Humanity Journal

Allow me to begin with two contemporary parables of conscience. The first is fictional. In Michael Haneke’s film Caché (2005), a well-heeled Parisian, Georges, finds himself subject to anonymous surveillance, sparking a series of events that lead him to reflect on his past. Specifically he is prompted to recall his jealous response, as a child in rural France, to the arrival in his home of an Algerian boy orphaned when his parents were killed in the 1961 “Paris Massacre.” 1 Georges dissembled and lied to ensure that the boy, Continue reading → Continue reading →

In this essay, “commoditization” and “commodification” refer to two distinguishable aspects of the relationship between human rights knowledge and the commodity form. Commoditization happens when human rights is marketed like a commodity, whether by packaging information in standardized and easily consumed numbers, icons, and graphics or “branding” human rights–monitoring organizations and their campaigns. Commodification happens when human rights information actually becomes a commodity, such as when rights investigations are done under contract, at times through international information supply chains, while possibly also subject to intellectual property restrictions. While commoditization is an Continue reading → Continue reading →

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. . . technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original in itself . . . the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition . . . And in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced . . . Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that Continue reading → Continue reading →

Today . . . the idea of development stands like a ruin in the intellectual landscape. Delusion and disappointment, failures and crimes have been the steady companions of development and they tell a common story: it did not work. Moreover, the historical conditions which catapulted the idea into prominence have vanished: development has become outdated. But above all, the hopes and desires which made the idea fly, are now exhausted: development has grown obsolete . . . It is time to dismantle this mental structure Continue reading → Continue reading →

The Birth of the New Justice: The Internationalization of Crime and Punishment, 1919–1950 Mark Lewis Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xii + 346 pp. The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924 Bruno Cabanes Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. vii + 360 pp. The Emergence of International Society in the 1920s Daniel Gorman Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii + 377 pp. Toward the very end of The Division of Labor, his 1897 masterpiece on the modern form of social solidarity produced by industrial modernity, Continue reading → Continue reading →