Everyday Peace


Book Description

The everyday, circuitry, and scalability -- Sociality, reciprocity and reciprocity -- Power -- Parley, truce and ceasefire -- Everyday peace on the battlefield -- Gender and everyday peace -- Conflict disruption.




Managing Humanitarian Relief 2nd Edition


Book Description

Managing Humanitarian Relief is aimed at the relief worker who in the midst of these complex situations is putting together a programme of action to help people in extreme crisis. It provides humanitarian relief managers with a single comprehensive reference for many of the management issues they are likely to encounter in the field.




Health in Humanitarian Emergencies


Book Description

A comprehensive, best practices resource for public health and healthcare practitioners and students interested in humanitarian emergencies.




The Good Project


Book Description

NGOs set out to save lives, relieve suffering, and service basic human needs. They are committed to serving people across national borders and without regard to race, ethnicity, gender, or religion, and they offer crucial help during earthquakes, tsunamis, wars, and pandemics. But with so many ailing areas in need of assistance, how do these organizations decide where to go—and who gets the aid? In The Good Project, Monika Krause dives into the intricacies of the decision-making process at NGOs and uncovers a basic truth: It may be the case that relief agencies try to help people but, in practical terms, the main focus of their work is to produce projects. Agencies sell projects to key institutional donors, and in the process the project and its beneficiaries become commodities. In an effort to guarantee a successful project, organizations are incentivized to help those who are easy to help, while those who are hardest to help often receive no assistance at all. The poorest of the world are made to compete against each other to become projects—and in exchange they offer legitimacy to aid agencies and donor governments. Sure to be controversial, The Good Project offers a provocative new perspective on how NGOs succeed and fail on a local and global level.




International Humanitarian Action


Book Description

This textbook examines a wide range of humanitarian action issues in five parts, presented by specialists from different academic fields. The respective parts reflect the five core modules of the International NOHA Joint Master’s Programme “International Humanitarian Action”: a) World Politics, b) International Law, c) Public Health, d) Anthropology, and e) Management. The book serves as a common basis for teaching at all NOHA universities and aims at imparting the basic knowledge and skills needed to excel in a complex interdisciplinary and international learning context. It provides in-depth information on key international humanitarian principles and values, professional codes of conduct, and the commitment to their implementation in practice. The book will thus be useful for all students of the NOHA Joint Master’s Programme and participants of any courses with a similar content, but also for academics and practitioners affiliated with entities such as international organisations and NGOs. It may also serve as an introduction to anyone with an interest in understanding the numerous and inter-linked facets of humanitarian action.




Crisis Management Beyond the Humanitarian-Development Nexus


Book Description

In addressing humanitarian crises, the international community has long understood the need to extend beyond providing immediate relief, and to engage with long-term recovery activities and the prevention of similar crises in the future. However, this continuum from short-term relief to rehabilitation and development has often proved difficult to achieve. This book aims to shed light on the continuum of humanitarian crisis management, particularly from the viewpoint of major bilateral donors and agencies. Focusing on cases of armed conflicts and disasters, the authors describe the evolution of approaches and lessons learnt in practice when moving from emergency relief to recovery and prevention of future crises. Drawing on an extensive research project conducted by the Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute, this book compares how a range of international organizations, bilateral cooperation agencies, NGOs, and research institutes have approached the continuum in international humanitarian crisis management. The book draws on six humanitarian crises case studies, each resulting from armed conflict or natural disasters: Timor-Leste, South Sudan, the Syrian crisis, Hurricane Mitch in Honduras, the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia, and Typhoon Yolanda. The book concludes by proposing a common conceptual framework designed to appeal to different stakeholders involved in crisis management. Following on from the World Humanitarian Summit, where a new way of working on the humanitarian-development nexus was highlighted as one of five major priority trends, this book is a timely contribution to the debate which should interest researchers of humanitarian studies, conflict and peace studies, and disaster risk-management.




