Projects > Humanitarian Interventionism in Global Hot Spots

The world is ensnared in a set of new systemic forces wherein failed states collapse, and the international community undertakes massive military and humanitarian interventions.

In the past decade major hot spots have been Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Kosova, Afganistan, and Iraq. These sites are referred to as complex emergencies, trouble spots and conflicts. Old ones endure and new ones will appear.

These sites are what Pierre Bourdieu might have called a difficult spot to describe and think about. The difficulty, in part, is that they are immersed in a kind of fog often exacerbated by the international community whose burden is to prove their competence and produce rapid results. The complexity and fluidity of these conditions begs for projects of long-term, engaged, collaborative, and multidisciplinary documentation and analysis. Certainly, there is a burgeoning theoretical literature about globalization that is helpful, but attempts to integrate this theorizing with a case study of a humanitarian crisis within the global scene are missing.

The ICORC sponsors dialogues, exchanges, and scholarship on humanitarian interventionism in global hot spots. The ICORC hopes that these efforts will add another perspective to those engaged in the work of humanitarian interventionism, and might also assist in the writing of theory concerning the events and processes of late-modernity .

The co-investigators of the Humanitarian Interventionism in Global Hot Spots project are Ralph Cintron, Ph.D., Ferid Agani, MD, and Stevan Weine, MD.

English 483: Studies in Language and Rhetoric:
Intervening in and Rethinking Today’s Global Hotspots