https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7836-9196
![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Responding to humanitarian crises is a prominent global domain, spanning thousands of relief agencies and billions of US dollars. Amidst the potentially infinite needs arising in these crises, how are humanitarian priorities constructed? Existing answers are dominated by functionalist and critical perspectives, stressing obvious needs or geopolitics. This paper builds on sociocultural approaches to examine the changing understandings of humanity that underpin humanitarian priorities. Analysis of 659 United Nations humanitarian resolutions from 1946 to 2018 reveals an evolving vision of human life in crisis that shifts from initially narrow foci on displacement, survival, and livelihood towards a multidimensional vision today, anchored in rights-bearing and agentic personhood. Underpinning the evolution are striking expansions in how crisis-affected persons, and their needs, agency, and entitlements are imagined. The trends are not reducible to function and geopolitics but reflect macro-cultural shifts towards individualised and globalised conceptions of society, stretching humanitarian imaginations of a universally shared humanity.
Acknowledgments
I thank Andréa García for her excellent assistance in coding resolutions for this project. The paper also benefitted from helpful comments by members of the UC Irvine and Stanford Comparative Sociology Workshops and the Scandinavian Consortium for Organizational Research at Stanford.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 9 relevant resolutions were not available for download and excluded.
2 To ensure that needs can plausibly be seen as human needs we did not count needs exclusively discussed in relation to the nation-state. For example, if the resolution only mentions how much an earthquake interrupted national development without relating this to human persons, this is not coded.
3 I did not focus on how often a topic is mentioned, easing concerns that patterns reflect changing resolution length.
4 It is impossible to consistently determine whether “displaced persons” refer to people displaced beyond borders or within them (later termed IDPs). If considered separately from the “refugee” category, the line for displaced persons increases in the 70s and begins flattening out in the 1990s as the IDP category emerges (see below).
5 The analysis revealed only two categories of humans that fade without achieving prominence: families and students (not shown in figures). Students are sporadically discussed in the 1970s/80s (highest proportion around 12%; total mentions: 37) and then decline. Families are sporadically discussed in the 1980s/90s (maximum of around 8%; total mentions: 39) and then decline. The fact that these more collective entities (especially families) never prosper and eventually fade is in line with my argument about individuation (see Elliott, Citation2014 on how human rights protect individuals more than collectives).
6 The following persons were mentioned extremely rarely and are not graphed: soldiers (3 mentions), migrants (4 mentions), farmers (2 mentions), the poor (9 mentions), minorities (8 mentions), and teachers (2 mentions).
7 Protection can refer to protection of civilians but also specifically to refugees’ protection needs due to their unique legal status, suggesting that its early nascent presence may be in line with the frame of “managing displacement.”
8 As noted, protection could be categorized with issues relating to refugees’ unique legal status. However, given its broader meaning (protection of civilians from violence), I consider it as its own category of safety.
9 The following issues were mentioned very rarely and are not graphed: cultural preservation and language issues (8 mentions), family reunification (13 mentions), and recreational activities (2 mentions).