Global Humanitarianism NGOs and the Crafting of Community [Hardcover]

In this book, author Daniel Robert DeChaine illuminates aspects of human rights organizations that have received relatively little attention, particularly from those focused more on the structure of such entities.In Global Humanitarianism Daniel Robert Dechaine undertakes an historical-cultural analysis of humanitarian NGO rhetoric and politics. He focuses his study specifically on M?decins Sans Fronti?res and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. This book, besides being the first of its kind, offers to the disciplines of political science, cultural studies, and sociology a model with which to consider the political and social roles of NGOs in the ever-changing global community.In Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the Crafting of Community, author Rob DeChaine explores a narrative common to the nongovernmental organization community about the promise and confusion of living together in post/modern times. Palpable in their affective admixture of idealism, fear, hope, anger and uncertainty, the protagonists of the story are humanitarian social actors, engaged in a vivid social drama. Their audience, as made apparent by DeChaine's excellent scholarship, is intimately engaged in the drama as well. According to DeChaine, the action takes shape in a multivocal polyphony of solidarity and, at times, cacophony of protest and dissent, with actors mobilizing symbolic resources in the service of uniting a public who would join with them in the cause. A major source of the actors' labor is symbolic, consisting in the successful rallying of formative energies in and around a cluster of key related terms, words and phrases, in order to dramatize and publicize the exigency of the crisis at hand. DeChaine argues that crises are embodied in the form of an intensifying hegemonic struggle over the articulation of community in a global/ized world. The struggle brings into tension local and global priorities, national governments and civil society, and state-centered forms of ile