Refugee Shelter in a Logistical World: Designing Goods for Supply‐Chain Humanitarianism

Focusing on the design and production of the IKEA Foundation “Better Shelter” and on its use in a camp on the island of Lesvos, Greece, this article explores the role of logistical calculative rationales in the provision of emergency shelters to refugees. It argues that an engagement with the critical geographies of logistics contributes to the study of such “humanitarian goods” in two main ways. First, it foregrounds the technologies that allow emergency shelter products to circulate across production sites and disaster and border zones, and their connections to broader infrastructures and commercial networks in what recent literature has called “supply‐chain humanitarianism”. Second, a logistical lens highlights the disruptions that characterise the production and usage of emergency shelter products. The analysis adds to a body of work that exposes humanitarian technology and design as sites of friction, deeply embedded in global processes of bordering and accumulation.     

Migration,knowledge production and the humanitarian agenda in times of crisis

By drawing on the Italian case, this article critically discusses the use of crisis as a tool of knowledge and expertise production. In recent years, the theme of crisis has played a key role in shifting migration management towards a humanitarian agenda based on the premise that contemporary migration to Europe is comprised of forced mass movement. The article considers the extent to which migrants’ subjectivities call into question the knowledge that has been produced during the current era. It also reflects on the ways in which gender and race provide fundamental insights for a better understanding of the evolution of migration management within the context of crisis.     

Decentring international and institutional famine relief in late nineteenth-century China: in search of the local

This article uses rural gazetteer biographies to examine village and household-level famine relief during the great North China Famine of 1876–9 to deepen our understanding of past relief methods and dynamics at the most local level. Despite the appearance of major works recently on famine in modern China, particularly on the Great Leap Forward, knowledge of Chinese famine relief remains thin and scattered considering the enormity of the subject. Nineteenth-century China saw intensifying international relief activity as well as the emergence of a vibrant charity-relief sector based in China's major cities, leading to the rise of prominent relief institutions in the twentieth century, such as the Chinese Red Cross. But the increasingly intense disasters of China's modern period also saw a surprising persistence of local humanitarian traditions still barely covered by historians.     

Disability and Social Inclusion: The Blind Songstress in Early Twentieth-Century Guangzhou

This article examines disability as a contested notion of social inclusion by focusing on the blind songstress (guji) in early twentieth-century Guangzhou (Canton). Through personal memoirs, the print press, and institutional documents, this article reconstructs the social life of guji as their experiences intersected with professional community, workplace, and charity. First, I show that the adoption of blind girls from families into training guilds managed by veteran guji was a chosen kinship strategy for blind women since the late Qing period. Second, the commercial sponsorship of guji following the establishment of the Republic not only expanded working opportunities for blind women but also exposed their vulnerability to male-dominated entertainment spheres. Third, the reformist critique of guji as an inappropriate form of sex-related consumption pushed the nascent military government to collaborate with foreign missionaries in “rescuing” blind girls from their professional households. The experiences of guji thus reveal competing ideas of what qualified a disabled person to become a member of society at the beginning of the twentieth century, as work-based inclusion gave way to charitable inclusion as an outcome of shifting social attitudes toward the employment of women with disabilities.     

Celebrity humanitarianism and the popular geopolitics of hope along the Thai-Burma border

In June of 2014 Angelina Jolie, actress and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador, visited camps—home to 130,000 Burmese exiles—along the Thai-Burma border to draw international attention to one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world. Her fourth trip to the border since 2002, Jolie's day-long visit was widely commended in popular media. I draw on ethnographic research among Burmese exiles in northern Thailand to argue that the popular geopolitics of hope she engendered is constituted through contradictory impulses of, on one hand, her signification of global capital and the concurrent widespread geoeconomic hope around Burma's deepening integration into global capitalism, and on the other, the far-reaching geopolitics of fear that has materialized around the threat of repatriation resulting from rapid political-economic change in Burma. Thus, this paper builds on recent work in popular geopolitics and geographies of emotion and affect to offer a grounded illustration of the micro-macro linkages between popular culture and everyday geopolitical experience, as well as the often politically nuanced role of celebrities in humanitarian interventions. This paper contributes to ongoing conversations around the relationship between celebrity humanitarians from the global North and the political-economic implications of the affective enrollment of their intended benefactors from the global South.     

