The International Humanitarian Regime and its Discontents: India’s Challenge

Abstract

In recent years, concerns over whether the humanitarian regime as we know it will survive a many-pronged challenge have spurred humanitarian organisations to embark on processes of soul-searching and innovation. With a steadily increasing aid budget and its more active and vocal role in development and humanitarian politics—and in global politics more generally—India has acquired the label of ‘emerging’ humanitarian actor. This article, however, shows that in many ways India has been a humanitarian pioneer, and connects the norms and values of the international humanitarian regime with India’s own philosophical, religious and democratic traditions. It also discusses how Indian policy-makers have critiqued the current United Nations-led international humanitarian regime and investigates how the government of an increasingly powerful and influential Commonwealth country from the South interacts with an international regime created in Europe. For many Indian policy-makers, current humanitarian practices are tainted by what they see as North American and European interventionist and highly political agendas in the South. The article concludes that while there is still a lot to be said for a global, multilateral humanitarian regime led by the United Nations, it need not be Western-biased, either in theory or in practice.     

Violence against Women in Politics: Female Politicians' Experience with Political Violence in Jamaica

This exploratory study describes the experiences of female politicians with political violence in Jamaica and the effect these encounters have had on them. The findings indicate that female politicians in Jamaica are affected by political violence before, during, and after an election, and even when they are in political office. Most of the violence experienced is of a gendered nature and can be defined as violence against women in politics. This study contributes to the growing body of scholarship on violence against women in politics by presenting and discussing findings from the Anglo Caribbean, an understudied region.     

Under the gaze of the 'big nations': Refugees, rumours and the international community in Tanzania

In most academic literature refugees are portrayed either asthose who lack what national citizens have or as a threat tothe national order of things. This article explores the effectsof being excluded in such a way, and argues that Burundian refugeesin a camp in northwest Tanzania find themselves in an ambiguousposition, being excluded from the national order of things —secluded in the Tanzanian bush — while simultaneouslybeing subject to state-of-the-art humanitarian interventions— apparently bringing them closer to the internationalcommunity. The article explores the ways in which refugees in the camprelate to the international community. Ambiguous perceptionsof the international community are expressed in rumours andconspiracy theories. These conspiracy theories create a kindof ontological surety by presenting the Hutu refugees as thevictims of a grand Tutsi plot supported by ‘the big nations’.Finally, the article argues that refugees — being excludedfrom the nation-state and being subject to the government ofinternational NGOs — seek recognition from the internationalcommunity rather than any nation-state. This does not, however,destabilize the hegemony of the nation-state, as refugees perceivetheir own position as temporary and the international communityas the guarantor of a more just international order in the longrun.     

International Organisations and the Evolution of Humanitarianism: Cross-perspectives on the Commonwealth and the European Union

Abstract

As international relations actors in the post-Second World War world, international organisations have played a significant role in the standardisation of global policy concepts during the 20th century, and humanitarian assistance has been no exception. While the study of the role of international organisations in shaping a dominant model of humanitarian aid has recently gathered pace, few historians have focused on different, less successful models and interpretations developed by other international organisations. Recently declassified Commonwealth Secretariat records show that discussions within the Secretariat and among member states regarding the potential objectives and scope of Commonwealth humanitarian assistance programmes took place as early as the 1960s, and continued throughout the following decades. This article provides an overview of the origin and evolution of the Commonwealth’s approach to humanitarian assistance since the 1960s. Its objective is to document this hitherto little known aspect of Commonwealth assistance policies, and, based on an initial literature and archival survey, to contribute to the identification of further research questions and gaps in this aspect of Commonwealth history. Although they are very different in nature and scope, the Commonwealth and the European Union share at least one common feature in so far as humanitarian assistance is concerned, namely their difficulty in reaching a consensual definition of it. By exploring the links and discrepancies between, as well as within, each organisation’s approach to humanitarian assistance, and by examining the initiatives of some of their member states, this paper seeks to highlight the plasticity of the definition of humanitarian assistance.     

