Search results
thought on the politics of the darker sides of neoliberal humanitarianism lurking behind its celebrity face. Dangerous Genres of Cowboy Romance Humanitarianism – Róisín Read The book is a fascinating in-depth case study on one celebrity’s move into development work. By focusing on one celebrity, in this case Ben Affleck, the book is able to explore border dynamics of celebrity humanitarianism, while at the same time being able
, it but serves to emphasize the reports, which for several months past have been reaching the outer world, of conditions which obtain in the stricken areas. ( Record , 1922b : 151–2) Although it is impossible to know how the audience felt retrospectively, we can reflect on the injunctions to feel and care made in the films. The controversial films discussed above stand close to another visual genre – that of atrocity images. As with certain photographic cases used in transnational networks – who denounced abuses in the colonies ( Twomey, 2012 ) – atrocity images
decisions of poor leaders that led to such unnecessary violence and tragedy – as if Somalia had not seen enough of that already. RR: You both have mentioned other writings which influenced your work, but you don’t say a lot about other humanitarian memoirs. I wonder what your perception of humanitarian memoir as a genre was before you started writing? Here I’m wondering not just about the role they play in communicating the experiences of the sector to a wider audience, but also the potential role they play in generating a humanitarian nostalgia or myths about the
political phenomena outside of the romantic story genre. The story of the book The theoretical and methodological contribution of this work has been to illustrate the narrative nature of international politics. The book has argued that the idea of a narrative adopted from literary studies and narratology is helpful as it offers both an explanation for why narratives matter in the first place as well as providing a conceptual framework for the empirical analysis of narratives. Narratives are important for international politics from both a cognitive and a cultural
pattern of emergence and evolution is not unique to drones, nor is the course of works responding to it unique to drone art. All technologies raise challenging questions. All technologies evolve. Therefore, the arc of drone art is a valuable object lesson for how art about technology emerges, flourishes, evolves, fades and, ultimately, becomes something else. Drone ‘surfacing’ For those who have tracked the drone art movement closely, it is hard not to feel that the genre’s golden years have come and gone. Today, drone art in its original community-building form
these settings are individually and subjectively constituted, they draw on culturally embedded story genres which are commonly shared throughout society and are thereby intersubjective. A setting is, however, never complete, as it cannot show or describe the whole ‘story world’ or universe in which the story is taking place. It always has to leave spaces which can be filled by the reader’s or viewer’s imagination. 28 Romantic narratives in international politics In addition, the setting is not only a passive background picture which provides the colourful backdrop
This book complements extant histories of diplomacy by discussing change in the form of tipping-points, understood as the culmination of long-term trends.
The first part of the book discusses social evolution on the general level of institutions. The diplomatic institution has undergone four tipping-points: between culturally similar small-scale polities, between culturally different large-scale polities, permanent bilateral diplomacy, and permanent multilateral diplomacy. The consular institution has seen three: the emergence of the consul as the judge of a trading colony, the judge as a representative of the state, and the imbrication of the consular institution in unitary foreign services. The second part challenges extant literature’s treatment of diplomacy as a textual affair and an elite concern. It lays down the groundwork for the study of visual diplomacy by establishing diplomacy’s visual genres, discussing how diplomats spread images to wider audiences and drawing up a taxonomy of three visual strategies used for this purpose: a hegemonic and Western strategy, a national strategy, and a strategy that is spiteful of Western hegemony. Two case studies discuss the evolving place of the visual in one diplomatic practice, namely accreditation, and the importance of the social imagination. One possible evolutionary effect of the latter seems to be as a lair of hibernation for the otherwise threatened idea that diplomacy is not about dialogue but about the confrontation between good and evil. The book concludes by seeing the future of diplomacy in a continued struggle between state-to-state-based diplomacy and diplomacy as networked global governance.
In their focus on possible identities, meanings and events, the martial networks of US drones enact a shift from producing a definitive world picture to overseeing the ground from which such representations emerge. The mobilization of data that makes this possible, conflicts with the historical goals of surveillance and reconnaissance operations. Rather than identifying discrete individuals, the kill chain collects the partial traces of metadata in order to produce the actors necessary for a strike. These relations allow drones to penetrate the world directly, to work through and as instead of upon its objects. In this way, drone power shifts from the symbolic to the ontological; its operations become one of world-making. Using work by Trevor Paglen, Noor Behram and others, this chapter examines the ways in which the above relations resurface in the context of drone art and the larger attempt of this genre to reimagine its subject by way of this convergence.
The English language has three tenses in the realis mood. The previous chapters have been devoted to two of them, past and present, and the following and final chapter will look at the third, the future. However, in addition to the realis mood, there is also the irrealis mood, which charts what might have been, might exist elsewhere, might come – that is, what is not (yet) real. This matters to our understanding of diplomacy, for most people will only experience diplomacy second hand, be that through news media (a realis genre) or through sundry
: A Peace Corps Chronicle that helped promote participation in the US Peace Corps. 1 As the industry has become entrenched as a third player permanently integrated into global relations, humanitarian memoir has become a fast-growing genre. For both the relief and development industries memoir is admirably suited as an ambassador from the field to the larger public, oriented as it is to personal