Law after July 22, 2011: Survivors, Memory and Reconstruction

Source at https://www.prio.org/publications/12987.​While the criminal law and security governance aspects of the July 22 terror attack in Norway have been extensively analyzed in the academic literature, much less attention has been given to processes involving civil law, legal mobilization and legal-bureaucratic processes. ​The slow workings of the law mean that the aftermath of July 22 is still unfolding in different legal processes. This PRIO paper carves out a socio-legal research agenda intended to bridge the aforementioned knowledge gap. In so doing, it identifies various aspects of how the law deals with survivors, their families and the bereaved. It also addresses the legal debates over memorials and the reconstruction and securitization of the Norwegian Government Quarter. We argue that in choosing between extraordinary and ordinary legal mechanisms and instruments to deal with the terror attack, the state and the legal system have opted for the latter. This emphasis on “ordinary law” must be investigated. We are interested in how law distributes resources, rights and identities and sets limits on government interventions – and how individual actors and organizations mobilize the law to shape the political, popular and legal narratives around July 22

Humanitarian innovation, humanitarian renewal?

The continued evolution of the humanitarian innovation concept needs a critical engagement with how this agenda interacts with previous and contemporary attempts to improve humanitarian action

Now is the time to deliver: looking for humanitarian innovation’s theory of change

Since the publication of the ALNAP study on innovation in international humanitarian action in 2009, innovation has emerged as a central vehicle for change in the humanitarian sector. As the field of humanitarian innovation expands and matures, there is an increasingly vocal expectation that “now is the time to deliver.” Navigating optimistic claims about the role and relevance of humanitarian innovation as a vehicle of change—and the reverse inclination to dismiss humanitarian innovation as a neoliberal hype—this review article sets out to get a better sense of the expectations concerning humanitarian innovation as a theory of change: exactly what do actors in the humanitarian sector expect innovation to deliver, how, and why does it matter

Technology, Dead Male Bodies, and Feminist Recognition: Gendering ICT Harm Theory

Drawing on anthropology, feminist science and technology studies (STS), and critical masculinity studies, this article contributes to a theory of male harm by reflecting on examples of data-driven screening practices in refugee protection and targeting practices in drone strikes as a way of making sense of the relationship between technology and men’s suffering. The article identifies and unpacks the shifting composite of attention and dis-attention to male vulnerability and intersectionality residing at the heart of the gendered and racialised logic of screening and targeting. This logic produces distinctions between ‘protectable’ and ‘undesirable’ civilian bodies, where data-mediated masculinity emerges as a key attribute of this undesirability. The article ends by discussing possible methodological turns for developing a more conscious techno-legal feminism