Scandinavian countries are routinely considered exceptional for their commitment to development cooperation, peace mediation, and humanitarian action. This book highlights how the political culture of Scandinavia is indeed characterized by the idea of doing good on the world stage, but then shows how this 'Scandinavian humanitarian brand' is an asset that policymakers and others can capitalize on to legitimize policy interventions and ideas, or to advance commercial, diplomatic, and security interests. Providing case studies from all Scandinavian countries, this book shows how the brand is made, reinforced, and used in a variety of policy contexts, from foreign aid and humanitarian assistance; to military operations, peace-building, and mediation; to migration policy, global health, and international cooperation. A key objective of the book is to explain why the Scandinavian humanitarian brand retains such apparent resilience in a time when Scandinavia's characteristic approach to world affairs seems challenged from many sides at once. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

"Scandinavian countries are routinely considered exceptional for their commitment to development cooperation, peace mediation, and humanitarian action. This book highlights how the political culture of Scandinavia is indeed characterized by the idea of doing good on the world stage, but then shows how this "Scandinavian Humanitarian Brand" is an asset that policymakers and others can capitalize on to legitimize policy interventions and ideas, or to advance commercial, diplomatic, and security interests. Providing case studies from all Scandinavian countries, this book shows how the brand is made, reinforced, and used in a variety of policy contexts, from foreign aid and humanitarian assistance; to military operations, peace-building, and mediation; to migration policy, global health and international cooperation. A key objective of the book is to explain why the Scandinavian Humanitarian Brand retains such apparent resilience in a time when Scandinavia's characteristic approach to world affairs seems challenged from many sides at once. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core"--

This prescient Handbook examines how legacies of colonialism, gender, class, and other markers of inequality intersect with contemporary humanitarianism at multiple levels.

What does it mean to devote yourself wholly to helping others? In Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar seeks out people living lives of extreme ethical commitment and tells their deeply intimate stories; their stubborn integrity and their compromises; their bravery and their recklessness; their joys and defeats and wrenching dilemmas. A couple adopts two children in distress. But then they think: If they can change two lives, why not four? Or ten? They adopt twenty. But how do they weigh the needs of unknown children in distress against the needs of the children they already have? Another couple founds a leprosy colony in the wilderness in India, living in huts with no walls, knowing that their two small children may contract leprosy or be eaten by panthers. The children survive. But what if they hadn't? How would their parents' risk have been judged? A woman believes that if she spends money on herself, rather than donate it to buy life-saving medicine, then she's responsible for the deaths that result. She lives on a fraction of her income, but wonders: when is compromise self-indulgence and when is it essential? We honor such generosity and high ideals; but when we call people do-gooders there is skepticism in it, even hostility. Why do moral people make us uneasy? Between her stories, MacFarquhar threads a lively history of the literature, philosophy, social science, and self-help that have contributed to a deep suspicion of do-gooders in Western culture. Through its sympathetic and beautifully vivid storytelling, Strangers Drowning confronts us with fundamental questions about what it means to be human. In a world of strangers drowning in need, how much should we help, and how much can we help? Is it right to care for strangers even at the expense of those we are closest to? Moving and provocative, Strangers Drowning challenges us to think about what we value most, and why.

Social justice has returned to the heart of political debate in present-day Europe. But what does it mean in different national histories and political regimes, and how has this changed over time? This book provides the first historical account of the evolution of notions of social justice across Europe since the late nineteenth century. Written by an international team of leading historians, the book analyses the often-divergent ways in which political movements, state institutions, intellectual groups, and social organisations have understood and sought to achieve social justice. Conceived as an emphatically European analysis covering both the eastern and western halves of the continent, Social Justice in Twentieth-Century Europe demonstrates that no political movement ever held exclusive ownership of the meaning of social justice. Conversely, its definition has always been strongly contested, between those who would define it in terms of equality of conditions, or of opportunity; the security provided by state authority, or the freedom of personal initiative; the individual rights of a liberal order, or the social solidarities of class, nation, confession, or Volk.

This book critically investigates Nordic criminal justice as a global role model. Not taking this role for granted, the chapters of the book analyze how Nordic approaches to criminal justice were folded into global contexts, and how patterns of promotion were built around perceptions that these approaches also had a particular value for other criminal justice systems. Specific actors, both internal and external to the region itself, have branded Nordic criminal justice as a form of ‘penal exceptionalism’ associated with human rights, universalistic welfare, and social cohesion. The book shows how building and using the brand of Nordic criminal justice allowed stakeholders to champion specific forms of crime control across a variety of criminal justice areas in both domestic and international settings. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of criminal justice, international law and justice, Nordic and Scandinavian studies, and more widely to the social sciences and humanities.