Protection Versus Project: Italian Humanitarian Interventions Towards Refugees as a Challenge to Equity

2016 ◽  
pp. 215-237
Author(s):  
Chiara Dallavalle
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Interventions

Out of War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariane C. Ferme
Keyword(s):  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Red Cross ◽  
Cultural Survival ◽  
Social Fabric ◽  
Rural Landscapes ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Sensory History ◽  
History Of

Out of War is an ethnographic engagement with the nature of intercommunal violence and the material returns of history during and after the 1991–2002 Sierra Leone civil war. The questions raised concern the nature and reckoning of time and reality, fact and fiction; the experience of violence and trauma; the reversibility of perpetrator and victim, friend and enemy; and past, present, and future in the colony and postcolony. The book is a reflection on West African epistemologies and ontologies that contribute to questions in counterpoint with those of international humanitarianism, struggling with the possibilities of truth and quandaries of justice. In the context of massive population displacements and humanitarian interventions, the ethnography traces strategies of psychological, political, and cultural survival and material dwelling in liminal spaces in the midst of the destruction of the social fabric engendered by war. It also examines the juridical creation of new figures of crimes against humanity at the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone scene, in the aftermath of war, is visualized as a landscape of chronotopes, neologisms that summon the uncertainty of war: the sobel (“soldier by day, rebel by night”), pointing to the instability of distinctions between enemy and friend, or of opposing parties in the war (the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front [RUF] and soldiers in the national army), and the rebel cross, pointing to the possibility that the purported neutrality of the Red Cross masked partisan interests alongside the RUF. Chronotopes also testify to the difficulty of discerning between facts and rumors in war, and they freeze in time collective anxieties about wartime events. Finally, beyond the traumas of war, the book explores the returns of material traces in counterpoint to the more “monumental” presence of Chinese investments in Africa today, and it explores the forgotten sensory history of another China (Taiwan versus the People’s Republic of China) and another Africa inscribed in ordinary agrarian practices on rural landscapes, and in the fabric of domestic life, particularly since the non-aligned movement emerged from the Bandung conference in 1955.

Moral Victories

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Moral Status ◽  
Just War ◽  
Just War Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
Civil Military Relations ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Theory Of War ◽  
Military Relations

What does it mean to win a moral victory? In the history, practice, and theory of war, this question yields few clear answers. Wars often begin with ideals about just and decisive triumphs but descend into quagmires. In the just war and strategic studies traditions, assumptions about victory underpin legitimations for war but become problematic in discussions about its conduct and conclusion. After centuries of conflict, we still lack a clear understanding of victory or reliable resources for discerning its moral status, its implications for conduct in war, or its relationship to changing ways of war. This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to tackle such issues. It is organized in two parts. After a synoptic introduction, Part I, ‘Traditions: The Changing Character of Victory’, charts the historically variable notion of victory and the dialogues and fissures this opens in the just war and strategic canons. Individual chapters analyse the importance of victory in the Bible, Clausewitz’s strategy, the political uses of defeat, arguments for unlimited war, revisionist just war theory, and contemporary norms against fights to the finish. Part II, ‘Challenges: The Problem of Victory in Contemporary Warfare’, shows how changing security contexts exacerbate these issues. Individual chapters discuss ethics in unwinnable wars, the political scars of victory, whether we can ‘win’ humanitarian interventions, contemporary civil–military relations, victory in privatized war, and operations short of war. In both parts, contributors work towards a clearer understanding of victory, forwarding several shared themes discussed in a critical conclusion.

Ethical Considerations in Crisis and Humanitarian Interventions

2007 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rita Sommers-Flanagan
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Considerations ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions

scholarly journals Structural vulnerability: migration and health in social context

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (Suppl 1) ◽  
pp. e005109
Author(s):  
Lauren Carruth ◽  
Carlos Martinez ◽  
Lahra Smith ◽  
Katharine Donato ◽  
Carlos Piñones-Rivera ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Clinical Care ◽  
Professional Associations ◽  
Humanitarian Assistance ◽  
Structural Vulnerability ◽  
Global Migration ◽  
Humanitarian Interventions ◽  
Care Models ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
Training And Support

Based on the authors’ work in Latin America and Africa, this article describes and applies the concept ‘structural vulnerability’ to the challenges of clinical care and healthcare advocacy for migrants. This concept helps consider how specific social, economic and political hierarchies and policies produce and pattern poor health in two case studies: one at the USA–Mexico border and another in Djibouti. Migrants’ and providers’ various entanglements within inequitable and sometimes violent global migration systems can produce shared structural vulnerabilities that then differentially affect health and other outcomes. In response, we argue providers require specialised training and support; professional associations, healthcare institutions, universities and humanitarian organisations should work to end the criminalisation of medical and humanitarian assistance to migrants; migrants should help lead efforts to reform medical and humanitarian interventions; and alternative care models in Global South to address the structural vulnerabilities inherent to migration and asylum should be supported.

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