abstract: In 2001, a refugee group of unaccompanied minors known as the Lost Boys of Sudan began arriving in the United States. Their early years were met with extensive media coverage and scores of well-meaning volunteers in scattered resettlement locations across the country. Their story was told in television news reports, documentary films, and published memoirs. Updates regularly appeared in newsprint media. Scholars have criticized public depictions of refugees as frequently de-politicized, devoid of historical context, and often depicting voiceless masses of humanity rather than individuals with skills and histories (Malkki 1996, Harrell-Bond and Voutira 2007). These representations matter because they are both shaped by and shape what is possible in public discourse and everyday relations. This dissertation research creates an intersection where public representation and everyday practices meet. Through participant observation as a volunteer at a refugee community center in Phoenix, Arizona, this research explores the emotions, social roles and relations that underpin community formation, and investigates the narratives, representations, and performances that local Lost Boys and their publics engage in. I take the assertion that "refugee issues are one privileged site for the study of humanitarian interventions through which 'the international community' constitutes itself " (Malkki 1996: 378) and consider formation of local 'communities of feeling' (Riches and Dawson 1996) in order to offer a critique of humanitarianism as mobilized and enacted around the Lost Boys. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Geography 2014

M.A. / Migration and resettlement in South Africa bring many challenges to refugee women. Within a very hostile and discriminating environment, refugee women have to familiarise themselves with a new culture and new languages, as well as gain access to systems of health, education and employment. Loss of identity, income, career, equality and significant others are evident, which leaves them, as refugee women, excluded, isolated and disempowered. However, instead of just becoming passive recipients of aid, refugee women are active in forming their own informal horizontal helping networks, defined as Philanthropy of Community (PoC). PoC can be described as informal, multi-directional, intra-gender helping relationships among refugee women, who share communality in terms of language, culture, social circumstances and ideals. In this study, the networks are also referred to as “the sisterhood”, based on the shared goals, circumstances and feelings of mutual empathy and loyalty toward each other. Driven by the philosophy of ubuntu, altruism and religious beliefs, and guided by the principle, “If I have, I give”, the sisterhood gives and receives material and non-material help in its community. The goal of this study was to gain an appreciative understanding of philanthropy of community (PoC) among refugee women in Johannesburg as a social asset for community development. Objectives of this study were to identify and describe the PoC of the sisterhood, as it perceives and experiences it, and identify assets that can be utilised to facilitate community development practice. The sample consisted of five Congolese refugee women from Yeoville. All participants had a tertiary qualification, yet were unemployed. A qualitative research approach was followed to allow participants to construct meaning out of their social and cultural realities. Data collection methods were focus groups and individual interviews to elicit information and meaning of the sisterhood in Yeoville. 2 The following social assets were identified in the sisterhood of Yeoville: protection against social exclusion, provision of informal social support, maintenance of cultural links, promotion of socialisation and communication, community-building, pooling of human capital, self-organised support in adversity and a sense of well-being and spiritual fulfilment. Despite the positive effect of PoC, it also has limitations: a perceived sense of familiarity, based on same-ethnic relationships, as well as laziness, often lead to exploitation of fellow sisters, resulting in distrust and loneliness. It was concluded that PoC does not have the potential to meet all the psycho-social needs of refugee women, and cannot fully replace organised social welfare services. Research concluded that while participants acknowledge PoC within the sisterhood as their main means of survival, they find it difficult to envision the mobilisation of existing sisterhood networks towards participatory community development initiatives, creating sustainable livelihoods and integration into the local community. Reasons are a lack of capacity, lack of assertiveness and distrust. While they seem well-informed about the internal functioning of their sisterhood, they show a lack of information and skills on how to link with the external community to form partnerships and networks to stimulate development. A participatory Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) approach, with its mechanism for healing, social cohesion and nation-building, is the most appropriate way to propel human, social and economic integration and growth in the current migration context. By focusing on what is present, instead of what is absent, problematic or needed among women refugees, and embracing their strengths, gifts and indigenous wisdom, PoC within the sisterhood can be applied by community developers as a social tool in a planned change process to facilitate integration and development of refugee women in South Africa.

