HUMANITY VOLUME 16, ISSUE 1-2
The latest issue of Humanity is out and features a special dossier on childhood.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Equally Vulnerable: Liberal Internationalism, the Traffic in Women and Children, and the Non-Politics of Race
Scholars interested in the history of international thought usually assume that the ideas of racial equality and shared humanity were not officially fused in global discourse until the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). By contrast, this article maintains that a “nonpolitical” version of this fusion occurred three decades earlier when the League of Nations substituted the term “traffic in women and children” for what had, until then, been known as “the white slave traffic.” Unlike the League’s mandate system–which explicitly relied upon a Read More »Charter 77 Transnational: A Local Dissident Movement in International Human Rights Networks
From its inception, Charter 77 was part of a broader transnational human rights constellation. While its history has often been interpreted through the prism of the Helsinki process, this paper argues that the Charter’s transnational entanglements extended far beyond the CSCE framework. Drawing on original archival research in multiple countries, the study situates Charter 77 within three interrelated layers of postwar international human rights politics: the institutional human rights internationalism of the United Nations system (with a focus on the International Labour Organization), the intergovernmental Read More »From Relief to Rule: Food Rations and State-Making in Iraqi Kurdistan
This essay analyses the emergence of limited Kurdish self-rule within the broader framework of humanitarian governmentality from 1991 to 2003. Beginning with the emergency relief that followed Operation Provide Comfort, and extending through the Oil for Food Programme (OFFP), humanitarian aid introduced a set of administrative practices that became central to governing the Kurdistan region. At the heart of these practices were food rations. Rations not only secured subsistence but also became a key site through which humanitarian aid flowed into a wider project of Read More »Impossible Conditions of Life: Famine, Humanitarian Management, and Genocide in Gaza
This article examines how the Israeli government engineered humanitarianism in Gaza since the 2005 withdrawal, transforming it into a biopolitical regime of containment and an instrument of war. Drawing on the work of Eyal Weizman and Michel Agier, the article argues that the resulting matrix of control set the stage for starvation crimes to become a modality of genocide. It becomes clear that Israel’s humanitarian management functioned as an occupation strategy that sustained basic survival while systematically obstructing economic development, deliberately producing a state of Read More »Populism: The Existential Threat to Liberal Democracy
This study critically examines the works of three authors who analyze populist leadership and its associated political practices. The essay highlights a recurring issue in their analyses: the broad generalization and conflation of distinct political phenomena—such as clientelism, favoritism, corruption, and vote-buying—with the traits of populist leaders, rather than with the structural characteristics of the political systems in which these leaders operate. The authors’ emphasis on populist figures overlooks the fact that corrupt practices are also prevalent among non-populist leaders, legislators, and judicial actors within Read More »If Our Bodies Will Not Tell Our Tale, Perhaps Our Ruins Will
This article examines the concept of ruins, exploring their complex relationships with power, the built environment, and society within the context of ongoing settler colonialism. It asks how ruins in Palestine might serve as silent witnesses capable of documenting and constructing a living archive of dispossession and resistance. Contrary to views that see ruins as inert remnants or results of neglect, this study proposes understanding them as active agents that connect past, present, and possible future(s). Reclaiming the agency of ruins offers a powerful means Read More »Vulnerability, Innocence and Futurity: Essays on Contemporary Politics of Childhood
This introduction frames the collection of essays, “Vulnerability, Innocence and Futurity: Essays on Contemporary Politics of Childhood.” This collection centers children who unsettle the dominant cultural imaginaries of childhood by examining cultural politics surrounding the adoption of Indigenous children in Canada, the incarceration of children deemed terrorists in Egypt and migration of children at the US-Mexico border as well as the protests against “gender ideology” in France and children at the forefront of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran. Rather than reclaiming innocence and Read More »Diagnostic Journeys of the Indian Problem after the Sixties Scoop: From Cultural to Neurodevelopmental Exculpations
What happens when an adopted child does not fit into the fantasy frame of an adoptive family? Scholars and policy makers began posing this question in Canada in the late 1980s and early 1990s as adoptive placements of Indigenous children from the infamous “Sixties Scoop” era began to break down at rates that far exceeded any other demographic configurations. This phenomenon has largely been (mis)understood through reductive theories of cultural difference and race that reify historical conditions of colonization as bio-social conditions of Indigeneity itself. Read More »"If They Catch Me Today, I'll Come Back Tomorrow": Young Border-Crossers' Experiences and Embodied Knowledge in the Sonora-Arizona Borderlands
Transcription* of Valentina Glockner Fagetti’s talk at AAA 2022 Danger, Vulnerability and the Future: A Panel on Contemporary Politics of ChildhoodRead More »"For the Girl Who Wished to be a Boy": Revolutionary Children and the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising
This essay reflects on how children’s participation at the forefront of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising in Iran reshapes the longstanding notion of the child as innocent and “the state of nature.” It shows how the mainstream liberal conceptualization of childhood gender variance as biomedical innate difference hinders perceiving gender dissident children as political subjects. At a time when right-wing political movements are globally mobilizing around protecting children against “gender ideology,” Iranian children’s revolt for gender justice offers a different horizon of childhood gender politics Read More »Gender Ideology, the Figure of the Child, and the Fear of Cultural Reproduction
This article examines the role that the figure of the child has played in anti-gender arguments. Specifically, it focuses on the emergence of anti-gender protests and rhetoric in France around the 2013 gay marriage law, the mariage pour tous. I argue that “gender ideology” came to feature in French right-wing discourse during these gay marriage debates because of children. The bill mentioned neither gender nor children and yet most of the controversy centered on these two topics. My second argument is that the struggle around “gender ideology” in Read More »Threading Liberalism with Authoritarianism: Egyptian Children as Geopolitical Actors
What comes into view when we take childhood as a window into larger political formations? How do “children” as a category reinforce or unsettle some of the most enduring foundations of modern politics? In this essay, I examine the politics of Egyptian children to bring liberalism and authoritarianism, which are oftentimes studied as separates, into a unified analytical framework. I do so by examining portrayals of Egyptian children in the media and in government discourse at a time of heightened authoritarianism in Egypt that is Read More »Reading Through Innocence: From Liberal to Illiberal Politics
Starting with a discussion of the genocide and the figure of the child in Gaza, this essay brings together the collection “Vulnerability, Innocence and Futurity: Essays on Contemporary Politics of Childhood,” arguing that the various essays show how children serve as a battleground for the shifting relationship between liberalism and illiberalism in the contemporary world. I suggest that the shift towards illiberalism is visible by looking at the concept of innocence, and how it changes in relation to children. Specifically, the liberal, Enlightenment belief that Read More »From a Right of Self-Defense to the Fact of Conquest
From a Right of Self- Defense to the Fact of Conquest1Read More »
