Humanitarian Reform Research Articles

‘Tearing Off the Bonds’: Suffrage Visual Culture in Australia, New Zealand and the USA, 1890–1920

AbstractThis article will examine how transpacific suffrage visual culture imagined and reimagined an artistic tradition centred around the figure of the bound woman. White suffragists and anti‐suffragists in Australia, New Zealand and the United States used the iconography of bonds, chains and whips to mediate the possibility of women’s enfranchisement. Haunted by the legacies of settler colonialism, suffrage cartoons directly and obliquely evoked the spectre of chattel slavery, convict transportation and incarceration alongside the elusive ideals of humanitarian reform. While anti‐suffrage cartoons lamented the prospect of women’s enfranchisement, pro‐suffrage cartoons appropriated this iconography primarily for the benefit of white women.

The Necessity of Humanitarian Reform

The Necessity of Humanitarian Reform

Localisation of humanitarian action in War-torn Countries: The experience of local NGOs in Yemen

Localisation has recently emerged as one of the most prevalent global norms shaping humanitarian reform towards more locally-led response as a corrective to power imbalances in the humanitarian system. The concept of localisation however remains subject to much debate and the practical complexities of localised humanitarian response have not yet been fully unpacked. This paper explores the meaning of – and challenges to – localisation of humanitarian action through a case-study of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in war-torn Yemen. Drawing on empirical fieldwork including interviews with international and local NGOs, it analyses the practical, logistical, and political obstacles to the application of localisation and explores the conceptualisations of locally-embedded actors. The paper finds that whilst some progress has been made in terms of technical-operational localisation despite highly challenging conditions, genuine localisation viewed as empowerment that disrupts hierarchical aid relationships has not been actualized. Finally, the paper explores the policy and practice implications of the findings and suggests areas for further research.

Coordination during Cholera Outbreak Response: Critical Insights from Yemen.

Within the humanitarian arena and since the introduction of the humanitarian reform process in 2005, the cluster approach was introduced to strengthen the cooperation and accountability between agencies working in the same field. Such an integrated approach is particularly needed and relevant in emergencies like cholera, especially in countries undergoing internal conflicts like Yemen. Several areas of concern have been identified during the past field experiences, which include dysfunctional cooperation as a result of different mandates as well as the relationship between nongovernmental organizations and their donors. Control of environmental health services is, for instance, the responsibility of several clusters/agencies and stakeholders, which usually results in a complicated and sometimes confusing approaches to address gaps and barriers. As far as the drinking water quality monitoring and surveillance are concerned, sampling and testing and compilation of data are usually carried out by many agencies included in the health and water sanitation and hygiene (WASH) clusters. We believe that the cluster theoretical approach for emergency response remains a turning point for the humanitarian arena. However, lessons from the recent past, especially in the management of a cholera outbreak in fragile settings, may serve as a serious reflection on roles and dynamics within the blurred border between health and WASH. Specifically, cluster leads in the field have the responsibility for ensuring that humanitarian actors working in their sectors remain actively engaged in addressing crosscutting concerns such as the environment.

Localisation in the Context of UK Government Engagement With the Humanitarian Reform Agenda

Localisation is a key element of the humanitarian reform agenda. However, there are continuing debates regarding its form and emphasis, linked to understandings of the local, the role of the state and the implications for interpretation of humanitarian principles of “de-internationalised” humanitarian response. This paper considers UK engagement with the localisation agenda, particularly through examination of the policies and programmes of the Department for International Development (DFID). The UK was a major contributor to dialogue on localisation at the World Humanitarian Summit of 2016 and has subsequently shown strong support for Grand Bargain commitments and implementation of a larger proportion of programmes involving cash transfers. Overall, however, advance on this agenda has been limited. The paper notes three major areas of constraint. First, logistical concerns have frequently been noted, particularly with respect to tasks such as procurement and financial monitoring. This has limited the engagement of many local actors lacking organisational capacity in these areas. Second, conceptual ambiguity has also played a significant role. Localisation is poorly theorised, and the roles, functions and capacities—beyond procurement of supplies and emergency technical assistance—that local actors may be able to fulfil far more effectively than international ones are not frequently addressed. Narrowly framed understandings of principles such as independence and impartiality, for instance, appear to severely limit confidence in engaging with local religious actors. Third, political considerations appear to have increasingly limited the space for more radical interpretations of the implications of localisation. Successive UK Secretaries of State for International Development have defended the commitment to a fixed proportion of Gross National Income (GNI) for development assistance based on strong public support for UK aid expenditure to reflect national interests and values. In this context, there are few clear political incentives to cede power over decision-making regarding UK Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) to national and local actors in a manner required for fundamental localisation of humanitarian response. Even where there is a clear potential UK interest—for example, bolstering capacity of local actors in contexts vulnerable to humanitarian emergency to avert more costly emergency response—the public perception of capacity strengthening (compared to life-saving humanitarian actions) mitigates against such moves in a climate of contested public spending. The establishment of a merged Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office in 2020 signals the likelihood of a reframing of localisation. While some advancement in terms of some logistical and conceptual barriers may be anticipated, issues of both national interest and public perceptions of national interest seem likely to continue to constrain a more radical implementation of localisation, particularly with current suspension of the commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on ODA.

