Webinar ‘Humanitarianism and Human Rights: A World of Differences?’
DATE & TIME: Thursday 29th April 2021, 3 – 5pm
The UCD School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice with the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Nottingham, UK hosted the webinar ‘Humanitarianism and Human Rights: A World of Differences?’ where the authors discuss some of the debates within the book.
About this Event: The book, edited by Michael N Barnett, explores the fluctuating relationship between human rights and humanitarianism. For most of their lives, human rights and humanitarianism have been distant cousins. Humanitarianism focused on situations in faraway places dealing with large-scale loss of life that demanded urgent attention whilst human rights advanced the cause of individual liberty and equality at home. .
In this virtual roundtable organised in collaboration with UCD's School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, and chaired by Dr Ronan McDermott (University of Nottingham), leading scholars who contributed to the book will probe how the shifting meanings of human rights and humanitarianism converge and diverge from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and debate topics including violence against women, humanitarian aid in a genocide context, and practices of humanity.
Speaker bios:
Professor Michael Barnett: Professor of International and Political Science at the George Washington University. He will be introducing the reasons for the interest in the distinction between human rights and humanitarianism, their relationship, and what this distinction tells us about the world we live in.
(opens in a new window)Professor Aisling Swaine, University College Dublin: Professor of Gender Studies in the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice. She was named by A-Political as one of the world's 100 Most Influential People in Gender Policy 2021. She'll be discussing her chapter 'At Odds? Human Rights and Humanitarian Approaches to Violence Against Women During Conflict' which examines the relationship between the human rights and humanitarian fields respectively through the lens of both their normative and related approaches to practice and responses in humanitarian contexts to the issue of conflict-related violence against women.
Professor Alan Lester: Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Colonisation and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance, with Fae Dussart (Cambridge University Press 2014) and Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century British Empire, with Kate Boehme and Peter Mitchell (Cambridge University Press 2021). In this session he'll be talking about the relationship between humanitarian governance, Protection and the Rights of Man in the nineteenth century British Empire.
Professor Bertrand Taithe: Since 2009, Bertrand Taithe has been a founding member and Executive Director of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester, which combines the research interests of colleagues in the humanities and opens a dialogue with humanitarian workers and medical practitioners. Betrand has been editor of the European Review of History- revue europeenne d'histoire since 1994., and has chaired the editorial committee of Manchester University Press for a number of years . He now edits two book series: Cultural History of Modern War and Humanitarianism Key Debates and New Approaches, as well as the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs.
Registration (opens in a new window)link
See book published by Cambridge University Press (opens in a new window)here