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FFS why don't you two just get married and be done with it :rolleyes:

This is a progressive move and one i fully support. Are humanitarian NGOs to be conceptualised as an extension of 'Western' states? The level of funding they receive from donor govts certainly lends some credibility to this position. Furthermore the militarisation of humanitarianism also...

News update: Mexican security forces enter Ciudad Juarez BBC coverage Reuters/AlertNet

Ain't nothing to read. Its just this quote taken from a book. Am just interested to know if/how this quote relates to your idea of "exploring the differences and similarities between imperial conquest and humanitarian intervention". [Can add to your reading by sending articles by Duffield if...

Interested to hear what you make of this Vim? EDIT: apologies -- there's no reason why this should just be aimed at Vim; anyone else have annything to say about Duffields analysis?

HCC vim?

Agreed Zhao that the lack of coverage is shameful. I/we have tried to examine the dynamics of the conflict from a political economy perspective in the Rolling Great Lakes thread [check it out] -- seems a bit daft to have two threads on the same niche topic don't ya think? Anyhow, I think all...

gnomic? mysterious, often incomprehensible, yet seemingly wise....

Interesting BBC Natural World documentary on the future of British agriculture: A Farm for the Future iPlayer link so will time out at some point soon.

Rights and duties are socially constructed -- there is nothing innate about them IMO. So part of the state-building process is the construction of legitimacy whereby elites seek to generate support for their activites. In Gramscian terms, hegemony (of elites over societies) is not just based on...

In what sense?

Stability and justice -- not absolute values. Justice for who? Regimes which are found towards the authoritarian end of the spectrum may offer little in the way of legal equality. Application of the law may be pretty arbitrary. Justice serves the elite not the masses. Still the society in...

Fuck y'all then... switching to tangent proof jet-packs. Ha!

More dilemmas... Despite the routine humanitarian claims to neutrality/impartiality/apoliticism, most humanitarian organizations, UN agencies as well as NGOs, depend to a large extent on funds from Western donor governments, whose priorities are — quite legitimately — not influenced by...

so how do you feel about this kind of position scott? have you read his work? if not i thoroughly recommend it and can e-mail you some pdf docs if you're interested.

Oh -- you mean the one with the imaginative title: 'Economics and Violent Conflict'? By Macartan Humphreys at Harvard. Alright but i don't want any pretentious crap infiltrating here ;)

Ok i'm in. Post some initial thoughts somewhere (a new thread maybe?) and see where we go from there. Something that springs to mind straight away though is this quote from Mark Duffield's book Global Governance and the New Wars: The current concern of global governance is to establish a...

Just want to be clear about why this is a "dilemma" - fucked my original post up so hopefully this should be a corrective. Basically, humanitarianism can be seen as part of a globalization process with a liberal agenda and therefore can be argued to contribute significantly to generating global...

No worries there are many. For a start from the same article i linked to above: The dilemmas of humanitarian action were, for example, agonizingly exposed in the huge assistance operation for the Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire in 1994. Not only had many — if not most — of the refugees taken...

Most humanitarian organizations are indeed keenly aware of the moral dilemmas of their operations and the pitfalls of the “humanitarian imperative”. Mary Anderson warns, however, that “it is a moral and logical fallacy to conclude that because aid can do harm, the decision not to give aid would...