AFGHAN REFUGEES: THE IMPACT ON PAKISTAN

One of the most important arenas that have been profoundly affected by the security situation in Afghanistan is Pakistan's internal security environment. The instability in Afghanistan has had a negative spill-over effect on Pakistan's domestic security scenario, as the Afghan quagmire poses immense implications on Pakistan's domestic framework. One of the important consequences of the Afghan conflict since the 1970s has been the massive inflow of the Afghan refugee population to the neighbouring Pakistan which in following years has brought about a number of demographic and security challenges to the Pakistani society. Therefore along with a number of factors, at this present juncture, Afghan refugees have also become a principal factor in determining Pakistan's Afghanistan policy.     

“Characteristically Generous”? Australian Responses to Refugees Prior to 1951

When Australia pledged to accept 15,000 Jewish refugees from Europe in 1938, it was applauded by the London Times as “a characteristically generous contribution” and an example for others. Australia's reputation for generous humanitarianism was solidified after the war when it absorbed more than 180,000 of Europe's Displaced Persons and committed to international human rights instruments designed to protect refugees and asylum seekers. This reputation has been used to both defend and critique the nation's contemporary responses to asylum seekers. Recent Australian Prime Ministers have invoked Australia's proud record of refugee resettlement to deflect criticism of their tough border control policies, policies which critics charge repudiate the nation's humanitarian traditions. This article critically reviews the history of Australia's responses to refugees and asylum seekers prior to 1951 and demonstrates that contemporary border control policies are neither a deviation from, nor defence of, a proud humanitarian record. Rather, they embody the migration management approach to refugees that provided impetus for Federation in 1901, governed Australia's response to the Jewish refugee crisis in the 1930s, and shaped its conditional acceptance of the Displaced Persons and the position it adopted in the drafting of the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees in 1951.     

Local aid workers in the digital humanitarian project: between “second class citizens” and “entrepreneurial survivors”

This paper examines the experiences of Filipino workers recruited for technology and communications work by international aid agencies involved in the Typhoon Haiyan response. Filipino workers, many of whom were personally coping with the social and economic impact of this disaster, were hired on short-term contracts to test and implement various digital humanitarian innovations such as feedback and hazard mapping technological platforms. These workers were doubly marginalized: first, as tech workers whose work was viewed by aid officers on the ground as less substantial than that of food or shelter programs; and second, as local voices often drowned out by national and international colleagues. Moving beyond the usual figure of the cosmopolitan and adventure-seeking Western humanitarian acting on distant suffering, this paper draws attention to local aid workers’ aspirations for personal and professional mobility as they seize novel opportunities opened up by the digital humanitarian agenda. It outlines how the digital humanitarian project’s ambition to facilitate the inclusion of disaster-affected communities is fundamentally undermined by labor arrangements that doubly marginalize local aid workers.     

Humanitarianism from the Suburbs: Australian Refugee Relief and Activism during the 1971 Bangladeshi Liberation War

The Bangladesh Liberation War against West Pakistan in 1971 triggered an exodus of ten million refugees, the deaths of approximately 1.5 million people and widespread destruction of villages, crops and infrastructure. Preoccupied with the Cold War and domestic politics, powerful nations such as the US and UK did not intervene directly and reluctantly provided aid. The Australian government, for its part, was particularly slow to offer aid, trailing efforts of New Zealand and most Western European governments. While the McMahon administration remained indifferent, Australians from diverse backgrounds engaged with this conflict by raising public awareness, fundraising and lobbying the Australian government to increase its aid contribution to Bangladeshis displaced by war. At a time when Australian government policies focused on the war in Indo‐China, Cold War politics and development in south‐east Asia and the south Pacific, I consider the ways Australian individuals offered aid to Asian, non‐Christian refugees, some of whom held Maoist views. Using archival materials, historical newspapers and census data, this article argues that, paradoxically, it was individuals with little political capital who spearheaded Australian efforts to aid Bangladeshi refugees. In short, the Bangladesh Liberation War provoked a groundswell of suburban activism that acted independently of government policies.     

The Syrian Refugee Crisis and the International Community

This article analyzes the problematics of the international community's response to the Syrian refugee crisis: patterns of displacement, including the lack of attention to basic needs, the limited economic opportunities in host countries, the conditions facing Syrian refugee children, the risk involved in migration, and the challenge of adapting to host societies. The article then elucidates the series of failures of the international community to address the causes of this displacement, despite efforts by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international institutions to alleviate suffering. It traces the humanitarian mismanagement to political divisions in the international community, including the failure of Arab states, the Iranian intervention, and the role of the United Nations, Russia and the United States in aggravating the displacement. The article provides policy recommendations for international actors in order to honor their commitments to hosting refugees and addresses the political requirements for a lasting solution.     

