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Humanitarian aid in Central Europe after World War I repositioned both food and food research on a global scale. This essay follows the British scientific delegation that worked in Vienna as part of the food aid program and shows how the city became a "lab" for international nutrition. Assuming a political role, British nutrition experts were motivated to collaborate with local experts. To examine what internationalism looked like in the lab, the essay reconstructs the forgotten Viennese NEM system, a scientific theory in which food was measured in milk units instead of calories, and demonstrates the unlikely ways the British researchers adopted it. The exchange of scientific standards between experts resulted in a series of milk experiments in which human and animal milks were exchanged and compared. Bearing on historiographic discussions of standards and internationalism, this case study offers an intervention into how we connect the history of measurement, international politics, and living creatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identities and identity politics play a significant role in the lives of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. Using empirical qualitative research with focus groups as the primary research method, this article is a critical investigation into the ways in which Syrian refugees in Lebanon are simultaneously politicized through their everyday lived experiences yet depoliticized through humanitarian policy and practice. In particular, the article explores how the politicization/depoliticization dichotomy impacts Syrian refugees' access to and experiences within higher education opportunities made available for them in Lebanon. The article argues that humanitarianism's inattentiveness to intersectional identities and social hierarchies of power has often resulted in physical and psychological educational exclusions and reinforced existing inequalities and fissures/divisions between different groups of refugees. In this way, higher education for refugees has often fallen short of its potential to transform lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little existing work studies public perceptions of climate-induced migration. We redress this gap, drawing on diverse literatures in political science and social psychology. We argue that climate migrants occupy an intermediate position in the public view, garnering greater support than traditional economic migrants but less support than refugees. Evidence from a conjoint experiment embedded in nationally representative surveys of 2,160 respondents in the United States and Germany provide support for this claim. Importantly, this result holds for internal and international migrants. These findings suggest the importance of humanitarian considerations and empathy in shaping migration attitudes. We use a follow-up factorial experiment to explore potential policy implications of public support for climate migrants. We find no evidence that priming climate migration increases support for climate change mitigation, echoing existing work on the difficulty of mobilizing climate action and suggesting that climate migration is unlikely to spur greater support for mitigating climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The refugee camp today has been naturalized as a product of failed international idealism and political expediency that serves as a timeless reminder of the plight of displaced peoples. This article explores the refugee camp's origins as a product of a late Victorian imperial and military legacy and the contingencies of World War I. The use of the concentration camp as a tool to provide refuge and control displaced populations began during the war as a humanitarian measure. Part of a larger world of camps that interned civilians, prisoners of war, and refugees during World War I, the refugee camp in the Middle East existed at the crossroads of Allied military objectives and the Western-led humanitarian movement. In the wake of victory in the east, the army of occupation, aid workers, and local actors fashioned the concentration camp as a site of refuge as part of an emerging international order. American relief efforts led by Near East Relief and later the League of Nations have been well studied. Less understood is how and why Britain, due to the central role it played in combat operations and eventually in dividing up the Middle East with its French ally, guided and shaped norms and conditions for dealing with displaced peoples. Ultimately, the experience of total war shaped Allied war strategy regarding civilian populations during the humanitarian crisis that engulfed the east. It produced the refugee camp as an ostensibly temporary solution to what became for many a permanent problem of statelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a conceptual and historical introduction to the significance of witnessing in relationship to environmental questions for the Hau special section "Witnessing Environments." The articles in this special section take as their focus the often fragmented ways in which witnessing gains traction—as both practice and ethos—across environmental interventions. They also chart the ways that the pairing of "witnessing" and "environment" reconfigures both terms, with environmental questions, their politics, and their mediatization at once challenging and providing emergent spaces of creativity and experiment in relation to witnessing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We develop a dynastic human capital investment framework to study the importance of family borrowing constraints and uninsured labor market risk, as well as the process of intergenerational ability transmission, in determining human capital investments in children at different ages. We calibrate our model to data from the Children of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. While the effects of relaxing any borrowing limit at a single stage are modest, eliminating all life-cycle borrowing limits dramatically increases investments, earnings, and intergenerational mobility. The impacts of policy changes at college-going ages are greater when anticipated earlier, and shifting subsidies to earlier ages increases aggregate welfare and human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies show a beneficial effect of peacekeeping operations (PKOs). However, by looking at individual effect pathways (intensity, duration, recurrence, diffusion) in isolation, they underestimate the peacekeeping impact of PKOs. We propose a novel method of evaluating the combined impact across all pathways based on a statistical model of the efficacy of UN PKOs in preventing the onset, escalation, continuation, and recurrence of internal armed conflict. We run a set of simulations based on the statistical estimates to assess the impact of alternative UN policies for the 2001–13 period. If the UN had invested US$200 billion in PKOs with strong mandates, major armed conflict would have been reduced by up to two-thirds relative to a scenario without PKOs and 150,000 lives would have been saved over the 13-year period compared to a no-PKO scenario. UN peacekeeping is clearly a cost-effective way of increasing global security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Departing from Aihwa Ong's influential analysis of citizenship as a Foucauldian cultural project of subject-making, this contribution examines three global development citizen-subjects: transnational high-tech companies, marginalized women, and everyday humanitarians. It draws on two ethnographic research projects to analyze how market logics and digital technologies contribute to the global configurations of corporate citizenship and online microfinance that articulate corporate and development objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic study explores how migrant shelters that assist people migrating without authorization through Mexico mediate seemingly contradictory frameworks: human smuggling and humanitarianism. Amid intensified immigration enforcement and policing along migration routes, Central Americans crossing Mexico without authorization increasingly interact with smugglers. These interactions are often characterized as much by mutuality as they are by exploitation. Shelter workers relied on material and embodied signs to make tentative interpretations about these ambiguous dynamics of care and coercion without confronting potential smugglers explicitly. These findings build on previous studies that examine how social workers rely on different kinds of evidence to both reproduce and transform social inequities. Examining how shelter workers interact pragmatically with material objects, in addition to language, to mediate frameworks of humanitarianism and human smuggling informs social work practice with other criminalized populations who do not fit neatly into dichotomies of victimhood and victimization, or innocence and guilt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the ubiquity of humanitarian language, action, and sentiment in our current world, there has been no consensus on the precise definition of humanitarianism. Humanitarian obligations, jurisdiction, limits, and even actors remain unsettled and often hotly contested. Suspicions about motives and probity, often articulated through the language of corruption, play a key role in these contests. Through a consideration of humanitarian assistance to Palestinian refugees, this essay advances several related arguments about how corruption operates in humanitarianism. Most broadly, suspicions and accusations of corruption play an important role in the on-the-ground work of defining what humanitarianism is for providers and recipients. They do so, in part, through (1) establishing and elaborating the refugee as a category of humanitarian governance and personhood and (2) articulating and consolidating an array of obligations and responsibilities across the humanitarian field. Viewed through the lens of concerns about corruption, refugees appear as ethically comprised subjects not because of their inherent qualities but due to their circumstances. Humanitarian governance responds in various ways to this perceived incapacity. Refugees not only are the targets of corruption management but also make their own accusations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A case study is presented of British humanitarianism in the instance of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Save the Children Fund (SCF) in relation to a film commissioned by SCF from the firm Kestrel Films and film director Ken Loach. Topics include Loach's critique of the SCF in Kenya as paternalistic, the history of the SCF in relation to philanthropy, and the professionalization of humanitarian NGOs associated with the group Voluntary Committee on Overseas Aid and Development (VCOAD).

