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In this interview, Celso Amorim, former Brazilian foreign minister, discusses changes in global governance and their likely impact on international cooperation. He critically reflects on his experiences in positioning Brazil on the world stage and democratising human rights. And he considers whether the influence of Brazil and other Southern states is likely to continue expanding.
-fields of both the history of humanitarianism and human rights. The emergence of such scholarship is an exciting and welcome development. Among other things, it provides an additional angle for analysing both affinities and differences between human rights and humanitarian practice – an issue getting more attention of late ( Barnett, 2020 ) – by attending to their respective visual cultures. It also raises conceptual challenges, given that I have already referred not only to ‘humanitarian’ photography
practicality prevents it). This is the same foundational commitment that animates human rights work. The humanist core to both of these forms of social practice is a similar kind of belief in the ultimate priority of moral claims made by human beings as human beings rather than as possessors of any markers of identity or citizenship. What differences exist between humanitarianism and human rights are largely sociological – the contextual specifics of the evolution of two different forms of social activism. I have argued elsewhere, for example, that
mistreatment of prisoners of war. Another side may be better disposed to those elements of international law that uphold a right of resistance against occupation but less keen on international law's injunctions against harming civilians. Finally, both parties may be disdainful of existing norms of humanitarian law on the grounds that they are controlled by their opponents, but still use the rhetoric of humanitarianism and human rights to accuse the other of hypocrisy. 9
among political parties both on the right and on the left of politics (see Mulinari and Neergaard, 2017 ). An important insight from this overview is that migration control in Sweden has always balanced between political rhetoric praising humanitarianism and human rights ideals on the one hand, and an expansive capacity for exclusion, containment, and deportation, on the other (see Weber et al., 2019
). Cuttitta , P. ( 2018 ) ‘Delocalization, humanitarianism and human rights: The Mediterranean border between exclusion and inclusion’, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography , 50 ( 3 ): 783–803 . Danish Refugee Council ( 2016 ) ‘Forgotten fatalities: The number of migrants’ deaths before reaching the Mediterranean’, Mixed Migration Monitoring
policing – termed by the authors ‘humanitarian borderlands’ – is ‘often conducted simultaneously with, against and through humanity. The mission is framed and legitimized through the language of humanitarianism and human rights, officers are partly required to perform their tasks as humanitarian agents, at the same time as they find themselves complicit and practically involved in deeply inhumane
reflected a genuine effort on the part of the international community to stop humanitarian catastrophes, they did nevertheless characterise a normative insistence on humanitarianism and human rights; see R. A. Falk, Human Rights Horizons: The Pursuit of Justice in A Globalizing World (London: Routledge, 2000 ), p. 169. In his ‘Two concepts of sovereignty’, Kofi Annan makes
an ‘inside’ literature concerned to document and develop the transitional justice field, often directed towards identifying ‘best practice’ and refining an appropriate ‘toolkit’.3 Counterposed to this is a literature often having much in common with the growing critiques of humanitarianism and human rights, in which transitional justice is seen to be a technique of rule, often allied to nationalist and/or a global neo-liberal politics with its associated depoliticizing effects.4 In the wider transitional justice literature, the South African Truth and