Non-governmental organisations and the management of HIV and AIDS in refugee camps: A comparison of Marratane Camp in Mozambique and Kakuma Camp in Kenya

In recent years, a number of sub-Saharan African states appear to have placed restrictions on the operations of international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) within their state boundaries. Indeed, some commentators and academics have questioned the role NGOs should play in providing humanitarian aid to refugees and to what extent they are, or should be, involved in the political, cultural, economic and healthcare concerns and agendas of any state. However, the high HIV/AIDS prevalence in refugee camps in sub-Saharan Africa creates negative economic, social, political and security implications for their host states and many states lack the knowledge, experience and funds to manage the problem successfully. Within this context, this article examines and compares the role and effectiveness of two separate NGOs involved since 2001 in HIV/AIDS management programmes in two distinct refugee camps: Save the Children in Marratane Refugee Camp in Mozambique and the International Rescue Committee in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. NGO success in managing HIV/AIDS programmes is analysed according to UNHCR guidelines and specifically against four key aspects of HIVAIDS management; HIV/AIDS awareness, HIV/AIDS prevention, access to HIV healthcare services and the provision of treatment.     

The Worst Is Not over Yet: The Lives and Deaths of the ‘Self’ and ‘Others’ in Brazil's Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper focuses on the politics of life and death in Bolsonaro's Brazil during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is argued that while this administration, and the president himself, have long supported violence against individuals and social groups they did not see as fully human, their response to the pandemic marked a public transition from valuing certain kinds of lives as opposed to others, to a general contempt for human lives. The paper explores this transition by discussing the reification of the economy to the detriment of the people who produce and consume.     

Austria's Report Card on Neutrality during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956

The Hungarian revolution of 1956 tested the Austrians' ability to exercise neutrality for the first time, while simultaneously rendering humanitarian aid to Hungarian refugees. Needing to justify the invasion of a Warsaw Pact ally, communist authorities exploited issues like border incidents, espionage, repatriation of refugees, and favouritism toward organisations to “prove” Austria's breech of neutrality. The Raab government — which signed the State Treaty only one year earlier — prudently weighed every move, passing the test admirably.     

Aid and transition from a war economy to an oligarchy in post-war Tajikistan

Exclusion and violence persist in post-conflict states, despite international assistance aimed at the demilitarization of politics. Through a field-based study of Tajikistan, this paper argues that aid focuses on economic liberalization, not the implementation of peace agreements, in the initial stage of post-war transition. Such an organization of aid empowers a particular group of elites who have privileged access to state assets at the time of civil war settlement, allowing them to establish institutional frameworks that will consolidate their personal and monopolistic control of resources. This leads to the collapse of power-sharing arrangements, as the incumbent regime seeks to remove wartime commanders and opposition leaders from the administrative apparatus. In Tajikistan, the incumbent regime has also prosecuted many of these former allies and opponents on account of corruption through state agencies established with donor assistance. Aid thus institutionalized exclusion and sustains patterns of violence along civil war divisions, rather than transforming wartime power structures.     

War Refugees and Violence in Hamidian Istanbul

This paper examines the place of war refugees in patterns of interpersonal violence in Istanbul in the 1890s. I argue that refugees, especially from the 1878 Russo-Turkish war, committed a disproportionate amount of criminal violence, and that their violent acts were often more extreme than those of other groups. I argue that factors such as poverty are insufficient to explain the degree of difference from the patterns of the general population. It is also necessary to look at an important cultural factor that most of these refugees share: exposure to and experience of violence. The conflicts from which the subjects of my paper were fleeing were particularly brutal ones, and thus could be expected to have a particularly brutalizing effect.     

Material Things

In “Positive Bleeding,” I argue that allusions to blood in contemporary South African art and literature fruitfully link myriad stigmatized experiences and embodiments of self usually considered taboo, including HIV/AIDS, female sexuality, menstruation, and sexual violence. Through Mlu Zondi’s and Ntando Cele’s dance performance piece Silhouette (2005), Zanele Muholi’s mischievous and haunting photographic Period series (2006), and Makhosozana Xaba’s revisionist short story “Inside” (2008), blood is defiantly transformed from a remnant of personal and historic trauma into that which incites female–female pleasure and eroticism. I contend that the politics of visibility operate uncomfortably within all four texts; blood serves as both a reminder of and departure from sensationalized images of violence against lesbians.     

