Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 78-81).

This thesis explores the relationship between refugee protest and the politics of asylum governance through the case of a 2005 protest in Egypt. It challenges prevalent views of refugees as victims, of the bodies that host and assist as benevolent, and of the relationships between them as apolitical. In a 2005 sit-in in Cairo, Sudanese demonstrators took collective political action as refugees – but found their action countered and undone by host states and humanitarian institutions. Drawing from this case, the thesis develops existing understandings of the politics of asylum governance, and political activism concerned with it, along three lines. First, it takes an inductive approach to understanding the politics at play, developing concepts that allow for comparison across contexts. Second, it integrates analysis of both protester and institutional accounts of a refugee protest. Third, it explores three hitherto understudied aspects of the politics of asylum governance: the political activity of asylees regarding the rules of asylum within host countries; the effects of political struggles within asylum governance on refugee political participation; and the interactions between refugees and asylum governance in an urban, southern context. This thesis argues that refugee protest and the politics of asylum governance are related in causal, discursive, and epistemological ways: that the politics of asylum governance play a causal role in refugee protest; that protest and governance concerned with asylum share a discursive repertoire, which may be mobilised agonistically; and that the study of refugee protest is a compelling approach through which to gain insight into the politics of asylum governance. Through this study, the thesis opens new dimensions within existing scholarship on the depoliticisation of refugees, and of humanitarianism as a dominating force.

The study set out to investigate the challenges faced by NGOs in carrying out supplementary feeding programmes in Zimbabwe’s rural areas. CARE and PLAN International in Zimbabwe were the two NGOs used as case studies and their operations in the Lower Gweru district of the Midlands Province Zimbabwe provided the empirical data for this study. This study was principally qualitative in nature as it sought to provide an in-depth analysis of the main challenges that NGOs face when carrying out supplementary feeding programmes in the rural areas of Zimbabwe. For the purpose of collecting data the study relied on Focus Group Discussions, in-depth interviews with key informants and document study. The key informants included Country Directors, Programme and Field officers at both CARE and PLAN International who had intimate knowledge of some of the challenges that their supplementary feeding programmes faced. Challenges that faced CARE and Plan International’s supplementary feeding programmes were categorized into two themes, internal and external organizational challenges. Internally the study revealed that the NGOs were unable to retain critical personnel such as nutritionists and programme officers. It also emerged from the study that field officers were involved in the thefts of food meant for the supplementary feeding programmes. The management of the supplementary feeding programmes was made difficult by lack of adequate information about the target beneficiaries. Further the study noted that there were contestations when it came to the selection of the beneficiaries of the programme. It was also found that during the rainy season it was difficult to 8 avail food timeously to the beneficiaries of the supplementary feeding programmes. It emerged from the study that supplementary feeding programmes were victims of political interference as the government and war veterans were suspicious that the programmes were being used to influence the voting behavior of the recipients. The global financial crisis also limited the capacity of the donors to continue availing substantial amounts of money for food procurement. As part of the broader strategy to increase the effectiveness of the NGOs in carrying supplementary feeding programmes this study recommended that NGOs should re-strategize on how they remunerate key personnel such as nutritionists. The NGOs through their mother body NANGO should constantly engage government so that there is a good working relationship supportive of poverty reduction through supplementary feeding programmes.

M.Ed. (Educational Psychology) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

In order to establish the views on suffering held by the nineteenth-century (1821-1881) Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, it is first necessary to determine the viewpoint of his age. In general, it was an age of humanitarianism-- the age of "compassion for the suffering of human beings," the age of optimism, of faith in a morality established by science and reason." Humanitarianism itself was an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment, the eighteenth-century intellectual movement which emphasized reason. This age of reason reflected the progress in science, which had weakened the hold of the Church and of faith on men's minds. Dostoyevsky's rejection of socialism made it necessary for him to reject the corollary of socialism: the elimination of human suffering. Thus he was forced to evolve a personal interpretation for the suffering that he would not let be abolished. Critics generally consider Siberia to be the turning point in Dostoyevsky's life, both from a personal and a literary standpoint. Before his imprisonment, Dostoyevskyts values were too immature for him to develop a significant theory illuminating the problem of suffering. It took Siberia to teach Dostoyevsky the meaning of metaphysical suffering-- the search for the meaning of God and reality. This meaning can be traced in the majority of his post-Siberian works in the form of the theory that happiness and ultimate salvation are made available to man through the purifying effects of his metaphysical sufferings.

Thesis (M.A.)--Villanova University, 2009. / Political Science Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

Despite a legion of criticisms from frustrated and reflective practitioners of humanitarian aid working in Africa and elsewhere, the fundamental problems surrounding NGO aid work persist; a critical mass of westerners are insufficiently receptive to these voices. I will demonstrate that this lack of receptivity is due to a set of implicit and explicit ideological commitments that comprise what I call ‘Charitable Consciousness.’ In this project I will describe the history of humanitarianism in the west, the Hegelian perspective with which to understand this history, and nature and structure of Charitable Consciousness. I will uncover the consequences of inhabiting this ideology and close with suggestions on how to confront and transform this perspective so as to encourage more productive aid work in the Global South.

