The “Phantom Local” and the Everyday Distinction Practices of Humanitarian Actors in War: A Socio-Legal Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned the everyday practices of international humanitarian actors who deliver assistance in armed conflict zones. Drawing on original fieldwork conducted in South Sudan, it elucidates how humanitarian actors engage with the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law (IHL). The article considers how the desire to enforce distinction impacts humanitarian actors’ relationships with others, and introduces the concept of everyday distinction practices. These practices have an important performance component, designed to appease the “phantom local.” It is proposed that such practices may have adverse implications for the humanitarian–beneficiary encounter. By positioning war-affected populations as an audience for distinction, everyday distinction practices reconfigure the victims of war from being receivers of aid to perceivers of aid. By lumping beneficiaries together with armed actors as part of the “phantom local,” distinction practices also paint the victims of war as an object of mistrust, fear, and potential danger.     

US Media and Post-9/11 Human Rights Violations in the Name of Counterterrorism

This article adds to earlier research revealing that the American news media did not discharge their responsibility as a watchdog press in the post-9/11 years by failing to scrutinize extreme and unlawful government policies and actions, most of all the decision to invade Iraq based on false information about Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction arsenal. The content analyses presented here demonstrate that leading US news organizations, both television and print, did not expressly refer to human rights violations when they reported on the torturing of foreign detainees during “enhanced interrogations” in US-run prison facilities abroad and the killing of civilians, including children, in US drone strikes overseas and outside theaters of war. Moreover, by framing torture and the “collateral damage” caused by drone-launched missile attacks episodically rather than in the context of human rights, the news media failed to alert the American public to the grave humanitarian violations in the so-called war on terrorism during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.     

Against Humanitarian Impunity: Rethinking Responsibility for Displacement and Disaster in Northern Uganda

Abstract

Given that humanitarian organizations can often be responsible for enabling, prolonging or intensifying violence and conflict through their interventions into war zones, it is important that these organizations, despite their presumed neutrality and beneficence, be held accountable for the deleterious consequences of their actions. The case of northern Uganda will be used to demonstrate how humanitarian agencies have made possible the government's counterinsurgency, including its policy of mass forced displacement and internment, which has led to a vast humanitarian crisis. The Ugandan government policy will be assessed as a war crime, making aid agencies accessories to this crime. This case study is used as an example to highlight that processes which demand the post-conflict accountability of those responsible for violence may be dramatically incomplete, and unjust, if they do not include the humanitarian agencies. In conclusion it will be suggested that if humanitarian organizations built popular accountability mechanisms into their daily operations this might prevent them from being complicit with egregious violence in the first place.     

Putting “Traditional Values” Into Practice: The Rise and Contestation of Anti-Homopropaganda Laws in Russia

This article explores how “traditional values” are being used by the Russian government to refute the claim that “LGBT rights are human rights” and justify the introduction of anti-homopropaganda laws, and how members of the Russian LGBT community have sought to contest it. Centrally, it traces the development of a discourse that refutes the essentialization of sexual identity and, in doing so, seeks to challenge the focus on individual identity-based rights of contemporary human rights norms. This discursive shift has meant that opponents of the legislation have had to develop contestation strategies that collectively seek to present an alternative interpretation of “traditional values.” The article concludes by considering the implications of the Russian case for human rights norms and for the notion of universal human rights more widely, arguing that it represents a serious challenge to the viability of identity-based LGBT rights claims as a basis on which to advance observance of fundamental human rights due to their homonormativity.     

Law as a System of Rights: A Critical Perspective

The “rhetorical incorporation of human rights terminology” into domestic law is the central concern of this article. Over the last 20 years or so, countries have faced international pressure to conform to human rights standards in order to enjoy legitimacy. However, there is a huge gap between what is legalized as “human rights” in domestic laws and what is set forth as “human rights” in international human rights instruments. Based on this presupposition that a proper incorporation of human rights on the books is a prerequisite for putting them into practice, this study by adopting a Systems Thinking approach seeks to show that law as a soft system on the books is more than the name and number of rights. It is a complex whole whose function depends on not only the name and number of rights but also different features of rights and the relationships between them. To this end, law is conceived as a system of rights that has five major features including the “frame of reference,” “scope of rights,” “orientation of rights,” “enforceability of rights,” and “realizability of rights.” The way of codification of human rights with respect to each of these features makes a big difference in implementing human rights in practice. To develop a heuristic devise for evaluating the situation of human rights in current legal systems, the conceptual space of law as a system of rights is depicted in a matrix called a “Rights Fabric Matrix.”     

