Humanitarian Communication Research Articles

Beyond victim and hero representations? A comparative analysis of UNHCR’s Instagram communication strategies for the Syrian and Ukrainian crises

Abstract The Ukrainian crisis has received substantial Global Northern policy support and favourable news coverage, contrasting sharply with Global Southern crises. Nevertheless, refugee organizations can influence public perceptions through social media. This study comparatively analyses UNHCR’s Instagram communication strategies for the Ukrainian and Syrian crises (2022–2023). Applying a multimodal critical discourse analysis on UNHCR’s Instagram posts (N = 90), we discern interacting humanitarian and post-humanitarian appeals, involving inter- and intra-group hierarchies of deservingness, expanding research on humanitarian communication. While UNHCR mainly represents forcibly displaced Ukrainians as victims and focuses on ‘ideal victims’, it mostly portrays forcibly displaced Syrians as empowered individuals, likely due to context-specific differences and partially countering news and policy narratives. Both humanitarian representations often intersect with post-humanitarian strategies, facilitated by Instagram affordances. This study thus contributes to the literature on humanitarian communication with comparative crisis-specific and platform-specific insights and causes. Moreover, it nuances the often-assumed importance of post-humanitarian imageries on social media.

Visual bordering: How refugee-serving organizations represent refugees on Instagram

Theories of symbolic bordering highlight how xenophobic media coverage and humanitarian messaging create boundaries between migrants and receiving communities partly based on deservingness. Contrasting with studies of mainly text-based representations of refugees, we examine refugee-serving organizations’ visual communications work on Instagram. Using a discourse-centered online ethnographic approach, we collected 191 posts made in early 2021 by five UK-based organizations. Then, we applied quantitative content and qualitative semiotic analysis to these posts, complemented by two semi-structured interviews with communications staff members. We show how visual choices invoke divisions between posts’ refugee subjects and their intended audiences, while rendering some refugees legible and particularly worthy of protection or empathy. These choices include using stereotypical elements, obscuring identifiable people, and explicitly attributing quotations to refugees. We also identify “takeover” posts where refugees had controlled organizations’ social media accounts. Our study contributes understanding of how symbolic bordering occurs visually online and has implications for humanitarian communications practice.

How news media visually dehumanize victims of humanitarian crises through framing disparities: A quantitative comparative analysis

News images have been powerful agents in chronicling humanitarian crises, shaping public engagement with vulnerability, and inhibiting or supporting societal and political interactions. Research critically indicates that refugees frequently face dehumanizing visuals in news media. However, the humanitarian communication literature has primarily limited itself to surveying the vulnerability of the global South as visualized by Western media. This study addresses this gap by employing an inductive-then-deductive framing approach to compare how the news media in the UK, the US, and China visually depict the humanitarian crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine. The analysis shows that the way humanitarian crises are visualized in the news media is influenced by journalism culture across media systems and the geographical origins of suffering. The UK and US media perpetuate a post-humanitarian routine of cultural assimilation, while Chinese authoritarian media instrumentalize distant humanitarian crises for geopolitical purposes, both reinforcing the visual dehumanization of humanitarian vulnerability.

The surge of spreading harmful information through digital technologies: a distressing reality in complex humanitarian emergencies

The surge of spreading harmful information through digital technologies: a distressing reality in complex humanitarian emergencies

The use of animation in NGOs’ audio-visual communication about solidarity and migration

One of the latest transformations of humanitarian communication in recent years has certainly been the growing adoption of the language of animation, especially in online media. Looking at the effects of this new trend, this article intends to reflect on how NGO communication has concretely changed on a visual and discursive level through the use of animation. The corpus analysed, selected from YouTube, consists of a series of examples of animated online videos of NGOs that deal with a recent and influential phenomenon: the refugee crisis. Since 2015, an increasing number of new NGOs have emerged in order to contribute to aid for migrants, as opposed to European policies: what kind of representation of migrants do NGOs convey in their communication campaigns that employ animation? What kind of solidarity discourse is adopted through this audiovisual language? The analysis of these examples will serve as a basis for introducing the theorisation of numerous characteristics specific to animation, which make it an effective medium for the promotion of humanitarian missions and for the transmission of the testimonies of migrants.

International humanitarian narratives of disasters, crises, and Indigeneity.