In the fall of 1938, Marion Kenworthy, child psychologist, and Clarence Pickett, director of the American Friends Service Committee, began designing a bill that would challenge the United States's government's strict immigration laws and allow persecuted children to come to the United States and live in American homes. The Wagner-Rogers Bill, named for Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Representative Edith Rogers of Massachusetts and introduced in February 1939, sought to allow the entry of 20,000 refugee children from Germany. At the time, multiple domestic factors limited the willingness of American politicians to meet this problem head on: high unemployment rates after the stock market crash in 1929, an isolationist sentiment after the impact of World War I, and xenophobia. These factors discouraged the lawmakers from revising the quota limit set on obtainable visas established by the 1924 Immigration Act and allow outsiders into the United States. These few actors who supported the Wagner-Rogers Bill reflect a hidden minority of the American public and political body that fought to help Jewish refugees by standing up to the majority of citizens and politicians against higher immigration into the United States, and the story of the this Bill demonstrates what might have been possible and illuminates 20th century models of American humanitarianism and its role in creating international refugee protection. / Master of Arts / In the fall of 1938, Marion Kenworthy, child psychologist, and Clarence Pickett, director of the American Friends Service Committee, began designing a bill that would challenge the United States’s government’s strict immigration laws and allow persecuted children to come to the United States and live in American homes. The Wagner-Rogers Bill, named for Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Representative Edith Rogers of Massachusetts and introduced in February 1939, would allow the entry of 20,000 refugee children from Germany. At the time, multiple domestic factors limited the willingness of American politicians to meet this problem head on: high unemployment rates after the stock market crash in 1929, an isolationist sentiment after the impact of World War I, and xenophobia. These factors discouraged the lawmakers from reforming pre-existing immigration policies to allow more outsiders into the United States. These few actors who supported the Wagner-Rogers Bill reflect a hidden minority of the American public and political body that fought to help Jewish refugees by standing up to the majority of citizens and politicians against higher immigration into the United States, and the story of the this Bill illuminates 20th century models of American humanitarianism and its role in creating international refugee protection.

This thesis seeks to understand how the restrictive immigration policies – taken by the Swedish Government in 2015 as Europe was facing a huge stream of people seeking refuge – could be justified when research demonstrates that Sweden’s national identity is based on humanitarianism and asserts that Sweden has a great commitment to human rights. The nationalistic act seemed paradoxical – however, previous research displays a disputed understanding of the relationship between the humanitarian discourse and the nationalistic discourse. The thesis uses discourse theory to trace how the Swedish Government through its representation of the decision to tighten immigration constructs and reproduces the Swedish national identity. The empirical analysis displays a shift in the focus of Swedish immigration policy from an international (humanitarian) one to a national one. Even though it is not possible to fully assert an identity change the analysis indicates an identity crisis – the analysis demonstrates how humanitarian values acquires meaning within a nationalistic discourse. The thesis also demonstrates how the Swedish Government represents immigration as a contradiction to the Swedish welfare state. The decision to tighten immigration appears as a measure taken in order to rescue the national identity and its main feature – the welfare.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, humanitarian intervention became an important pillar in the emerging new world order. From 1989 to 1995, 96 violent civil confrontations have occurred, but 91 of them did not result in humanitarian interventions. Here comes the question: Why? Why there were interventions in Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo and not in Rwanda, the Sudan, and Tajikistan? These are the main questions that the following study aims to answer. Particularly, the issue of American humanitarian intervention is scrutinized. The casual factors of interventions are examined to explain the selectivity of American Humanitarianism. Furthermore, a theory building is initiated to outline a model of variables which will allow to explain the combination of which casual factors leads to which form of intervention or non-intervention.

This study takes the changing role of the military as a starting point for exploring a set of broader ongoing processes at the intersection of security and humanitarianism. The focus is on one particular assemblage, described here as conflict preventionism. This notion brings together the transformation of the military, the proliferation of civil-military cooperation, and the increasing interest in managing and preventing violent conflicts within a single framework. As such, conflict preventionism helps render visible how various actors, concepts, and organizational techniques converge in emergent forms of intervention. The research was carried out during the planning, execution, and evaluation of Viking 03, a civil-military exercise organized in 2003 by the Swedish Armed Forces. An examination of Viking 03 evinces intriguing resemblances between conflict preventionism and organizational facets of neoliberalism, epitomized by increasingly ubiquitous concepts such as “partnership,” “transparency,” and “evaluation.” Also, it shows that conflict preventionism does not settle on one particular understanding of conflict, but rather imposes directionality on contemporary engagements with the world.

This dissertation is a material-archival history of the Palestinian refugee camp. Its primary claim is that to read Palestine-Israel one must read the camp; the refugee camp, I argue, is the settlercolony’s irreducible foil. How, then, has the question of the camps (neither synonymous with nor reducible to the ‘refugee problem’) exerted its own gravitational force on Palestinian, Israeli, and humanitarian politics? What kind of historical relation is there, I ask, between camp-form and that spatial form from which it seems inseparable—the colony? Working with a range of textual and visual documents (from bureaucratic reports to prose fiction and architectural drawings) drawn from four different archives, I argue that the Palestinian camps lie at the center of the foundational-temporal impasse of the Israeli state—its inability to decisively render the moment of its inception as past. In other words, my argument is that the camp sits not only at the intersection of the most critical biopolitical sites of the settler- colonial—the colonized body and its movements, land and its possession in regimes of property and ownership—but, and perhaps even more consequentially, at the point of their temporal resolution in definite and final forms. Camp and colony are entangled from the start; co-produced in the double movement of dispossession and substitution, un-homing and homing; twinned but inversed topologies of the freedom of movement.