Constructing and contesting legitimacy and accountability in polycentric regulatory regimes

The legitimacy and accountability of polycentric regulatory regimes, particularly at the transnational level, has been severely criticized, and the search is on to find ways in which they can be enhanced. This paper argues that before developing even more proposals, we need to pay far greater attention to the dynamics of accountability and legitimacy relationships, and to how those in regulatory regimes respond to them. The article thus first seeks to develop a closer analysis of three key elements of legitimacy and accountability relationships which it suggests are central to these dynamics: The role of the institutional environment in the construction of legitimacy, the dialectical nature of accountability relationships, and the communicative structures through which accountability occurs and legitimacy is constructed. Second, the article explores how organizations in regulatory regimes respond, or are likely to respond, to multiple legitimacy and accountability claims, and how they themselves seek to build legitimacy in complex and dynamic situations. The arguments developed here are not normative: There is no “grand solution” proposed to the normative questions of when regulators should be considered legitimate or how to make them so. Rather, the article seeks to analyse the dynamics of legitimacy and accountability relationships as they occur in an attempt to build a more realistic foundation on which grander “how to” proposals can be built. For until we understand these dynamics, the grander, normative arguments risk being simply pipe dreams – diverting, but in the end making little difference.     

Prosecution of grave violations of human rights in light of challenges of national courts and the intenational criminal court: The congolese dilemma

The war in the DRC has resulted in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis with over 3.4 million displaced persons scattered throughout the country. An estimated 4 million people have died as a result of the war. The most pressing need to be addressed is the question of justice and accountability for these human rights atrocities in order to achieve a durable peace in the country and also in the Great Lakes region. It is particularly true in post-conflict situations where justice systems have been either partially or completely destroyed, that national courts are not capable of arriving at a uniform stance, or willing to provide justice for atrocities in the immediate future. As a result, international justice seems to be a crucial and last resort that must continue to be fortified against efforts to undermine it. However, even if the ICC achieves its full potential, it faces a number of challenges. Firstly, it is realistically not able to address all situations in which national courts are unwilling or unable to prosecute perpetrators. Secondly, there are temporal and other jurisdictional limitations on what cases the ICC can hear. Accordingly, the ICC will only have the power to try people accused of the gravest human rights violations committed after 1 July 2002; the date the Rome Statute which established the ICC took effect. As a result, only a small number of individuals responsible for the atrocities committed will be tried by this Court. Thirdly, is the establishment, of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), one of the civilian institutions that emerged from the peace talks, meant to end impunity or to cover up gross violations of human rights committed in the DRC? It remains to be seen how it will function and interact with the courts.     

Administrative Accountability in the ‘Westminster’ Democracies: Towards a New Conceptual Framework

Understandings of administrative accountability in the “Westminster” democracies remain too closely linked to the institutional arrangements through which accountability has traditionally been exacted in these countries. This has prevented a full appreciation of the nature and extent of changes which have been under way for some time. The article argues that a refined concept of accountability and five subordinate “conceptions” of accountability, corresponding to distinctive sets of institutional arrangements, are needed to comprehend the relevant changes. The identification of multiple options for administrative accountability, in turn, raises questions about how the different accountability systems are to be chosen and combined to maximize accountability without impairing administrative effectiveness.     

Accountability‐by‐Proxy in Transnational Non‐State Governance

Transnational non‐state governance arrangements (NGAs) are increasingly common in areas such as labor standards and environmental sustainability, often presenting themselves as innovative means through which the lives of marginalized communities in developing countries can be improved. Yet in some cases, the policy interventions adopted by the managers of these NGAs appear not to be welcomed by their supposed beneficiaries. This article accounts for this predicament by examining the effects of different configurations of accountability within NGAs promoting labor rights. Most labor‐rights NGAs incorporate “proxy accountability” arrangements, in which consumers and activists hold decision makers accountable “on behalf” of the putative beneficiaries of the NGAs: workers and affected communities in poorer countries. The article shows how and why different combinations of proxy versus beneficiary accountability influence the choice of policy instruments used by NGAs, and applies the argument to three prominent non‐state initiatives in the domain of labor standards.     

