development Goals, the global community enshrined a commitment to “increase significantly” a range of high-quality data over the next 15 years, to facilitate qualitative as well as quantitative understandings of growth and
Read More »
Over the next week, Humanity will be hosting an online symposium on the changing nature of knowledge production in fragile states. In light of the intensification of evidence-based policymaking and the “data revolution” in development, the symposium asks what the ethical and political implications are for qualitative research as a tool of governance. The symposium will begin tomorrow with a short paper from Deval Desai and Rebecca Tapscott, followed by responses during the week from Lisa Denney and Pilar Domingo (ODI); Michael Woolcock (World Bank); Morten Jerven (Norwegian University of Life Sciences and Simon Fraser University); Alex de
Read More »
The Human Rights Working Paper Series (WPS) is dedicated to interdisciplinary and critical dialogue on international human rights law and discourse. It publishes innovative papers of the highest quality by established and early-career researchers and practitioners, from the University of Texas and other institutions around the world. The WPS provides authors with an opportunity to receive feedback on works in progress. It also seeks to provide a lively, productive environment for debate about human rights among academics, policymakers, practitioners, and the wider public. To
Read More »
International Research Academy on the History of Global Humanitarianism Academy Leaders: Fabian Klose (Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz) Johannes Paulmann (Leibniz Institute of European History Mainz) Andrew Thompson (University of Exeter) in co-operation with the International Committee of the Red Cross (Geneva) and with support by the German Historical Institute London Venues: University of Exeter, UK & Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva Dates: July 10-22, 2016 Deadline: December 31, 2015 Information at: http://hhr.hypotheses.org/ and http://imperialglobalexeter.com/ The international GLOBAL HUMANITARIANISM | RESEARCH
Read More »
The European Agenda on Migration, published May 13 and implemented throughout the past summer, is a fascinating initiative. The policy has four stated “pillars”: (1) reducing incentives for unauthorized or “irregular” migration; (2) border management — which is understood as both border enforcement and saving the lives of migrants at risk; (3) a “strong common asylum policy” and (4) providing new avenues for legal migration. This agenda presents the EU’s most comprehensive attempt to address a surging number of asylum seekers and migrants now
Read More »
Rescues at sea are dangerous and come with great possible cost to those involved. In this brief essay, I consider why, beyond a simple explanation of the imperative to protect life, civilian sailors rescue refugees at sea, and explore how specific extreme environments and professional identities may interface at the boundaries of humanitarian imagination, thought and action Before MSF and the navies of EU states became more involved in intercepting boatloads of refugees sinking into the Mediterranean, the job of pulling them out of the
Read More »
There is this great anecdote that Gershom Scholem tells at the end of his monumental Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. It speaks of the Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism, who, when he had “a difficult task before him . . ., would go to a certain place in the woods, light a fire and meditate in prayer — and what he had set out to perform was done.” The tale follows the slow, generational loss of the elements that ensure successful results
Read More »
At the heart of his provocative essay, Samuel Moyn highlights the shortcomings of the human rights framework to confront socioeconomic inequality. His central argument asserts that human rights norms articulate the minimal obligations of states to protect the poor but say nothing about the excesses of wealth, therefore accommodating a neoliberal ideology that fundamentally threatens human dignity. In my view, Moyn produces a brief but inadequate description of human rights provisions for social welfare (floors), overlooks some recent attempts at placing limits on accumulation (ceilings),
Read More »
Some new research I am doing considers what — if anything — the explosion of human rights politics in our time has to do with our recently confirmed explosion of inequality across the same time period. An initial progress report appears in this weeks’s review section of the “Chronicle of Higher Education.” What do you think?