Narratives are a means of making sense of disasters and crises. The humanitarian sector communicates stories widely, encompassing representations of peoples and events. Such communications have been critiqued for misrepresenting and/or silencing the root causes of disasters and crises, depoliticising them. What has not been researched is how such communications represent disasters and crises in Indigenous settings. This is important because processes such as colonisation are often at the origin but are typically masked in communications. A narrative analysis of humanitarian communications is employed here to identify and characterise narratives in humanitarian communications involving Indigenous Peoples. Narratives differ based upon how the humanitarians who produce them think that disasters and crises should be governed. The paper concludes that humanitarian communications reflect more about the relationship between the international humanitarian community and its audience than reality, and underlines that narratives mask global processes that link audiences of humanitarian communications with Indigenous Peoples.

Socio-Political Factors of Humanitarian Communication between Georgia and Russia

The article considers the factors shaping the specifcs of cooperation between Russia and Georgia in the humanitarian sphere. The authors state a decrease in the intensity of scientifc, educational, and cultural communication. The impossibility of a fnal civilizational break is noted due to the commonality of the historical past, religion and culture. The key problem identifed is the impossibility of building full-scale humanitarian cooperation due to the lack of diplomatic relations and the presence in Russia of a visa regime to Georgia. The pragmatic position of the Georgian ruling elite towards Russia, as well as the growth of the tourist flow of Russians to Georgia, are positive factors for the further development of cooperation in the humanitarian sphere. The authors conclude that in the absence of a political dialogue at the highest level, the impetus for the development of humanitarian cooperation can be given by organizations of the non-proft sector and diasporas of Georgians in Russia and Russians in Georgia. The article was based on the results of a scientifc discussion held at the National Communications Development Research Institution (NIIRC), Moscow, Russia in 2022.

Visualising Africa at diaspora expense? How and why humanitarian organisations ignore diaspora audiences in their ‘ethical’ communications

AbstractCritical commentaries on visual constructions of distant suffering within humanitarian communication research have critiqued and problematised how International non‐governmental organisations (INGOs) frame Black and Brown distant ‘Others.’ However, much focus has been on the implications of these mediated imageries for overseas communities, while African diaspora have received much less attention. African diaspora is critical in current debates around representation, especially given increased criticisms around the ethicality of INGO fundraising communications for UK‐situated Black racialised publics. This article thus complicates existing debates by repositioning the empirical preoccupation with distant Others ‘over there,’ towards UK‐situated African diaspora ‘over here.’ Using interview evidence with UK‐based INGO professionals involved in the production and dissemination of imageries of humanitarian issues, it explores how INGOs construe African diaspora populations in considerations around, and implications of, the ethicality of their communications. Revealing that African diaspora are largely absent or ‘afterthoughts’ in INGO consciousness and practices for three central reasons. (1) They are not considered distinct and differentiated donor audiences worthy of strategic prioritisation, (2) Implicit professional/organisational ‘whiteness’ limits reflexive foresight of potential implications (negative or positive) of communications for diaspora and, (3) INGOs temporise over the (im)practicalities of ‘diaspora inclusive’ agendas for ethical communication.

Drawing Humanitarian Communication as Performativity: Visual Design of the Tigray Refugee Situation on the UN Refugee Agency UK Website

This article outlines the discursive construction of the refugee situation in Ethiopia’s Tigray region by examining photographs found on the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHRC) United Kingdom website. The purpose is to discern humanitarian aid communication discourse not simply for its informational value, but also in its performative force of narrative to frame the refugee crisis as one that merits support (Chouliaraky 2017).
 Multimodal CDA and social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 1999; Kress and van Leeuwen 2017) were employed in order to break down visual communication into elements, and to systematically reveal the performative practice of meaning in relation to the categories of settings, the represented participants, actions, angles, and proxemics. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted in order to determine the number of photos with a given feature.
 By highlighting the plight of those forcibly displaced and emphasising their uniqueness and personal experiences - in contrast to the dehumanised massified representation found in western media (Chouliaraky 2017; Adi and Cheregi 2015) -, the phenomenon of their forced fleeing from Tigray is humanised. In line with Bellander (2021), the UNHRC is constructed as being trustworthy and actionable, and refugees are clearly depicted as being in urgent need of support. Visitors to the UK website are invited to feel they are involved with the life of the refugees and morally engaged in “the work performed by the organization” (Bellander 2021: 310). By means of the combination of specific affection drawing on discourses of morality, solidarity and ethical equality, the overall images provide “the symbolic conditions under which we are invited to imagine the predicament of these sufferers” (Chouliaraky 2017: 5) and in so doing to appeal to a force that will work towards a practical push towards action.