The destruction of old Jaffa in 1936 and the question of the Arab refugees

Abstract

One outcome of the Jewish–Arab conflict at the time of the British Mandate was the Arab refugee problem. It usually accompanied any escalation in hostilities and was evident at foci of the friction between Arabs and Jews. Reprisals by the authorities against the Arab population was an additional cause. At the time of the Arab Revolt the refugee issue assumed for the first time significant proportions as a result of destructive actions by the British army, the greatest being the home demolition operations unleashed in Jaffa. As a result many families became refugees inside and outside their city. For the first time in the Mandate period the British government was obliged to contend with the problem of Arab refugees that it itself had created, and resolve it. The article aims to shed light on a unique operation by the Mandatory government intended to establish a locality to house Arab refugees, which was implemented and completed in the Mandate period. The article shows that for the authorities the establishment of a quarter for refugees was the required and most appropriate solution to the problem that had arisen.     

后冷战时代的失败国家课题

失败国家是后冷战时代世界政治中的一个突出课题 ,它对内造成了严重的人道主义灾难 ,对外则是世界和平与地区安全的重大隐患。本文对失败国家的内涵、研究价值、指向性特征、形成原因、相关的国际干预机制等等进行了初步的探讨。     

The limits of agency: Emily Hobhouse’s international activism and the politics of suffering

Abstract

This article pieces together the activism of the British welfare worker and feminist-pacifist Emily Hobhouse (1860–1926) during two largely unrecorded episodes of transnational activism: firstly, her ministry of Cornish miners in Virginia, Minnesota, in the United States; and secondly, her interventions during the period of reconstruction following the South African War (1899–1902). The article endeavors to contextualize Hobhouse’s activism and offer a broader understanding of the limitations and restraints on her actions. Ultimately, her activism required a platform that was in the gift of political actors and establishment figures, and dependent on fluctuations within specific political and bureaucratic situations. Based on close inspection of undocumented material in both South African and British archives, the article investigates Hobhouse’s repertoire of missionary and philanthropic roles within a wider context of humanitarian politics. It demonstrates how women’s activism and their behind-the-scenes politicking informed political decision-making in modern imperial and international affairs.     

Somaliland's post-war reconstruction: Rubble to rebuilding

ABSTRACT

This study captures the momentum of Somaliland's national reconciliation nationstate-rebuilding phase as it drives a reconstruction process involving the demobilisation of militias; internal state institutional reconstruction focusing on the House of Elders and the House of Representatives; the international dimensions of reconstruction involving humanitarian aid and developmental assistance; private reconstruction initiatives interacting with the development of a monetary exchange process and the participation of the Somaliland diaspora; and the role of women as the backbone of the Somaliland economy, and how all of these social components of nation-state building are framed constitutionally in the crafting of a multi-party democracy with northern Somali characteristics. However, the broader context in which these reconstructive dynamics unfold is conditioned by the emergence of militant expressions of political Islam within and outside the Somali coast in and around the Red Sea ‘Afrabian’ transregion and the Persian Gulf.     

Multi-level Implementation of International Law: The Role of Vertical Epistemic Communities

Subnational entities in federal states typically retain a degree of sovereignty and enjoy leeway in implementation, raising questions such as whether—and how—international law is actually implemented at the subnational level. This article sheds light on these questions, using two contrasted case studies in Switzerland: The Istanbul Convention on domestic violence and the European Union (EU) Directive 2016/680 on data protection. Based on a document analysis of the law-making process and 44 semi-structured interviews with national and subnational political actors, we observe how international obligations are legally implemented, that is, transposed into legislation at the subnational level. Our results show that: (1) Subnational civil servants play a decisive role, while members of parliament are marginal. (2) Civil servants may constitute Vertical Epistemic Communities (VECs), which are able to “technicize” the issue to ensure swift implementation through administrative venues. (3) VECs are particularly influential as they use intercantonal conferences as institutional platforms to shape implementation processes. Otherwise, implementation becomes politicized, and its success strongly depends on subnational politics.