Read More »
Scholars, pundits, opinion-makers, and the general public too often agree that the primary concern to address today in the contemporary Middle East is religious diversity and the need to protect religious minorities. As a result, the so-called religious minorities have gradually come to constitute a fundamental feature of state politics. They are usually depicted and discussed as unchangeable entities presenting coherent political assets in international affairs, as well as analytical categories through which a more immediate understanding of the Middle Eastern scenario is finally possible. This
Read More »
This is one entry in a roundtable on the NIEO, featuring short articles by scholars who contributed to Humanity’s recent special issue on the topic. Be sure to read other posts by Johanna Bockman and Patrick Sharma. A conference centre in the small town of Haslemere, 43 miles south-west of central London, is an unlikely place to start a revolution. But it was there, in January 1968, that a group of twenty-five “young and disillusioned” members of Britain’s NGO sector (acting in an individual capacity, but happy to be recognised as
Read More »
…the Vichy constitution of 1944. Its first article read: “The liberty and dignity of the human person are supreme values and intangible goods.” I have recently been looking into this, on a tip from James Chappel, with help from my research assistant Rachel Craft, and advice from my honored former colleague Bob Paxton. In case it is of general interest, or anyone out there knows more, I am reporting my findings here, which I am incorporating in the final version of my historical
Read More »
The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, International Law Department, is holding a conference entitled “International Law and Time” in Geneva, Switzerland, from 12-13 June 2015. Registration for the conference is now open. The programme features the following panels: Attributing Meaning to Time: Visions of History and Future Role of Time in the Creation of Norms Time and the Operation of International Law Norms International Law between Change and Stability Continuity, Discontinuity, Recurrence Dealing with the Past: Legacy, Retroactivity and Beyond The conveners can
Read More »
This is one entry in a roundtable on the NIEO, featuring posts by scholars who contributed to Humanity’s recent special issue on the topic. Be sure to read other posts by Kevin O’Sullivan and Patrick Sharma. My article focuses on the economic ideas behind the NIEO, specifically the ideas of the staff working for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Their ideas are rather surprising. They wrote about the need for markets, liberalization of trade, structural adjustment, export-oriented production, and increased financial flows. In our discussions at the
Read More »
[I wrote these for the exciting upcoming Princeton conference; comments welcome below.] The “history of human rights” is not a field I personally think ought to exist. The most important fact about it, in a certain sense, is that no one ever proposed to bring it into being until the present day. As its coverage expands backwards before the near present, it normally describes some interesting but partial inquiries that have long figured and could still figure in various prior fields, from the history
Read More »
This is one entry in a roundtable on the NIEO, featuring posts by scholars who contributed to Humanity’s recent special issue on the topic. Be sure to read other posts by Johanna Bockman and Kevin O’Sullivan. Last October, the Chinese government announced the creation of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). The AIIB is intended to rival the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), which are dominated by the United States and other developed countries, in providing financial assistance to countries in Asia.
Read More »
Congrats to Miriam Ticktin, Humanity editorial collective member, who has been selected for a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Social Sciences.
Read More »
Joseph Slaughter, one of the members of Humanity‘s editorial collective, published “We’re in the Middle of a Corporate Civil Rights Movement” on Talking Points Memo. Check it out. Among other things, Slaughter notes that while people “often talk of the women’s liberation and gay rights movements as building on the success of the African-American Civil Rights Movement,” corporations “may be the biggest beneficiaries of abolition and the civil rights struggle—as the successful pushback against the Indiana RFRA will ultimately prove.” As Slaughter points out, this has a history,
Read More »
The Wall Street Journal runs my brief review of Jens Ohlin’s book contending that there is.
Read More »
Congrats to David Singh Grewal (Yale) and Jedediah Purdy (Duke) who have curated and introduced a major new dossier in Law and Contemporary Problems on law and neoliberalism. The table of contents with links to full-text articles is here.