Localization is Self-Determination

This paper gives a personal political perspective on the policy dispute about localization in the humanitarian sector to argue that localization is a realization of the political right to self-determination. It starts by describing how humanitarian aid is too international today. It then makes the case for localization as an essential process of self-determination and humanitarian citizenship. It then analyses the main political arguments used against localization by international humanitarians who are resistant to it and shows how they routinely exaggerate the necessity of international aid by misrepresenting the reality of most humanitarian operations. Finally, the paper makes three recommendations to help humanitarian reform move forwards to find a fairer balance of local, national and international organizations.

Studying Humanitarianism - A Course Audit of Master's Degree Programs in Humanitarian Action

Humanitarian emergencies are increasing globally and the world is facing the worst human displacement crisis since the end of World War II. The number of forcibly displaced people due to conflict, violence, severe weather events and complex emergencies has reached a record high of approximately 70 million. The United Nations estimates that 235 million people will urgently require humanitarian assistance in 2021 at a cost of approximately US$35 billion. The increase of emergencies as well as the expansion of the humanitarian sector are accompanied by growing levels of professionalisation. The past few decades are characterised by humanitarian reforms, and the emergence of new codes, standards and frameworks to provide improved, better coordinated humanitarian aid. The increasing professionalisation of humanitarian aid is also reflected in the rapid growth of professional training and formal education. University courses in the field of ‘humanitarian action’ are multiplying around the globe. This is especially the case at a master’s level and most visible in the ‘Global North’. Despite this trend, there is no universal agreement on a core course curriculum in Humanitarian Studies. This working paper surveys 23 ‘humanitarian action’ master’s degree programs offered in the US, the UK, Europe, Australia and Nigeria to identify key commonalities across courses. This paper does not put forth a proposal of how a core curriculum should look like; rather, it highlights core commonalities across programs. Findings presented in this working paper are preliminary and contribute to the understanding of what could qualify as part of a ‘core curriculum’.

Church Networks and Localisation Practice in the Pacific

The localisation agenda is the largest humanitarian reform in decades. Global research, advocacy and adaptations of localised approaches continue to mature following the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016. The Summit produced The Charter for Faith-based Humanitarian Action, recognising the unique position and comparative advantage of local faith actors (LFAs) in humanitarian settings, owing to their presence in communities before, during, and after crises. More than 80% of the world’s population professes a religious faith, and international development and humanitarian work takes place within communities deeply influenced by faith, with local staff often themselves people of faith (cited in Fletcher 2018, p. 4). LFAs have consistently been among the top implementing partners of UN Agencies in undertaking humanitarian response (UNHCR Partnership Note on faith-based organizations, local faith communities and faith leaders 2014, p.8). Despite this recognition, little has promulgated on the role of LFAs in the localisation agenda and the primacy of LFAs' voices in contextualising the agenda for their communities. Accordingly, CAN DO (Church Agencies Network Disaster Operations) a network of Australian churchbased agencies with established relationships in the Pacific, is building an evidence base to inform international actors and affirm the significance of LFAs in localised humanitarian response within the Pacific region, thereby contributing towards the Charter for Faith-Based Humanitarian Action commitments. This paper is a critical reflection of the 2017-2018 localised response to the Monaro Volcano eruption in Vanuatu. Key learnings frame future collaborations with Pacific churches and pave the road ahead in shifting power differentials, including the advancement of LFAs' role within policy and decision-making at all levels of humanitarian response (Charter for Faith-Based Humanitarian Action 2016, p.2).

