The electronic journal Behemoth which “focuses on the general problem of the fading and/or failing state,” has a new themed issue which focuses on epidemics, more specifically exploring “critical issues arising within the new problem space of emerging infectious diseases,” (Caduff 2010). As Carlo Caduff argues in his introduction to the volume,
“In the aftermath of the Cold
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Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions. Edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi
Zone Books, 2010
408 pp., $36.95 (hardback)
Reviewed by Ross Parsons
(Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Africa University, Zimbabwe)
A recent Zimbabwean joke had it that ‘if the four horsemen of the Apocalypse had not already arrived, then there were …
Disaster and the Politics of Intervention
Edited by Andrew Lakoff
Columbia University Press, May 2010
160 pages, $15.00 (paperback)
Reviewed by Jennifer Ilo Van Nuil
Tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanoes, pandemics, global warming, and financial crises: lately, catastrophes have become part of a larger conversation about the varied nature of disaster and intervention. Bridging case studies of disasters from around the globe, …
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Contributed by Pierre Minn (McGill University)
Two months after the catastrophic earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and its surrounding areas, hundreds of thousands of Haitians continue to lack basic resources such as shelter, food, water, and sanitation. Public health experts warn of outbreaks of cholera, typhus and other infectious diseases, while the “ordinary” pathologies that Haitians have confronted for years: malnutrition, …
This post was contributed by Ari Samsky.
It is adapted from his paper “Medical Humanitarianism Without Humans: How international drug donation programs reshape health, disease, and local law,” which won the 2009 Rudolph Virchow Graduate Paper Award.
In Paris in March of 2008 I attended an international coordinating meeting of non-governmental groups involved in the control of onchocerciasis, a blinding …