Read More »
This post is the final response in our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay from our most recent issue. Be sure to read the entries by Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, and Bart De Sutter. I would like to thank Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, and Bart de Sutter for their thoughtful comments. De Sutter is right to point to the limited availability of the internal documentation of Human Rights Watch (HRW). Much remains to be discovered, and I look forward to learning more about the history of the Helsinki
Read More »
This post is part of our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay on the origins of Human Rights Watch from our recent issue. Please be sure to read other entries by Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, and a final response from the author. Peter Slezkine’s contribution is a welcome attempt to understand the expanding scope of Human Rights Watch (HRW) from its origins as the Helsinki Watch to its current claim to defend the rights of people worldwide. Despite the recent surge of interest in the history
Read More »
This post is part of our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay on the origins of Human Rights Watch from our recent issue. Please be sure to read other entries by Stephen Hopgood, Kenneth Roth, Bart De Sutter, and a final response from the author. Peter Slezkine does a good job describing the origins Human Rights Watch. I could quibble over a few details and points of emphasis. In general, however, so far as it goes, his account seems to me to be accurate. In the comment that follows,
Read More »
This post is part of our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay on the origins of Human Rights Watch from our recent issue. Please be sure to read other entries by Stephen Hopgood, Aryeh Neier, Bart De Sutter, and a final response from the author. Peter Slezkine is right to note there were two different methodologies at the origin of Human Rights Watch, which began as a series of regional Watch groups. Helsinki Watch was founded foremost to protect local activists in Soviet-era Moscow, Warsaw, Prague and other Eastern
Read More »
This post is part of our round table on Peter Slezkine’s essay on the origins of Human Rights Watch from our recent issue. Please be sure to read other entries by Kenneth Roth, Aryeh Neier, Bart De Sutter, and the final response from the author. Peter Slezkine’s “From Helsinki to Human Rights Watch” tilts persuasively at a key myth beloved by human right advocates, that of the ineluctable unfolding of natural law (being “in league with the cosmos,” Thomas Jefferson called it). Actually how Human Rights Watch evolved was
Read More »
Deadline for abstract submission: February 15, 2015 The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva (IHEID), International Law Department, is convening a conference entitled ‘International Law and Time’ from June 12–13, 2015, to explore the phenomena of time and change in international law. Time is an inherent component of many of the most important international law concepts. However, it also fundamentally determines international law as a field. International law has been inconstant dynamic change since its inception. Capturing and understanding this change in time is
Read More »
Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle’s forthcoming book, Cartographies of the Absolute, addresses the proliferation of works in the visual arts, film and literature that seek to tackle the representation of contemporary capitalism. Their research, which began in 2009 with a collaborative text on the HBO series The Wire, forms a critical survey of works that “totalize” current conditions and look to “thematize those facets of social existence which are particularly symptomatic of the trends and tensions in today’s political economy: financial markets, logistical complexes, commodity chains, and so on.” Inherent in this turn
Read More »
The international Global Humanitarianism | Research Academy (GHRA) offers research training to advanced PhD candidates and early postdocs. It combines academic sessions at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz and the Imperial and Global History Centre at the University of Exeter with archival sessions at the Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. The Research Academy addresses early career researchers who are working in the related fields of humanitarianism, international humanitarian law, peace and conflict studies as well as human rights covering the period from the 18th to the 20th century. It supports scholarship on
Read More »
Israeli Author Yoram Kaniuk passed away exactly one year ago, on June 8, 2013. His somewhat rambling and quasi-biographical essay Angels (“Mal’achim”) was published posthumously as a small book. The author is depicted on the book’s jacket in a long black coat. Standing on top of a lamppost like a crow, he overlooks the urban skyline of Tel-Aviv. White wings attached to his back suggest that he is the angel in the book’s title.
Read More »
Q: When we abduct, imprison, torture, or force another person by violence and credible threats of violence to do our bidding, are we engaging in acts of a) dehumanization, b) demonization, or c) dis-humanization?
Think hard, because a lot depends on the answer.
Read More »
Given the current interest in "human dignity" -- which I have canvassed elsewhere -- a number of people are interested in why it became canonized in the first place.
Read More »
There are two sets of ghosts that we experience when visiting and engaging with field sites. The more obvious are the people whose worlds we seek to study, such as empirical ghosts. The other is the philosophical ghost, which underpins how we approach a particular point of enquiry. This latter ghost travels with us to the field, resting on our observations and indeed guiding how we see. But which “field ghost” remains to sculpt our knowledge, guiding the essence of our study?
Read More »
In the summer of 2011, I made a day trip to the Gedenkstätte Sachsenhausen memorial museum on the grounds of a former Nazi concentration camp and later Soviet detention center. Like many others, I think, I had wanted to see a former concentration camp for some time for vague, hard-to-articulate feelings. What would I feel while on site? What of the physical grounds remained in place? Which narratives were emphasized and which relegated to the periphery?
Read More »
Forty-nine years ago today, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, gunmen opened fire on the African-American activist Malcolm X, killing him almost instantly. He was 39 years old. By the time of his murder, Malcolm had become an isolated figure in American life. He spent most of the last year of his life either abroad (in Africa, the Middle East, and Europe) or preparing to go abroad.
