Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 75 - June 2020): Development Aid

This book builds upon critiques of development in the disability domain by investigating the necessity and implications of theorising disability from the Global South and how development policies and practices pertaining to disabled people in such contexts might be improved by engaging with their voices and agency. The author focuses on the lived experiences of disabled people in Burkina Faso, while situating these experiences, where necessary, in the wider national and regional contexts. She explores development agencies' interventions with disabled people and the need to re-think these practices and ideologies which are often framed within western contexts. This work will appeal to policy makers, NGOs, academics, students and researchers in the fields of development and disability studies. 

This book explores how humanitarian interventions for children in difficult circumstances engage in affective commodification of disadvantaged childhoods. The chapters consider how transnational charitable industries are created and mobilized around childhood need--highlighting children in situations of war and poverty, and with indeterminate access to health and education--to redirect global resource flows and sentiments in order to address concerns of child suffering. The authors discuss examples from around the world to show how, as much as these processes can help achieve the goals of aid organizations, such practices can also perpetuate the conditions that organizations seek to alleviate and thereby endanger the very children they intend to help.

This book explains why there is a pronounced disjuncture between R2P's habitual invocation and its actual influence, and why it will not make the transformative progress its proponents claim.  Rather than disputing that R2P is a norm, or declaring that norms are insignificant, Hehir engages with post-positivist constructivist accounts on the role of norms to demonstrate first, that the efficacy of a norm is not directly related to the extent to which it is proliferated or invoked, and second, that in the post-institutionalization phase, norms undergo both contestation and (potentially regressive) reinterpretation. This volume analyses the evolution of R2P, and demonstrates that it has been steadily circumscribed and co-opted, so that today it has no power to meaningfully influence the behaviour of states. It is essential reading for academic audiences in the disciplines of International Relations and International Law.