Humanity Journal

Abstract: This article explores the differences and similarities between neoliberalism and Cold War liberalism by looking at the decade’s long relationship between two of its chief representatives: Friedrich Hayek and Raymond Aron. It argues that the key to understanding their differences concern’s Aron’s notion of an “end of ideology”: the perspective that the post-War welfare state had made obsolete the need for something like a revolutionary workers party. Hayek, contra Aron, believed that such welfare states were inherently ideological and thus potentially totalitarian. What kept Continue reading → Continue reading →

Abstract: This article explores why the figure of the child soldier as an abused and exploited victim of war erupted to the forefront of humanitarian and human rights advocacy in the 1990s, arguing that a humanitarian calculus of concern constructed this “child soldier crisis.” It analyzes the structural and contingent factors that drove the development of transnational advocacy from initial concerns in 1969–71 to the 2000 Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. The article highlights the successful campaigning tactics of these Continue reading → Continue reading →

Abstract: Displacement is often framed as exceptional to a presumed norm of national sedentism. However, displacement can be seen as an increasingly ubiquitous experience, deriving from conditions that throw into question the sustainability and flourishing of lives and accompanying experiences of struggle and uncertainty. Historically deep forms of dislocation and contemporary global projects of accumulation by dispossession structure how displacement is experienced by diverse populations—including many with the privilege of citizenship. This article argues for a more expansive utility of the framework of displacement (thus Continue reading → Continue reading →

Abstract: Exchanging the lens of migration for one of displacement can help move away from assumptions about migrant exceptionalism, but it does not necessarily trouble the idea that some people are “out of place” and others are “in place.” This is bound up with nationally specific ways of encoding and remaking race. I examine this with reference to the UK’s Windrush Scandal and consider the class dimensions of displacement which are imbricated with race. This points to the importance of attending to citizenship and its Continue reading → Continue reading →

Abstract: From the vantage point of Philadelphia and the surrounding region, this article situates refuge within a framework attentive to settler colonialism and imperialism. Through the example of Fort Indiantown Gap, a space of both temporary refuge and colonial war, I note that making refuge in the United States entails a demarcation of those deemed non-human through practices of dispossession and displacement. By articulating displacement not as a past phenomenon of nation-building but an ongoing project, this article argues for the centrality of displacement to Continue reading → Continue reading →

Abstract: Arguing against the reification of a citizen-noncitizen binary, and drawing on the example of economically precarious Indonesian workers and worker-activists in Hong Kong, I argue that simultaneous citizenship and non-citizenship (both a politico-legal citizen of one state and a non-citizen of another) can contribute to existential displacement in the form of disrupted lives and futures. The severe displacement of Indonesian workers, despite heroic mitigating efforts of migrant worker activists after a new passport renewal policy was introduced in 2015, illustrates how their displacement is Continue reading → Continue reading →

Abstract: This paper considers how accounts produced by illegalized residents in the United States shapeshift US immigration enforcement regimes by defining narrators and their communities as “belonging.” Anthropologist Aimee Cox develops the notion of “shapeshifting” to refer to how groups that are deemed “social problems” redefine the institutions within which they are embedded. The illegalized residents interviewed for this paper redefined US immigration law and policy as arbitrary, racially biased, and exploitative, even as they argued that they deserved status in the United States. Such Continue reading → Continue reading →

Abstract: In São Paolo’s ancient center, squats provide protective spaces to thousands of residents who cannot or do not want to access the formal and highly gentrified housing market. At the same time, these formerly abandoned buildings are also a site of the political struggle and claim the right to decent communal living. This paper traces the motives and aspirations of different types of squatters, such as activists, internal and international migrants as well as refugees. Through the notion of “aspirational anxieties” it concentrates on Continue reading → Continue reading →

Abstract: One of the problems with the term “displacement” is that it is often mapped onto seemingly bounded groups—the “refugees,” the “homeless”—whose displacement is considered distinct. The effect of this bounding is twofold: displacement is treated as an exceptional experience, and the structural forces of displacement are obscured. In this article, I collapse the conventional bounding of displacement by bringing the experiences of disparate groups into the same analytical frame. These experiences prompt us to consider displacement from a political economy lens, showing that—far from Continue reading → Continue reading →