МІСІЯ І РОЛЬ СОЦІАЛЬНОГО ПЕДАГОГА В РОЗБУДОВІ ОСВІТНЬОГО СЕРЕДОВИЩА ЗАКЛАДУ ОСВІТИ

The last three years have been associated with a change in the status of social pedagogy as a branch of scientific knowledge and professional practice, as a result of which it was transferred from the pedagogical branch to the branch of social work. In addition, serious social changes in Ukraine, related both to the development of democracy in society, the implementation of humanitarian reforms, and the emergence of a number of social problems (war, population migration, poverty, the crisis of the family institution, etc.), indicate the need for changes in the field of professional assistance aimed at ensuring the psychological well-being of citizens. Today, there is some uncertainty regarding the main aspects of the profession of a social educator in society. But the content of this activity in the context of the deployment of professional practices in educational institutions, in particular in a secondary school, causes no less contradictions. The main idea is to autonomize the position of a social educator. A social educator should become a conductor of the philosophy and policy of the functioning of the educational environment, which is safe for the child, humanistically oriented, developing personal potential, providing appropriate material, physical, psychological, spiritual resources. His activities should be aimed at a critical assessment of the team's progress towards progress, a clear response to the negative social influences of the educational environment on the personality of the child, participation in planning the impact of events on the personality of the child and the acquisition of a positive socialization experience. His mission is to improve the quality of human life through the harmonization of human-environment relations, and the goal of the activity is to create conditions for positive socialization and effective integration of man in society.

Operational Guidelines for UNHCR’s Engagement in Situations of Internal Displacement

1 February 2016 ... Annex: UNHCR Interventions in Situations of Internal Displacement (the “IDP Footprint”) This document provides guidance on UNHCR’s engagement in situations of internal displacement. As a complement to existing policy, it clarifies UNHCR’s responsibilities and decision-making within the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) cluster approach. Importantly, it also provides parameters for UNHCR’s operational engagement, including principles for engagement and interventions to consider in support of UNHCR’s leadership of the clusters for protection, shelter and camp coordination and camp management (CCCM) in a coordinated response. These Operational Guidelines establish institutional standards and parameters for UNHCR’s engagement (or expected engagement) in a coordinated response to internal displacement. They apply to UNHCR Representatives and their teams as well as other staff members at all levels involved in the planning, design and implementation of operations in situations of internal displacement, as well those supporting these operations through the Regional Bureaux and Divisions and Services at Headquarters. These Operational Guidelines complement UNHCR’s existing policy and guidance on internally displaced persons (IDPs) as well as those developed by the IASC following the Humanitarian Reform in 2005 and the Transformative Agenda in 2011.1

Operational Review of UNHCR’s Engagement in Situations of Internal Displacement

September 2017 UNHCR has responded to the needs of internally displaced persons [IDPs] for many decades. In doing so and deriving from its mandate for refugees and stateless persons, it has drawn from an intimate knowledge of forced displacement – its root causes, the protection risks that arise from it and the requirements for sustainable solutions. Alongside other UN agencies and international organizations, UNHCR’s engagement in IDP situations has become more robust in recent years, in particular as a result of the United Nations Humanitarian Reform [2005] and the Inter-Agency Standing Committee [IASC] Transformative Agenda [2011].1 In 2007, UNHCR developed a comprehensive IDP policy,2 which was strengthened in 2016 with the issuance of Operational Guidelines3 and an Internal Note on Protection Leadership in Complex Humanitarian Emergencies.4 Equally important are UNHCR’s Strategic Directions for 2017–2021, which amplify the fundamental purpose of protection in the Office’s pursuits and make IDPs an integral part of UNHCR’s overall response to forced displacement. UNHCR is also an active partner on internal displacement in the IASC, where it leads the Global Protection Cluster [GPC] and co-leads the Global Shelter Cluster and the Global Camp Coordination Camp Management Cluster [CCCM].

