Browsing by Subject "humanitarianism"

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    Humanitarianism, Development, and Human Rights: The Boundaries of Social Fields in Today’s World Society
    (2022-08) Rotem, Nir
    Humanitarianism faces an existential dilemma: Should the ultimate goal of humanitarian assistance be the mitigation of immediate suffering, or should it provide long-term assistance and address root causes? In facing this dilemma, humanitarian organizations merge relief, development strategies, and rights-based approaches. For humanitarians, however, this is a highly contentious topic. Drawing strong symbolic boundaries, practitioners who are wary of the politicization of the humanitarian environment have negatively dubbed this shift as “new humanitarianism.” Using the case of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), this work demonstrates that such blurring of boundaries is far from being a new occurrence, but that it has recently intensified. By tracing the historical shifts of the UNHCR since the 1950s and applying a sociological perspective, it examines the gradual extension of development and human rights knowledge into the humanitarian field. Whereas earlier research emphasized the split nature of humanitarianism or applied a field theory approach to account for agents’ tendencies to safeguard their field from external influences, this work advances a different theoretical argument. First, from a Bourdieusian historical-sociological perspective, the issue is framed in terms of changes in the fields’ boundaries. Notably, conversions within UNHCR do not take place in isolation. Rather, they closely follow changes that the development and human rights fields have undergone. In order to explain this, an integrated approach is introduced, which draws on sociological field theory and world society theory. It enables observers to identify the global diffusion of social knowledge and the readjustment of the fields’ boundaries. It is argued that the issue is not only a matter of direct relations between several fields, but also one of the spread of ideas and their incorporation into world culture. Second, the case of humanitarianism and human rights can be analyzed in terms of differentiation and de-differentiation. Here this work visits classic and contemporary social theory to understand the blurring of boundaries on a deeper level, as part of the social configurations of our era. The argument is based on the conditions of Ulrich Beck’s second modernity, together with the global spread of cultural elements, as explained by John W. Meyer’s world society theory. The result is a fusion of social knowledge, which brings these two fields closer together. As the analysis has uncovered, in its rhetoric and the solutions it has adopted, UNHCR mirrors elements from these diverse fields as part of world society. Thus, and not without struggle, UNHCR embraced a development- and human-rights-driven rationale. As is shown throughout this work, this partial-adaptation/partial-rejection is explained by world society mechanisms. The “new humanitarianism” is in fact rather old. In acknowledging that the dilemma posed above is an existential one, rather than ignoring it, this work paves the way for a comprehensive view of humanitarianism and other forms of aid and the division of labor between them. Clearly, these shared understandings should be reinforced in the attempt to alleviate suffering and to build brighter futures. This work also devotes special consideration to the underexamined qualitative strategy of historical ethnography. It is the agile journey of ethnographers who traverse history with the aim of reconstructing culture. Its distinct characteristics are examined, namely, its past-facing orientation and the reliance on a range of materials to reconstruct the research field. It also tends to be highly informed by theory, thus it follows deductive or abductive reasoning. Informed reflections on the different stages of research close this part. In conclusion, this work suggests that world society is a fusion society. The growing diffusion of scripted social knowledge during a social era that is open to plurality facilitates this transformation. Alongside differentiated fields, on the ontological level, there is growing commonality.