Narrating Democracy in Myanmar

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamas Wells
Keyword(s):  
English Language ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
National League ◽  
Contested Meanings

This book analyses what Myanmar's struggle for democracy has signified to Burmese activists and democratic leaders, and to their international allies. In doing so, it explores how understanding contested meanings of democracy helps make sense of the country's tortuous path since Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy won historic elections in 2015. Using Burmese and English language sources, Narrating Democracy in Myanmar reveals how the country's ongoing struggles for democracy exist not only in opposition to Burmese military elites, but also within networks of local activists and democratic leaders, and international aid workers.

A liberal narrative

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamas Wells
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Capacity Building ◽  
Future Orientation ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Transitional Countries ◽  
The World ◽  
Formal Procedure ◽  
International Aid Agencies

This chapter unpacks a liberal narrative of democracy. It grounds and locates the ways that many aid workers in Myanmar understood and communicated about democracy. The chapter outlines three elements of this narrative. First, most international aid workers involved in the research pointed toward the challenge of ethnic and religious divisions in the country. These aid workers described how divisions in Myanmar were perpetuated by a personalised political culture where formal institutions of democracy were insufficiently embedded. Second, aid agency representatives often expressed a vision of a formal procedure-based democracy supported by liberal values of human rights, pluralism and the protection of minorities. This vision also had a future orientation, where proponents of this narrative saw Myanmar’s democratisation as being set within the context of other transitional countries around the world – moving away from traditional systems toward a democratic future. Third, many aid workers emphasised a strategy of government and civil society capacity building led by international aid agencies.

From Humanitarianism to Humanitarianization

2020 ◽  
pp. 138-162
Author(s):  
Andrew C. Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
Bosnia And Herzegovina ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Considerable Time ◽  
International Intervention ◽  
Humanitarian Action ◽  
Cultural Conditions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Housing Reconstruction

This chapter explains that much of contemporary international intervention takes places under the sign of humanitarianism. One of the most significant undertakings in postwar Bosnia and Herzegovina was the massive housing reconstruction projects run by international aid organizations as part of a highly politicized effort to move refugees back to their prewar homes. Alongside the usual technical tasks of such projects, aid workers spent considerable time and effort in their encounters with refugees creating the social and cultural conditions conducive to humanitarian action—a process which can be called humanitarianization. The chapter analyzes these efforts and demonstrates that the humanitarian status of such aid projects was never more than provisionally settled. It argues that this unstable, provisional nature of humanitarian action forms an underexplored dynamic shaping and limiting aid interventions in Bosnia and beyond.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamas Wells
Keyword(s):  
International Aid ◽  
Aid Workers

This chapter introduces the concept of narratives of democracy and links it to the context of Myanmar and the struggles between Burmese activists and democratic leaders, and international aid workers, over the meaning of democracy. It also provides an overview of the book’s structure.

South Sudanese Perceptions of Justice

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-291
Author(s):  
Kirsten Lavery
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Due Process ◽  
South Sudan ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
International Pressure ◽  
South Sudanese ◽  
The Impact

Abstract During an outbreak of violence in July 2016, a South Sudanese journalist was killed and international aid workers were brutally raped by government soldiers at the Terrain compound in South Sudan. Following intense international pressure, 11 soldiers were found guilty of various crimes by a specially created military court martial in 2018. As the first widely reported case in which perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence were held accountable in South Sudan, this verdict is an important milestone. However, for the other countless South Sudanese victims of rampant sexual violence, the path to justice remains uncertain. This article explores the current pursuits of accountability for sexual violence in South Sudan and why they have failed to advance justice. After considering the factors that led to the Terrain prosecution in a military court, this article explores the impact of this case on South Sudanese perceptions of justice. The trial intensified the desire of many South Sudanese for accountability and increased knowledge of conflict-related criminal prosecutions. The justice system also marginally built its capacity and independence. However, there were serious due process concerns that led many to question the impartiality and credibility of the proceedings. This article argues that this case set a precedent that shows the international community will demand accountability in the wake of attacks on international aid workers. The threat of accountability may deter perpetrators from committing violence against this group, but will not necessarily protect South Sudanese victims. Finally, the article identifies lessons learned from the Terrain case and provides recommendations on how South Sudanese and others impacted by sexual violence can benefit from accountability efforts in the future.