The aim of this thesis is to study how the issue of sex work occurring within humanitarian contexts is addressed by the humanitarian sector, and what this in turn can say about how the problem itself is framed. The analysis focuses on three types of approaches which were identified. These are: to address humanitarian staff and their behaviour in the field in relation to using transactional sex; understanding sex work as a ‘negative coping strategy’ and addressing underlying vulnerabilities; and using a rights-based and community empowerment approach to sex work. By analysing codes of conducts, policies, guidelines, and literature suggesting ways for humanitarian workers and peacekeepers to deal with, position themselves against, and understand sex work in the field, I found that, besides the fact that this issue has not been given enough attention in the humanitarian sector, it has mostly been understood as a form of exploitation, and as a coping strategy either used or forced onto mostly women in contexts of crises. The recurrent themes in many of these approaches, have been the focus on gendered vulnerabilities and power structures between people working within or together with the humanitarian sector and the local population in contexts of crisis. Within these frameworks, the issue of to what extent women engaged in sex work are perceived to have agency is somewhat ambivalent, and some critics have argued that their agency has been denied and that not enough focus has been given to the actual needs and risks of those who engage in sex work. This critique has in turn inspired new guidelines and programmes to be developed. By linking the analysis to further debates on sex work and critique of the humanitarian sector, I conclude that the simplistic and victimising portrayal of people engaging in sex work and of people living in contexts of humanitarian crises, as well as the sometimes-lacking reflection of ideologies and frameworks motivating humanitarian operations, can blind us to the more nuanced and diverse needs that people in these situations might have. It can also negatively impact the approaches that we use to address stigmatised issues such as sex work. Therefore, I stress that it remains important to study the processes through which knowledge about these issues is produced, and whose voices are included in the process.

Throughout Africa today Christian missionaries from the United States and Europe are providing more medical assistance than ever before and yet they remain, in much recent scholarship, more often associated with the colonial past than the humanitarian present. In many rural areas of Africa these missionaries provide much of the day-to-day healthcare that is available, treating commonplace afflictions, such as malaria, broken limbs or complications associated with childbirth. This dissertation considers Christian medical humanitarianism and its historical legacies by examining the lives and relationships of the many people who visited and worked at a small mission hospital in rural southern Zambia. Based on archival research and fieldwork (conducted between August 2014 and November 2015, and a month during August 2016), I consider how rural Zambian patients related to the expatriate missionary doctors and Zambian staff as they sought treatment at the hospital. I look at the motivations of the long- and short-term American missionaries, their relations with patients and staff members, and consider how they imagined the beneficial effects of their work. And I examine the place of the Zambian clinical staff members at the hospital – the nurses, clinical officers, laboratory technicians, and others – as they attempted to balance their multiple obligations to family members, neighbours, and friends with the needs of their patients and the high expectations of their missionary colleagues. Engaging with central themes in recent anthropological work on humanitarianism, Christianity, morality and ethics, I argue that Christian missionaries, staff members and patients at the hospital enduringly perceived different aspects of their relationships as morally significant: from the missionaries’ capacity to see the endurance and suffering of Zambian patients as evidence of God’s action in the world, to patients’ praise of the American missionaries as ‘angels’ (bangelo) who arrived from elsewhere and treated them ‘non-selectively’. At the mission hospital, patients, missionaries and staff members brought to their encounters the capacity to perceive moral meaning in their relations in ways that often exceeded one another’s expectations. In response to this, I outline a way of understanding the capacity, among these diverse actors, to perceive moral meaning in their ambivalent and unequal relations. This approach, I suggest, has implications for how we think about suffering, morality and politics, both in contemporary humanitarianism and in forms of anthropological writing.

This study investigates the evacuation of 60,000 French and Belgian children to Switzerland between 1940 and 1945. This humanitarian action was initially implemented by a coalition of Swiss charities but because of its growing popularity and increasing scope, the Swiss Red Cross joined the efforts in 1942. Despite the devastation, food scarcities and logistical limitations of the Second World War, these children were successfully fed, clothed and housed in Swiss households for three-month periods before they returned home. Given the massive diplomatic and material challenges, it is surprising that such a large transnational evacuation for vulnerable, foreign children was generally effective. By evaluating both how these evacuations were conducted and why participating governments sought to support or prohibit their implementation, this thesis reveals new information that challenges the standard narratives of the wartime actions of the Allies, Nazi Germany and Switzerland. Britain and America’s role in the evacuation does not support their reputation as righteous victors, but as bickering governments strategizing to strengthen their post-war political position in Europe. Nazi Germany’s authorization of the evacuation deepens our knowledge by demonstrating how “humanitarian” operations were circuitously manipulated as a way to increase Nazi control. The noteworthy hospitality of Swiss citizens significantly diverged from the strict immigration policies imposed by their government, a finding which both challenges and reinforces the controversy surrounding Switzerland’s prohibitive, internationally-condemned refugee policies. Overall, this thesis recasts each participant in a new light by questioning the motivations of governments at war, the value of children in war, and the logistics of wartime humanitarian operations.