Humanitarian Practice Research Articles

The unaccounted effects of digital transformation: participatory accountability in a humanitarian organisation

PurposeThis study explores the evolving dynamics of participatory accountability within humanitarian contexts, where digitally connected crisis-affected populations demand better accountability from aid organisations, and as a result, shift traditional hierarchies and relationships between humanitarian agencies and beneficiaries.Design/methodology/approachThis study employs a case study approach, focussing on the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), to investigate how participatory accountability manifests outside formal practices and re-emerges in social media spaces. The study analyses internal organisational challenges and explores the implications of digital platforms on humanitarian practices. The authors employ Chouliaraki and Georgiou's (2015, 2019, 2022) networks of mediation, particularly intermediation and transmediation, to understand how digital expressions translate to offline contexts and reshape meanings and actions.FindingsThe study reveals that social media platforms enable beneficiaries to demand participatory accountability beyond traditional practices, democratising humanitarian response and challenging power structures. These effects are multifaceted, introducing enhanced democratic and inclusive humanitarian aid as well as new vulnerabilities. Digital intermediaries and gatekeepers play pivotal roles in curating and disseminating crisis-affected voices, which, when transmediated, result in nuanced meanings and understandings. Positive effects include capturing the potential of digital networks for democratic aid, while negative effects give rise to moral responsibilities, necessitating proactive measures from the ICRC.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the literature by highlighting the impact of digital technology, particularly social media, on participatory accountability. It expands the understanding of the evolving landscape of accountability within the humanitarian sector and offers critical insights into the complexities and dual purposes of participatory accountability in contexts of resistance. Employing Chouliaraki and Georgiou's networks of mediation adds depth to the understanding of digital technology's role in shaping participatory practices and introduces the concept of transmediation as a bridge between digital expressions and tangible actions.

Humanitarianism torn between ethics and politics

This paper aims to provide an overview of the main landmarks and basic problems of humanitarianism, which is seen as a philosophy - an ethical response to suffering - but also as a practice in the form of humanitarian actions. There is general agreement that suffering ought to be alleviated, but not that humanitarian actions, and the humanitarian sector in general, are an adequate response. However, the practice of humanitarianism itself is not clearly demarcated. While for some it only refers to the actions aimed at eliminating or alleviating immediate suffering, others believe that humanitarianism requires dealing with the causes of suffering, and in its most extreme form, that humanitarianism requires force in the form of military intervention to stop suffering. Therefore, the objections to humanitarianism are contradictory - while on the one hand, its apolitical stances are respected in the name of timeless and decontextualized ethics, on the other its politicization is criticised. To condemn or praise humanitarianism, whether it comes from the point of ethics or politics, the authors conclude, it is important to always keep in mind what exactly is meant when referring to it.

The Anthropological Turn: Cultural Practices for the Development of Human Complexity

Introduction. In the worldwide situation of collision accompanied with systemic crises, it is proposed to raise a reflexive question – how institutions and knowledge-systems can be arranged to support complexity, diversity, and subjectivity of Human action. Authors propose an approach to overcoming systemic gaps through reframing and re-actualization of the field of socio-humanitarian practices. It is necessary to “build up” the environment of integration of sciences and cultural practices of human development. The article presents the key provisions of the “Anthropological Turn” approach, provides an overview of the foundations and basic ideas, as well as specific practical models of activity. Materials and Methods. The “Anthropological Turn” sets a fundamentally different framework and actually highlights the objects and mechanisms of interpretation of the results for future humanitarian research. “Anthropological Turn” research program overcomes the naturalistic approach in the study of humanitarian processes. Results. Authors propose and describe four basic practical and organizational models. These models are acting as the activity infrastructure for the implementation of the ideas of the Anthropological Turn: the historical and evolutionary methodology for designing universities of the future; productive activities for the socio-cultural development of territories and technological entrepreneurship in childrenʼs and adult communities; search, development and replication of humanitarian (cultural, educational, etc.) practices; the family as an institution for the development of subjectivity and human identity. Discussion and Conclusion. The described approaches and implemented projects made an ecosystem of educational solutions. On the one hand, they provide support for the development of the professional and educational space and innovative activities of the subjects of Russia, the creation and dissemination of promising educational practices, training of high-level professionals for the social sphere, business; and, on the other hand, it contributes to the formation of a dynamic system for the implementation of continuous professional development of personnel.

Интеллектуальная составляющая непрерывного поликультурного образования личности

The problem statement concerns the actual issues of raising the status of the intellectual component of the Humanities education within the framework of the author’s investigation on “Cultural self-determination of the individual in the space of realization of intercultural communication”. The conditions of modeling communicative situations of the ecosystem of multicultural education are determined in the paradigm “From observation to generalization and replication through cooperation”. The focus of this paper is on the strategic and tactic directions of the development of Russian education within the methodology and technology of the Self as a cultural personality. Socio-philosophical perception and theoretical justifi cation of the problem under consideration have given grounds for mastering the communicative culture of the individual in the frames of intellectual architectonics of multilingual culture as the methodological basis of the many years of activity. The multicultural intellectual architectonics refl ects a humanizing core of the regional information and educational spaces. The social signifi cance of the formation of a multicultural mindset of the personality initiates creating of one of the possible models of the ecosystems of the synergetic effect of co-management in a communicative society. The presentation of the effects of cooperation of the Department of the Institute of Continuing Education, educational organizations of Novosibirsk and Novosibirsk region, domestic publishers, as well as the effects of cooperation of regional, All-Russian and international universities is carried out within the framework of the project “Creating a unifi ed information and educational secure communication environment”. As the fi nal result of the generalization, the corpus of case-studies is considered, and the system of conditions for their implementation is substantiated as a multidimensional humanitarian project in the aspect of the integration of society and the reproduction of culture within the humanitarian educational practices. Such features of students’ perception of a different culture as the development of multilingualism and multicultures in artifi cial conditions of mastering the communicative skills of implementing the basics of intercultural communication are noted. Special emphasis focuses on the social signifi cance and cultural mission of educational organizations in the aspect of modeling the corpus of vital communicative situations/events in the space of scientifi c and methodological support within the socio-humanitarian sphere of regional events. In conclusion, the system of methodological, pedagogical and methodological conditions for the effective implementation of the author’s model for the formation of intercultural skills and teaching/learning techniques of intercultural communication, which form the basis for the development of additional professional programs in the system of continuing professional education of specialists in various fi elds, is formulated.

