Project MUSE®: Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2010) through current issueLatest Articles: Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and DevelopmentTWOProject MUSE®Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development2151-43722151-4364Latest articles in Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Equally Vulnerable: Liberal Internationalism, the Traffic in Women and Children, and the Non-Politics of Race
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985991
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Over the last two decades, a growing number of interdisciplinary scholars interested in the origins of both contemporary global hierarchy and the idea of liberal internationalism have turned their attention to critical examinations of the League of Nations—the world's first "great experiment" in international organization.1 In particular, these studies have focused on the tension between the League's dual commitment to the "equality of nations" (in Woodrow Wilson's words) and the preservation of the global color line—a commitment formally captured in the Drafting Commission's refusal to include a racial equality clause in the Covenant.2 For many scholars, the clearest institutional and rhetorical expression of this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallEqually Vulnerable: Liberal Internationalism, the Traffic in Women and Children, and the Non-Politics of Race2026-03-26text/htmlen-USEqually Vulnerable: Liberal Internationalism, the Traffic in Women and Children, and the Non-Politics of Race2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®1895822026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Charter 77 Transnational: A Local Dissident Movement in International Human Rights Networks
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985992
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From its inception, Charter 77 represented a transnational phenomenon. It has usually been interpreted within the framework of the Helsinki Process, launched in the early 1970s and culminating in the creation of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). The Charter is often seen as one of its most visible outcomes, if not a poster child for it.1 From the start, appealing to both domestic and international audiences was central to human rights movements in Central and Eastern Europe. Their members addressed international organizations, NGOs, foreign politicians, journalists, and like-minded movements. A crucial, yet still underexplored, component of these transnational networks was the support
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallCharter 77 Transnational: A Local Dissident Movement in International Human Rights Networks2026-03-26text/htmlen-USCharter 77 Transnational: A Local Dissident Movement in International Human Rights Networks2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®1857272026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26From Relief to Rule: Food Rations and State-Making in Iraqi Kurdistan
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985993
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In March 1991, following the defeat of Iraq in Kuwait, Iraqi Kurds launched a mass uprising against Saddam Hussein's regime. The regime responded with a violent crackdown, which sparked a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands toward Turkey and Iran.1 Stranded in the snowy mountains from across Turkey without food, shelter, or medical care, Kurdish refugees became the focus of unprecedented international attention.2 In response, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) passed Resolution 688, condemning Iraq's internal repression as a threat to international peace and security. Although it did not authorize military intervention, it demanded Iraq grant humanitarian organizations immediate and unrestricted access to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallFrom Relief to Rule: Food Rations and State-Making in Iraqi Kurdistan2026-03-26text/htmlen-USFrom Relief to Rule: Food Rations and State-Making in Iraqi Kurdistan2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®1514162026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Populism: The Existential Threat to Liberal Democracy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985994
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While populism seems to be a point of discussion everywhere by everyone today—as both right-wing and left-wing variants emerge across the globe, the more that is said about it, the more nebulous the definition becomes. And while three new books attempt to clarify the concept, they reproduce many of these confusions because these interpretations oversimplify many aspects of the populist agenda in terms of its institutional formation and historical context. Juan Peron, Carlos Menem, and Cristina Kirchner might correspond to the same broad category of populist governments, but their differences are significant enough to necessitate nuanced examination. Furthermore, their broad and often-dismissive generalizations seek
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallPopulism: The Existential Threat to Liberal Democracy2026-03-26text/htmlen-USPopulism: The Existential Threat to Liberal Democracy2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®651162026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Impossible Conditions of Life: Famine, Humanitarian Management, and Genocide in Gaza
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985995
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On May 10, 2024, South Africa issued its third request to the International Court for Justice (ICJ), also called the World Court, in The Hague, Netherlands, for additional provisional measures as the "Israeli assault on Rafah is deliberately inflicting on Palestinians conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction." The southern city had been the last refuge for Palestinians in Gaza, but it was no longer safe.1 The request was an urgent follow-up by the South African legal team in its case against Israel filed in December 2023.2 The South African Republic had instituted proceedings at the court to "protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to the rights of the Palestinian people