Lost in myth, lost in translation: Philippe Pinel’s 1809 Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation

Philippe Pinel is widely regarded as one of the founders of modern evidence-based psychiatry. Yet, until recently, his most important contributions to psychiatric theory and practice were effectively lost in myth, or lost in translation. It is instructive to review the history of these developments in order to correct any errors or omissions that may stand in the way of an accurate recognition of Pinel’s contributions to psychiatry, while at the same time highlighting some of his achievements that have been hidden by his celebrated mythical status as a pioneering humanitarian reformer. The aim of this article is to motivate further historical study of Pinel’s work, especially his 1809 Medico-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Alienation, which has only recently become available in English translation.

Europa 1777 r.: od humanitarnej krytyki prawa obowiązującego po budowę nowych kodeksów karnych

In the year 1777 in Europe (Switzerland and France) a few important public competitions on projects of a reform of the criminal law and criminal procedure, were conducted. The following years brought a bunch of significant works on codifications in this area. The paper presents state of the humanitarian literature circa 1777, as well as course of the competitions and authors of the projects. It emphasizes the thesis – based on the author’s own research and the newest achievements of science – that, after a period of critique of the existing criminal law, a new era of searching legislative solutions, appeared. During this era, a leading role was played by professional lawyers. This final stage of the humanitarian literature remained important even after the beginning of The Great French Revolution. The author is on the opinion, that now is an appropriate moment, to prepare a comprehensive history of a whole humanitarian reform movement. This work should not be limited only to mainstream of the humanitarian doctrine, strong in Italy, France and Germany, but it have to also include countries as Spain, Great Britain and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

“The Whip Is a Very Contagious Kind of Thing”: Flogging and humanitarian reform in penal Australia

This paper traces humanitarian debates over corporal punishment and the use of the lash in the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century, with particular attention to Quakers James Backhouse and George Washington Walker’s interventions in penal discipline in colonial Van Diemen’s Land. It examine the ways that corporal punishment of convicts and Aboriginal peoples was framed through abolitionist eyes and explores in detail specific objections to the lash, including ideas around suffering, abstract vengeance and pain. The paper considers the move to other punishment strategies such as silent and solitary confinement, promoted in place of the lash. As we show, the evidence provided by the travelling investigative Quakers did much to inform the 1837 Select Committee on Transportation chaired by William Molesworth. The same report is also credited with reducing the rate of flogging in the penal colonies. However, while the Molesworth Committee is regarded as a decisive turning point in the history of Britain’s deployment of convict labour, we argue that a shift in punishment strategies was already well underway before the late 1830s. Using new data on punishments awarded, we demonstrate that in Van Diemen’s Land the demise of the lash had begun well before the Molesworth Committee met. We conclude by arguing that the association between the great humanitarian moment and the demise of flagellation so often associated Molesworth, was more complex and less direct than is often supposed.

Shifting Our Focus on New York's Rural History: Politics, Prisons, and Social Reform

