Kirsten Nakjavani Bookmiller

Bio: Kirsten Nakjavani Bookmiller is an academic researcher from Millersville University of Pennsylvania. The author has contributed to research in topics: Emergency management & Urban search and rescue. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 5 publications receiving 62 citations.

Professional Standards and Legal Standard Setting: INSARAG, FMTs, and International Disaster Relief Volunteers

Abstract: This Article draws attention to the nascent efforts of emergency medical personnel, convened under World Health Organization auspices, to improve humanitarian health responses following catastrophic natural disasters. The Foreign Medical Team Working Group (FMT-WG) is pursuing new professional standards related to sectoral coordination, classification and registration. As its approach has been significantly influenced by the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group’s (INSARAG) prior advances in these areas, INSARAG’s contributions will first be highlighted. While more atypical contributors to international lawmaking than traditionally studied, the efforts by both groups shed significant light into the burgeoning International Disaster Response Law field. Two principle assertions here: that soft law-oriented technical guidelines can address highly time-sensitive, operational challenges related to transnational relief; and that ongoing professional self-regulation within specific response sectors may bolster state willingness to open its borders to outside international relief, even in the absence of a formal convention to do so.

Palestinian Radio and the Intifada

Abstract: Little has been written about the role of radio within the Palestinian movement since the outbreak of the intifada, particularly those broadcasts emanating from the al-Quds Palestinian Arab radio station (hereafter referred to as "al-Quds") and the Voice of the PLO-Baghdad.1 Yet an examination of these broadcasts is important, first, because both stations are clearly heard and widely listened to in the occupied territories,2 and second, because they reflect the larger political conflict within the Palestinian community over strategy and means in pursuing the intifada.

Canada and the Human Security Network (1998–2010): RIP?

Abstract: This article examines the role of the Human Security Network (HSN) within the context of Canadian foreign policy. Launched as a bilateral Canadian–Norwegian initiative in 1998, the HSN now encompasses twelve like-minded middle and smaller powers from across the globe. While Canada's human security agenda and Ottawa's activism in other multilateral forums have been extensively treated in the Canadian foreign affairs literature, scant scholarly attention has been dedicated to the HSN generally or as an instrument of Canadian foreign policy specifically. The authors assert, based on interviews with Canadian and other HSN diplomats, that although human security remains an important policy concern for Ottawa, the HSN itself no longer serves as a major diplomatic reference point and that Canada may even withdraw from the very forum that it co-founded. This dramatic development has less to do with the 2006 government changeover and more with macro trends within the HSN itself.

Donor countries as aid recipients: the USA, New Zealand and the lessons of Hurricane Katrina

Abstract: This study addresses the watershed case of the USA as large-scale international aid recipient following Hurricane Katrina, and its policy impact upon New Zealand's national disaster management planning in the same sphere. In both instances, countries more accustomed to playing the role of humanitarian benefactors were compelled to recognise a new global paradigm in which donor governments must also prepare for the contingency of being external aid beneficiaries. This paper further asserts that a binary approach of global donors and recipients is essentially irrelevant today and that all countries - wherever their position on the global wealth rankings - need to proactively develop sound legal and policy frameworks for incoming humanitarian assistance. To better appreciate this latter point, the study begins with a brief overview of contemporary global humanitarian assistance flows and motives for state aid offers and refusals.

Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine : The Politics of National Commemoration

Abstract: Many decades have passed since the Palestinian national movement began its political and military struggle. In that time, poignant memorials at massacre sites, a palimpsest of posters of young heroes and martyrs, sorrowful reminiscences about lost loved ones, and wistful images of young men and women who fought as guerrillas, have all flourished in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine tells the story of how dispossessed Palestinians have commemorated their past, and how through their dynamic everyday narrations, their nation has been made even without the institutional memory-making of a state. Bringing ethnography to political science, Khalili invites us to see Palestinian nationalism in its proper international context and traces its affinities with Third Worldist movements of its time, while tapping a rich and oft-ignored seam of Palestinian voices, histories, and memories.

Song, State, Sawa: Music and Political Radio between the US and Syria

Abstract: Song, State, Sawa: Music and Political Radio between the US and Syria Beau Bothwell This dissertation is a study of popular music and state-controlled radio broadcasting in the Arabic-speaking world, focusing on Syria and the Syrian radioscape, and a set of American stations named Radio Sawa. I examine American and Syrian politically directed broadcasts as multifaceted objects around which broadcasters and listeners often differ not only in goals, operating assumptions, and political beliefs, but also in how they fundamentally conceptualize the practice of listening to the radio. Beginning with the history of international broadcasting in the Middle East, I analyze the institutional theories under which music is employed as a tool of American and Syrian policy, the imagined youths to whom the musical messages are addressed, and the actual sonic content tasked with political persuasion. At the reception side of the broadcaster-listener interaction, this dissertation addresses the auditory practices, histories of radio, and theories of music through which listeners in the sonic environment of Damascus, Syria create locally relevant meaning out of music and radio. Drawing on theories of listening and communication developed in historical musicology and ethnomusicology, science and technology studies, and recent transnational ethnographic and media studies, as well as on theories of listening developed in the Arabic public discourse about popular music, my dissertation outlines the intersection of the hypothetical listeners defined by the US and Syrian governments in their efforts to use music for political ends, and the actual people who turn on the radio to hear the music.

Search without rescue? Evaluating the international search and rescue response to earthquake disasters.

Abstract: Earthquakes around the world are unnecessarily lethal and destructive, adversely affecting the health and well-being of affected populations. Most immediate deaths and injuries are caused by building collapse, making search and rescue (SAR) an early priority. In this review, we assess the SAR response to earthquake disasters. First, we review the evidence for the majority of individuals being rescued locally, often by relatives and neighbours. We then summarise evidence for successful live rescues by international SAR (ISAR) teams, along with the costs, ethics and other considerations of deployment. Finally, we propose an alternative approach to postdisaster ISAR, with the goal of reducing overall morbidity and mortality.

Do unto others as they have done unto you: explaining the varying tragic outcomes of settler colonialism

Abstract: The new field of settler colonial studies has focused on a specific structure of power, with the settlers and the metropole exerting domination over submissive natives. However, settler colonial st...