Read More »
The Berkeley Human Rights Program has announced a postdoctoral fellowship for the 2014-15 academic year. Applicants should currently be engaged in research on the historical and theoretical foundations of human rights. Applications are due February 10 via an online system. Additional information about the position and application process can be found at https://aprecruit.berkeley.edu/apply/JPF00344.
Read More »
Crossposted from the new blog Humanitarianism and Human Rights:
Read More »
Watch the video commentary on issue 4.3's visual citizenship dossier.
Read More »
We're thrilled to learn that Katherine Lebow is the winner of the Polish Studies Association's Aquila Polonica Prize for 2013 for her article "The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Autobiography and Social Rights" (Humanity 3:3 [Winter 2012]: 297-319).
Read More »
We theorists of international law like to pose venturesome, vitalizing questions, sweeping in scope: What would an ideal system of international criminal law look like, for instance, relieved of today’s geostrategic constraints? How might we lend some conceptual coherence to such a program, flesh out its normative details? What kind of world would be required for such a program to become possible, even intelligible? How should we imagine the workings of such a hypothetical world?
Read More »
Issue 4.3, featuring a dossier on visual citizenship, is now available!
Read More »
This week The Nation published my essay on the origins and trajectory of human dignity, in which I engage absorbing and accomplished books by Michael Rosen and Jeremy Waldron.
Read More »
In a recent opinion column (“The Duty to Protect, Still Urgent,” New York Times, September 13, 2013), Professor Michael Ignatieff, speaking on behalf of “those of us who have worked hard to promote the concept” of a responsibility to protect, passionately argues in favor of the use of force in Syria and more generally each time “civilians are threatened with mass killing.” Although he admits prevention through conflict resolution and legality via a Security Council vote are preferable, he observes that “when prevention fails, force becomes the last resort,” and “if the United State
Read More »
While the planned attack on Syria now seems to be deferred, the administration’s arguments supporting it will likely resurface. These arguments have admittedly been somewhat stuttering. Yet they will almost inevitably remain resources to be pulled up and reused, sooner or later. What can be said about the intervention’s purported justification from a human rights perspective? And perhaps more to the point, what would that perspective be?
Read More »
“This norm against using chemical weapons,” explained Obama in his Tuesday Remarks Before Meeting with Members of the Congress, “is there for a reason: Because we recognize that there are certain weapons that, when used, can not only end up resulting in grotesque deaths, but also can end up being transmitted to non-state actors.”
Read More »
Issue 4.2, featuring a symposium on human rights history organized by Humanity board member Jan Eckel, is now available!
Read More »
It was the first few pleasant moments in a two-day event, the second annual “Human Rights and the Humanities” conference at the National Humanities Center, held in March 2013. Greetings had been extended, sponsors thanked, the distinguished keynote speaker introduced, and the audience settled in. But almost immediately the speaker was parting company with many in his audience. His title was “Do States Have the Right to be Wrong about Justice?,” and the argument, surprising and disturbing to many in the room, was that yes, they did.
Read More »
The question of high-seas interdiction of asylum seekers has not come before the United States Supreme Court ever since Sale v. Haitian Centers Council. A comparative perspective, however, reveals quite a different story.
Read More »
James Ron and his colleagues have started a new discussion at Open Democracy called "Open Global Rights." Ron and friends posted an early piece concerning
Read More »
"If things were worse, they would be worse; and if they were better, they would be better. So I suppose that makes me a reformist, in those terms. I do not think that somehow without the velvet glove, all illusions would be undone and the masses would come to consciousness."
Read More »
"It is important to recognize that this thing we call neoliberalism is an intellectually complex field, and that there is not a single politics that we can neatly and unproblematically attach to the style of reasoning that we identify as neoliberal."
Read More »
Humanity co-editors Nils Gilman and Miriam Ticktin spoke with James Ferguson on May 31, 2013, at Stanford University. This week their conversation will appear here in three installments, starting with today's.
Read More »
Issue 4.1, featuring the work of photographer Murtada Bulbul and a dossier on transitions and reconciliation, is now live!
Read More »
<< Against political imagination I would also like to briefly defend The Body in Pain, a splendid, subtle book that I think offers a way around many of the snares that Moyn identifies in post-ideological politics generally, and in Rorty’s disaster-aversion project in particular. Scarry’s book has two parts. The first is about torture and war: means of “unmaking” the world. The second part, composed as a response to the first, is about human creativity: the way we make, as the case may be, “remake,” the world.