scholarly journals ‘Helping our beneficiaries tell their own stories?’ International aid agencies and the politics of voice within news production

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Wright
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Value For Money ◽  
News Production ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Production Processes ◽  
News Organizations ◽  
Save The Children ◽  
International Aid Agencies

International aid agencies often claim to give the poor and disenfranchised a voice by helping them tell their stories to others located far away. But how do aid workers conceptualize and operationalize a politics of voice within media production processes? How do ideas about giving voice to others shape aid agencies’ engagement with mainstream news organizations? This article explores two contrasting news production case studies which took place in South Sudan and Mali, involving Save the Children, Christian Aid and their local partners. It finds that different approaches to giving voice exist in aid work, creating tensions within and between agencies. In addition commercialized notions of value for money, the influence of mediated donor reporting, and aid workers’ weak understandings of linguistic and intercultural interpretation combined to make aid agencies’ values-in-action far less empowering than they assumed.

Challenging environments: Danger, resilience and the aid industry

2012 ◽  
Vol 43 (5) ◽  
pp. 475-492 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Duffield
Keyword(s):  
Therapeutic Response ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
International Aid ◽  
The Political ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Care Of The Self ◽  
Profound Change ◽  
Political Environments ◽  
Security Training ◽  
Political Patronage

Despite the widespread perception of danger, the aid industry continues to expand within challenging political environments. As a way of reducing risk, this expansion has been accompanied by the ‘bunkerization’ of international aid workers. While this development is largely viewed by the industry as an unfortunate response to a decline in external security, a more holistic approach is used here to explain the consequent paradox of liberal interventionism: an expansion that is simultaneously a remoteness of international aid workers from the societies in which they operate. The demise of modernist legal, moral and political constraints, together with a decline in the political patronage that aid agencies enjoy, has been important in shaping the new risk terrain. At the same time, these changes embody a profound change in the way contingency is approached. Earlier modernist forms of protection have been replaced by postmodernist calls for resilience and the acceptance of risk as an opportunity for enterprise and reinvention. Within the aid industry, however, field-security training represents a countervailing attempt to govern aid workers through anxiety. Resilience, in the form of ‘care of the self’ techniques, becomes a therapeutic response to the fears induced in this way. Viewed from this perspective, apart from reducing risk, the bunker has important therapeutic functions in a world that aid workers no longer understand or feel safe in.

scholarly journals The local labour building the international community: Precarious work within humanitarian spaces

2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 743-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Pascucci
Keyword(s):  
Humanitarian Aid ◽  
International Aid ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
Aid Workers ◽  
Precarious Work ◽  
Global Expansion ◽  
Syrian Refugee ◽  
Local Labour ◽  
Syrian Refugee Crisis

Recent research has highlighted the relevance of spaces of international aid and development as sites where global politics materializes. However, the position of local aid workers within these spaces remains less explored. Drawing on fieldwork with humanitarian professionals employed in responses to the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan and Lebanon, this paper theorizes the salience of labour and precarity in the geographies of contemporary humanitarian aid. The ethnographically informed argument is built through three main points: (1) unemployment and insecurity among locally recruited humanitarian staff; (2) the forms of care and affective labour that the aid sector mobilizes; and (3) racialized and classed relations within humanitarian spaces. I argue that the differential precarities experienced by aid workers reproduce a porous and contested ‘local vs international’ divide. While challenged by the ‘new inclusions’ brought about by the global expansion of the aid industry, this divide perpetuates entrenched exclusions and hierarchies, raising ethico-political concerns about the presumptions of abstract universality inherent to humanitarianism.

Young Spanish-English Language Learners' Cognate Facilitation on Picture Naming

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (Spring) ◽  
pp. 115-128 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsey Leacox ◽  
Carla Wood ◽  
Gretchen Sunderman ◽  
Christopher Schatschneider
Keyword(s):  
English Language Learners ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Picture Naming ◽  
English Language
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