Human, Humanity, Humanitarianism: A Global History from Abolitionism to USAID

Catalog description

This course examines the formation of the modern notions of human, humanity, and human rights as well as the emergence of institutions of humanitarianism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course begins with a theoretical study of religious and secular implications of human and humanitarianism as well as social relief and charity in diverse historical settings from the pre-modern and modern times around the world. Following the conceptual analysis, it delves into the historical and social circumstances of humanitarian politics and discourses that shaped human (and environmental) stories of conflict and survival in the contexts of modern war-making, displacement, public health and epidemic diseases as well as natural disasters. It moves from the “long” nineteenth century into twentieth-century political, social, medical, and natural events by analyzing the emergence of a new and global vocabulary of humanitarianism such as refugee, asylum, settlement, and trafficking. Students explore the connections and distinctions between national and supra-national, colonial and postcolonial, metropole and colony. The course will cover the humanitarian role of Red Cross/Crescent, League of Nations, missionary networks as well as Cold War initiatives such as USAID, PathFinder Fund, UNHCR, Rockefeller Foundation, as well as post-Cold War initiatives such as Physicians without Borders and their impact on local practices of education, medical assistance, and public health networks, gender dynamics as well as natural resources and refugee settlement architecture.