Refugees are on the move around the globe. Prosperous nations are rapidly adjusting their laws to crack down on the so-called "undeserving." Australia and Canada have each sought international reputations as humanitarian do-gooders, especially in the area of refugee admissions. Humanitarianism, Identity, and Nation traces the connections between the nation-building tradition of immigration and the challenge of admitting people who do not reflect the national interest of the twenty-first century. Catherine Dauvergne argues that in the absence of the justice standard for admitting newcomers, liberal nations instead share a humanitarian consensus about letting in needy outsiders. This consensus constrains and shapes migration law and policy. In a detailed consideration of how refugees and others in need are admitted to Australia and Canada, she links humanitarianism and national identity to explain the current shape of the law. If the problems of immigration policy were all about economics, future directions would be easy to map. If rights could trump sovereignty, refugee admission would be straightforward. But migration politics has never been simple. Humanitarianism, Identity, and Nation is a welcome antidote to economic critiques of immigration, and a thoughtful contribution to rights talk. It is a must-read for everyone interested in transforming migration laws to meet the needs of the twenty-first century.

Humanitarianism and Security contends that the search for stability and peace remains central to the political environment within the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Despite some positive political and economic progress observed in the Central African Region and the DRC in particular, the future of the region remains uncertain. Due to many unaddressed issues, including the multidimensional manifestations of humanitarian crises, the region is fragile with the potential for a relapse into violent conflict. Moreover, the DRC’s humanitarian crises have yet to be effectively addressed as consequences and promoters of insecurity and violence. Based on the “humanitarian-security-development” paradigm as an inclusive operational framework, Humanitarianism and Security articulates the trend of peace recovery in the DRC as contingent upon issues of security and the refugee/internally displaced population crisis. It claims and demonstrates that effective solutions must incorporate considerations of pre-colonial security dynamics, the place and role of identity within the humanitarian discourse/strategies, the determinants of transitional public security (TPS), and the various dynamics regarding the return and re/integration processes, into one operational framework. This framework must be accompanied by a continued effort to build strong local institutions as a critical component to the sustainability of operations.

The book examines the reasons behind accusations of dysfunctional humanitarian identities and the loss of space for impartial action. Through a combination of practical examples in case studies from the field with a theoretical and philosophical approach to questions of voluntary service, community and identity, it reconsiders the exceptional discourse that constructs these identities and drives humanitarian response in environments of complex emergency. By recognizing both the strength and the limits of its social and political agency, the study presents opportunities for the construction of a less exceptional space, or ‘niche’ within the humanitarian sector, where the politics is around one of an ordinary humanitarian society instead of an ordered humanitarian system.

The untold story of how American Jews reinvented modern humanitarianism during the Great War and rebuilt Jewish life in Jewish homelands.

In The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from aid recipients to aid workers themselves. The anthropological commitment to understand the motivations and desires of these professionals and how they imagine themselves in the world "out there," led Malkki to spend more than a decade interviewing members of the international Finnish Red Cross, as well as observing Finns who volunteered from their homes through gifts of handwork. The need to help, she shows, can come from a profound neediness—the need for aid workers and volunteers to be part of the lively world and something greater than themselves, and, in the case of the elderly who knit "trauma teddies" and "aid bunnies" for "needy children," the need to fight loneliness and loss of personhood. In seriously examining aspects of humanitarian aid often dismissed as sentimental, or trivial, Malkki complicates notions of what constitutes real political work. She traces how the international is always entangled in the domestic, whether in the shape of the need to leave home or handmade gifts that are an aid to sociality and to the imagination of the world.

Pioneering study of the transition from war to peace and the birth of humanitarian rights after the Great War.

Humanitarianism: Keywords is a comprehensive dictionary designed as a compass for navigating the conceptual universe of humanitarianism.