Read More »
When I was 18 years old, about to head off for college, a friend’s father gifted me a copy of Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and Social Hope. His explanation was cryptic.
Read More »
A new piece in this week's issue of The Nation considers Elaine Scarry and, through her criticism, the how and why torture has become so appalling.
Read More »
Let me conclude. In case I haven’t been clear, the political approach isn’t at all meant to undermine the enterprise or institution. True, it is analytically neutral (more so, certainly, than its three rivals). But if Judith Shklar was right, it could also provide the sole plausible and necessarily instrumental justification for the ICC, for it inquires into whether and how the institution makes the world more decent, especially insofar as it intersects other political agendas in interstate order and disorder.
Read More »
A final approach is available that tends to postpone the difficult calculus of political judgment, and I’ll call it preservation. People who recognize the severe limitations of promoting and professionalizing nevertheless strategically defer, during an initial period of institution-building, what political analysis is supposed to be about: critical distance for the sake of judgment of outcomes in context. On the preservative view, the ICC is a fledgling cause that needs to be sheltered from the ordinary conditions of inquiry.
Read More »
In the face of all this complexity, interim political judgment about what the goals are and whether they are being served is obviously as difficult as it is necessary. But along with promotion, there are two other ways of talking about the ICC I promised to cover. Trailing promotion, the other main form of discourse about our new institution is the professional or professionalizing approach, which follows from the work the ICC gives lawyers as vocational experience, from summer internships to careers in the system.
Read More »
So let’s bracket, at the outset, whether the ICC successfully provided retributive justice in the one guilty verdict so far, or even presume its success in any future ones, and then proceed to apply the political framework. In the main part of my talk, I want to consider the political environment for assessing the ICC’s meaning so far, considering possible ends and outcomes in connection with the larger political landscape.
Read More »
As time passes, this framework will have to supersede the extraordinary predominance of what I will call promotionalism in the world at large and at meetings like this one. The promotional idea presents the creation of the ICC as a moral achievement in spite of and against politics—or at least political interests narrower than those of humanity as a whole.
Read More »
When asked whether the French Revolution had succeeded, a recent Chinese premier is said to have responded that, after two centuries, it’s still far too soon to tell. That makes it rather unwise to draw any sort of balance sheet on the International Criminal Court at this early stage. Anyway, for the ICC—for the French Revolution for that matter—time isn’t the main difficulty. There is also the thorny matter of what criteria to apply to the assessment in the first place.
Read More »
This week I’m posting as a series of blog posts a talk I’ve hastily drafted for an interesting event at Yale Law School assessing the first ten years of the International Criminal Court. This still informal version has some things in it that the talk itself did not. For what it’s worth, my thoughts follow—with thanks to Kevin Heller and Paul Kahn for saving me from some even more grievous missteps.
Read More »
Whew, Mali. French air raids against Islamist positions in Mali began Thursday night, and the dust hasn’t settled yet. The news is changing fast, but three things emerge from the haze. First, fierce fighting in the North and the East, with French forces in the lead, will open up a whole new set of dangers. With Islamist forces on the attack, foreign intervention was necessary, and many Malians at home and abroad welcomed it enthusiastically. Still, this remains a dangerous moment all around.
Read More »
Humanity editorial board members Conor Gearty and Costas Douzinas have just published their new coedited Cambridge Companion to Human Rights Law -- of which a review is forthcoming in the journal. Meantime, according to his Twitter feed, Conor announces a book launch at Birkbeck on January 30, 2013 at 6 p.m.
Read More »
Right off let me say how grateful I am to Timothy Nunan for the care and intelligence with which he has read and commented on my book. Maybe it is worth saying at the outset that it was not an easy book to write, still less one of those books that write themselves. I found I was engaging more than usually a variety of quite disparate and mutually incomprehending scholarly and quasi-scholarly literatures to a degree that had simply not been true when I tried, for instance, to synthesise the historiography on the Nazi occupation of Europe.
Read More »
A new piece of mine reviewing Yang Jisheng's Tombstone and other relevant books appears in The Nation this week. Yang's summa is getting much coverage, on NPR, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Read More »
As Mazower would himself likely concede, there is in a sense nothing new in his case against the global governance project; one of the themes of Governing the World is that while the technology may change (airplanes one day, drones the next), some of the basic issues at stake in arguments about international law really do not change much from one era to another
Read More »
Less well-known, at least until Governing the World, however, is the extent to which this human rights revolution also wreaked havoc on the intellectual coherence of American internationalists traditionally thought of as liberals.
