Browsing by Subject "Humanitarianism"
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Item Open Access At the Threshold with Simone Weil: A Political Theory of Migration and Refuge(2012) Gonzalez Rice, David LaurenceThe persistent presence of refugees challenges political theorists to rethink our approaches to citizenship and national sovereignty. I look to philosopher Simone Weil (1909-1943), who brings to the Western tradition her insight as a refugee who attended to other refugees. Deploying the tropes of Threshold, Refuge, and Attention (which I garner and elaborate from her writings) I read Weil as an eminently political theorist whose practice of befriending political strangers maintains the urgent, interrogative insight of the refugee while tempering certain "temptations of exile." On my reading, Weil's body of theory travels physically and conceptually among plural, intersecting, and conflicting bodies politic, finding in each a source of limited, imperfect, and precious Refuge.
I then put Weil into conversation with several contemporary scholars - Michael Walzer, Martha Nussbaum, and Kwame Anthony Appiah - each of whom takes up a problematic between duties to existing political community and the call to engagements with political strangers. Bringing Weilian theory to bear on this conversation, I argue that polity depends deeply on those who heed the call to assume variously particular, vocational, and unenforceable duties across received borders.
Finally, by way of furthering Weil's incomplete experiments in Attention to the other, I look to "accompaniment" and related strategies adopted by human rights activists in recent decades in the Americas. These projects, I suggest, display many traits in common with Weil's political sensibility, but they also demonstrate possibilities beyond those imagined by Weil herself. As such, they provide practical guidance to those of us confronting political failures and refugee flows in the Western hemisphere today. I conclude that politico-humanitarian movements' own bodies of theory and practice point the way to sustained, cross-border, political relations.
Item Open Access Human Rights and the Sovereign State: An Examination of the Compatibility of State Sovereignty with the Humanitarian Necessities of a Global World(2013-05-02) Yaffe, LeahThis thesis looks at the problem of sustaining human rights in a world of sovereign states. What does it mean for the global human rights movement that the predominant form of political organization in the world is the individual sovereign state? What are the tensions between the theories of sovereignty and humanitarianism? I trace the origin of the modern notion of sovereignty in order to demonstrate the difficulties posed for the human rights movement by state sovereignty. I argue that the relationship between the two concepts is antinomic: human rights require the resources and structure of the state for their actualization, yet are simultaneously put at risk by the unchecked power of the state. Because the human rights movement relies on state stability, but the stability of the state does not rely on the provision of human rights, an imbalance of power exists. Examining notions of sovereignty that antedate our own, I conclude that the human rights movement must become an international force strong enough to counterbalance powerful individual states in order to encourage states to adhere to human rights norms. This involves greater coordination between many elements of the human rights movement, including individuals, NGOs, regional organizations, multilateral institutions, and the international justice system.Item Open Access Securing Youth: Humanitarian Futures in Post-Conflict Uganda(2021) Sebastian, Matthew RyanThe dissertation considers how young people in northern Uganda navigate post-conflict life through participant observation, interviews, and ethnographic focus groups with youth working as security guards, current and formerly incarcerated youth, and young people seeking employment in South Sudan. It offers a detailed, sustained view into the everyday practices young people undertake to envision a future after prolonged civil conflict despite intense social, political, and economic constraints. I worked extensively with individuals who occupied different positions of vulnerability and security in order to investigate how these categories overlapped and intertwined in their daily lives. By doing so, the research makes broader interventions into theories of youth and of post-conflict recovery including how individuals encounter post-war legal authority, how humanitarian interventions impact intergenerational and familial relationships, and what strategies young people employ when the resources and opportunities afforded to them through the expansive humanitarian network that once surrounded them leaves the region, or transforms into something else entirely. I argue that the constraints young people face, coupled with the state’s attempt to securitize them as a potentially destabilizing political and economic force, generate impossible predicaments which often require them to take on increasingly dangerous risks, which in turn open them up to further securitization in a cycle that leaves young people unable to build anything but fraught futures despite being the future of the nation. A central aim of my research was to destabilize the "post" in post-conflict, not only to point to the ways in which conflict has afterlives (which is well treaded territory in anthropology) but also to disrupt the clean temporality the term presumes. I argue that young people do not take the “post” as a new dawn from which to build possibility, but instead draw on their past experiences to make sense of the present despite the uncertainty of the future. Building on other recent scholarship, my research interrogates the durability of the "post" as a way of opening up pathways which young people (and others) draw on to make sense of their daily lives.
Item Open Access The Politics of Asylum Among Eritrean Refugees in Italy(2019) Hung, CarlaMy dissertation investigates how hospitality among Eritreans is criminalized by Europe’s border security system. Eritreans create autonomous structures of care to confront the securitization of European borders and the discriminatory distribution of resources in Italy. When prosecutors accuse refugees of illegal squatting and human trafficking, they misunderstand refugee solidarity as exploitative and profit seeking. Using profit to distinguish trafficking from humanitarianism develops during the movement to abolish slavery. My dissertation extends abolitionist debates, about the co-imbrication of humanitarian sentiment with the rise of industrial capitalism, by showing how this logic is used to define humanitarianism as non-for-profit. I argue that the economies of care Eritrean refugees rely upon to seek asylum have their own cultural histories and humanitarian paradigms are inadequate to evaluate them. By bringing abolitionist debates to bear on Europe’s asylum system my work reveals a fundamental contradiction faced by refugees who have the right to seek asylum but no legitimate means to arrive at sites of refuge. My work extends postcolonial scholarship on refugees in Europe by showing how Eritreans articulate political conflict about sovereignty through the political asylum system. My dissertation shows how political conflict in the Eritrean diaspora, coupled with structural inequality in Italy, influenced the politics of a human trafficking case against certain Eritrean refugees. My work exposes bias in humanitarian practices that lead to cultural misunderstanding and criminalization.
Item Open Access Toward a Practical Theology of Institutions to Serve Faith-Based Organizations(2014) Rice, Christopher PaulU.S. faith-based organizations (FBOs) founded by Christians have gained wide recognition and influence both nationally and internationally and have become, to a large extent, the de facto bearers of contemporary Christian mission in an increasingly post-denominational landscape. Yet the focus of this thesis is how FBOs suffer from a separation between missiology, ecclesiology, and theological reflection in ways that inhibit their participation in the mission of God, or missio Dei.
The thesis draws on history, sociology, and missiology to provide a critical framework for an inter-disciplinary analysis of FBOs that illuminates the problems they face and describes what is required for a recovery of faithful witness. The thesis begins with the emergence of FBOs as a uniquely Protestant story, locating their origins within the history of Protestant missions, the emergence of the voluntary society, and their evolution into humanitarianism and the problems which emerge out of that history. A move to sociological analysis situates contemporary FBOs within a wider social ecology of powerful forces that cause non-profits to behave like for-profit corporations, often giving themselves over to bureaucratic models shaped by a technological understanding of practice. The final move to missiology and ecclesiology makes the claim that the critical reference point for evaluation of the FBO is the flourishing of the practice of Christian missions.
This constructive missiology provides the basis for proposing marks of a faithful mission-type organization in the contemporary context which can sustain the practice of missions not primarily as humanitarian activism, but as participation in the missio Dei. The thesis re-narrates FBOs and the marks we should look for in FBOs by proposing several organizational disciplines that provide a response to the challenges facing the contemporary FBO. These marks are displayed through brief case studies from three FBOs: L'Arche International, the U.S. national organization InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and New Song Urban Ministries in Baltimore.