HAI Book Talk – Civilizing Contention: International Aid and Civilian Activism in War
The Humanitarian Action Initiative invites you to a discussion of Civilizing Contention, by Rana B. Khoury, featuring Professor Michael Barnett as discussant. This book explores how international aid shapes civilian and refugee activism during armed conflict. Drawing on interviews with Syrian activists and humanitarian workers, as well as original social-media data, Khoury traces how a social movement persisted throughout the violence of Syria’s war. Her research shows how international aid can both enable and constrain the efforts of civil actors, offering new insight into how ordinary people organize and act in extraordinary circumstances. This event is hosted in partnership with GW’s Institute for Middle East Studies and Institute for Security and Conflict Studies. Light lunch will be served.
Speakers
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Rana B. Khoury is an assistant professor of political science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Niehaus Center at Princeton University and received her Ph.D. in political science from Northwestern University. Khoury studies comparative and international politics, with a focus on conflict processes including civil action (or wartime activism), displacement, and humanitarianism. She is also interested in qualitative and multi-method research and her geographic focus is the Middle East, especially Syria. Her book "Civilizing Contention: International Aid in Syria’s War" explains the relationship between international aid and nonviolent action among civilians and refugees during the Syrian war. It employs data from field-based immersion and interviews, as well as original social media data. Khoury earned an M.A. in Arab Studies from Georgetown University and a B.A. in political science from American University. She has have lived as far afield as Syria and Singapore, but a piece of her heart is always in Ohio—where she grew up and conducted the research for her first book. "As Ohio Goes: Life in the Post-Recession Nation" received a national Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events in 2017.
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Michael Barnett is University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at the George Washington University. His research interests span the Middle East, humanitarianism, global governance, global ethics, and the United Nations. Among his many books are Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United Nations and Rwanda; Dialogues in Arab Politics: Negotiations in Regional Order; Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism; Rules for the World: International Organizations in World Politics (with Martha Finnemore); Security Communities (co-edited with Emanuel Adler); Sacred Aid (co-edited with Janice Stein); Power and Global Governance (co-edited with Raymond Duvall); Humanitarianism in Question (co-edited with Thomas Weiss). His most recent books include The Star and the Stripes: A History of the Foreign Policies of the American Jews; the edited volume Paternalism Beyond Borders; and the edited collection Humanitarianism and Human Rights: Worlds of Differences? Global Governance in a World of Change (co-edited with Jon Pevehouse and Kal Raustiala); and Israel and the One State Reality (co-edited with Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami). His current book projects are: The End of Humanity: An Autopsy of the Present and Future (with Unni Karanukara and to be published with Cambridge University Press; The Oxford Handbook of International Institutions (co-edited with Duncan Snidal); and The Spectre of the West ( to be published with Oxford University Press and co-authored with Janice Stein).
