Law
On 25 September 1911 the battleship Liberté exploded in Toulon harbour. This tragedy is just one of the many disasters that the French fleet suffered at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries and also represents the peak of these calamities, since it is undoubtedly the most deadly suffered by a French Navy ship in peacetime. The aim of this article is to study how the navy managed this disaster and the resulting deaths of service personnel, which were all the more traumatic because the incident happened in France’s main military port and in circumstances that do not match the traditional forms of death at sea.
The construction of an underground car park beneath the main square of Turin, Italy in 2004 led to the unearthing of the skeletonised remains of twenty-two individuals attributable to the early eighteenth century. At this time the city was besieged during the War of the Spanish Succession in a hard-fought battle that resulted in unexpected triumph for the Piedmontese, a victory that marked a fundamental turning point in Italian history. The current study assesses the strength of evidence linking the excavated individuals to the siege and assesses their possible role in the battle through consideration of their biological profiles, patterns of pathology and the presence of traumatic injuries. This article presents the first analysis of evidence for the siege of Turin from an anthropological point of view, providing new and unbiased information from the most direct source of evidence available: the remains of those who actually took part.
Based on a study of intersecting French archives (those of the Val de Grâce Hospital, the Service Historique de la Défense and the Archives Diplomatiques), and with the support of numerous printed sources, this article focuses on the handling of the bodies of French soldiers who died of cholera during the Crimean War (1854–56). As a continuation of studies done by historians Luc Capdevila and Danièle Voldman, the aim here is to consider how the diseased corpses of these soldiers reveal both the causes and circumstances of their deaths. Beyond the epidemiological context, these dead bodies shed light on the sanitary conditions and suffering resulting from years of military campaigns. To conclude, the article analyses the material traces left by these dead and the way that the Second Empire used them politically, giving the remains of leaders who died on the front lines of the cholera epidemic a triumphant return to the country and a state funeral.
Mercenaries are fighters who operate under special conditions. Their presence, as shadow combatants, often tends to exacerbate the violence of their enemies. That’s why the analysis focuses on the singularity of the relationship to death and ‘procedures’ concerning the corpses of their fallen comrades. As a fighter identified and engaged in landlocked areas, the mercenary’s corpse is treated according to material constraints pertaining in the 1960s. After violence on their body, and evolution towards the secret war, mercenaries favour the repatriation of the body or its disappearance. These new, painful conditions for comrades and families give birth to a collective memory fostered by commemorations.
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.
Humanitarian innovation has rapidly emerged to become central to discussions about the future of humanitarianism. Innovation practices are framed as a means by which the humanitarian community can identify the paradigm shift that it needs to survive in a rapidly changing world. However, this framing is based on a misunderstanding of economic theories of innovation and particularly of the nature of humanitarian economics. The lack of both a true market and a profit mechanism in the humanitarian industry means that innovations can be generated but will never be sustained. Unless this obstacle is addressed – perhaps through emerging networked approaches to economic activity – humanitarian innovation will continue to be a dead end.
Language and its translation are important operational concerns in humanitarian crisis response. Information sharing, coordination, collaboration and relationship-building all revolve around the ability to communicate effectively. However, doing so is hampered in many humanitarian crises by linguistic differences and a lack of access to adequate translation. Various innovative practices and products are being developed and deployed with the goal of addressing these concerns. In this theoretical paper, we critically appraise the ethical terrain of crisis translation and humanitarian innovation. We identify ethical issues related to three broad themes. First, we foreground questions of justice in access to translation and its prioritisation in contexts of widespread and pressing needs. Second, we consider the relationship between humanitarian ethics and the ethics of crisis translation. We argue for the importance of attending to epistemic justice in humanitarian crisis response, and consider how Ricoeur’s conception of linguistic hospitality provides insights into how relationships in humanitarian settings can be understood through the lens of an ethics of exchange while also acknowledging the steep asymmetries that often exist in these contexts. Finally, we identify issues related to how translation innovations intersect with humanitarian values and humanitarians’ ethical commitments.
This is an initial exploration of an emergent type of humanitarian goods – wearables for tracking and protecting the health, safety and nutrition of aid recipients. Examining the constitutive process of ‘humanitarian wearables’, the article reflects on the ambiguous position of digital humanitarian goods developed at the interface of emergency response contexts, the digitisation of beneficiary bodies and the rise of data and private-sector involvement in humanitarian aid. The article offers a set of contextual framings: first, it describes the proliferation and capabilities of various tracking devices across societal domains; second, it gives a brief account of the history of wristbands in refugee management and child nutrition; third, an inventory is given of prototype products and their proposed uses in aid. It is argued that what needs to be understood is that, in ‘the making’ of humanitarian wearables, the product is the data produced by digitised beneficiary bodies, not the wearables themselves.