Kjersti Lohne

The Rise of the Humanitarian Drone: Giving Content to an Emerging Concept:

This article explores and attempts to define the emerging concept of the humanitarian drone by critically examining actual and anticipated transfers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, from the global battlespace to the humanitarian emergency zone. Focusing on the relationship between the diffusion of new technology and institutional power, we explore the humanitarian drone as a ‘war dividend’ arising from the transfer of surveillance UAVs, cargo-carrying UAVs and weaponised UAVs. We then reflect on the ways in which military practices and rationales guiding drone deployment may also shape humanitarian use, giving particular attention to the concept of surgical precision, the implications of targeting logic, and the ambiguous role of distance. Next, we consider the broader implications for humanitarian action, including the promise of global justice and improved aid delivery. Finally, we analyse the most difficult aspect of the humanitarian drone: namely, its political currency as a ‘humanitarian weapon’ in conflict scenarios.

Gender and crime revisited: criminological gender research on international and transnational crime and crime control

The increased internationalization of law and the strengthened position of transnational civil society create a need for a criminological research agenda that investigates intersections between legitimacy and representation, punishment and welfare beyond the nation state. This article explores the need for and scope of such a research agenda, and particularly focuses on the potential value of criminological tools in analyses of power dynamics in international and transnational crimes and related legal strategies. We argue that much criminological scholarship is characterized by the application of a bottom-up perspective, a critical perspective on social control and welfare institutions and their practices, and a recognition of the disciplines close relation to and relevance for contemporary criminal justice policies. Drawing on research on conflict-related sexual violence and human trafficking we demonstrate what such a criminological approach entails. In particular we focus on unintended consequences of punitive responses, and the role of NGOs in the formation of criminal policies relating to these fields. We argue that criminology can play a central role in furthering an understanding of global power structures, and suggest important questions such research efforts may engage with.

Penal humanitarianism beyond the nation state: An analysis of international criminal justice

In a recent account of border control, Mary Bosworth introduces the notion of ‘penal humanitarianism’ to describe how humanitarianism enables penal power to move beyond the nation state. Based on a study of international criminal justice, this article applies and develops the notion of penal humanitarianism, and argues that that power to punish is particularly driven by humanitarian reason when punishment is disembedded from the nation state altogether. Disguising the fact of situatedness through claims to the global and universal, international criminal justice is not only a product of situated relations of power, but also constitutes new geographies of penal power. By complicating notions of humanitarianism, penal power and the state, international criminal justice raises interesting questions about the epistemological privilege of the nation state framework in the sociology of punishment.

The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns

In The Refugee in International Society, political scientist Emma Haddad sets out to examine the conceptualization of the refugee as a product of the international state system. Why do we get refugees, when did the refugee ‘problem’ emerge, and how can ‘the refugee’ ever be reconciled with an international system that rests on sovereignty? Haddad offers a sophisticated and thorough contribution to refugee studies by looking beyond the notions of ‘failed states’ and legal polemics of what constitutes ‘real’ refugees. Rather she approaches the very workings and practices of international society. The book centers around the argument that refugees are ‘an inevitable if unanticipated part’ of the international state system; forced into the ‘gaps between states’, the refugee will remain as long as states are constructed and separated by political borders (p. 7). From the outset of the English school perspective within international relations, and combined with a substantial constructivist edge, The Refugee in International Society offers a tripartite analysis made up of conceptual, historical and contemporary approaches that each serves to illuminate how constructions of the refugee and refugee issues are contingent upon the political context. Taken together, these perspectives enable insights into important shifts and continuities in dealing with refugees; not least challenging the widely accepted perception that today’s refugee flows and concerns are something radically new and different. The first part addresses the normative and multi-disciplinary conceptualizations of the refugee. In acknowledging the limitations of contemporary (legal) definitions, Haddad presents a categorization of the refugee that embodies: (i) a degree of compulsion; (ii) an undetermined temporal element; and (iii) an essentially political basis. From this follows a discussion of the refugee as the significant ‘other’ in the forging of national identities, as an exception to the ‘state–citizen–territory trinity’, yet at the same time defined in statist terms and thus an intrinsic part of the international society of separate sovereign states. As the international state system is constituted through the interplay between the adverse values of communitarianism and cosmopolitanism – pluralism and solidarism – human rights only makes sense within the legal