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallImpossible Conditions of Life: Famine, Humanitarian Management, and Genocide in Gaza2026-03-26text/htmlen-USImpossible Conditions of Life: Famine, Humanitarian Management, and Genocide in Gaza2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®2805982026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26If Our Bodies Will Not Tell Our Tale, Perhaps Our Ruins Will
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985996
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These contrasting perspectives—between detached cartography and lived experience—frame the central challenge of this article: how to represent and communicate the realities of a land and people subjected to profound violence and erasure.At the time of writing, Gaza has endured over a year and a half of Israeli aggression. Death tolls have exceeded fifty thousand,2 with some unofficial estimates surpassing one hundred thousand. Reports suggest the bombs dropped in this period are equivalent to two nuclear strikes.3 Daily casualties include two mothers killed every hour,4 and over one in four residents have suffered starvation,5 according to the UN. This war has been reported as the deadliest of the twentieth and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallIf Our Bodies Will Not Tell Our Tale, Perhaps Our Ruins Will2026-03-26text/htmlen-USIf Our Bodies Will Not Tell Our Tale, Perhaps Our Ruins Will2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®1301272026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Vulnerability, Innocence and Futurity: Essays on Contemporary Politics of Childhood
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985997
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This collection grew out of a series of conversations about the salience of the child in multiple domains of contemporary politics. In recent years, the discovery of 215 bodies of Indigenous children buried by the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Canada brought children to the forefront of debates on the violence of settler colonialism and the need for reparations. The separation of migrant children from their parents in the United States or their deaths in the Mediterranean became emblematic of the cruelty of immigration and border policies to some, and of a border crisis that needs to be further controlled to others. Gender and sexual politics have been forcefully played out over children, from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallVulnerability, Innocence and Futurity: Essays on Contemporary Politics of Childhood2026-03-26text/htmlen-USVulnerability, Innocence and Futurity: Essays on Contemporary Politics of Childhood2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®280502026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Diagnostic Journeys of the Indian Problem after the Sixties Scoop: From Cultural to Neurodevelopmental Exculpations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985998
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If a home was a monument to what you lost or were losing out on, wouldn't you run away?1Not that long ago, they said they were taking Indian children and putting them into Residential Schools to avoid the "influence of the Wigwam," part of a civilizing mandate to bring Aboriginal peoples into modernity.2 Based on numbers alone, this project of civilizing the Native has been an abysmal failure. Today, there are more Indigenous children in Canadian state "care" than any other era of Indigenous abduction, including the height of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system, leading many to ask: Is there really any difference between IRS and contemporary child welfare systems?3 Whether such a condition constitutes a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallDiagnostic Journeys of the Indian Problem after the Sixties Scoop: From Cultural to Neurodevelopmental Exculpations2026-03-26text/htmlen-USDiagnostic Journeys of the Indian Problem after the Sixties Scoop: From Cultural to Neurodevelopmental Exculpations2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®1053002026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26"If They Catch Me Today, I'll Come Back Tomorrow": Young Border-Crossers' Experiences and Embodied Knowledge in the Sonora-Arizona Borderlands
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/985999
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Transcription* of Valentina Glockner Fagetti's talk at AAA 2022Danger, Vulnerability and the Future: A Panel on Contemporary Politics of ChildhoodI'm going to share a PowerPoint presentation that is mostly images and quotes from a group of teenagers. This belongs to work I developed through the end of 2019 and the very start of 2020 with a group of Mexican teenagers aged between fifteen and seventeen who were staying at a Mexican government shelter for unaccompanied children, being deported by Border Patrol. This work takes place at the border between Sonora and Arizona, specifically along the Mexico-US border. The initial idea of this series of workshops was to assess how much knowledge the children, the teenagers
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmall"If They Catch Me Today, I'll Come Back Tomorrow": Young Border-Crossers' Experiences and Embodied Knowledge in the Sonora-Arizona Borderlands2026-03-26text/htmlen-US"If They Catch Me Today, I'll Come Back Tomorrow": Young Border-Crossers' Experiences and Embodied Knowledge in the Sonora-Arizona Borderlands2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®133072026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26"For the Girl Who Wished to be a Boy": Revolutionary Children and the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986000
