event
BOOK LAUNCH
Tuesday
03
March
Till Mostowlansky

Humanitarianism from Below? Universalism and the politics of inhumanity

Till Mostowlansky, Geneva Graduate Institute
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Geneva Graduate Institute, Maison de la paix, room S5

ANSO CONVERSATIONS is a space for scholars to share work-in-progress and research findings of relevance to contemporary anthropology and sociology.

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Abstract

Since the late twentieth century, wealthy nations and international organisations have claimed a monopoly on humanitarianism. Even critical views of this regime of global aid and assistance have reinforced the image of a phenomenon shaped by secularised Christian ethics and Euro-American politics of life. At the same time, around the world various humanitarian institutions and practices have flourished that remain outside this realm.

Mostly invisible to Western publics, these forms of humanitarianism have reshaped global landscapes of aid in tangible ways; from protecting Indigenous communities in Canada to African diasporic initiatives in response to the Ebola pandemic; from Islamic economies of giving and Buddhist concepts of the human to crowdfunding aid in Ukraine. Written by leading scholars in the field, Humanitarianism from Below? forcefully illustrates that these humanitarian actors do not merely represent grassroots initiatives but have altered humanitarianism at large, involving alternative economies and politics. Drawing on original ethnographic and historical research, Humanitarianism from Below? addresses a wide audience of scholars and students in humanitarian and development studies, anthropology and political science. This volume considers humanitarianism’s multiple histories and relations of power and offers a profound reassessment of humanitarian pluralism today.

 

About the speakers
 

Till Mostowlansky is a research professor of Anthropology at the Geneva Graduate Institute and professor of Urban Studies at the Kyiv School of Economics. Previously, he taught and conducted research at the University of Bern, the National University of Singapore and the University of Hong Kong. He has published widely on humanitarianism, infrastructure and Muslim societies, and is the author of Azan on the Moon: Entangling modernity along Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), as well as a co-editor of Infrastructure and the Remaking of Asia (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2023). 
 
Alexander Ephrussi is a doctoral student at the Geneva Graduate Institute and was a guest researcher at the Galatasaray University of Istanbul from 2022 until 2023. His work investigates the powers of political exclusion and deportation in the context of migration, as well as the modes of resistance that migrants develop in the absence of legal protection. He received a master’s degree in social and cultural anthropology from the University College London in 2018, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Oxford in 2016.
 
 

Discussant 

 Prof. Davide Rodogno 
 

Book Cover

 

Event jointly organised with the The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy.

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