Responding to Emergencies and Fostering Development


Book Description

Civil wars, genocides, natural disasters and other emergencies multiplied in the 1990s, and not just in the South, but in the Balkans and the former Soviet bloc. This book examines how to respond to the fundamental difficulties thrown up by these humanitarian crises. What kind of aid, in particular, should be brought in when the situation on the ground mixes up emergency relief with the longer-term process of development? The book includes many different voices and embodies an open-ended debate about the whole diverse process of international aid. The experiences and lessons it contains are relevant to all those playing a part in, or wishing to understand, the practice and dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the 1990s.




The Uprooted


Book Description

By conservative estimates about 50 million migrants are currently living outside of their home communities, forced to flee to obtain some measure of safety and security. In addition to persecution, human rights violations, repression, conflict, and natural and human-made disasters, current causes of forced migration include environmental and development-induced factors. Today's migrants include the internally displaced, a category that has only recently entered the international lexicon. But the legal and institutional system created in the aftermath of World War II to address refugee movements is now proving inadequate to provide appropriate assistance and protection to the full range of forced migrants needing attention today. The Uprooted is the first volume to methodically examine the progress and persistent shortcomings of the current humanitarian regime. The authors, all experts in the field of forced migration, describe the organizational, political, and conceptual shortcomings that are creating the gaps and inefficiencies of international and national agencies to reach entire categories of forced migrants. They make policy-based recommendations to improve international, regional, national, and local responses in areas including organization, security, funding, and durability of response. For all those working on behalf of the world's forced migrants, The Uprooted serves as a call to arms, emphasizing the urgent need to develop more comprehensive and cohesive strategies to address forced migration in its complexity.




The politicization of humanitarian aid and its effect on the principles of humanity, impartiality and neutrality


Book Description

Master's Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - Topic: Development Politics, grade: 1,7, Ruhr-University of Bochum (Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict), course: European Masterprogram on Humanitarian Action (NOHA), language: English, abstract: The humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality and impartiality provide an ethical framework that defines and delineates the humanitarian space within which relief agencies are supposed to operate. Current experiences, however, show that these traditional principles were not designed to cope with the development underlying the increasing merging of humanitarian aid and politics. To avoid political manipulation, relief organizations must rethink these traditional principles and face the responsibility of getting more involved in the broader political arena to be able to take appropriate action, and to avoid longterm damages on a society. The ‘Sphere’ project, which was launched to improve the quality of humanitarian action and to put relief aid on a legal basis as set forth by international law, acknowledges the dependence of humanitarian aid on external political decisions. Still, it emphasizes traditional principles and expresses agencies’ commitment to act in accordance with them. ‘Sphere’s actual value must therefore be seen in defining a common basis around which agencies, donors and governing authorities can potentially agree on. It provides a basis for defining core humanitarian responsibilities that recognizes the limits of humanitarian action, while setting an agenda for individual and collective action. Even though the attempt to define humanitarian principles that serve as blueprints in every global emergency for all humanitarian organizations does not seem to be achievable, the importance of ethical guidelines and benchmarks still exists. The heterogeneity of relief work is just a phenomenon, which is based in the nature of humanitarianism and this will always put a stamp on attempts to find common standards, principles and codes.




The Vulnerable Humanitarian


Book Description

The Vulnerable Humanitarian challenges the prevalence of stress and burnout culture within the aid sector, laying bare the issues of power, agency, security and wellbeing that continue to trouble organisations and staff. Engaging and insightful, this book illustrates the problematic and unrealistic expectations of aid workers through the archetype of the perfect humanitarian, and considers why burnout is so endemic, yet so rarely acknowledged, within aid organisations. The book provides practical means through which staff and managers can reflect upon and discuss damaging organisational cultures and behaviours, and develop a more inclusive and caring work environment. Drawing on original academic research and interviews with national and international aid workers and development experts, the book proposes a feminist, anti-racist and decolonial agenda in challenging oppressive systems and structures within the sector. With extensive professional experience as an aid worker herself, Gemma Houldey also shares her own struggles with mental health and what she has learned from feminist practices for self- and collective care. Proposing new ways of addressing wellbeing that are sensitive to the multi-faceted personalities and lived experiences of people working on aid and development programmes, The Vulnerable Humanitarian is essential reading both for current aid sector employees and for prospective employees and students.