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On a morning in the autumn of 2022, I woke up in Montreal (Tiohtià:ke) and reached for my phone to see what the day, already halfway along in Iran, had brought. I only do that when a critical situation unfolds in that part of the world, which is not a rare occurrence. A friend had sent me a video of three children, likely in first or second grade, walking stridently side by side, chanting "woman, life, freedom." They wore school uniforms but held their headscarves in their hands, waving them vigorously.1 As with many images and videos from those days, their backs were to the camera.2 The determined, collective gait of those small bodies and the passionate tone of their child voices stirred something in me—neither
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmall"For the Girl Who Wished to be a Boy": Revolutionary Children and the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising2026-03-26text/htmlen-US"For the Girl Who Wished to be a Boy": Revolutionary Children and the Woman, Life, Freedom Uprising2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®543202026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Gender Ideology, the Figure of the Child, and the Fear of Cultural Reproduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986001
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In recent years, the fight against "gender ideology" has become a rallying cry for much of the Right throughout the world. Politicians across the globe have invoked the dangers of "gender" and its noxious effects on children to block access to abortion and contraception, revoke marriage equality and anti-discrimination laws for LGBTQ individuals, and ban medical care for trans youth. Elected officials have appealed to "gender ideology" to police higher education and shut down departments such as women's studies, ethnic studies, or sociology, all presented as incubators of this hazardous "gender theory." Along similar lines, they have mobilized the specter of a "gender agenda" to forbid discussions of sexual
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallGender Ideology, the Figure of the Child, and the Fear of Cultural Reproduction2026-03-26text/htmlen-USGender Ideology, the Figure of the Child, and the Fear of Cultural Reproduction2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®511602026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Threading Liberalism with Authoritarianism: Egyptian Children as Geopolitical Actors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986002
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What comes into view when we take childhood as a window into larger political formations? How do "children" as a category reinforce or unsettle some of the most enduring foundations of modern politics? In this essay, I examine the politics of Egyptian children to bring liberalism and authoritarianism, which are oftentimes studied separately, into a unified analytical framework. I do so by examining portrayals of Egyptian children in the media and in government discourse at a time of heightened authoritarianism in Egypt that is supported by liberal democratic states in the European Union amid a long-drawn global "War on Terror." In particular, I consider the criminalization and incarceration of the children of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallThreading Liberalism with Authoritarianism: Egyptian Children as Geopolitical Actors2026-03-26text/htmlen-USThreading Liberalism with Authoritarianism: Egyptian Children as Geopolitical Actors2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®537532026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26Reading Through Innocence: From Liberal to Illiberal Politics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986003
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It is impossible to think or speak of the politics of childhood today without thinking of the images of starving children in Gaza—their bones protruding in excruciating ways, and others, at several months old, weighing less than they did at birth. I have long critiqued humanitarian logic—where only innocent children, or "women-and-children" matter, and where they matter only in the sense that they evoke pity. But I hoped that this liberal humanitarian logic might nevertheless finally help to stop the genocide in Gaza, succeeding where the massive global protests, strikes, and boycotts have not. And, indeed, the images of children being starved to death as an Israeli weapon of war—as the famine was officially
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallReading Through Innocence: From Liberal to Illiberal Politics2026-03-26text/htmlen-USReading Through Innocence: From Liberal to Illiberal Politics2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®453362026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26From a Right of Self-Defense to the Fact of Conquest
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/986004
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On October 7, 2023, some arguments began that continue to this day. Did the Hamas-led attack on Israel come out of the blue, or was it a response to decades of domination and dispossession? Was it an incomprehensible act of savagery or a long-awaited prison break? A well-timed strike at a complacent oppressor or a counter-productive mistake? Were its intended targets military or civilian or both? Were Hamas leaders telling the truth when they said, "There were clashes and confrontations [but] we did not have any intention or decision to kill civilians"?2These and other questions may divide global opinion for the foreseeable future, but in the wake of October 7 many world leaders immediately united around a single
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/499/image/coversmallFrom a Right of Self-Defense to the Fact of Conquest2026-03-26text/htmlen-USFrom a Right of Self-Defense to the Fact of Conquest2026-03-262026TWOProject MUSE®1503082026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002026-03-26