Read More »
Yet more than lead the charge for a reform of the world monetary system and the global economy, with all it entailed, the United States in the mid- to late 1970s also found a way to discredit much of the Third World’s anti-American, anti-Western discourse by creating new counter-discourses and institutions that bypassed the General Assembly.
Read More »
Yet as Mazower has emphasized in his earlier 2009 No Enchanted Palace, this was not our UN. Many of the men who played a crucial role in the formation of the organization, from Roosevelt to Churchill to Jan Smuts to Alfred Zimmern (not to mention Stalin) were keenly attuned to the realities of Great Power politics.
Read More »
Prognoses of American decline were already in vogue prior to the attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, but ever since the wave of such terrorist attacks and protests across the Muslim World in early September, the Obama Administration has seemed rudderless in articulating what it wants, not just in its relations with Muslim-majority countries, but in terms of international order more broadly. Administration advocates for the Libyan adventure like Samantha Power have been nowhere to be heard from in some time.
Read More »
Watch here in the coming days for Timothy Nunan's review of Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York, 2012). The review will appear on this blog in five installments, which we look forward to bringing you.
Read More »
Our new issue is a dossier on social rights in the twentieth century, beautifully curated by Małgorzata Mazurek, Paul Betts, Andreas Eckert, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, and Sandrine Kott. Start by reading the preface by Mazurek and Betts, and don't miss Fred Cooper's concluding reflections on the essays.
Read More »
The 1970s are remembered in the Global North as a time of stagflation, malaise, and political drift. But from the point of view of much of the Global South, this same epoch was a time of unprecedented economic prosperity and political ambition. Particularly for primary producers in the wake of the OPEC oil price hikes, the 1970s were a time of unparalleled hopes for a rebalancing of global power relations and institutional authority. One manifestation of the new global mood was a profound shift in the understanding of global responsibilities for achieving development in the South.
Read More »
Ayça Çubukçu: Considering the impressive common ground shared by what you differentiate as liberal and antiliberal ideologies of empire, why would it be incorrect to interpret what you name an anti-liberal ideology of empire as an articulation internal to liberal imperialism? What are your criteria for distinguishing between liberal and antiliberal ideologies of empire on the one hand, and “techniques” and “ideologies” of imperial practice, on the other?
Read More »
Ayça Çubukçu: In contradistinction to nationalist projects that would be fashioned during the colonial modern, in a formation you distinguish as the early modern, various “native” figures in British India—among them Rammohan—were campaigning for liberty and equality as subjects of the British Crown, with a certain kind of faith in the emancipating mission of British rule. What is the significance of such early modern imaginaries of political community, which you observe to have been “doomed”? Why do they resist attempts to subsume them in nationalist historiographies of modernity?
Read More »
Ayça Çubukçu: How would you describe the field and the genre which The Black Hole of Empire fits, or else, wishes to inspire? What is the craft you practiced when writing The Black Hole? Is this a book in Anthropology and Asian Studies as the Princeton University Press catalogue claims?
Read More »
Congratulations to Samera Esmeir, Humanity editorial board member, on the publication of her new book, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford University Press).
Here's the publisher's description:
Read More »
When Siraj, the ruler of Bengal, overran the British settlement of Calcutta in 1756, he allegedly jailed 146 European prisoners overnight in a cramped prison. Of the group, 123 died of suffocation.
Read More »
If you pass through Belgium this fall, stop by "Newtopia: The State of Human Rights," an ambitious new art exhibition staged by Katerina Gregos and others. (Here's an interview with Gregos.) Along with Ariella Azoulay, Stéphane Hessel, and Elena Sorokina, I've offerd a short text for the catalogue.
Read More »
Any place on its way to hell or already there has been preceded by stories like this. Small things that insist on attention and remain in memory, because that is the world people spontaneously create and sustain all the time in their daily lives when they are free to do so, alongside whatever authorities and governments and media regimes they may live under. Violence disrupts this everyday freedom, as it has disrupted even my memories from a distance.