Shifting Our Focus on New York's Rural History:Politics, Prisons, and Social Reform Jeffrey A. Mullins (bio) In 1839, a bitter partisan battle broke out in the central New York town of Auburn, the modest market town serving as the seat of Cayuga County, with conditions at the state penitentiary there constituting the core of the controversy. Following reports of squalid living conditions and a series of physical abuses, the death of Louis Von Eck at the hands of prison guards prompted a full-scale investigation. The controversy was politically charged, with the newly empowered Whigs leading the attack against those prison officials still in place from the recent Democratic administration. In some ways, the dispute might reasonably be understood as a matter of state-level politics, with Democrats and Whigs each picking up on any issue that they could use to assail their opponents. More broadly, one might justifiably cast the controversy in national terms, as simply an embodiment of broader conversations on social reform, and the proper role and limits of government in supporting such endeavors. Indeed, this has overwhelmingly been how historians have treated such matters. In contrast, this essay argues that this episode—and many like it—was decidedly local, rural, and regional. Specifically, two arguments are forwarded here. First, in addressing state-level politics in the first half of the nineteenth century, historians have largely ignored the extent to which political dynamics percolate up from the local and rural to the center and metropolitan. Interestingly, historians of politics on the national level generally have been more sensitive to this. It is still possible, of course, to find leading historians describing the key period of the 1830s in a top-down vision of the "emergence of national parties with tentacles extending into states and localities." For the most part, though, historians stress the extent to which the 1830s and 40s political groupings on the national scale began as little more than loose alliances, and even at their height were more of [End Page 427] a disparate amalgam than a unified whole. In describing this process, historians often point to states and national regions as the building blocks of political ideology. The Whigs, for example, had to hold together members with abolitionist sympathies in the North and those with pro-slavery sentiments in the South.1 The localized process of building state politics, however, gets little attention. For New York, historians certainly have emphasized statewide ideological schisms, but these are generally treated as if the texture of such partisan divisions lay uniformly across the land. Thus in studies of New York during the 1830s and 40s we know a lot about the "radical" and "conservative" factions of the Democratic Party (wholly splitting into two different state conventions in 1847), and the "hard-shell" and "soft-shell" Whigs. In terms of specific locales, the most one tends to read about is that the western part of the state was more Whig leaning. By focusing on Cayuga County in the 1830s, we can begin to reveal the dynamics by which rural politics shaped the larger statewide discussion.2 Furthermore, by paying attention to the ways in which politics played out beyond the major urban centers, a second finding emerges. Although the standard narrative of the emergence of the "second party system" in the 1830s—giving rise to the Democratic and Whig parties—overwhelmingly prioritizes economic issues such as the struggle over whether to re-charter the Bank of the United States, other factors contributed to the ideological [End Page 428] differences between the two major parties. Indeed, in accounts of the more fully formed Whig Party of the 1840s, historians routinely mention the Whig emphasis on humanitarian reform movements that gave rise to such institutions as mental hospitals, penitentiaries, and schools for the blind and deaf. Treatment of this commitment, however, is almost always done in passing, and generally nothing is said about how Whigs came to embrace this position as part of their political platform. While historians have scrutinized the pathways by which contemporary concerns about slavery and racial inequality entered into and transformed political dialogue, little has been done to offer analogous explanations for the wide...

Heading South to Teach: The World of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815–1845 by Kim Tolley

Reviewed by: Heading South to Teach: The World of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815–1845 by Kim Tolley Edward McInnis Heading South to Teach: The World of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815–1845. By Kim Tolley. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 265. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2433-4.) Kim Tolley’s account of Susan Nye Hutchison’s teaching career in North Carolina demonstrates how women could successfully challenge middle-class expectations while remaining within the parameters of acceptable behavior in the antebellum United States. Drawing extensively on Hutchison’s personal journal, Tolley presents the life of an ambitious woman who embraced teaching as a career and a chance for entrepreneurship rather than as simply a job to surrender upon marriage. Inspired by the ideals of the Second Great Awakening and driven by her personal ambition, Hutchison traveled far from her home and her parents in Amenia, New York, to teach in Raleigh, North Carolina. Tolley describes how Hutchison, first as a teacher at the Raleigh Academy’s Female Department and then as head of her own school, became a respectable community member who contributed to humanitarian reform in many ways. Teaching became more than a labor of love for Hutchison. Her husband Adam Hutchison’s business failures and his early death made her the primary provider for her family, which included five children. Despite these challenges and many limitations on ambitious women, Hutchison successfully provided her children future opportunities while securing [End Page 916] middle-class respectability. All the while Hutchison secretly taught slaves and ministered to prisoners condemned to execution. Tolley’s account of Susan Nye Hutchison illustrates how women could skirt the conventions of domesticity that Nancy F. Cott’s The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, 1977) and other works identify as the dominant cultural ideal for women during the 1800s. Tolley’s book has much to offer both lay readers and academics interested in nineteenth-century intellectual and social history. Through her biographical account of Hutchison, Tolley not only offers readers a window into the challenges ambitious antebellum-era women faced but also provides a view of the institutions and values that tied antebellum America together and then split the nation apart. Tolley nicely builds off Nathan O. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, 1989) by giving readers a sense of how the Second Great Awakening united Americans by inspiring reform and connecting people between different regions while also dividing them on the morality of slavery. Through the book, readers will also discover a diverse South—or North Carolina at least—where some white southerners embraced the antislavery movement, valued expanded educational opportunities for women, and supported a state-funded common school system. Tolley’s book complements Jonathan Daniel Wells’s Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South (New York, 2011), which examines how women increased their acceptance in publishing careers. Tolley also captures how gender inequality and slavery played out on a personal level by detailing Hutchison’s struggles with her abusive husband and her experience at witnessing the breaking up of enslaved families. Finally, through Tolley’s description of Hutchison’s journey to North Carolina, readers gain a sense of the riskiness of travel between regions before railroads had been built. The book’s one shortcoming is that it never compares North Carolina with other southern states where Hutchison might have found teaching success more difficult. Kentucky was the only other southern state after North Carolina to allot money for common schools before the Civil War, and this was a small amount. Addressing this issue would highlight the uniqueness of teaching in North Carolina. Nevertheless, by detailing Hutchison’s entrepreneurial spirit, intellect, and sense of social justice, Tolley illustrates how antebellum-era women, despite society-imposed limitations, found avenues to reshape American culture while securing respectability for their families. Tolley offers readers a new and interesting perspective on teaching in the antebellum South. I highly recommend her book to those interested in women’s roles in reforming the South. Edward McInnis University of Louisville Copyright © 2016 The Southern Historical Association

