Humanitarian Industry Research Articles

Quantifying Vulnerability

Humanitarianism has recently undergone a so-called innovation turn, utilizing cutting-edge technologies to enhance the reach and efficiency of humanitarian aid. This article focuses on novel advances in the way aid organizations record, measure, and classify household vulnerability among Syrian refugees. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Lebanon and Jordan, I explore how the datafication of refugees in humanitarian action not only reveals the constitutive limits of quantitative ontologies but also poses transformative implications for the institutional configurations of humanitarianism. In particular, I suggest that the aid sector’s growing reliance on data systems entrenches an extractive relationship between humanitarian organizations and refugees that conscripts, entangles, and unsettles data practitioners themselves. I conclude by pointing to vulnerability assessments as one node within a larger apparatus of integrated data systems, one that centralizes power within the humanitarian industry and poses grave risks for refugee rights.

Speaking with a ‘soft voice’: professional and pragmatic civilities amongst South Sudanese NGO leaders

ABSTRACT This article examines the forms of ‘civility’ promoted by South Sudanese NGO leaders and staff in their efforts to navigate a context of pervasive political repression. Drawing on in-depth, life-work history interviews, it shows how the careful cultivation of a ‘non-political’ identity was a way of securing space to operate in a highly militarised, politically restricted environment, of working across the divisions created by conflict, and of creating small spaces for change. The article also points to the limitations of these non-political positions, to the struggles of aspirational projects to overcome the inequalities in which they are embedded, and to the risk of reproducing the hierarchies and exclusions of the wider humanitarian industry. For external actors engaged in ‘localisation’ efforts, the discussion is a reminder that decisions about which organisations to fund are inherently political, with implications for dynamics of inequality and marginalisation in South Sudanese (civil) society.

8 - ‘New Wars: Forgotten Warriors’: Why Have Girl Fighters Been Excluded from Western Representations of Conflict in Sierra Leone?

Since the end of the cold war, the way we talk about war has changed. Instead of talking about ‘noble’ inter-state warfare, as was common in the past, there is a new Western vocabulary depicting modern conflict as chaotic and callous. Child soldiers are seen as emblematic element of the ‘new wars’, yet the presence of girl fighters has been continually ignored by the international community and neglected in academic writing. When girls have attracted attention, it has been purely as victims. Using a case study of Sierra Leone, this essay analyses how the Western representation of girls as victims plays into the Western construction of Africa as a place needful of military and humanitarian intervention. By looking at discourses of gender and youth, I examine how the construction of the girl child is integral to maintaining the myth of the young ‘aggressive’ African male and the white ‘saviour’; both essential for ‘new wars’ and the humanitarian industry. The conflict in Sierra Leone has been considered by many academics as a prime example of a ‘new war’ (Kaplan 1994; Kaldor 2001) and thus lends itself particularly well to the subject under discussion. The emphasis in the West has been on the ‘barbarity’ and high level of atrocities carried out by combatants 1 as well as the use of child soldiers. As Rosen points out, it is seen as a ‘symbol of the horrors of modern war’ (2005:58) and continues to attract media attention, as has done the recent film Blood Diamonds shows. Sierra Leone has also been chosen as a case study because of the high level of female participation in the conflict (Mazurana and Carlson 2004:2) and because of the recognition that girls were failed in the Demobilisation Demilitarization and Reintegration (DDR) process (Coulter 2005), which I shall briefly touch on in this essay, although space limits a more detailed analysis.

Evaluating underpinning, complexity and implications of ethical situations in humanitarian operations: qualitative study through the lens of career humanitarian workers

IntroductionData regarding underpinning and implications of ethical challenges faced by humanitarian workers and their organisations in humanitarian operations are limited.MethodsWe conducted comprehensive, semistructured interviews with 44 experienced humanitarian aid workers,...

Expat, Local, and Refugee

In migration studies, humanitarian work and workers are studied as benefactors or managers of migrants and refugees. This article inverts the gaze from “researching down” refugees to “studying up” the humanitarian structure that governs them. The article studies how the humanitarian industry ballooned after the Syrian refugee response in Jordan due to the influx of expatriate humanitarians as economic migrants from the global North to refugee situations in the host country in the global South. It examines the global division of mobility and labor among expatriate, local, and refugee humanitarian workers, investigating the correlation between geographic (horizontal) mobility and social/professional (vertical) mobility, demonstrating that the social and professional mobility of workers depends on their ability to access geographic mobility. Thus, rather than advocating for and facilitating global mobility, the humanitarian industry maintains a colonial division of labor and mobility. This raises the question: who benefits most from humanitarian assistance?

The Black Hole of Humanitarian Innovation

Humanitarian innovation has rapidly emerged to become central to discussions about the future of humanitarianism. Innovation practices are framed as a means by which the humanitarian community can identify the paradigm shift that it needs to survive in a rapidly changing world. However, this framing is based on a misunderstanding of economic theories of innovation and particularly of the nature of humanitarian economics. The lack of both a true market and a profit mechanism in the humanitarian industry means that innovations can be generated but will never be sustained. Unless this obstacle is addressed – perhaps through emerging networked approaches to economic activity – humanitarian innovation will continue to be a dead end.

Child Soldier Narratives and the Humanitarian Industry

This article shows the ways child soldier narratives, a predominantly African genre of literary writing, invite readers to reimagine the relationship between Western humanitarianism and its intended recipients. It begins by defining two basic types of humanitarian groups. Operational organizations respond to crises with material relief, while advocacy organizations attempt to raise awareness about these crises to mobilize support for relief efforts. Operational organizations are depicted throughout the genre as mostly incapable of providing meaningful help to communities affected by war. Relief aid is routinely stolen or misallocated, while aid workers are overwhelmed in spite of their best intentions. Yet many child soldier narratives portray humanitarian advocacy favorably, and in particular the memoirs are a vehicle for advocacy against child soldiering. The narratives’ authors are often viewed with suspicion in communities recovering from war, but in the West their unique social identities as ex–child soldiers are privileged, and many become advocates themselves. There are consequences to publicly embracing this identity insofar as it is difficult to transcend, as Ishmael Beah’s experiences show. More broadly, the genre provides a nuanced view of the relationship between Western humanitarian organizations and their beneficiaries in communities affected by warfare.

