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Freedoms, set out in 1941, provided particularly American inspiration for the post-war development of liberal global governance. 1 But the principles of great-power trusteeship and balancing, reflected in the Dumbarton Oaks proposals in 1944, were decisive in the creation of the United Nations. 2 Despite the early proliferation of liberal institutions under the aegis of the UN, Cold War prerogatives undermined cosmopolitan aspirations for world government. Cancelling each other out in the Security Council, the US and the Soviet Union
collectively from a long battle within the American establishment, in which the military has, for the time being, gained the upper hand over civil servants and career politicians, with their cosmopolitan project of liberal order and rules-based global governance, initiated after the Second World War and expanded after the Cold War. If this victory is consolidated, it will bring an end to the American messianism of the twentieth century, with its division of the world between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, its globalising imperative to reorganise the world through the
Cold War, which is endangering both humanitarian teams and the operations they conduct. References to ‘before’ have been heard since the mid-1990s, in the wake of the Bosnian War and the Tutsi genocide. The mass killings in Bosnia and Rwanda – coming on the heels of the Somali and Liberian civil wars – created a landscape of widespread violence, ‘anarchic conflicts’ in which not even humanitarian workers or journalists were safe. People stressed the contrast with earlier
effectively than attempting to find answers to such far-reaching questions in a global context. Somalia was selected because of its pivotal role in redefining humanitarian aid in the post-Cold War era. The crisis in the region altered understandings of humanitarian intervention as a tool of international security, raised questions about NGO engagement with, or disregard for, local politics and offered massive logistical challenges in the delivery of aid ( Harper, 2012 ). Its legacy still
own societies, especially as reformists of the centre left and right (Clinton, Blair) came to dominate the party-political scene after Thatcher and Reagan embedded the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s. After the Cold War, in other words, the liberal world order was a fact of life. In Margaret Thatcher’s immortal words, ‘there is no alternative’. The consequences of this focus on private enterprise, mobile money, weakened unions, reduced state welfare and regulation and lower taxes are all too visible today in areas like wealth inequality and
History Security-risk management has long been a concern at Médecins du Monde (MdM), as it was for other humanitarian agencies operating at the height of the Cold War. However, it was in the 1990s that security had to address its own set of issues. The collapse of the Soviet bloc and the post-Cold War conflicts created safety issues for humanitarian agencies: a booming aid sector led to an increase in exposure, together with a trend for
undermines existing obligations of all parties under international humanitarian law to allow civilians in areas affected by fighting to leave in search of safety and impartial aid to reach those in need. It is on that basis that the concept is not one which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) wishes to promote, even though it acknowledges its possible necessity for other humanitarian organisations ( ICRC, 2003 ) and has resorted to it on occasions. 1 Numerous examples of failed corridors and safe zones becoming the target of attacks during the post-Cold
, a neo-humanitarianism from World War II through the end of the Cold War and a liberal humanitarianism from the end of the Cold War to the present. In this vein, other authors have explored different expressions of humanitarianism during the same period ( Hoffman and Weiss, 2006 ; Kahn and Cunningham, 2013 ). Volha Piotukh (2015) , in addition to following the above classification, delves into the nature and implications of this ‘“new” humanitarianism’. Specifically, she proposes to analyse the multiplication of rationalities and technologies of power that are
Introduction Drawing its energy from the wave of New Left and counter-cultural radicalism of the 1960s ( Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005 ), an NGO-led direct humanitarian action pushed onto the international stage during the 1970s. The radicalism of this new anti-establishment sans frontières humanitarianism lay in its political challenge to the conventions of Cold War sovereignty. By being there on the ground it sought to hold sovereign power to account, witnessing its excesses while professing a face-to-face humanitarian
.), Engaging Men in the Fight against Gender Violence: Case Studies from Africa ( New York : Palgrave Macmillan ), pp. 69 – 100 . Tickner , J. A. ( 2001 ), Gendering World Politics: Issues and Approaches in the Post-Cold War Era ( New York : Columbia University Press ). Tobin