Joël Glasman

Les humanités humanitaires. Petit manuel d’auto-défense à l’usage des volontaires. Paris. Les Belles Lettres, 2023, 426 p.
Humanitarian action involves hard choices. Should we accept access conditions imposed by jihadists? Should we leave refugee camps if aid is diverted? Can we accept donations from any private company? Should humanitarian organisations prioritise the fight against global warming? This first Humanitarian Humanities textbook offers a time for reflection. From the history of humanitarian action to the anthropology of global health and the sociology of massacres, this handbook provides an overview of the most useful research for thinking in emergencies. An introduction to the human and social sciences for those who help others to save their lives and dignity.
This book won the Red Cross Foundation Research Prize (2024)

Minimal Humanity. Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs. London/New York. Routledge. Humanitarian Studies Series, 2020, 261p.
This book provides the first historical inquiry into the quantification of needs in humanitarian assistance. Ultimately the book argues that we cannot understand the global humanitarian aid movement, if we do not understand how humanitarian agencies made human suffering commensurable across borders in the first place. The book identifies four basic elements of needs: as a concept, as a system of classification and triage, as a form of material apparatus, and as a codified standard. Drawing on a range of archival sources ranging from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), and the Sphere Project, the book traces the concept of needs from their emergence in the 1960s right through to the modern day, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s call for „evidence-based humanitarianism“. Finally the book assesses how the international governmentality of needs played out in a recent humanitarian crisis, drawing on detailed ethnographic research of Central African refugees in the Cameroonian borderland in 2014-2016.

Reviews:
The International Review of the Red Cross dedicated a discussion forum to the book |

Techniken der Globalisierung. Globalgeschichte meets Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie, Bielefeld, transcript Verlag, 2016.
Global history is currently one of the most dynamic fields in the study of history. In the humanities and social sciences, actor-network theory (ANT) is one of the most sought-after theoretical tools. This volume examines the compatibility of global history and actor-network theory and combines them. The contributions show how the theoretical assumptions and methods of Bruno Latour, the most prominent proponent of actor-network theory, can contribute to renewing and sharpening the profile of global history. The starting point is not an omnipotent force called globalisation. Instead, the question is posed as to the people and techniques that were capable of forming far-reaching networks. The contributors provide answers to the question of which actors have globalised which phenomena.