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For decades, nuclear weapons have been portrayed as essential to the security of the few states that possess them, and as a very ‘normal’ part of national and international security. These states have engaged in enormous programmes of acquisition and development, have disregarded the humanitarian implications of these weapons, and sought to persuade their publics that national security was dependent on the promise of killing hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians. The term ‘nuclearism’ has been used to describe this era, and several elements of nuclearism are explored here to identify how these states have been able to sustain their possession of nuclear arsenals. By perpetuating a discourse of ‘security’ which avoided international humanitarian law, by limiting decisions on nuclear policy to small groups of elites, by investing vast amounts of resources in their nuclear programs, and by using the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to perpetuate their privileged status as nuclear states, despite their promises to disarm, the great powers have been able to sustain a highly unequal – and dangerous – global nuclear order. This order is now under challenge, as the Humanitarian Initiative explored the implications of nuclear weapons’ use. Its sobering findings led non-nuclear states, supported by civil society actors, to create the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, making these weapons illegal, for all states. The Humanitarian Initiative has posed a challenge to all the elements of nuclearism, and has resulted in a significant rejection of the existing nuclear order. The treaty will not result in quick disarmament, and it faces several hurdles. It is, however, a notable achievement, delegitimizing nuclear weapons, and contributing to the goal of a nuclear-free world.
contribute to this conversation by highlighting how celebrity and corporate humanitarian initiatives focus attention on women and girls in ways that not only reproduce neoliberal individualist logic but also reproduce harmful gendered and racialised humanitarian saviour/saved logics. By turning their attention to success stories of female empowerment in the humanitarian sector, Gregoratti and Bergman Rosamond use postcolonial feminist analysis to reconsider unintended consequences of particular
crowd-sourced live maps, which provided close to real-time information about the location of injured persons and infrastructure damage ( Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011 ; Munro, 2013 ). To amplify the capacity for translation, a group from Microsoft, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University also created a Machine Translation (MT – automatic, computer translation) engine from Creole to English ( Lewis et al. , 2011 ). These initiatives
and differences between the two. When it comes to defining ‘humanitarian photography’, they narrowly define it as ‘the mobilization of photography in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries’ (1). That just pushes the question back a step: what is a ‘humanitarian’ initiative? Clearly, they think atrocity photography falls under this heading, but for similar reasons human rights photography could too. Perhaps a broader definition might have been more
has aimed to offer a more expansive security management framework to facilitate policy conversations about what is actually going on in the field, why these tensions are persisting and what alternatives to current approaches exist. Acknowledgements The interviews for this article were conducted under the auspices of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, with funding from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, fund number: 210665. The authors wish to thank Anaïde Nahikian, who collaborated on designing the interview methodology and
Mennonite volunteers who were about to be deployed in WWII Europe ( Kraus, 1944 ) – one finds that much of the book is a history of humanitarian logistics in the previous forty years in humanitarian aid. She attempted to transfer knowledge across crises using archives produced by humanitarian initiatives then. It may be a lesson to us all. You mentioned the role of logisticians in knowledge transmission Mickaël, could you expand on this? Mickaël: I have associated it to logistics, but of
may purchase these products. They thus shared substantive similarities, but it is the visibility and legitimacy accorded to them by the global refugee agency that prompted us to research them further to apprehend the specific logics that inform them. In what follows, we first locate our article within postcolonial feminist debates in gender and development and the ways in which such scholarship enables a critical analysis of humanitarian initiatives seeking to empower
Conclusion From 2012 to the present day, I’ve had the opportunity to monitor and analyse the Syrian situation and all the humanitarian initiatives undertaken in Syria. Over the course of my different missions, I’ve also been an actor in and direct witness to MSF’s relief operations, as well as an observer of the conflictual and heterogeneous environments in which they were run. Drawing on these experiences, I have related the questions and concerns that occupied me
faith in what was being called the Humanitarian Initiative on nuclear weapons as an alternative means of framing the nuclear weapons debate, and that they aimed to shift the discourse on nuclear weapons – and nuclearism more generally – away from purely strategic concerns. For many of these states, building on the earlier processes of humanitarian arms control and disarmament
question. The fifth element identified was the way in which the P5 nuclear states have long used the nuclear NPT to ensure that the global nuclear order remains as it is, always favouring themselves as the guardians of this order. Rejecting the discourse of security An important result of the Humanitarian Initiative process and the subsequent treaty has been