Introduction Pope Benedict XVI, Russian President Vladimir Putin and United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres have at least one thing in common: they each, at different times and in reference to different contexts, called for or ordered the opening of so-called ‘humanitarian corridors’. Whether it was to evacuate wounded civilians in South Ossetia in 2008, to implement a daily ceasefire in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta in 2018, or to assist populations in Ethiopia’s Tigray region in 2021, respectively, the notion is now so frequently invoked that it goes
report / synthesis offered by Maelle L’Homme, the author returns us to the analysis of classical humanitarian action as defined in traditional international humanitarian law. Analysing the use and misuse of the discourse of ‘humanitarian corridors’, the author argues that the widespread use of the term challenges norms of humanitarian access to civilians in conflict settings. By creating corridors as zones of exception in which humanitarian norms apply, all other zones are normalised as non-humanitarian spaces, thereby constraining all other types and modes of access
). In late October, the GoS and its allies proposed a pause in their campaign, and they set up what were called ‘humanitarian corridors’, urging the population to evacuate eastern Aleppo. However, opposition groups and civilians refused to surrender. The military campaign resumed with heavy aerial bombardment to force residents to flee the city. In November 2016, the GoS used chlorine gas in targeting residential areas and civilian infrastructure in eastern Aleppo ( Guardian , 2016 ). Consequently, the opposition, alongside the remaining civilians, were trapped in a
had announced the opening of humanitarian corridors and the implementation of relief operations for western Aleppo (under siege at the time), MSF’s office in Moscow approached the Russian defence ministry. This ministry organised a meeting in Damascus at the end of August 2016 between a delegation made up of members of MSF Belgium and MSF Switzerland and the Syrian health minister and vice-minister of foreign affairs. The discussions resulted in an
Given the significant similarities and differences between the welfare states of Northern Europe and their reactions to the perceived 'refugee crisis' of 2015, the book focuses primarily on the three main cases of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Placed in a wider Northern European context – and illustrated by those chapters that also discuss refugee experiences in Norway and the UK – the Danish, Swedish and German cases are the largest case studies of this edited volume. Thus, the book contributes to debates on the governance of non-citizens and the meaning of displacement, mobility and seeking asylum by providing interdisciplinary analyses of a largely overlooked region of the world, with two specific aims. First, we scrutinize the construction of the 2015 crisis as a response to the large influx of refugees, paying particular attention to the disciplinary discourses and bureaucratic structures that are associated with it. Second, we investigate refugees’ encounters with these bureaucratic structures and consider how these encounters shape hopes for building a new life after displacement. This allows us to show that the mobility of specific segments of the world’s population continues to be seen as a threat and a risk that has to be governed and controlled. Focusing on the Northern European context, our volume interrogates emerging policies and discourses as well as the lived experiences of bureaucratization from the perspective of individuals who find themselves the very objects of bureaucracies.
Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’, Cultural Anthropology, 7(1), pp. 24–44. Malkki, L. H. (1995). ‘Refugees and Exile: From “Refugee Studies” to the National Order of Things’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 24(1), pp. 495–523. Mallardo, A. (2017). Humanitarian Corridors: A Tool to Respond to the Refugees’ Crisis. Oxford Border Criminologies Blog. Available at: www.law.ox.ac. Introduction27 uk/research-subject-groups/centre-criminology/centreborder-criminologies/ blog/2017/05/humanitarian (Accessed 17 August 2017). Maroufi, M. (2017). ‘Precarious
support, mediation, donor conferences, border management missions, the establishment of no-fly zones and humanitarian corridors, while domestic crisis management may require ceasefire negotiations, security interventions, curfews and financial concessions. In prolonged crises, external crisis management can also stretch to sanctions, and short-term military interventions. The worldview that informs crisis