Abstract: From its inception, Charter 77 was part of a broader transnational human rights constellation. While its history has often been interpreted through the prism of the Helsinki process, this paper argues that the Charter's transnational entanglements extended far beyond the CSCE framework. Drawing on original archival research in multiple countries, the study situates Charter 77 within three interrelated layers of postwar international human rights politics: the institutional human rights internationalism of the United Nations system (with a focus on the International Labour Organization), the intergovernmental human rights diplomacy of the CSCE, and the activist human rights globalism of NGOs such as Amnesty International. Each of these levels represented a distinct yet interconnected mode of human rights transnationalism—differing in structure, agency, and political impact. By tracing the Charter's interaction with these arenas, the paper highlights the movement's dual role as both a beneficiary and a co-producer of the emerging global human rights regime. The analysis challenges the dominant "Helsinki narrative" by revealing the deeper structural and historical continuities between postwar internationalism, 1970s human rights globalism, and local dissident practices.
Revised Abstract: This article examines how the Israeli government engineered humanitarianism in Gaza since the 2005 withdrawal, transforming it into a biopolitical regime of containment and an instrument of war. Drawing on the work of Eyal Weizman and Michel Agier, the article argues that the resulting matrix of control set the stage for starvation crimes to become a modality of genocide. It becomes clear that Israel's humanitarian management functioned as an occupation strategy that sustained basic survival while systematically obstructing economic development, deliberately producing a state of precarity. After October 7, 2023, this infrastructure of deprivation was compounded by humanitarian gaslighting, namely the state's discursive practice of asserting legality and benevolence, while actively perpetrating starvation crimes, a rhetorical move that not only deflects responsibility but also risks enabling impunity. While the prewar carceral system alone may not constitute genocide, its intentional design to create a systematically weakened population made it essential to the broader logic of mass atrocity. These conditions, the article shows, align with Helen Fein's concept of genocide by attrition, gradual destruction through sustained deprivation. Recognizing starvation crimes as a central component of this modality and reassessing humanitarianism's potential role in perpetuating structural violence, the article argues, is critical in setting important legal precedents and holding perpetrators accountable for using starvation as a tool of genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Abstract: When the absurd is sustaining a slaughterhouse and we are witnesses. When our collective will to stop the slaughterhouse is met with imaginary structures built for us to fight with. A part of our common humanity and ourselves is dead. This death is not a source of despair, but newly found sense of ironic fearlessness.
Abstract: The literature on the history of international organization tends to highlight the dominant role of European internationalists and their (arguably) secular cosmopolitan visions in the life and functioning of these institutions. Conversely, in our contribution, we trace the parallel trajectories of two path-breaking figures in the United Nations (UN) with affinities with the Global South and between the 1950s and 1990s: Hernán Santa-Cruz and Sadruddin Aga Khan. In the tense international (dis)order of the Cold War, they both relied on a combination of Third Worldist solidarity and religious visions, more specifically Catholic Socialism and Ismaili Shi’ism, to advance proposals for alternative international order(s) in the North while simultaneously promoting the ‘global’ in the South. Their narratives shed light on how international civil servants with anticolonial visions pushed for an expansion of the mandate of IOs to pursue a fairer distribution of resources at the planetary scale and to empower formerly colonized peoples to shape the ‘global’ in their own terms. Moreover, Santa Cruz and Aga Khan’s trajectories allow us to break free from the binary of ‘secular’ liberal internationalism vs ‘irrational’ religious cosmopolitanism and explore the immanent religious undertones of internationalism in the international institutions of the post-decolonization era. Finally, both histories show that the Cold War, contrary to the common assumption, was not a time of hiatus, but rather an intense period of dispute where lawyer-diplomats from the ‘Global South’ attempted to remake the world in its own likeness and image —a struggle that is far from over.
Abstract: This paper examines how biolegitimacy and brokering are central to labor migration governing regimes in Thailand. Whereas undocumented migrants would risk deportation whilst seeking health services in the past, current policy responses favor medical treatment - as opposed to deportation - regardless of patients’ legal migrant status. Exploring how migrants’ corporal bodies give rise to new forms of policy practices and claim-making, the paper explicates how these changes have enabled a broadened operational space for aid agencies that assist labor migrants. At the same time, these changes must be understood in relation to the role of brokers (e.g., migrant health translators) and brokering practices (i.e., aid programs’ role as mediators of assistance) in how they expand interventions. Thus, aid programs’ extended operational space can usefully be understood as brokered biolegitimacy. The paper concludes by considering wider implications for how we both understand brokerage and the politics of life within migration policy regimes.
