Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy

by Edited by Richard Ashby Wilson , Richard D. Brown

• ISBN13: 9780521883856
• ISBN10: 0521883857
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-11-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Humanitarian sentiments have motivated a variety of manifestations of pity, from nineteenth-century movements to end slavery to the creation of modern international humanitarian law. While humanitarianism is clearly political, Humanitarianism and Suffering addresses the ways in which it is also an ethos embedded in civil society, one that drives secular and religious social and cultural movements, not just legal and political institutions. As an ethos, humanitarianism has a strong narrative and representational dimension that can generate humanitarian constituencies for particular causes. The emotional nature of compassion is closely linked to visual and literary images of suffering and innocence. Essays in the volume analyze the character, form, and voice of private or public narratives themselves and explain how and why some narratives of suffering energize political movements of solidarity, whereas others do not. Humanitarianism and Suffering explores when, how, and why humanitarian movements become widespread popular movements. It shows how popular sentiments move political and social elites to action and, conversely, how national elites appropriate humanitarian ideals for more instrumental ends.

Table of Contents

Mourning, pity, and the work of narrative in the making of "humanity"	p. 31
Contemporary humanitarianism : the global and the local	p. 58
Humanitarian reading	p. 88
Global media and the myths of humanitarian relief : the case of the 2004 tsunami	p. 108
Hard struggles of doubt : abolitionists and the problem of slave redemption	p. 118
"Starving Armenians" : the politics and ideology of humanitarian aid in the first decades of the twentieth century	p. 140
International bystanders to the Holocaust and humanitarian intervention	p. 156
Victims, relatives, and citizens in Argentina : whose voice is legitimate enough?	p. 177
Children, suffering, and the humanitarian appeal	p. 202
The physicality of legal consciousness : suffering and the production of credibility in refugee resettlement	p. 223
"Can you describe this?" : human rights reports and what they tell us about the human rights movement	p. 245
Financial reparations, blood money, and human rights witness testimony : Morocco and Algeria	p. 265
Remnants and remains : narratives of suffering in post-genocide Rwanda's Gacaca courts	p. 285
Index	p. 307
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