Read More »
After several days of conferencing, our group of twenty or so takes a day-trip to the ruins of ancient Palmyra, over 200 kilometers northeast. The journey takes about two hours by bus. On the far outskirts as we leave the city before entering the desert, we drive through a monumental construction site covering an area of what looks to be several square miles, extending on either side of the highway. It is a housing project, a large-scale settlement clearly intended for and anticipating hundreds if not thousands of people.
Read More »
I pay the bill and we head out walking for an hour or so in the neighborhood, which is outside the old city. With no particular place to go and the barest of maps, we circle the area of our hotel, sometimes retracing our steps but all in the process of orientation. It is not late when we start, maybe eight o’clock or so, but there are few people around and most of the businesses are closed. We pass pastry shops displaying pyramids of sweets, and several others that seem devoted entirely to wedding announcement cards, examples of which are exhibited in the windows.
Read More »
From Nils Gilman's introduction: "This dossier explores some of the ways that contemporary practices of development and humanitarianism have recently come to interpenetrate with military activities.
Read More »
“Is this your first visit?” asked the passport official.
“Yes.”
“Welcome to Syria.”
Read More »
Just over two years ago, in March 2010, I was a tourist in Damascus: I ate things, I bought things, I danced around a tiled fountain with the cigar-wielding brother of a restaurant owner in the Christian Quarter. I walked through souks, madrassas, caravanserais and hammams; I was guided around the Umayyad Mosque by a young Arabic teacher who doubled as a guide for extra cash, as families sat around in the sunny inner courtyard passing the time, eating, watching their children play. I was on holiday in Syria. This hardly seems possible now.
Read More »
Over the next couple of weeks, the Humanity blog will feature a series of posts penned by Kelly Grotke, a postdoctoral fellow at the Erik Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, University of Helsinki. In her political travel memoir, which concerns a visit to Damascus in March 2010, Grotke ruminates on expectation and exception from the visitor's point of view.
Read More »
Mali in the rainy season has its own rhythm, especially in the South: long days under heavy skies anticipating rain; moments when it comes so powerfully the world seems ready to end. Afterwards, a peculiar freshness and coolness, and new brown streams gurgling everywhere. With Ramadan coming soon, that rhythm will be syncopated, the regular beat of fasting, praying, and feasting punctuated by the shifting rhythm of the storms.
Read More »
Congratulations to Humanity editoral collective member Nehal Bhuta on his appointment as Professor of International Law at the European University Institute in Florence.
Read More »
On a recent trip to Berlin I visited KZ Sachsenhausen, a former Nazi concentration camp located just an hour north of the city. It was a beautiful day—high summer in Berlin, in the mid-seventies with a slight breeze—and the treetops, visible over the camp’s reconstructed fence, bobbed in the wind. The tour bus pulled into a large gravel parking lot across from tidy stucco houses with drawn blinds and trimmed gardens. An older man dressed in shorts and an open shirt rummaged around in his tool shed and emerged with a pair of gardening shears.
Read More »
There's a very important new paper out in Nature entitled "Approaching a state shift in the Earth's biosphere." Exec summary:
Read More »
Strange bedfellows in the Malian Sahara of late. The Tuareg rebel movements that took control of northern Mali last month looked to have struck a deal over the weekend, only to have it come into question since. The supposedly secular, progressive, and multi-ethnic MNLA shook hands with the Ansar Dine, the Salafist movement that has been more or less playing host to sundry terrorists, criminals and hostage-takers like AQMI, MUJAO, or Boko Haram. It’s tough to say just what this deal means, or how long it will last, but it ought to have put some of the MNLA’s foreign fans in a bind.
Read More »
On Lawfare.org last week I posted a review of Mary Dudziak's interesting new book War Time, dwelling on the American mythology of endless war. Dudziak offered her own reflections in response.
Read More »
The New York Times saw fit to grace its "Sunday Review" section this weekend with our editorial board member's Faisal Devji's excellent essay on the poety of Muslim radicalism, as well as my own piece on human rights. Thanks!
Read More »
Explanations of American national security policy can scarcely be more timely. Events in Iraq, Libya, and Syria invite reflection on the propriety of US interventions abroad. Both the Bush administration's domestic wiretapping program as well as the Obama administration's “targeted killing” of American citizens like Anwar al-Awlaki have reflected an expanded executive authority that has drawn criticism. As the country faces new challenges—Iran, Pakistan, China—contemplating the future of its national security policy demands an unambiguous understanding of its recent past.
