Humanitarian Crises and International Relations 1959-2013

This book examines the emergence and evolution of the notion of “humanitarian crisis” as a pretext for military intervention from the Cold War to the current Afghan crisis. Each chapter outlines a series of crises in chronological order from 1959 to 2013, with a focus on the post-Cold War paradigm of “collective security” and intervention. The primary aim is to detail the influence of humanitarian field on both international conflict and international relations in the post-Cold War paradigm.
Historical reflection, as a methodological approach, maps the evolution of the terms to define humanitarian crises in international relations from 1959 to the present. Historical cases offer individual examples to examine the politics of intervention, but also offer an opening to leverage multidisciplinary tools, such as anthropological tools, to explore the social consequences of situations, namely social chaos, forced migrations at large, or gendercide. This book draws on extensive field research and visual anthropological films on Diaspora in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt, India communities over a fifteen-year span.