Lessons learnt from coordinating emergency health response during humanitarian crises: a case study of implementation of the health cluster in northern Uganda.

BackgroundBetween the late 1980s and 2000s, Northern Uganda experienced over twenty years of armed conflict between the Government of Uganda and Lord’s Resistance Army. The resulting humanitarian crisis led to displacement of a large percentage of the population and disruption of the health care system of the area. To better coordinate the emergency health response to the crisis, the humanitarian cluster approach was rolled out in Uganda in October 2005. The health, nutrition and HIV/AIDS cluster became fully operational at the national level and in all the conflict affected districts of Acholi and Lango in April 2006. It was phased out in 2011 following the return of the internally displaced persons to their original homelands.ConclusionsThe implementation of the health cluster approach in the northern Uganda and other humanitarian crises in Africa highlights a few issues which are important for strengthening health coordination in similar settings. While health clusters are often welcome during humanitarian crises because they have the possibility to improve health coordination, their potential to create an additional layer of bureaucracy into already complex and bureaucratic humanitarian response architecture is a real concern. Although anecdotal evidence has showed that implementation of the humanitarian reforms and the roll out of the cluster approach did improve humanitarian response in northern Uganda; it is critical to establish a mechanism for measuring the direct impact of health clusters on improving health outcomes, and in reducing morbidity and mortality during humanitarian crisis. Successful implementation of health clusters requires availability of other components of the humanitarian reforms such as predictable funding, strong humanitarian coordination system and strong partnerships. Importantly, successful health clusters require political commitment of national humanitarian and government stakeholders.RecommendationsAlthough leaving health coordination entirely to governments (in crises where they exist) may result in political interference and ineffectiveness of the aid response efforts, the role of government in health coordination cannot be overemphasized. Health clusters must respond to the rapidly changing humanitarian environment and the changing needs of populations affected by humanitarian crises as they evolve from emergency towards transition, early recovery and development.

6. Coordination and control

Any complex operation requires a system for management. In most societies, disaster management is the responsibility of the government. Coordination and control is a system that provides the oversight for all of the disaster management functions. The roles and responsibilities of a coordination and control centre include: (1) planning; (2) maintenance of inventories; (3) activation of the disaster response plan; (4) application of indicators of function; (5) surveillance; (6) information management; (7) coordination of activities of the BSFs; (8) decision-making; (9) priority setting; (10) defining overarching goal and objectives for interventions; (11) applying indicators of effectiveness; (12) applying indicators of benefit and impact; (13) exercising authority; (14) managing resources; (15) initiating actions; (16) preventing influx of unneeded resources; (17) defining progress; (18) providing information; (19) liasing with responding organisations; and (20) providing quality assurance. Coordination and control is impossible without communications. To accomplish coordination and control, three factors must be present: (1) mandate; (2) power and authority; and (3) available resources. Coordination and control is responsible for the evaluation of the effectiveness and benefits/impacts of all interventions. Coordination and control centres (CCCs) are organised hierarchically from the on-scene CCCs (incident command) to local provincial to national CCCs. Currently, no comprehensive regional and international CCCs have been universally endorsed. Systems such as the incident command system, the unified command system, and the hospital incident command system are described as are the humanitarian reform movement and the importance of coordination and control in disaster planning and preparedness.