A critical response to the essay "Reflections on Violence, Law, and Humanitarism" by Talal Asad in the December 2014 issue of the periodical "Critical Inquiry" is presented. Topics mentioned include Asad's work in anthropology, specifically on the aspects of culture and society, his use of genealogy in determining concealed meanings and functions in individual concepts, and the emergence of a liberal sociocultural and political order in modern civilization.

A critical response to the essay "Reflections on Violence, Law, and Humanitarism" by Talal Asad in the December 2014 issue of the periodical "Critical Inquiry" is presented. Topics mentioned include an overview of various studies and reflections on violence in society, a discussion on the bounded nature of violence, and an overview of forces at work in the exercise of violence.

The article discusses the link between violence, law, and humanitarianism in modern society. Topics mentioned include the concept of the universal benevolence in psychological interiority, advancement in moral progress with the use of international diplomacy to address conflict rather than violence, and relationship between the decline in human violence and the emergence of the state.

A sizeable literature has been devoted to determining the effectiveness of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping in ending civil wars. Much less work has attempted to improve our understanding of the force-level commitments made by the UN to ongoing conflicts. We systematically address the issue of UN force commitments to civil conflicts and their relation to conflict hostility. Specifically, we posit that UN force deployments are a product of UN Security Council (UNSC) bias in favor of or against individual conflict factions and the battlefield performance of those combatants. To test our arguments, we employ newly collected data on UNSC resolution bias, monthly peacekeeping personnel commitments, and dynamic monthly-conflict conditions for African civil conflicts over the 1991–2008 period. We find that bias in UNSC resolutions is an important determinant of UN troop-deployment levels when its preferred side is sustaining higher casualties. These findings have important implications for peacekeeping effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The principles of humanitarian assistance dictate that aid be distributed in accordance with need while remaining neutral with respect to the political stakes. However, these principles have unique implications in the postconflict context, where need is often correlated with opponents' performance in the previous contest. In these cases, humanitarian assistance is likely to be biased towards the conflict loser. Using a crisis-bargaining framework, this article describes a simple logic for how humanitarian aid can inadvertently undermine peace by creating a revisionist party with the incentive to renegotiate the postwar settlement. The empirical expectations of the theory are tested using a panel dataset of cross-national humanitarian aid expenditures in civil conflicts since the end of the Cold War. As the theory predicts, postconflict states treated with higher levels of humanitarian assistance exhibit shorter spells of peace; however, this effect only occurs after conflicts that ended with a decisive victory. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study compares the genocidal legacies of Cambodian-Canadian and Jewish-Israeli trauma descendants. Despite important contextual sociopolitical and historical differences, both case studies similarly deviate from the reductionist descendant profile of the pathological, publicly enlisted witness in search of redemptive testimonial voice. Findings thereby allow for a grounded deconstruction of the Euro-Western universalized semiotics of suffering. Set against the above similarities, key differences between Khmer and Jewish self-perceived sense of vulnerability/empowerment, lived experiences of memory and forgetting, and genocide-related moral modes of being not only challenge key axioms in the scholarship and in humanitarian practice but raise epistemological concerns regarding the constitutive role of cultural worldviews often marginalized in sociopolitical analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I review the concept of sustainability and the various approaches to quantifying it. My focus is on the role that natural capital plays in supporting human welfare, the extent to which there are substitutes for it in this role, and how this is reflected in sustainability measures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]