Enjoy Poverty: humanitarianism and the testimonial function of images

The overlap between production of humanitarian images and interventions in contexts of natural and man-made catastrophes is growing on a global scale. An increasingly close relationship exists between image production, news production and humanitarian industry. In this article, we argue that this process is transforming the meaning of the social, political and ethical act of bearing witness. We analyse the epistemic and political implications of visual humanitarian testimony through the documentary film Enjoy Poverty (2008), shot in Congo by the Dutch artist Renzo Martens. Examining some of the key scenes of the film, we undertake an analysis of the visual culture of humanitarianism within which the contemporary production of sensational images of strong emotional impact is inscribed and justified. We maintain that rethinking testimonial debt in light of contemporary visual humanitarianism fundamentally means to acknowledge and explore the hierarchical relationship that visual humanitarianism creates between the witnesses, the victims and the spectators. We conclude by arguing that Enjoy Poverty constitutes an attempt to generate a new visual, discursive and political horizon within which one can prevent the transformation of the testimonial relationship into a relationship of power.

The Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) and the Humanitarian Industry in Britain, 1963-85.

This article explores the history of modern British humanitarianism. Specifically, it charts the rise of an extensive humanitarian aid 'industry' in Britain, between 1963 and 1985. It does so through a focus on the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC), an umbrella body for joint emergency fundraising established in 1963. The DEC is an enduring and important presence in the British humanitarian landscape, as it brings together leading aid agencies to make fundraising campaigns on television after major disasters. This article represents the first systematic historical analysis of the DEC, which it uses to illuminate larger questions about the politics of non-state humanitarianism, state-voluntary sector relations, the political impact of television, and the end of empire. It is shown that while DEC appeals fuelled the growth of its members, this was also a problematic process. Many principal aid agencies wished to shift their focus away from short-term disaster relief work to tackling the long-term structural causes of global poverty instead. It is argued that, despite an increasing political focus, humanitarian organizations were constrained from doing so by the power of television; a perceived lack of public support; the interventions of the British government; and competition between aid agencies in a crowded marketplace. Consequently, continued involvement in short-term, apolitical emergency assistance remained a requirement even for agencies sceptical about its value and impact. This analysis complicates linear narratives of a transition from emergency relief to development aid in post-war British humanitarianism, instead presenting the period as characterized by competing and even contradictory trajectories.

The Everyday Experience of Humanitarianism in Akkar Villages

Within the framework of the Syrian humanitarian crisis, this paper aims to understand the way everyday practices are changing in response to humanitarian programs currently in place in North Lebanon, through the use of a bottom-up ethnographic approach. Rather than delving deeper into the technical analysis of humanitarian policies and programs, the fieldwork focused on the everyday experience of beneficiaries, from the local and the new refugee communities. Prior to the beginning of the Syrian crisis, the humanitarian industry, as well as the state, had neglected North Lebanon, to a large extent. The present paper will examine the qualitative changes that the humanitarian market has been engendering over the past two years, concerning the massive flow of refugees into Lebanon, which is a non-signatory country to the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention. People’s accounts suggest that the Syrian refugee community is becoming frustrated with the alleged neutrality and depoliticization of humanitarian assistance, which merely aims at alleviating their suffering, without concrete action to put an end to the war in Syria. On one side, the initial ethnicization of needs implied that beneficiaries were placed in specific categories before being granted access to services; the reiterated use of aid provision as a strategy to gain international legitimacy politicized humanitarian assistance further. On the other side, interviewed humanitarian practitioners revealed how they continue to defend the "alleviation-of-suffering" logic. To explore the humanitarian sphere, notions of agency and citizenship in historically neglected regions have been used, through utilizing a grounded theory, where empirical data comes before hypothetical theories. This was archived through in-depth interviews with faith-based, secular, international, and local organizations and by relying on the researcher’s participatory observation of the day to day living of aid beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. The ethnographer’s emotional response to the experiences shared with field companions is inevitably incorporated in the methodology. Thus, this paper aims at elaborating a data-driven critique of the impact of non-state structures – which proliferate in the emergency sphere, in which Lebanon eternally finds itself entangled – on the rarely studied everyday life, in order to able to transcend macroscopic perspectives.

‘Tsunami third wave’ and the politics of disaster management in Sri Lanka

The paper compares the social and political consequences of two disasters that struck Sri Lanka 70 years apart, the 1934–1935 malaria epidemic that killed over 100,000 people and the tsunami of 26 December 2004. The main argument is that while the state and civil society responses to the malaria epidemic of 1930s in many ways led to the establishment and development of the Sri Lankan welfare state and the related outcomes, including rapid advances in quality of life particularly in the rural sector, the more elaborate and well-funded tsunami response driven by the international humanitarian industry failed to facilitate speedy recovery, failed to galvanize the peace process and even added to the vulnerability of some of the affected people due to the rapid exodus of many newly arrived INGOs before completing their humanitarian mission. While the relative failure of the tsunami response may be partly attributed to the persistent conflict between the Government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelaam (LTTE), it also exposes some of the key weaknesses of humanitarian aid in the modern world. A more historically grounded and conflict-sensitive approach is necessary along with greater coordination among agencies involved.

Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine: A Practical Guide

Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine: A Practical Guide