This article explores and attempts to define the emerging concept of the humanitarian drone by critically examining actual and anticipated transfers of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, from the global battlespace to the humanitarian emergency zone. Focusing on the relationship between the diffusion of new technology and institutional power, we explore the humanitarian drone as a ‘war dividend’ arising from the transfer of surveillance UAVs, cargo-carrying UAVs and weaponised UAVs. We then reflect on the ways in which military practices and rationales guiding drone deployment may also shape humanitarian use, giving particular attention to the concept of surgical precision, the implications of targeting logic, and the ambiguous role of distance. Next, we consider the broader implications for humanitarian action, including the promise of global justice and improved aid delivery. Finally, we analyse the most difficult aspect of the humanitarian drone: namely, its political currency as a ‘humanitarian weapon’ in conflict scenarios.

Whilst sexual violence has been an offence associated both with war‐ and peacetime throughout history, its rise to the tables where international peace and security are negotiated, represents a significant shift. This article continues the scholarly conversation about conflict‐related sexual violence and its emergence as a “hot topic” on academic, political, and activist agendas. Specifically, we ask how and why criminal law constitutes the ultimately meaningful response to such violence. Building on frame analysis, we address how the fight against conflict‐related sexual violence has become the fight against impunity. We examine what imageries of victims and perpetrators, causes and consequences key actors within interstate diplomacy and human rights advocacy evoke to drive this development. We argue that these narratives shape the political discourse on conflict‐related sexual violence, which may in turn influence the perceived political maneuverability in the face of such harms.

In a recent account of border control, Mary Bosworth introduces the notion of ‘penal humanitarianism’ to describe how humanitarianism enables penal power to move beyond the nation state. Based on a study of international criminal justice, this article applies and develops the notion of penal humanitarianism, and argues that that power to punish is particularly driven by humanitarian reason when punishment is disembedded from the nation state altogether. Disguising the fact of situatedness through claims to the global and universal, international criminal justice is not only a product of situated relations of power, but also constitutes new geographies of penal power. By complicating notions of humanitarianism, penal power and the state, international criminal justice raises interesting questions about the epistemological privilege of the nation state framework in the sociology of punishment.

Advocates of Humanity offers an analysis of international criminal justice from the perspective of sociology of punishment by exploring the role of human rights organizations in their mobilization for global justice through the International Criminal Court. Based on multi-sited ethnography, primarily in The Hague and Uganda, the author approaches the transnational networks of NGOs advocating for the ICC as an ethnographic object. A central objective is to explore how connections are made, and how forces and imaginations of global criminal justice travel. By analysing how international criminal justice is arranged spatially, and as such expresses social, political, and cultural relations of power, Advocates of Humanity shows how international criminal justice is situated in particular spaces, networks, and actors, and how they structure the imaginations of justice circulating in the field. From a sociology of punishment perspective, it compares the ‘penal imaginations’ of domestic and international criminal justice, and considers the particularly central role of victims as a universalized symbol of humanity for the legitimacy of international criminal justice. With clear global asymmetries emerging from the work, Advocates of Humanity provides descriptive as well as explanatory understandings of criminal punishment ‘gone global’, analysing its social causation while examining its cultural meanings, particularly as regards its role as an expression of ‘the international’ will to punish. To whom is it meaningful, and why?

ABSTRACT:Over the past few years, the study of humanitarianism has emerged as an interdisciplinary subfield in international political sociology. This article maps out some preliminary ideas about the role of legal sociology in this project. The study of international humanitarian law has overwhelmingly been the terrain of doctrinal legal scholars, while the apparent lack of other law has meant that, until recently, legal sociologists have paid little attention to the humanitarian sector. There has also been little scholarly concern regarding the consequences of not asking questions about the role of law in the humanitarian project. We argue that legal sociology helps us understand how rules, standards and norms shape and are shaped by practices and interactions within and across humanitarian spaces globally, and how law contributes to humanitarian governance.

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With the consolidation of a cosmopolitan field of international criminal justice, penality has ‘gone global’. In spite of the abundance of doctrinal legal analysis, human rights studies, and transitional justice studies, there are few analytic attempts to engage with the working assumptions, cultural commitments, and dominant mentalities that give shape to international criminal justice as a penal field. Based on ethnographic observations, interviews with key actors, and critical reading of international criminal justice scholarship, this article compares the cosmopolitan penality of international criminal justice to that of late modern, domestic, penality. Using David Garland’s The Culture of Control as an analytic yardstick, it argues that international criminal justice both resembles and departs from ‘the national’. For example, whilst the cosmopolitan penality relies upon retributive justifications, it makes no appeal to harsh penal sanctions; nor is it concerned with the rehabilitation of prisoners. Rather, it is an expressive and humanitarian form of justice where the victim takes central stage – as the embodiment of a suffering humanity. Moreover, there is a remarkable faith in the transformative effects of international criminal justice, resembling a form of penal welfarism ‘gone global’. As national capacity building and penal development has become intrinsic to the project of international criminal justice, the article shows how the global dimension of the power to punish is based on a moralization of politics.