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Call for Publications Theme: Humanitarianism and Responsibility Publication: Journal of Human Rights Date: Special Issue (Dececmber 2012) Deadline: 1.9.2011 __________________________________________________ “Humanitarianism and Responsibility” A Special Issue of The Journal of Human Rights Guest Editors: Dr. Kerry Bystrom (English) and Dr. Glenn Mitoma (Human Rights) University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA On 12 January 2010, a massive earthquake struck the Caribbean island nation of Haiti with catastrophic results. The scope of the devastation was massive; the quake left over 300,000 people dead and some 1,000,000 homeless. It also demolished the country’s infrastructure, symbolized in the photograph of the collapsed Presidential Palace featured on the front page of The New York Times the day after the quake. Yet even before the magnitude of the destruction became widely known, a vast and decentralized humanitarian aid machine sprang into action. International agencies, national governments, and non-governmental organizations all mobilized to provide rescue teams, medical supplies and assistance, food and water, emergency shelter, and public security. Despite inadequacies, flaws, and missteps, the humanitarian response to the Haitian earthquake demonstrated just how thoroughly disaster relief has become institutionalized as the preeminent responsibility of the international community. Indeed, the invocations of that responsibility came from all quarters. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, speaking less than a week after the quake, proclaimed the provision of aid and hope to the Haitian people “our universal responsibility.” US President Barak Obama, after having mobilized American Embassy staff, the US Agency for International Development, Coast Guard search and rescue, Navy cruisers and helicopter ships, the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, the hospital ship Comfort, and the 82nd Airborne Division, affirmed that his country had the “continuing responsibility” to “reach out quickly and broadly and to deliver assistance that can save lives.” Although he had no airborne divisions at his command, founding director of Be The Change International, Rev. Dr. Robert V. Lee, III, spoke for the global civil society when he told the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard that it was “the responsibility of all NGOs to cooperate with one another in an effort to empower […] the people of Haiti.” Finally, but perhaps most importantly for attracting western media attention, George Clooney, actor and organizer of the “Hope for Haiti Now” telethon, told millions of viewers who would eventually contribute over $66 million dollars: “We all have a lot of responsibility to look out for people that can't look out for themselves.” This rapid rhetorical response to the Haitian earthquake suggests the extent to which “responsibility” has emerged as an organizing principle of humanitarianism. As such, the term has been invoked to signify a wide and sometimes contradictory set of ideas and practices associated with the effort to alleviate the suffering of what Richard A. Wilson and Richard D. Brown call “distant others.” But if its ubiquity as an organizing principle belies its deeply contested significance, then responsibility deserves a more sustained interrogation than it has heretofore received. What is responsibility? What does and should it mean vis-à-vis humanitarianism? This special issue is intended as an initial and interdiscplinary approach to these questions. It aims to uncover and clarify the various and crosscutting visions of responsibility that are currently operating within the discussions of humanitarianism carried out by practitioners, policy-makers and scholars. Attempting to figure out what responsibility might mean has both a practical and an ethical component, since it helps us not only to assess why different actors generate specific policy suggestions or come up with specific response plans when faced with humanitarian crisis, but also to come to a clearer picture of what actions should be (or should not be) taken in such situations. To put it differently, if the forms that humanitarian actions take are dictated in part by what Thomas Haskell once called the “perceptual and cognitive style” of responsibility, then the struggle to define, declare, and even deny humanitarian responsibility is a critical one. To address these issue, we currently seek essays focusing on three specific sub-themes within the broader topics of humanitarianism and responsibility. The first is the ongoing effort to rethink humanitarian intervention through the “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) doctrine. R2P is perhaps the most prominent and controversial embodiment of this new emphasis on humanitarian responsibility. First developed in 2001 by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, R2P was partially adopted as “official” United Nations policy at the World Summit in 2005. Designed to address some of the thorny issues raised by the rise of humanitarian military interventions in the post-Cold War era, including the international actions in Somalia (1992), Haiti (1994), and Kosovo (1999), as well as the failure to act to prevent the Rwandan genocide (1994), R2P recasts state sovereignty as a responsibility rather than a right and, more importantly, defines the obligations of the international community to protect civilians. The political struggle over the scope, significance, and institutionalization of R2P—more visible then ever in the wake of the NATO intervention in Libya—reveals the possibilities and limitations of this particular iteration of humanitarian responsibility. We invite submissions of essays that address these possibilities and limitations in theory and in through specific case studies. Many of the same developments that motivated the formulation of R2P have also provoked heightened self-scrutiny and a new degree of contention among non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and activists, as well as their academic observers, over the nature of humanitarian action more broadly. In discussions held by aid workers, scholars, and officials, the language of responsibility has become a ubiquitous discourse through which competing conceptions of the humanitarian project are framed. In the second section of this special issue we will analyze the ways in which humanitarian NGOs have elaborated and practiced their responsibilities. Here, we invite contributions that will, in particular, help to clarify the much-noted tension between those such as David Rieff who insist that “responsible” humanitarianism is limited to the provision of immediate aid to populations in eminent danger of death or injury, and those such as Thomas Weiss who have called on humanitarian actors to take responsibility for assisting broad political programs designed to “halt violence and ensure respect for human rights.” What are the stakes of taking one or the other of these positions? Is there a way to see beyond the seeming opposition between them? Finally, we will examine how advocacy campaigns and relief projects that fall outside of the more established arenas of the UN and major international NGOs construct and disseminate particular conceptions of global responsibility. Along with the news media, such campaigns, including the Product (RED) campaign, the micro-finance organization Kiva, and Starbucks’ advocacy for Ishmael Beah’s popular memoir A Long Way Gone, serve as cultural arbiters of a dynamic “ethos of humanitarianism” broadly disseminated among a privileged transnational public sphere. For this last section, we invite essays that explore these and other campaigns and cultural texts aimed at producing senses of transnational or global responsibility. Beyond assessing the impact of this diffuse advocacy work, such essays might unpack the dynamics and the ethical dimensions of the way such campaigns configure chains of responsibility and causality between “victims” of humanitarian crises and individuals in a position to respond, whether this be through what Lisa Ann Richey and Stefano Ponte call “compassionate consumption,” political activism, or more traditional forms of charity. Submissions for this special issue (6,000 to 8,000 words, inclusive of notes and bibliography) be sent to both editors no later than September 1, 2011. All submissions should be original, unpublished work and will be subject to peer review. Editorial decisions will be announced by November 1, 2011 and final drafts will be due December 15, 2011. The special issue is scheduled to appear in Dececmber 2012. The editors are happy to discuss potential contributions in advance of a formal submission, as well as to answer other queries. They can be contacted via email: [email protected] and [email protected] Contact: Glenn Mitoma University of Connecticut Human Rights Institute Thomas J. Dodd Research Center 405 Babbidge Road, U-1205 Storrs, CT 06269 USA Email: [email protected] __________________________________________________ InterPhil List Administration: http://interphil.polylog.org Intercultural Philosophy Calendar: http://cal.polylog.org __________________________________________________
