Suchergebnisse

The main claim in this article is that humanitarianism can be depicted as an attempt of establishing a realistic utopia. The claimed is supported by comparison between More's Utopia and Dunant's A memory of Solferino. Despite the differences in style and context, both authors show a sensitive analysis of human nature and war as a phenomenon. They both show that war should be conducted in a way that reduces suffering. It is also important that several of their ideas that were far flung at the time have become political mainstream. This in turn illustrate that some utopian depictions can turn out to be realistic. Dunant's text illustrates this by making concrete proposals that brought about long lasting changes in the conduct of war. Despite coming short of abolishing war his text represent a realistic utopia that expanded the field of what was politically possible.

This article examines the relationship between humanitarian aid and ecologically unequal exchange in the context of post-disaster reconstruction. I assess the manner in which humanitarian aid became a central part of the reconstruction process in India's Tamil Nadu state following the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. This article focuses on how the humanitarian "gift" of housing became a central plank of the state's efforts to push fishers inland while opening up coastal lands for various economic development projects such as ports, infrastructure, industries, and tourism. As part of the state and multilateral agency financed reconstruction process, the humanitarian aid regime provided "free" houses as gifts to recipients while expecting in return the formal abandonment of all claims to the coast. The humanitarian "gift" therefore helped depoliticize critical issues of land and resources, location and livelihood, which prior to the tsunami were subjects of long-standing political conflicts between local fisher populations and the state. The gift economy in effect played into an ongoing conflict over land and resources and effectively sought to ease the alienation of fishers from their coastal commons and near shore marine resource base. I argue that humanitarian aid, despite its associations with benevolence and generosity, presents a troubling and disempowering set of options for political struggles over land, resources, and social entitlements such as housing, thereby intensifying existing ecological and economic inequalities.

On March 19, 2011, French and British forces, with the military support of the United States, launched a massive attack against the Libyan army. The official objective of the air and naval strikes was to impose a no-fl y zone to protect the civilians of Misrata, Ajdabiya, and Benghazi from massacres predicted by the head of the Libyan National Transitional Council. Nine days later, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and British prime minister David Cameron jointly declared that "hundreds of thousands of people had thus been saved from a humanitarian disaster"—but, they added, "Libya was still confronted with a humanitarian crisis."