Humanitarianism tomorrow? Humanitarian actions in former Yugoslavia (original) (raw)
Related papers
American Ethnologist, 2016
In 2002, Bosnia and Herzegovina was the site of massive housing-reconstruction projects run by international aid organizations as part of a plan to move refugees back to their prewar homes. Alongside the usual technical tasks of such projects, aid workers spent considerable time and effort establishing and stabilizing the categorical distinction between things humanitarian and things political. Analysis of these efforts by one aid organization reveals the often-overlooked social and cultural work necessary to maintain a humanitarian field of operation, demonstrating that the humanitarian status of aid projects is never more than provisionally settled. This unstable, provisional nature of humanitarian action constitutes an underexplored dynamic shaping and limiting international responses to suffering and need.
This paper explores how the boundary between humanitarianism and politics was reproduced in the everyday life in a Bosnia and Herzegovina town. It addresses the use of (post)Yugoslav ideas about humaneness as an apolitical core surrounded by layers of socio-political identities in the course of humanitarian actions. The paper suggests that the depoliticization of humanitarian actions allowed people to distance themselves from the hegemonic understanding of politics as interest-oriented management of ethno-national groups. Those who needed humanitarian help relied on depoliticizing discourses of humaneness to assert their (political) claims to survival and wellbeing in the context marked by the dominance of ethno-nationalist rhetoric.
Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2014
Through an ethnographic focus on humanitarne akcije in Bosnia and Herzegovina – a local form of raising monetary donations to people who need medical treatments abroad – this paper explores humanitarianism and its understandings of life. Ethnographically tracking the course of a humanitarna akcija organised in one Bosnian town, this paper makes two related points. First, it ethnographically demonstrates that lives of the ‘helpers’ and ‘helped’ in humanitarne akcije were understood as immersed in the intense talk and gossip of the town and as exposed to the sociopolitical environment troubled in the same way. Comparing this understanding of life with the international humanitarianism, this paper suggests that the notion of ‘bare life’ in international humanitarian projects in emergencies may be the product of the separation of infrastructures, which enable and manage lives of the ‘savers’ and ‘saved’. Second, those who needed help through humanitarne akcije strongly criticised the lack of organised health care and social security in Bosnia and Herzegovina that pushed them to initiate humanitarne akcije. They criticised less how other people perceived them (the terms of their sociocultural recognition) and more the shrinking public health-care insurance, unavailability of medical treatments, unequal allocation of medicines, tissues and organs, and so forth (the unjust redistribution of resources). Their dissatisfactions imply that humanitarianism as an industry of aid can be criticised for failing to intervene in the global regimes of unequal redistribution of resources in a transformative way.
From Bosnia to the Kosovo Humanitarian Internvetion case
This paper emphasizes the historical, chronological line of events of the dissolution of the Yugoslavian federation. The bloody conflict caused loss of thousands of humans lives and infringement of the International Law sovereignty principles. The massacres that took place in Bosnia and the Humanitarian Intervention in Kosovo are interconnected. This study gathered different sources that aim the describing of the grounds of the conflicts in details.
Vernacular humanitarianisms. Introduction to special issue of the SA/AS journal
Social Anthropology, 2023
There has been an increase of anthropological interest in small-scale humanitarianisms that make situated claims to universality. The articles in this collection demonstrate that some genealogies of such situated universalisms have been explored more than others. Focusing on vernacular humanitarianisms, the goal is not to celebrate the standpoint of 'radical alterity' but rather to acknowledge that imagining and recognising similarities of people's experiences is not reserved for the Western European epistemology. Anthropological research of small-scale humanitarianisms points to situated, alternative and sometimes even decolonising visions and practices of 'the humanity' understood as a framework for imagining and recognising broadly shared experiences. Th is collection asks how vernacular humanitarianisms are performed in everyday life, enabling particular forms of ethics, power and inequality. Th us, it keeps possibilities of social critique in sight and moves a conversation towards an ethnographically attuned perspective that explores the role of vernacular humanitarianisms in various projects of governance.
An analysis of humanitarian intervention in action
2016
This submission examines the doctrine of humanitarian intervention by focusing on the Western involvement in the violent breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia during the 1990s and the wars that this ignited. It draws on several publications written over the past decade including "Securing Verdicts: The Misuse of Witness Evidence at The Hague", in Herman E.S. (ed), The Srebrenica Massacre: Evidence, Context, Politics (Szamuely 2011); Herman E.S., Peterson D. & Szamuely G., 2007, "Yugoslavia: Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party" (Szamuely 2007); and Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War on Yugoslavia (Szamuely, 2014). Academic writers as well as policymakers deem NATO’s bombing of Bosnia in 1994 and 1995 and of Kosovo in 1999 to be exemplars of the successful use of force to secure humanitarian outcomes. This submission examines these claims in light of the standards that the advocates of humanitarian intervention have themselves put...