The “ultimate empathy machine” as technocratic solutionism? Audience reception of the distant refugee crisis through virtual reality

ABSTRACT This article aims to deconstruct the myth of technological utopianism which contends that immersive virtual reality (VR) can inevitably lead to a more moral and egalitarian world due to its promises of copresence, immediacy and transcendence in humanitarian communication. The problématique we explore is whether existing VR artifacts, as exemplars of the “ultimate empathy machine,” construct a technocratic solutionism which becomes constitutive of humanitarian crises themselves. Drawing upon empirical material from focus group discussions and in-depth interviews with VR audiences in China, Germany, and the UK, the findings show that VR may easily construct a depoliticized hyperreality of intense spectacularity and trap audiences within an improper distance, thereby reworking the colonial legacies of humanitarianism while also obfuscating complex asymmetries of power and structural political exclusion. These findings have important implications for reminding humanitarian news organizations and aid agencies that they should not rely entirely on the particular affordances of VR to gain a moral bond with the distant refugee crisis.

Introduction

This article introduces you to the general themes and questions of this special issue. We argue that history and visual media have long been central to humanitarian communication, but that the overlaps between history, visual media, and humanitarian communication have seldom been addressed. A focus on those overlaps, we suggest, not only demonstrates that critical historical inquiry has much to offer for professional communication specialists, it also sheds new light on the workings, changes and persistence of humanitarian narratives over the twentieth century.

Humanitarian Communication Through the Lens of Feminist Ethics of Care

Ethics are the driving force of the humanitarian field, a domain that has been governed by general and universal ethical principles. Researchers have largely focused on studying the organizational commitment to these principles, paying less attention to the role-specific ethics of this field. Moreover, researchers who consider the humanitarian field from a media studies lens have often focused on media representation, while questions about communication as practice are sidelined. In this paper, I approach humanitarian ethics with a particular focus on role morality and communication practices. With a particular focus on the role of a humanitarian communications specialist, I argue, in this paper, that the feminist ethics of care is a useful ethical framework that can guide communication specialists to better practices when they are in the field of operation. I also answer the following research questions: What are the main ethical principles that humanitarian communication specialists are expected to observe as humanitarians? Why are these principles insufficient? How might feminist ethics of care fill the gap left by current humanitarian principles and what would be the added value of this framework for practicing humanitarian communication? To answer, I ground my approach in an experiential understanding built from my personal experience as a humanitarian communications specialist. Second, I offer a literature review to highlight the common ground between humanitarian ethics and the feminist ethics of care and the added value of the feminist ethics of care why applied by humanitarian communication specialists. Third, I provide some examples of communications practices that may follow the feminist ethics of care model.

The Logic of Negative Appeals: Graphic Imagery, Affective Empathy, and Foreign Development Aid

AbstractThe use of negative visual imagery of the poor to conjure feelings of pity, guilt, and empathy (also called “poverty porn”) is premised on an emotional mechanism that is supposed to elicit compassion and giving behavior, and yet the very emotional nature of the response to this kind of negative imagery can have the exact opposite effect by evoking compassion fatigue and psychological numbing. Our study interrogates this puzzle. Leveraging original data from survey experiments, we show that exposure to negative and personalized images of aid recipients in despair actually increases support for foreign development aid. In contrast, descriptive statistical information about global poverty moves people very little, or not at all. Our findings have implications for understanding the role imagery plays in shaping public opinion on foreign aid and for development communication. This study builds a bridge between research on foreign aid and humanitarian communication.

Commodifying COVID-19: Humanitarian Communication at the Onset of a Global Pandemic

ABSTRACT Corporations have become prominent actors in responding to COVID-19. Within the context of increasing privatization of humanitarianism and marketization of social justice, corporate marketing has played a part in the “interpretive battles” to define the global crisis of COVID-19. Understanding corporate COVID-19 communications contributes to understanding the politics of the global pandemic. This article analyzes companies’ humanitarian communications during the early phase of COVID-19 in Europe and North America to identify how their messages define COVID-19 and justified particular responses. We find that brands constructed COVID-19 as a crisis of expertise and logistics, a crisis of resources and capital, and a crisis of the self. In response to these crises, corporations provide products to “help” consumers to manage the pandemic and to manage themselves. These humanitarian narratives make the case that business has a concrete role to play in solving crises and present individual consumption as a humanitarian act.