国际法、女权保护与第一次世界大战期间的英德宣传战

宣称战争因某种道德理想而展开是一次大战的显特征,国际法、平民权益特别是妇女儿童权益保护就成了区分和衡量战争正义合法与否的标尺。英德关于非人道作战方式的合法性争执凸显出国际法存在的严重缺失及其在宣传战中作用的有限性,而侵害最易成为战争受难的妇女儿童权利便成了宣传战中最能调动舆论情绪、最易产生宣传效果的主题,这也是英国适时将宣传战主题从德国违反国际法切换到德军大规模强暴妇女儿童上来的主要原因。     

South Africa's Departure from the Commonwealth, 1960–1961

Famine threatened the lives of over twenty million residents of north China in 1920, prompting a massive, and ultimately successful, relief effort. Scholarship on the famine has largely credited China's foreign and coastal, cosmopolitan Chinese circles with this humanitarian feat at the expense of what was in fact a surprisingly effective Chinese state apparatus that year, as well as local relief operations by many famine-stricken communities themselves. This study captures a very specific moment of US and European cultural production on ‘China’ and ‘the Chinese’ in which the great north China famine of 1920–1 occurred, to argue that our current understanding of Chinese relief culture circa 1920 remains largely a product of foreign characterization (by the celebrated likes of Somerset Maugham and Bertrand Russell) and political commentary by reformist Chinese during a period of post-May Fourth cultural turmoil. If we hold the output of these writers up to alternative original sources on events that year, it becomes clear that the historiography on China's greatest humanitarian crisis of the first quarter of the twentieth century remains insufficiently insulated from the raw discursive climate in which the crisis unfolded.     

Empire of Scholars: Universities,Networks and the British Academic World, 1850–1939, by Tamson Pietsch

ABSTRACT

This article reconstructs the history of animal protection organisations in Palestine from the British occupation to the beginning of World War II. Although Arab and Jewish mandate state subjects consistently rejected these organisations, animal protection remained an important part of the mandate government throughout the political upheavals of the interwar period. Despite their seemingly apolitical nature, animal welfare associations enjoyed unique legal privileges and drew support from the most prominent British personnel in Palestine. Managing cruelty and compassion towards animals, I argue, was a means of making Palestine part of the British Empire. Animal protection functioned both as a tool for direct financial control over agriculture, and as an educational project that promoted an emotional ‘civilizing mission.’ In the spirit of inter-war British imperial humanitarian networks, animal welfare created civilizational hierarchies through compassion, and revised the role of the human-animal divide in imperial culture.     

A Fleet of Mediterranean Border Humanitarians

EUrope has created a space of human suffering within which military‐humanitarian measures seem urgently required if the mass drowning is to be halted. The framing of migration governance as humanitarian has become commonplace in spectacular border practices in the Mediterranean Sea. Nonetheless, maritime disasters continue to unfold. This article discusses three non‐governmental actors, part of an emerging “humanitarian fleet” that seeks to turn the sea into a less deadly space: the Migrant Offshore Aid Station, Médecins Sans Frontières, and Sea‐Watch. While the rescue of precarious lives and the alleviation of suffering are central concerns, they imagine their humanitarian practices, the subjects of their compassion, and EUrope's role in shaping borderzones in different ways, pointing to a wide humanitarian spectrum. Engaging with the different discursive frames created by the three “border humanitarians”, the article explores what possibilities exist for political dissent to emanate from within humanitarian reason.     

Postcolonial theory and globalized empathy: from development to difference

ABSTRACT

Postcolonial theory, with its focus on epistemological difference, material subversion, and cultural hybridity, is said to be at odds with the emotional and cognitive takeover implied in empathy. My paper will, to the contrary, suggest that the critique of political developmentalism and the turn towards a preference for cultural difference that inaugurated postcolonial studies as we know it may have actually helped to forge a relation between the perspectives of postcolonial theory and empathy. This relation is based on the ultimately individual focus that both imply through their rejection of abstract rational politics, which politically limits them to humanitarianism. My reading of Indra Sinha's Animal's People will show how this novel performs the heavy impact of this entanglement between postcolonial otherness, empathy, and humanitarianism by arguing that the novel ironically restructures its plot and political imaginary to suit the needs of humanitarian empathy that governs the global market for postcolonial literatures.