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Featured researches published by Michal Givoni.


Millennium: Journal of International Studies | 2011

Humanitarian Governance and Ethical Cultivation: Médecins sans Frontières and the Advent of the Expert-Witness

Michal Givoni

This article seeks to analyse contemporary humanitarianism as an advanced-liberal formation of global governance. It tracks the emergence in the 1970s of the French humanitarian organisation Médecins sans Frontières and shows that its care for and control of distant victims has been commingled with and dependent upon care for Western selves. The article contends that humanitarianism ‘without borders’ was the outgrowth of the legitimacy crisis of the medical profession, and that its practice of witnessing has ultimately been a mode of ethical self-cultivation by means of which physicians could fashion themselves as more enlightened personae. It further shows that the recent concern with the detrimental side effects of humanitarian action should be deciphered as the culmination of the practices of the self in which global humanitarianism has been embedded since the 1970s.


Journal of Human Rights | 2011

Beyond the Humanitarian/Political Divide: Witnessing and the Making of Humanitarian Ethics

Michal Givoni

This essay examines how witnessing became encoded as an act of advocacy that may furnish a response to the plight of distant victims, and how it has impacted upon contemporary humanitarian ethics. By following the discourses and practices of witnessing elaborated by the French section of the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) since the late 1970s, the essay argues that witnessing helped transform a well-established humanitarian sensibility into a full-fledged humanitarian responsibility, which has been thoughtfully and systematically attentive to the pitfalls of transnational aid. The essay shows that when mobilized by individual and collective actors who strove to constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct, witnessing took on disparate forms and rationalities that amounted neither to eye-witnessing nor simply to the public use of speech. It concludes by offering a reappraisal of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism, arguing that contemporary humanitarian ethics maintains dynamic and shifting relations with the political.


Theory, Culture & Society | 2014

The Ethics of Witnessing and the Politics of the Governed

Michal Givoni

During the 20th century, witnessing outgrew its original affiliations with legal evidence and religious belief and became a social vocation in its own right. This essay explores the ethical expertise with which witnessing has been infused as the witness became the deferred result of a process of subjective transformation by probing some of the meta-testimonial discourses that emerged in response to the Great War, the Holocaust, and Third World emergencies. Against the ethical redefinition of witnessing advanced by Jean-François Lyotard, Shoshana Felman, and Giorgio Agamben, it analyses ethical witnessing as a practice of self that binds individual autonomy to institutional platforms, technological innovations, and reflective procedures that tackle the pitfalls of witnessing, maximize its potential, and trace its most adequate and resonant forms.


Environment and Planning D-society & Space | 2016

Between micro mappers and missing maps: Digital humanitarianism and the politics of material participation in disaster response

Michal Givoni

Crisis mapping is a new modality of participatory humanitarian action in which global publics are mobilized to trace digital maps of disaster-stricken sites and to classify, verify, and plot on maps Big Data produced by disaster-affected people. This article untangles the political rationalities behind this emergent form of digital humanitarianism by looking at two platforms that shape the self-organizing crowds in which crisis mapping is grounded: MicroMappers, a microtasking platform for processing messages from disaster zones, and the Missing Maps Project, which traces maps of disaster-prone areas in poor countries. While looking at the increasingly prominent interplay between device-based participation and technologies of advanced liberal governance in humanitarianism, I make two interrelated claims. First, I argue that ICTs do not promote the democratization of disaster response as much as they put at its disposal new tools for establishing order and security in crisis zones by facilitating the transfer of responsibility to humanitarian crowds. Second, I claim that the emergence of the crowd as a new humanitarian actor that serves the dual and potentially incommensurate purposes of resilience and witnessing perpetuates the ambiguities of a humanitarian endeavor whose inherent tensions had grown deeper since it gained its current political prominence.


Humanity | 2016

Reluctant Cosmopolitanism: Perceptions Management and the Performance of Humanitarian Principles

Michal Givoni

Abstract:Following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, humanitarian organizations grew increasingly preoccupied with the ways in which people in the field perceive them. In order to address the blurring of lines between military and humanitarian interventions, they undertook perceptions studies and enhanced their networking and field communication capacities, thereby turning the monitoring and management of local perceptions into a knowledge-based and more systematic endeavor. This article examines the conjunctures that have turned the views of so-called stakeholders into a strategic issue for contemporary humanitarianism. Based on an analysis of the rise of perceptions management, it demonstrates just how indebted the humanitarian hold over emergency zones is to political technologies that analyze the arenas in which humanitarian actors operate in order to make them more hospitable and responsive to humanitarian efforts.


Cultural Studies | 2018

Indifference and repetition: occupation testimonies and left-wing despair

Michal Givoni

ABSTRACT As despair is increasingly seeping into leftist politics in many parts of the world, its long-held image as a hindrance to political activism still prevents the thriving literature on the politics of feeling from adequately theorizing this collective posture. This article seeks to probe the public manifestations of left-wing despair by looking at the despairing dispositions that have evolved in the Israeli Left in response to its failure to undermine Israel’s regime of occupation, using the coping modes this failure has sparked as a conduit for complicating the negative image of despair in politics. The analysis draws on two documentaries that showcase soldiers’ testimonies – Z32 and Censored Voices – in which the compulsive but fruitless repetition of witnessing is brought to the fore and serves as a platform for the enactment of despair as a distinctively public disposition. In dialogue with Wendy Brown’s notion of left melancholy and Lauren Berlant’s notion of cruel optimism, the article propounds despair – understood not as an affect, a feeling, or an emotion, but as a recursively performed posture – as an alternative analytic grid for grasping the contemporary agonies of the Left. Drawing on the Israeli documentaries, it demonstrates that despair may be propelled and perpetuated by two kinds of crises – a crisis of movement and a crisis of belonging. Taking both modalities as evidence that despair does not necessarily involve a withdrawal into the self and may transpire through public acts of care, the article claims, using Bonnie Honig’s work on public things, that the ground for the assessment of despair should be shifted from its presumed impact on political actors to the tangible imprints it leaves in the public settings in which action takes place.


Archive | 2009

The power of inclusive exclusion : anatomy of Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian territories

Adi Ophir; Michal Givoni; Sārī Ḥanafī


Archive | 2016

The Care of the Witness: A Contemporary History of Testimony in Crises

Michal Givoni


Constellations | 2017

Dividing crowds: In search of a worldly ethics for cosmopolitan publics

Michal Givoni


Archive | 2011

Non-Governmental Politics and the Ethics of Witnessing

Michal Givoni

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Marcelo G. Kohen

Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

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