The fight over representation and rights: Defending gendered rights through the UN Economic and Social Council, 1948–1950

A century after release of the ‘Declaration of Sentiments,’ a feminist statement countering laws that defined citizenship rights for women differently than those of men, representatives of the US Women’s Bureau offered a new post-WWII testimonial, now before the United Nations General Assembly. It defended civic and political rights for women, including eligibility to hold public office and to serve as international delegates in the UN itself, asserting, ‘A modern nation cannot afford to waste half of its adult populations in a state of second-class citizenship.’ The women who stood behind this and other propositions in the years that followed the war used the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) – the body producing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – to press for global action with a gendered social purpose. From the basic premise of the right to representation they developed a discourse on a realm of additional rights: towards equal treatment, family welfare, justice for refugees and other migrants, and true social inclusion. This article focuses on the ways in which US women fought for representation and access within ECOSOC institutions in order to elicit policy change in the name of justice and international humanitarian reform.

Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America (review)

Reviewed by: Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America Barbara Clark Smith (bio) Keywords Early American law, 18th-century law, Intertextuality, Legalism Law’s Imagined Republic: Popular Politics and Criminal Justice in Revolutionary America. By Steven Wilf. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xiv + 242. Cloth, $89.00. Paper, $25.99.) Steven Wilf ’s study of early American law and politics is engaging, eloquent, and essential. Historians have sometimes started with familiar nineteenth-century legal institutions, then moved backward to find comparable structures and practices to consider as the source of what came later. By contrast, Wilf seeks to rediscover eighteenth-century law on its own terms, suggesting that the law’s very boundaries and meaning may have been different in that different time and place. In aid of that rediscovery, Wilf urges us to conceive of law as something “imagined”—meaning understood, discussed, and experienced in a variety of cultural, social, and political venues, not only in legislatures and courtrooms but also in published broadsides and newspapers and in the taverns and city streets where the people gathered “out of doors.” Law was “a public sphere” (1) in the early nation, Wilf suggests, and Americans of the day read the law “intertextually” (9), which is to say they viewed pieces of legislation and cases of law in the context of other laws, other cases, and a far broader discourse surrounding affairs of the day. The book is a series of essays that do not, admittedly, add up to a single, coherent account of changes in law and politics in the early republic. Nor do the cases Wilf skillfully examines invariably support his ambitious theoretical formulations. Together, however, the essays provide striking insights and invite further exploration. Of particular value are Wilf ’s chapters on the resistance movement that preceded the American [End Page 135] Revolution. The era saw an extraordinary proliferation of “law talk,” he notes, much of it focused not on “the abstraction of constitutional principles” but on the criminal law. Many colonists organized their protests against British policies using the language of legal punishments, as in hanging, parading, and sometimes burning effigies of British officials. These occasions allowed broad participation and expressed popular ideas of fairness. In the resistance movement, Wilf writes, “Americans rallied behind a new idea of criminal law with legal transparency and participation of the common people at its core” (10). Wilf explores vernacular views in part by analyzing published narratives of crime and punishment that circulated in the 1770s. Ebenezer Richardson, a customs informer who killed a child by firing a gun into a Boston crowd, is a familiar figure to political historians; Levi Ames, a burglar in the same vicinity, might be better known to students of crime. Wilf shows that people of the day thought of these two cases in relationship to one another: Could it be justice that Ames hanged while Richardson got off ? More than merely legal cases, these were political matters. Wilf mines other intriguing criminal narratives to explore self-representation by convicted criminals in the 1780s. Another essay examines the reformers who grappled with criminal punishment in the post-Revolutionary decades. Americans imagined their own legal regime in light of republican ideals but also over and against two other systems—the “bloody code” of English law, which supposedly relied extensively on sanguinary punishments, and French Revolutionary violence of the 1790s. Equally important, Wilf notes the significant degree to which postwar Americans’ humanitarian reform of punishments involved making those punishments less participatory for the population at large. A closing essay illustrates the impact of vernacular law and popular political forms on both legislation and its enforcement, in the case of the New York Anatomy Act of 1789. Short but ambitious, Law’s Imagined Republic raises many questions: Is the metaphor of “reading” the law—intertextually or otherwise—truly apt if we are trying to recover the ideas of people who encountered (and made) law in the courtroom, in public punishments, by listening to sermons or passing on stories of crime? Wilf suggests we consider criminals who wrote popular narratives as “founders” of the American republic (3), but isn’t it more plausible...