Read More »
My new piece in The Nation reviews two new books on the subject.
Read More »
One of the things that fascinate me about humanitarianism is how chaotic it is. I expected to find the aid community to be highly professionalized, highly organized, and highly disciplined—something more like WalMart than a MASH unit. What I found instead was a huge group of aid agencies, donor governments, and representatives of local government who were mostly winging it. So my problem became figuring out how to theorize "winging it," and to find out how to trace its effects on both geopolitics and on the lives of displaced people.
Read More »
I’ve abstained from commenting on Beth Simmons’s early chapter about the history of human rights. It is not so much that, in my obviously self-interested view as a contributor to that field, her chapter is often uncritical and occasionally unsubstantiated (in its frequent repetition of the commonplace but dubious notion that the Holocaust prompted human rights law for instance). Rather, Simmons’s history of the origins of human rights doesn’t matter to her argument.
Read More »
Domestic politics, then. This interim post explores how Beth Simmons thinks the interface between international treaties and domestic forces works. When she turns to the domestic forum, Simmons lays out a tripartite structure for how domestic actors can make use of the new tool of international treaties – at any rate, more than they could make of the hazy moral norms of natural law, or their clarification in written form in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.
Read More »
Beth Simmons’s Mobilizing for Human Rights: International Law in Domestic Politics (Cambridge, 2009) has been celebrated as the most significant work in the field in many years. And the reception of the book is generally well deserved. As most people know, Simmons brings extraordinary quantitative rigor to the topic of whether several human rights treaties make a difference.
Read More »
Editorial collective member Miriam Ticktin has just published her book, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France with University of California Press. Congratulations!
Here is the book description:
Read More »
Drug addiction in Russia has reached epidemic proportions, but the government is refusing to address the problem head-on, preferring instead to inveigh against external forces like the USA, NATO and the war in Afghanistan. On current problems and their implications for the future.
Read More »
A couple of weeks ago when it became clear that Barack Obama has reneged on his campaign promise to close the Guantánamo Bay facility, Hendrik Hertzberg inveighed against the result in the New Yorker. Torture was a “vile offense to elementary morality” on George W. Bush’s watch, and there were sundry other “crimes against American and international law” from which Obama’s new policies do not sufficiently depart.
Read More »
Nils Gilman's coedited book Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century has been published.
Here is the description:
Read More »
There have been not a few commentators, from the bleeding hearts on the liberal left to the usual suspects on the neocon right, who have been celebrating the raining down of Tomahawk missiles on Libya as a wonderful return of morality to foreign policy.
Read More »
A few people have asked my how my recent account of the history of human rights connects to the contemporary events in Middle Eastern politics. While I have no expertise with respect to the latter, I have a new post at Dissent magazine applying to the events a distinction between the rights of man and human rights on which my book is based.
Read More »
I explore that question in a new article in the American Historical Review.
Read More »
Humanity editorial board member Paul W. Kahn has recently published a new book.
Here is the description:
Read More »
As Sam Moyn has pointed out in his previous post, the events in Tunisia and Egypt have triggered a revival of sorts of “democracy promotion.” Yesterday, the New York Times ran a feature about “the return of pushing democracy” that explored how current events are used by some supporters of the previous administration to suggest that George W.
Read More »
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.
Read More »
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.
Read More »
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.
Read More »
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:
Read More »
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:
Read More »
What does tracking bushmeat do for humanity?
Read More »
Against the "liberalism of fear" argument.
Read More »
Brief note on the 2011 World Development Report of the World Bank.
Read More »
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).
Read More »
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.
Read More »
For a good sense of what "development" today is and isn't, you can do worse than to read this excellent if troubling New York Times article on Chinese business practices in Zambia:
Read More »
It could be that without Virginia Gildersleeve, no one would be talking about it today.
Read More »
There are two sets of ghosts that we experience when visiting and engaging with field sites.
Read More »
Forty-nine years ago today, at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, gunmen opened fire on the African-American activist Malcolm X, killing him almost instantly.
Read More »
The Berkeley Human Rights Program has announced a postdoctoral fellowship for the 2014-15 academic year.
Read More »
A project that enables us to put words back into the void that trauma leaves behind.
Read More »
