DEVELOP 717

Humanitarian Interventions


Please note: this is archived course information from 2017 for DEVELOP 717.

Description

Humanitarian agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have recently become important sites for social scientific inquiry parallel to their increasing prominence in the management of world affairs.

This course traces the rise of the humanitarian narrative and examines how humanitarianism — along with other key words such as crisis, emergency, and intervention — has become one of the organizing categories of political action and order. 

Course content analyses both the possibilities and limits of intervening in the lives of individuals and communities grounded upon humanitarian discourses of compassion.

Weekly seminars address the following topics, among others:

  • Conceptualizing disaster and emergency
  • Humanitarian values and governance
  • Humanitarian mobility
  • Discourses of building back better – linking relief and development
  • Sacred aid – faith-based organizations in humanitarian interventions
  • Social lives and everyday practices of humanitarian aid workers

Course Objectives: By the end of the semester, students will…

  1. Review and critique the historical rise (and present crisis) of humanitarian intervention as a prominent mode of governance in global affairs.
  2. Think, write, and speak critically about key analytical concepts in studies of humanitarian interventions such as the politics of bare life, the emergency-development continuum, humanitarian partnerships, trauma, and resilience.
  3. Identify and critique research methods used in social studies of humanitarian interventions.  
  4. Situate the everyday practices of humanitarian intervention (project design and implementation, organizational management, working with local partners, etc.) in light of objectives 1, 2 and 3.
  5. Locate and critically appraise these debates and practices in the context of particular case studies of humanitarian interventions around the world. Examples may include but are not limited to:  Christchurch earthquake, Haiti earthquake, Asia-Pacific cyclones (e.g. Cyclones Haiyan, Pam, and Winston), Syrian civil war and refugee crisis, Hurricane Katrina, volcano eruptions and frequent flood events across Southeast Asia, American military misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, etc.

Availability 2017

Semester 1

Lecturer(s)

Coordinator(s) Dr Jesse Hession Grayman

Reading/Texts

The weekly readings rely primarily on articles published in critical social science journals. We will also read selections from the following books:

Abramowitz, Sharon and Catherine Panter-Brick (eds) 2015. Medical Humanitarianism: Ethnographies of Practice. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Barnett, Michael N. and Janice Gross Stein (eds) Sacred Aid: Faith and Humanitarianism. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Fassin, Didier and Mariella Pandolfi (eds) 2010. Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Intervention. New York: Zone Books.

Huet, Marie-Hélène. 2012. The Culture of Disaster. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Malkki, Liisa. 2015. The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Simpson, Edward. 2014. The Political Biography of an Earthquake: Aftermath and Amnesia in Gujarat, India. London: Hurst Publishers.

Smirl, Lisa. 2015. Spaces of Aid: How Cars, Compounds and Hotels Shape Humanitarianism. London: Zed Books.

Assessment

Seminar Participation (10%)

Weekly Critical Reading Response (30%)

Student-Led Presentation & Discussion (15%)

Case Study Research Project (45%)

Points

DEVELOP 717: 15 points