On the moral and political economy of Somali piracy, as well as what its visibility and the effort to combat it reveal about world players.
Afterword: Social Rights and Human Rights in the Time of Decolonization
Concluding this collection, Cooper places the question of social and human rights in the context of the acute uncertainty about world politics in the years after World War II. Not least of the questions was the unit in which rights could be claimed: nation-state, empire, humanity as a whole. That issue was particularly open in the years after 1945 because of struggles over colonialism. Could the expanding notion of social rights in postwar England and France be confined to the metropole, especially as colonial powers needed to redefine their basis of legitimacy and as social and political movements in Africa were asserting political voice? Political movements in the colonies were not necessarily focused on independence, but on the right to claim rights—social as well as political—in an imperial polity. The locus of rights, as well as their contents, have remained in question ever since.
Pirate Trials, the International Criminal Court, and Mob Justice: Reflections on Postcolonial Sovereignty in Kenya
Even as Kenya imports the original ‘‘enemy of all’’—the pirate—it prepares to export to The Hague the new ‘‘enemy of all’’—the perpetrator of crimes against humanity.
Of Pirates, Empire, and Terror: An Interview with Lauren Benton and Dan Edelstein
Two important new books, histories of the early modern period, are starkly different in their topics, approaches, and conclusions. Yet they both intersect the topic of piracy in its heyday.
Child Trafficking or Labor Migration? A Historical Perspective from Mali’s Dogon Country
For demographic and historical reasons, there is no way to separate a discussion of the worst forms of child labor from the history of rural migration patterns.
The Colonial Testing Ground: The International Committee of the Red Cross and the Violent End of Empire
The ‘‘wars of national liberation’’ in the 1950s and 1960s posed new challenges to the International Committee in Geneva, because the humanitarian objective was repeatedly overlaid and endangered by Realpolitik.
Constitutionalism Beyond the State: Myth or Necessity? (A Pluralist Approach)
Despite the happy consciousness of those who proclaimed the end of history and the worldwide triumph of the liberal democracy in the early 1990s, the legitimating principles for domestic polities around the globe remain diverse.
Introduction: The Gender of Humanitarian Narrative
The editors of the special dossier on gender and humanitarian issues explain the motivations and main themes of the sequence of essays.
Bleeding Humanity and Gendered Embodiments: From Antislavery Sugar Boycotts to Ethical Consumers
Mimi Sheller returns to sugar and other boycotts in the era of antislavery—with their gendering of consumer action—and how they might help put contemporary Fair Trade movements in historical and political perspective.
The Rhetoric of Revelation: Sex Trafficking and the Journalistic Exposé
Soderlund provides a rhetorical analysis of tropes that pervade contemporary discourses of sex trafficking, relating them to past humanitarian sensibility and a gendered narrative of expose and rescue.