The Next Step: The California Cybersecurity Institute’s Anti-Trafficking Virtual Reality Immersion Training

Digital gaming and virtual learning platforms have expanded the boundaries of experiential based anti-trafficking training. Virtual reality provides a technological mechanism for immersive storytelling through the simulation of a physical presence within an artefact using software and specialised hardware. The success of virtual-based immersive training is directly dependent on a series of factors, including realism, re-playability, and supplemental in-person training. This article describes the California Cybersecurity Institute’s anti-trafficking immersion training programme, which advances beyond awareness education to test law enforcement and first responder-specific skills and biases. This multi-layered programme looks to incorporate all concepts of ‘serious gaming’ within law enforcement and humanitarian communication.

The identity work of Chinese charities in their online donation-oriented crowdfunding appeals

By conceptualizing identity as a type of illocutionary resource, this study seeks to address the unheeded identity work that Chinese charities perform in their online donation-oriented crowdfunding appeals (hereafter ODC appeals). The analysis of 60 appeals drawn from an ODC platform based in China shows that via the employment of identity-oriented strategies (viz. foregrounding, creating and identification seeking), Chinese charities exploit the diverse dimensions of identity, not only of the charities themselves but of their beneficiaries and prospective donors as well. It is argued that such diverse identity work is influenced by both the institutional context surrounding ODC practices and the wider sociocultural context of China. By providing a finer picture of Chinese charities’ identity work pertaining to the different dimensions of identity, this study may shed light on the emerging research into ODC appeals and will add non-Western insights to previous discussions on humanitarian communication.

The ‘awkward’ squad: British women foreign correspondents during the interwar years

ABSTRACT During the interwar years, gendered inequalities in newspaper newsrooms and social prejudice against ‘mobile’ women combined to force women who wanted to work as foreign correspondents to seek alternative routes to raising their voices on international affairs. Women’s reportage can be found in a range of platforms from the mainstream press to early journals of humanitarian communication and literary magazines. When women reported for major newspapers they were often precariously freelance and the gendered nature of their treatment by newspaper hierarchies emphasised their, and all women’s, outsider status when it came to international politics. Women's international journalism, often rooted in the humanitarian tradition, concentrated on telling the lives of minor characters and ordinary people, and offers insights into individual human suffering at a time of great international anxiety. Their writing, often anonymous or in overlooked niche publications, represents a missing actor on public opinion at this critical time.

From media to hypermedia: Journalistic representations of Rohingya refugees and humanitarian communication

The paper is a comparative analysis of two media artifacts from Reuters engaging with the ongoing Rohingya refugee crisis. One artifact are the ‘traditional’ images that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018; the second is a special report utilising several aspects of new media. Locating the artifacts within humanitarian journalism, the analysis seeks to understand whether emergent media has pronounced gains over traditional media. The study argues that moral connections through technology are not a given and that such relationships between the spectators and subjects of humanitarian communication artifacts must be continually worked on and improved upon through a vigilant media ethics. The paper hopes to contribute to knowledge about new media’s intersections with journalistic refugee representations and to the broad field imaginary of humanitarian communication.

Safeguarding Civilian Internet Access During Armed Conflict: Protecting Humanity’s Most Important Resource in War

A recent spate of governmental shutdowns of the civilian internet in a broad range of violent contexts, from uprisings in Hong Kong and Iraq to armed conflicts in Ethiopia, Kashmir, Myanmar, and Yemen, suggests civilian internet blackouts are the ‘new normal.’ Given the vital and expanding role of internet connectivity in modern society, and the emergence of artificial intelligence, internet shutdowns raise important questions regarding their legality under intentional law. This article considers whether the existing international humanitarian law provides adequate protection for civilian internet connectivity and infrastructure during armed conflicts. Concluding that current safeguards are insufficient, this article proposes a new legal paradigm with special protections for physical internet infrastructure and the right of civilian access, while advocating the adoption of emblems (such as the Red Cross or Blue Shield) in the digital world to protect vital humanitarian communications.

Humanitarian behavior across high-/low-context cultures: a comparative analysis between Switzerland and Colombia

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) attempts constantly to motivate its audience through social media to adopt humanitarian attitudes and behaviors. Owing to its multicultural audience, the results of this communicative attempt varies from region to region. In this context, in order to optimize the humanitarian communication outcome, it is of high importance to investigate the mediating role of culture. Drawing on Hall’s context theory, this comparative survey-based study tries to analyze the influence of personal context culture on humanitarian behavior intention in a low-context-culture country (Switzerland) and a high-context-culture country (Colombia). The results indicated that once exposed to implicit social media posts of the ICRC, the Colombian showed slightly higher behavior intention compared to the Swiss and participants’ personal context-culture score fully accounted for this difference. This study is also an empirical examination of Hall’s context theory in a humanitarian communication context.