This thesis explores the (re-)positioning of the EU border agency Frontex within a wider shift towards humanitarianism and human rights in EUropean border governance. By examining Frontex’s public self-representation through time, it shows that the agency has gradually appropriated humanitarianism and human rights, while at the same time continuing to rely on a conceptualisation of migration as a security issue. The thesis traces this development, outlining how the agency has increasingly mobilised all three discursive formations in its public narratives about itself, border controls, and unauthorised migration to EUrope. Seeking to move beyond analysing Frontex through its public documents and statements only, the thesis complements this analysis with insights gained through interviews and informal conversations with Frontex staff and guest officers, as well as participant observations at Frontex events and in joint operations between May 2013 and September 2014. Exploring the perceptions of those working for and with Frontex, it complicates common portrayals of Frontex as a unitary, rational actor in EUropean border governance. Instead, it argues that Frontex is better understood as a highly fragmented organisation situated in an ambiguous environment and faced with inconsistent and contradictory demands. Situated at the intersection of critical security studies and critical migration and border studies, this thesis seeks to make three contributions to these literatures: first, it argues that critical security studies would benefit from a cross-fertilisation with insights gained in new institutionalism, which add organisational dynamics as an additional layer of analysis to developments in broader security fields. Second, it provides insights into the relationships between the discursive formations of security, humanitarianism, and human rights in contemporary border governance. The thesis argues that the three formations, at times seen as opposed to one another, share a number of important commonalities that create the conditions of possibility for the appropriation of humanitarianism and human rights by security actors such as Frontex, and for the emergence of new coalitions of actors in the EUropean border regime; as security, humanitarian, and human rights actors share the goal of rendering EUropean border controls less (visibly) violent. Third, the thesis provides rare empirical insights into the security actor Frontex, which has remained relatively opaque and elusive despite attracting much interest within academic and activist communities alike.

This dissertation examines the histories of international adoption and child sponsorship in China from the 1930s to the 1950s to illustrate China’s crucial but unrecognized role in shaping the politics and practices of global humanitarianism. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Chinese child welfare organizations developed a new form of humanitarian fundraising in which private citizens across the world “adopted” Chinese children by funding their lives at orphanages in China. Under the adoption model, Chinese children and their foreign “foster parents” built personal relationships through the exchange of photographs, gifts, and translated letters that used familial terms of address. The relationships forged between children and their foster parents constituted a new mode of affective and material exchange across national, racial, and cultural boundaries that I call “global intimacy.” At the same time, the adoption plan was also deeply ideological, embedding the relationships between children and their sponsors within the politics of WWII and the Cold War. At once emotional and economic, humanitarian and political, the adoption plan transformed the emotional loyalties of children into a key battleground on the affective terrain of these global conflicts. The emergence of the adoption plan as one of the most successful methods of humanitarian fundraising in China precipitated a broader “intimate turn” in global humanitarian practice. During WWII, Chinese child welfare organizations developed new discursive and material practices—as well as new global administrative structures—that made the adoption of Asian children into a distinct form of humanitarian rescue. After the war, an American organization called China’s Children Fund utilized the rhetoric of Christian love to transform the adoption plan into one of the largest humanitarian programs in Asia, systematizing the transnational flow of gifts and letters to create a paradoxical bureaucracy of global intimacy. When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, rather than dismiss the adoption plan as a tool of the reactionary Nationalist Party and their American imperialist allies, they instead sought to transform it into a centerpiece of a new form of “revolutionary humanitarianism.” However, during the Korean War the CCP ultimately decided to dismantle all foreign humanitarian institutions in China, leading transnational aid organizations to again remake the adoption plan as a lynchpin of a new “Cold War humanitarianism” across East Asia. “Adopted by the World” sheds light on the global history of humanitarianism, the intertwining of intimate relations and international relations during the WWII and Cold War eras, and the political significance of children in modern Chinese history. By analyzing how Chinese child welfare institutions utilized children’s letters to mold international opinion of China, I show how children were enlisted as key actors within the political campaigns of both the Nationalist and Communist parties. Engaging with recent scholarship that has argued that the provision of global humanitarian aid served the Cold War foreign policy interests of Western powers, this dissertation explores how the recipients and critics of humanitarian aid in China both shaped and challenged the post-WWII global humanitarian order.

acase@tulane.edu