Humanitarianism Identity And Nation

Refugees are on the move around the globe. Prosperous nations are rapidly adjusting their laws to crack down on the so-called "undeserving." Australia and Canada have each sought international reputations as humanitarian do-gooders, especially in the area of refugee admissions. Humanitarianism, Identity, and Nation traces the connections between the nation-building tradition of immigration and the challenge of admitting people who do not reflect the national interest of the twenty-first century. Catherine Dauvergne argues that in the absence of the justice standard for admitting newcomers, liberal nations instead share a humanitarian consensus about letting in needy outsiders. This consensus constrains and shapes migration law and policy. In a detailed consideration of how refugees and others in need are admitted to Australia and Canada, she links humanitarianism and national identity to explain the current shape of the law. If the problems of immigration policy were all about economics, future directions would be easy to map. If rights could trump sovereignty, refugee admission would be straightforward. But migration politics has never been simple. Humanitarianism, Identity, and Nation is a welcome antidote to economic critiques of immigration, and a thoughtful contribution to rights talk. It is a must-read for everyone interested in transforming migration laws to meet the needs of the twenty-first century.

Humanitarianism and Security contends that the search for stability and peace remains central to the political environment within the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Despite some positive political and economic progress observed in the Central African Region and the DRC in particular, the future of the region remains uncertain. Due to many unaddressed issues, including the multidimensional manifestations of humanitarian crises, the region is fragile with the potential for a relapse into violent conflict. Moreover, the DRC’s humanitarian crises have yet to be effectively addressed as consequences and promoters of insecurity and violence. Based on the “humanitarian-security-development” paradigm as an inclusive operational framework, Humanitarianism and Security articulates the trend of peace recovery in the DRC as contingent upon issues of security and the refugee/internally displaced population crisis. It claims and demonstrates that effective solutions must incorporate considerations of pre-colonial security dynamics, the place and role of identity within the humanitarian discourse/strategies, the determinants of transitional public security (TPS), and the various dynamics regarding the return and re/integration processes, into one operational framework. This framework must be accompanied by a continued effort to build strong local institutions as a critical component to the sustainability of operations.

Humanitarianism: Keywords is a comprehensive dictionary designed as a compass for navigating the conceptual universe of humanitarianism. It is an intuitive toolkit to map contemporary humanitarianism and to explore its current and future articulations. The dictionary serves a broad readership of practitioners, students, and researchers by providing informed access to the extensive humanitarian vocabulary.

An extraordinary outbreak of xenophobic violence in May 2008 shocked South Africa, but hostility toward newcomers has a long history. Democratization has channeled such discontent into a non-racial nationalism that specifically targets foreign Africans as a threat to prosperity. Finding suitable governmental and societal responses requires a better understanding of the complex legacies of segregation that underpin current immigration policies and practices. Unfortunately, conventional wisdoms of path dependency promote excessive fatalism and ignore how much South Africa is a typical settler state. A century ago, its policy makers shared innovative ideas with Australia and Canada, and these peers, which now openly wrestle with their own racist past, merit renewed attention. As unpalatable as the comparison might be to contemporary advocates of multiculturalism, rethinking restrictions in South Africa can also offer lessons for reconciling competing claims of indigeneity through multiple levels of representation and rights.

Pioneering study of the transition from war to peace and the birth of humanitarian rights after the Great War.

The book examines the reasons behind accusations of dysfunctional humanitarian identities and the loss of space for impartial action. Through a combination of practical examples in case studies from the field with a theoretical and philosophical approach to questions of voluntary service, community and identity, it reconsiders the exceptional discourse that constructs these identities and drives humanitarian response in environments of complex emergency. By recognizing both the strength and the limits of its social and political agency, the study presents opportunities for the construction of a less exceptional space, or ‘niche’ within the humanitarian sector, where the politics is around one of an ordinary humanitarian society instead of an ordered humanitarian system.

The untold story of how American Jews reinvented modern humanitarianism during the Great War and rebuilt Jewish life in Jewish homelands.

In Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Community, author Rob DeChaine explores a narrative common to the nongovernmental organization community about the promise and confusion of living together in post/modern times. Palpable in their affective admixture of idealism, fear, hope, anger and uncertainty, the protagonists of the story are humanitarian social actors, engaged in a vivid social drama. Their audience, as made apparent by DeChaine's excellent scholarship, is intimately engaged in the drama as well. According to DeChaine, the action takes shape in a multivocal polyphony of solidarity and, at times, cacophony of protest and dissent, with actors mobilizing symbolic resources in the service of uniting a public who would join with them in the cause. A major source of the actors' labor is symbolic, consisting in the successful rallying of formative energies in and around a cluster of key related terms, words and phrases, in order to dramatize and publicize the exigency of the crisis at hand. DeChaine argues that crises are embodied in the form of an intensifying hegemonic struggle over the articulation of 'community' in a global/ized world. The struggle brings into tension local and global priorities, national governments and civil society, and state-centered forms of identity and allegiance and a broad-based vision of global citizenship and belonging. DeChaine demonstrates that the crisis of community is one of the defining themes of our contemporary era, one that we ignore at our peril. This book is not only important to the NGO community but represents cutting edge analysis in rhetoric, cultural studies, semiotics, sociology and social organizations.