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19 ‘Humanitarianism of the greatest value’: Manchester Rotarians and refugees It does not appear than any other Christian denomination but the Quakers set up a refugee committee or in other ways reached out consistently to refugees. William Hodgkins, minister of the Congregationalist Chapel in Oldham Road, wrote articles in support of refugees in the Manchester City News, including one which lavished fulsome praise on the refugees for their contribution to Manchester life, but there is no evidence that he or his chapel were otherwise active on their behalf. There
banality: long-term programming, properly supported (financially and politically) by states and international agencies. Yet in calling for better-informed, long-term decision-making, he nonetheless highlighted the need for a much deeper discussion of the relationship between long-term processes, lessons learnt and the practice of humanitarian aid. At a time of great uncertainty in the world, increased instrumentalisation of humanitarianism and heightened expectations of aid
, which would become an ‘icon of Third World suffering’, were the ‘watershed that turned the conflict into a global media event’ (9). It was neither the first nor the last time such images were used to draw Western attention to distant suffering. Indeed, the path-breaking collection Humanitarian Photography – which includes an essay by Heerten on Biafra – takes a longer view by gathering historians to analyse the visual culture of humanitarianism from the late nineteenth century to
The book traces the history of international humanitarianism from the anti-slavery movement to the end of the Cold War. It is based on an extensive survey of the international literature and is retold in an original narrative that relies on a close examination of the sources. It explains how relief entered both the national and the supranational institutions' agenda, and the programmes of non-governmental organisations, contributing to shape the relationship between the global North and South. The reconstruction of humanitarianism’s long history unfolds around some crucial moments and events: the colonial expansion of European countries, the two World Wars and their aftermaths, the emergence of a new postcolonial order. Salvatici looks especially closely at the major actors of aid operations (such as the Red Cross, Save the Children, the United Nations agencies, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders) and highlights how the meaning of international humanitarianism has changed over time.
-to-earth living standards to interpreting and fulfilling human desires’ ( Aravena, 2016 : 3–4). It was the last week before the Biennale closed for the season, and I had, over the previous summer, read a great deal of enthusiastic commentary on the event and its explicitly humanitarian intentions. I was keen to see the exhibits, especially given my long-running scepticism about the ability of architects to play a useful role in humanitarianism. However, after walking through the many
torment end their stricken lives. 1 In these lines, Voltaire was describing the death and destruction brought by the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755. This dramatic episode was defined as the first modern natural disaster and is often cited as l’événement inaugural 2 of contemporary humanitarianism. 3 The reasons for the modernity of this event can be traced back to the reaction of the Portuguese monarchy, which considered the response to the emergency to be its own responsibility. This was the first occasion on which there had been an attempt
practicality prevents it). This is the same foundational commitment that animates human rights work. The humanist core to both of these forms of social practice is a similar kind of belief in the ultimate priority of moral claims made by human beings as human beings rather than as possessors of any markers of identity or citizenship. What differences exist between humanitarianism and human rights are largely sociological – the contextual specifics of the evolution of two different forms of social activism. I have argued elsewhere, for example, that
foundational years. In particular, the chapter draws attention to the gendered nature of humanitarianism and how women struggled in the world of masculinist humanitarianism in the aftermath of World War I. The model of humanitarianism established by Henri Dunant and entrenched within the International Committee of the Red Cross promoted a gendered approach to medical matters with nursing the domain of women, and medical
century. Historian Samuel Moyn argues that ‘the slow amalgamation of humanitarian concern for suffering with human rights’, sped up from the 1970s onwards, culminating in the two becoming ‘fused enterprises, with the former incorporating the latter and the latter justified in terms of the former’. 4 For Moyn, this process promoted humanitarianism’s ever-closer relationship with the power of the state, and showed how human
5302P Democracy MUP-PT/lb.qxd 1111 2 3 4 5111 6 7 8 9 10111 11 12 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40 1 42111 23/10/09 16:08 Page 133 6 Humanitarianism and the representation of alterity: the aporias and prospects of cosmopolitan visuality Fuyuki Kurasawa Introduction To state things in a slightly hyperbolic vein, I want to begin by setting out what is arguably one of the major tasks of intellectual labour in our globalized age: pondering the implications, for the liberal-democratic imaginary, of the visual character of Euro