Glimpsing the Holocaust in post-war British detective fiction

ABSTRACT

Scholars including David Cesarani have noted that there was no concerted effort to represent what we now term the Holocaust in British fiction of the immediate post-war years. What can be found in novels from the late 1940s and early 1950s, however, are suggestive glimpses of how British understandings of the Holocaust were beginning to develop. Detective fiction is a useful point of reference because in the interwar years this form was typically based on simplified or even stereotyped characters, with the war years and the post-war period signalling a turn to greater realism. As Gill Plain has argued, detective fiction expresses a desire both to see and to evade seeing the dead body. Plain explores this as an expression of post-First World War cultural anxieties but, in the wake of the widespread circulation in Britain of images of the opening up of the concentration and death camps, such ambivalence takes on a particular significance. Examining two quite different examples, Agatha Christie’s A Murder Is Announced (1950) and Ellis Peters’s Fallen into the Pit (1951), Stewart’s article reveals contrasting early engagements with the Holocaust. Both novels feature peripheral characters who are refugees from Europe, and whose stories, although told only in fragments, nevertheless destabilize the process of reinstating order that is the usual narrative trajectory of the detective novel. Stewart will argue that such glimpses of the Holocaust are as telling about contemporary attitudes as more concerted, explicit and direct engagements might be.     

Rejecting “rights-based approaches” to development: Alternative engagements with human rights

Following the growth of “rights-based approaches,” an increasing trend within recent research has been to establish the diverse opportunities, challenges, and potential pitfalls such approaches offer development NGOs. Although these areas remain important to current policy and practice, they equally stifle further research that is required concerning alternative engagements with human rights. This article argues that closer attention must be directed towards understanding how and why numerous development NGOs have rejected such approaches, whilst also embedding a strong and strategic use of “rights talk” within everyday campaign practice. This article draws upon recent qualitative research into practitioner responses to “rights-based” and wider human rights practice and, in so doing, enlists an in-depth analysis of two distinct subcategories of development NGOs — “faith-based” and “political.” The article proposes two current “perspectives” on human rights practice and a new and alternative engagement with a discourse of rights.     

War as the Continuation of Hegemony by Other Means: How Contemporary Wars Reach into Societies

Much thinking on war has been inspired by von Clausewitz’ famous dictum of “war being merely the continuation of policy by other means.” Such a politics/war dialectic conceives of war as being excluded from life within state and society; yet, contemporary warfare is in many ways constitutive for societies on and off the battlefield. Recent debates on war call for rethinking war in a more vernacular, critical sense. By joining this call, the article takes its cues from the theory of hegemony as developed by political theorist Ernesto Laclau in order to pave a theoretical avenue on how war reaches into society. Paraphrasing Clausewitz, I argue that war is the continuation of hegemony with other means, explaining how and why war has stabilizing and constraining effects on (democratic) political and societal life. Illustrating my argument with observations from the “Global War on Terror,” I am able to show how war is entangled with society having dire consequences for societal cohesion in Western societies.     

The War on Cyberterrorism

This article addresses the problem of international law enforcement within the War on Cyberterrorism. Hybrid conflicts have replaced the traditional ones, and new threats have emerged in cyberspace, which has become a virtual battlefield. Cyber threats - cybercrimes, cyberterrorism, cyberwarfare - are a major concern for Western governments, especially for the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The international community has begun to consider cyberattacks as a form of terrorism, to which the same measures apply. Because the term “terrorism” is ambiguous and legaly undefined, there is no consensus on a definition of the derivative term “cyberterrorism”, which is left to the unilateral interpretations of states. Pretending to consider the cyberspace domain as traditional domains, and claiming to apply IHL for the sole purpose of lawfully using armed forces in contrast to cyberterrorism is a stretch. This paper addresses the question of whether or not current laws of war and international humanitarian law apply to cyber domain, and gives some recommendations on how to tackle this issue.     

Resisting LGBT Rights Where “We Have Won”: Canada and Great Britain

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) human rights are often assumed to travel from the core to the periphery, namely from the Global North to the Global South. However, these rights flows and resistances are more complex than a unidirectional model might suggest. Using a transnational perspective, we consider resistances to LGBT rights in places where LGBT rights are supposedly assured. In Canada and Great Britain, where various forms of equities legislation for LGBT people have been enacted, there is an increasing opposition to LGBT gains. The transnational circulation of these oppositional discourses can be seen in how Canadian and British organizations talk to, and about, each other and illustrate transnational networks that create resistances in the places where “we have won.” This questions a sole focus on resistances in places that do not have LGBT equalities legislation, usually those outside the Global North and associated with “less developed others.”     

