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intellectuals as experts 29 2 1 Intellectuals as experts Those who are charged with saying what counts as true – Michel Foucault2 As I am writing this chapter, the news is heartbreaking: floods in India, Nepal and Bangladesh displacing millions and killing thousands – a taster of climate change to come; the resurgence of fears of nuclear war and ill-chosen jokes about Armageddon from those who have not experienced this fear as real; a US president who equates armed neo-Nazis in Charlottesville with anti-fascist protesters and sanctions police brutality; a
This article aims to shed light on the post-mortem practices for Palestinian dead bodies when there is suspicion of human rights violations by Israeli military forces. By focusing on the case of Omran Abu Hamdieh from Al-Khalil (Hebron), the article explores the interactions between Palestinian social-institutional agents, Israeli military forces and international medico-legal agents. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data, the article explores how the intersectionality between the various controlling powers is inscribed over the Palestinian dead bodies and structures their death rites. The article claims that inviting foreign medico-legal experts in the Palestinian context could reveal the true death story and the human rights violations, but also reaffirms the sovereignty of the Israeli military forces over the Palestinian dead and lived bodies.
The Journal of Humanitarian Affairs is an exciting, new open access journal
hosted jointly by The Humanitarian Affairs Team at Save the Children UK, and
Centre de Réflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires MSF (Paris) and the
Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. It
will contribute to current thinking around humanitarian governance, policy and
practice with academic rigour and political courage. The journal will challenge
contributors and readers to think critically about humanitarian issues that are
often approached from reductionist assumptions about what experience and
evidence mean. It will cover contemporary, historical, methodological and
applied subject matters and will bring together studies, debates and literature
reviews. The journal will engage with these through diverse online content,
including peer reviewed articles, expert interviews, policy analyses, literature
reviews and ‘spotlight’ features.
Our rationale can be summed up as
follows: the sector is growing and is facing severe ethical and practical
challenges. The Journal of Humanitarian Affairs will provide a space for serious
and inter-disciplinary academic and practitioner exchanges on pressing issues of
international interest.
The journal aims to be a home and platform for
leading thinkers on humanitarian affairs, a place where ideas are floated,
controversies are aired and new research is published and scrutinised. Areas in
which submissions will be considered include humanitarian financing, migrations
and responses, the history of humanitarian aid, failed humanitarian
interventions, media representations of humanitarianism, the changing landscape
of humanitarianism, the response of states to foreign interventions and critical
debates on concepts such as resilience or security.
is often filtered through expert and professional opinions. Historically, disaster studies have failed to ground research in local realities ( Gaillard, 2018 ; Altbach, 2004 ) and research on post-disaster recovery and resilience is usually done about people experiencing risk rather than being done by or with them ( Jigyasu, 2005 ). In addition, local actors are often stripped of their political agency and reduced to victims that are merely surviving or recovering from hazards ( Sou, 2021 ; Chandler, 2012 ; Bohle et al. , 2019). These troubling trends led a
humanitarian response. We also looked at the main gaps in the five areas that experts agree are essential for children’s holistic development: good health, adequate nutrition, security and safety, responsive caregiving and opportunities for early learning. 2 Main Findings Half the world’s refugees are children; more detailed guidance on supporting them is needed. Attention to young children and their caregivers is present but should be more detailed. While all fifteen humanitarian standards and guidance documents reviewed address children, less than half
This article studies one of the humanitarian challenges caused by the COVID-19 crisis: the dignified handling of the mortal remains of individuals that have died from COVID-19 in Muslim contexts. It illustrates the discussion with examples from Sunni Muslim-majority states when relevant, such as Egypt, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco and Pakistan, and examples from English-speaking non-Muslim majority states such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada and Australia as well as Sri Lanka. The article finds that the case of the management of dead bodies of people who have died from COVID-19 has shown that the creativity and flexibility enshrined in the Islamic law-making logic and methodology, on the one hand, and the cooperation between Muslim jurists and specialised medical and forensic experts, on the other, have contributed to saving people’s lives and mitigating the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Muslim contexts.
security forces turned security advisors spend countless hours training aid workers on ‘how to manage kidnapping crises’. The policy advocated almost routinely by these experts can be summed up as ‘Pay, don’t say’. In the eyes of private security firms, ‘kidnapping can be reduced to a simple business negotiation’ 2 that requires the strictest confidentiality. According to Alain Juillet, former intelligence director at the DGSE (the
intervention vary, this collection of articles invites us to consider the importance of local, socially embedded meanings in humanitarianism and the potential difference between local understandings and expert analyses and norms. The first of these empirical articles, by Ara Joy Pacoma, Yvonne Su and Angelie Genotiva, is the output of collaboration with local researchers to explore and address local understandings, conceptions and expressions of resilience among people affected by disaster – in this case Typhoon Haiyan in Tacloban, Philippines. This article therefore
been conceived as a triumph of reason and rationality over emotions. To the extent it relies on emotions, it carefully directs them through curated narratives deployed in the realisation of predetermined advocacy objectives ( Fernandes, 2017 : 2). With humanitarian actors increasingly engaging in specific thematic issues and policy changes, they have privileged authoritative facts that positions them as experts, enhancing their legitimacy in the eyes of decision
, Russians and Iranians, and between rebel and regime groups. All are extremely active online. Pro-regime Russian content producers have created websites and attacked groups like the White Helmets, calling them ‘terrorists’ and dismissing stories about children killed by chemical attacks as fake news featuring ‘actors’ ( Solon, 2017 ). In articles from all sides of the campaign, there are links to official-looking reports and the biographies of experts that seem trustworthy. It can be very difficult to discern the provenance of information or