Non-western celebrity politics and diplomacy: introduction

The origins of the specific project featured in this Cultural Report lie in a larger scale project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and based at the White Rose East Asia Centre at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield. The project set out to explore the influence and roles of a range of informal political actors such as former leaders, political spouses and 10 celebrity diplomats, to name but a few, across both the domestic and international levels of analysis in three regions of the world: East Asia, Russia and the Arab World

The new Victorians? Celebrity charity and the demise of the welfare state

This article asks whether the expansion of celebrity involvement in charitable and humanitarian issues in Northern Europe and the US might be a comparable historical phenomenon with the philanthropic endeavours of prominent nineteenth-century persons. The article notes that the conspicuous nature of star philanthropy in both Victorian times and the present is fairly dramatic in comparison with that of the mid twentieth century, when the welfare state and the New Deal were at their peak: a welfare-oriented era which, to some, now increasingly looks like a ‘historical blip’. It asks whether the rise of contemporary celebrity involvement in charity can therefore be explained in terms of the contemporary political conjuncture, inasmuch as celebrities could be understood as individuals with large amounts of private capital seeking to intervene in – and gain forms of power through – involvement in humanitarian and charitable causes that might have formerly been the job of the state. Can celebrity involvement in charity be explained in these terms? Does the marriage of celebrity and charity today take a neoliberal form, one that parallels the liberal form of nineteenth-century interventions, bequests and donations? What might the key differences between forms of spectacular ‘philanthrocapitalism’ in these eras (particularly the contemporary insistence on the confessional and intimate modes of address) reveal about its workings, its internal traditions and about the specificity of our own age? This article draws on contemporary media discourse, debate in the voluntary sector, historical scholarship and Foucault’s distinctions between liberalism and neoliberalism to argue that whereas ‘celanthropy’ in the Victorian period eventually came to contribute to the welfare state, today it is more involved in privatising and dismantling it

Visualizers of solidarity: organizational politics in humanitarian and international development NGOs

iscussion of the visual politics of solidarity, in relation specifically to the representation of suffering and development, has been grounded in analysis of images. This article seeks to expand this debate by exploring the organizational politics that shape and are shaped by these images. The article is inspired by production studies in the cultural industries and draws on interviews with 17 professionals from 10 UK-based international development and humanitarian organizations that are engaged in planning and producing imagery of international development and humanitarian issues. The author discusses how power relations, tensions and position-taking shape the arguments and choices made by NGOs producing images of suffering and development. She focuses on two arenas of struggle about how to visualize solidarity: (a) intra-organizational politics - specifically tensions within NGOs between fundraising and/or marketing departments, and communications, campaign and/or advocacy departments; and (2) inter-organizational politics: the competing tendencies towards convergence, cohesiveness and collective identity of the humanitarian sector, and competition, distinction and divergence between organizations on the other. She shows that NGOs' visual production is an area of conflict, negotiation and compromise, and argues for the crucial need for attention to organizational politics in the production of visual representations of distant suffering in order to uncover diverse and competing motivations, and the forces driving current humanitarian and development communications

Humanitarian Futures

This chapter grows out of an engagement between scholars and practitioners interested and invested in questions about humanitarian futures, that is, questions around the future of humanitarianism as both a normative, ethical commitment to life and a practice concerned with saving lives, relieving suffering, and upholding human dignity. These urgent questions are increasingly being considered by scholars and practitioners. While there is an ever-growing body of work concerned with the politics of humanitarianism, both as a normative ideal and as a practice of intervention, recent interventions related to decolonizing humanitarianism have been keen to stress the importance of understanding the differences between them. Recent exposes made by those who have worked in the humanitarian industry have shone a light on the racist and white supremacist practices rooted in humanitarianism’s liberal universalizing claims. Shining a light on racism and white supremacy in the humanitarian industry requires an interrogation of the human subject at the heart of humanitarianism