Humanitarian Crises and the International Politics of Selectivity

How has the international community responded to humanitarian crises after the end of the Cold War? While optimistic ideational perspectives on global governance stress the importance of humanitarian norms and argue that humanitarian crises have been increasingly addressed, more skeptical realist accounts point to material interests and maintain that these responses have remained highly selective. In empirical terms, however, we know very little about the actual extent of selectivity since, so far, the international community’s reaction to humanitarian crises has not been systematically examined. This article addresses this gap by empirically examining the extent and the nature of the selectivity of humanitarian crises. To do so, the most severe humanitarian crises in the post-Cold War era are identified and examined for whether and how the international community responded. This study considers different modes of crisis response (ranging from inaction to military intervention) and different actors (including states, international institutions, and nonstate actors), yielding a more precise picture of the alleged “selectivity gap” and a number of theoretical implications for contemporary global security governance.     

当代大学生网络小说阅读情况分析——以湖北汽车工业学院为例

当前,网络小说在大学生中非常流行。为此,有必要了解当代大学生阅读网络小说的基本情况。本文在对大学生阅读网络小说的基本情况分析的基础上,探讨了网络小说受欢迎的原因和培养当代大学生养成良好读书习惯的对策。     

Norm Proxy War and Resistance Through Outsourcing: The Dynamics of Transnational Human Rights Contestation

A great deal of constructivist international relations research on norms focuses on the diffusion of liberal human rights values. In contrast, this article analyzes how critics seek to undermine human rights principles in contexts where human rights norms are increasingly hegemonic. It argues that when norm challengers are frustrated by the institutionalization of human rights, they engage in transnational strategies to pursue their agendas. In norm proxy war, actors patronize surrogates in locales where norms are weak in the hope that victories abroad will reverberate internationally and at home. This dynamic is illustrated by American evangelical sponsorship of political homophobia in Uganda, culminating in that country’s draconian anti-LGBT legislation. When norms are resisted through outsourcing, actors contract out human rights violations in an effort to erode norms through practice, as evidenced by patterns of extraterritorial detention and extraordinary rendition to torture in the post-9/11 “Global War on Terror.” Identifying these patterns broadens understanding of potential pathways of norm contestation.     

Human rights education in US social work: Is the mandate reaching the field?

Abstract

Social work education in the United States takes place not only in classrooms but also in the many workplaces where students complete their mandatory internships. This practicum, known as “field education,” is social work’s “signature pedagogy.” Although efforts have been made to integrate human rights education (HRE) into US social work education and the Council on Social Work Education now mandates a human rights competency, little research has examined how and whether the HRE mandate is implemented in field education. This article examines the impact of HRE on social work field education by focusing on one state—Florida. For this study, we surveyed 158 Florida field educators about their human rights knowledge and practices and conducted telephone interviews with the staff members who coordinate student internships at six social work schools. The data paint a complex picture. Although strides to foster students’ ability to apply human rights understanding in field education have been made, sustained institutional support for integrating HRE in field is needed at the university and associational level. True integration of HRE into field education will only be achieved when all educators receive the support they need to become educated on social work as a human rights practice.     

“A Forgotten Human Rights Crisis”: Statelessness and Issue (Non)Emergence

Despite international laws guaranteeing the right to a nationality, statelessness remains a pervasive global problem that has been termed a “forgotten human rights crisis.” The issue highlights an important question for scholars that has not yet received enough attention: Why do some issues make it onto the international agenda while others do not? This study examines the characteristics necessary for successful issue emergence, or the step in the process of mobilization when a preexisting grievance is transformed from a problem into an issue. Using qualitative data from interviews with 21 decision makers at leading human rights and humanitarian non-governmental organizations, the study highlights shortcomings in the existing literature and provides additional explanations for issue emergence (or non-emergence). Statelessness serves as a case study for better understanding this process, and the article ends with specific recommendations for addressing key obstacles to its full emergence within the international community.     

Queer Rights and the Triangulation of Western Exceptionalism

Given recent advances in queer visibility and rights within Western countries and internationally, the assumption around sexual issues is one of progress. Conversely, resistance to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and questioning (LGBTIQ) rights is understood as a lack of progress in the modernization of the relevant society or population. This article suggests that one must understand resistance in a more complex framework, focusing on the opposition between Muslim cultures and LGBTIQ politics to illustrate this argument. This article argues that one should understand the dialectic of Islam versus queer rights as a process of triangulation and should describe how the positioning of queer rights and Muslim homophobia within a triangulated model invokes a sense of Western exceptionalism. Consequently, this article argues that the deployment of queer rights both at “home” and “abroad” operates in a “homocolonialist” fashion that renders resistant populations inferior in relation to superior Western values, rather than as simply “lagging behind” the West.