John G. Dale

Smart Humanitarianism: Re-imagining Human Rights in the Age of Enterprise

A paradigmatic shift around the central role of ‘social entrepreneurs’ is captivating a broad, diverse range of social actors refashioning the institutional landscape of human rights and humanitarian practices. For this special issue dedicated to ‘Re-imagining Human Rights’, we explore some of the implications of these revolutionary changes in human rights practices, and their consequences for sociological study and political critique in the 21st century. Following a discussion of the state of the sociology of human rights practices, we describe the remaking of the human rights arena into a site of technocratic organizations with an emphasis on the ‘triple bottom line’ (financial, social and environmental sustainability). This market-led rights paradigm also promotes a new kind of empathy required for social problem-solving and humanitarian action – one less sentimental, much more technocratic and managerial. We offer some critical observations on this ‘smart humanitarianism’, which emphasizes the human-machine partnership via online technologies, apps, and expert systems management strategies; they redistribute the cognitive responsibilities of determining and delivering goods for greatest measurable impact with a quid-pro-quo of reframing inequality. We introduce the other contributing articles, signposting notable elements and the implications for wider socio-political critique, especially regarding ‘smart humanitarianism’.

Overcoming Global Inequalities

the society and, more specifically, between intellectuals and peasants, on the one hand, and the tsarist autocracy, on the other; and by competition between local traditions and the modernity represented by the West and its local elite promoters, beginning with Peter the Great. By contrast, Serbian history was shaped by the confrontations between Serbian peasants and the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, with these struggles forging closer ties between political and cultural leaders, on the one hand, and those leaders and Serbian society, on the other. Moreover, western influence was later to arrive in Serbia, and Serbs found it easy to identify with the West. Finally, these contrasts translated into a much stronger national identity in Serbia than in Russia and to an understanding by Serbs that the state was the representative, the ally, and indeed the guarantor of the nation. By contrast, Russian national identity was weaker, and it did not see the state as either its representative or its savior. In many ways, communism merely reinforced these striking contrasts. Here, I can provide two examples. One can be succinctly stated: while the tensions between state and society continued during the Soviet era and Russian nationalism was in effect diluted by that struggle, in Yugoslavia the Serbs saw the Yugoslav communist state as central to the survival and prospering of the Serbian nation. The other example is the difference in the design of these two ethnofederal states, especially with respect to the fact that the Russian republic was conflated with statewide political, economic, and cultural institutions whereas the Serbian republic was not and therefore was the equal in terms of institutional endowments and their support of strong identities based on the confluence of territory and ethnicity of the other Yugoslav republics. As these two examples highlight, the communist experiment, just as the historical experiences predating it, undermined the development of Russian identity and distanced that identity from the idea of the state as integral to it; whereas the Serbian experience was very much one of building a cult of the state. As a result, Russians in general and their cultural and political elites in particular were not wedded to the Soviet state, whereas their Serbian counterparts were very much tied to the idea of a state—if not the Yugoslav variant, then certainly a state that brought Serbs together in one political entity. Let me now close by highlighting a few of the most important contributions of this study to our understanding of nations, nationalism, and state-building. First, this is a study of core nations, not peripheral ones, with the latter targeted in most contemporary studies of nationalism. Second, this study reminds us that there are contested cultural narratives that rise, fall, and change in response to important developments. Indeed, a real strength of the book is Vujačić’s unwillingness to settle for arguments that draw a straight line between the distant and the more recent past. Third, Vujačić complicates the simple distinction between civic versus ethnic definitions of the nation and introduces two new considerations— that nations differ in their structures of political authority and in their views of the state. Finally, this book reminds us that historical experiences and the narratives constructed around them do not just define preferences; they also identify threats.

Poverty and Power: The Problem of Structural Inequality:

Virtually every academic in the United States, not to mention the reading public, knows too little about Iran (the fact that this is even truer for Iraq explains part of the reasons for that catastrophe). And I would recommend this book to every academic in the United States, especially in the social sciences and humanities. As someone who has undertaken a 500-year history of social change in Iran, who sees social movements through the prism of race, class, and gender, it was eye-opening to encounter so much that I did not know about the country. ‘‘Sexual politics’’ refers in this book to at least three things: (1) the struggle for women’s equality with men, (2) the struggle for gay and lesbian rights, and (3) the relationship of gender to social movements, cultural freedoms, and, in the case of Iran, revolutions. Janet Afary’s accomplishment is to document painstakingly the complexity of sexual politics across 200 years of Iranian history, and to present us with a new take on its surprising, and mixed, record. The author ultimately makes the case that sexual politics is intimately (as it were) connected to politics tout court. She goes far beyond the existing literature (some of it very good indeed) on ‘‘gender and Iran,’’ which has focused till now predominantly on women and almost exclusively on heterosexual matters. As befits a superb historian of Iran—her first book was a history of the 1905–11 Constitutional Revolution—she digs deeply and creatively into the archives for primary materials of all kinds and combs an extensive secondary literature in several languages. As an accomplished theorist who has coauthored with Kevin Anderson a wonderful book, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, she forges a highly original theoretical and conceptual interpretation of this material at the same time, on a scaffolding that includes Foucault’s ‘‘ethics of love;’’ James Scott’s ‘‘hidden transcripts’’; psychoanalytic insights from Freud, Fromm, and Marcuse; and a command of both Western and Third World feminist theory from Simone de Beauvoir to Chandra Mohanty, Deniz Kandiyoti to Minoo Moallem. The book is further graced with 80 valuable illustrations, including seventeenthcentury paintings showing homoerotic scenes, nineteenth-century black-and-white photos and sketches from the shah’s harem and other sites, political cartoons from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the turmoil of the 2000s, images from women’s magazines of the last 40 years, political posters and photographs of women’s participation in the Iranian Revolution and after, and portraits of many of the key players on all sides of sexual politics in Iran. The 16-page introduction, which presents the issues and previews the main characteristics of the last two centuries, is alone worth the price of the book. Although the book’s title tells us that it is a study of sexual politics in modern Iran, we are treated in Part One to 100 pages of deep background on ‘‘Premodern Practices,’’ which sensibly provide a baseline for the developments of the past century. These pages focus on nineteenthcentury patterns, meanings, and practices around marriage (including love and divorce), sexuality, law, religion, and resistance in its many guises. A turning point occurs during the authoritarian modernizing reign of Reza Shah, who seized power in a 1921 coup abetted by the British, had himself crowned king in 1925, and thereby started the Pahlavi dynasty. This would consist of himself until 1941, and his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (known to us simply as ‘‘the Shah’’) who would be deposed and see the monarchy itself abolished in the course of the 1978–89 revolution. In these chapters, Afary continues to cover all the topics above, and begins to document the changes in gender relations and social and cultural norms as Iran moved