An inventory rotation mechanism for relief supplies considering recycling and remanufacturing

Relief supply inventories are important in disaster response operations. To address the problem of dead stocks and avoid relief supply expiration, such inventories must be renewed periodically. Different from the traditional shelf-life rotation mechanism (i.e. renewal of the entire inventory at the expiration date), which pays more attention to decreasing the quantity of dead stocks, the novel period rotation mechanism that we design in this study will gradually rotate relief supplies according to their shelf life. We propose a mathematical programming model to minimise the total cost of relief organisations and conduct a case study and analyse the sensitivity of key parameters using real-world data. Results show that our rotation mechanism can substantially reduce the financial burden on relief organisations and improve the quality of relief supplies for victims. The novelty of our study includes: (1) We introduce a new approach that can rotate multiple times, through which we consider the quality of relief supplies; (2) We incorporate recycling and remanufacturing into the rotation process; and (3) We adopt an inductive reasoning method to develop the model with demand and time uncertainties. We prove the feasibility of our model and contributions of our study to humanitarian logistics practice and research.

For the sake of the children: The Lady Muriel Paget’s Mission to the Baltic States (1920–1922)

ABSTRACT A private organization created and managed by a devoted founder, Muriel Paget’s Mission to the Baltic States developed a welfare programme merging Paget’s pre-war charity work and the main agenda of post-war humanitarianism. In managing the mission’s activities, Paget distinguished between relief and rehabilitation. While rehabilitation practices were an extension of the pre-war work in which Paget had been involved, child welfare measures reflected the understanding of rehabilitation as a cultural colonization project. Accordingly, Paget envisaged the intervention of the mission as a necessary tool for ‘modernizing’ the attitudes of mothers and knowledge of local medical and paramedical personnel alike, and, therefore, enabling the growth of healthy young generations and the implementation of a new ‘modern’ mothering culture for both mothers and healthcare workers. In this, Paget’s Mission demonstrates significant continuity with analogous British humanitarian practices of that period as a particular intersection of liberal internationalism and imperialism.

The politics and spaces of public-private partnerships in humanitarian tech innovations

The past decade has seen a growing engagement of tech companies in conflict settings to develop multifaceted technological innovations, including digital biometric identification to register refugees, commercial drones to deliver cargo, and big data-fuelled algorithms to predict the spread of crises. Humanitarian technology has been largely acclaimed as a way of making aid more effective and of triggering a paradigm shift in humanitarian governance by putting crisis-affected communities in what is claimed to be the driving seat of aid programmes. Critics are however wary about the negative impacts these innovations have on humanitarian practices and crisis-affected population. This paper contributes to this debate by assessing whether technological innovations fundamentally alter the politics and spaces of humanitarian governance. To do so, it analyses the way public private partnerships (PPPs) mediate between the interests of the various stakeholders of tech experiments and distribute power among them. Drawing upon the exploratory analysis of 22 tech projects in crisis settings, a typology of PPPs is formalised based on the way they distribute power and resources among their stakeholders. The results show that only one type of PPPs - community-based digital humanitarianism – has the potential of increasing the ownership of crisis-affected communities over aid programmes and localising projects in so-called Global South societies. The two other types – technologising the humanitarian business and externalising the lab to crisis settings – appear as a continuation of neo-colonial practices with a digital touch.

Pathways to resilience and pathways to flourishing: Examining the added-value of multisystem research and intervention in contexts of war and forced displacement.

This paper examines the added-value that multisystem approaches bring to research and intervention in contexts of war and forced displacement. I highlight what is useful and truly innovative about systems-level work, aware that providing data-related evidence is only part of the story when connecting research to policy and practice. I discuss four types of added-value: these are conceptual, instrumental, capacity-building, and connectivity impacts that, respectively, aim to change current knowledge, improve implementation, build research skills, and strengthen network connectivity. Specifically, systems-based research can help transform the key frames of humanitarian work, fostering the more integrated and distributive models of professional assistance known as resilience and network humanitarianism. I argue that systems-level approaches on resilience and flourishing in war-affected and refugee populations help to articulate new mindsets, methodologies, partnerships, and ways of working relevant for humanitarian research, policy and practice. I focus attention on interdisciplinary, interventionist, prospective, transgenerational, and network-building initiatives. My specific examples cover the family context of mental health and trauma memory in Afghanistan, as well as program evaluation with Syrian refugees in Jordan, connecting stress biology to human experience, and social networks to psychological empowerment. The paper suggests future directions to support more effective and impactful systems-level work in protracted humanitarian crises.

Negotiation Power: How Humanitarian Frontliners Get Things Done with Hard Bargainers

Hard bargainers are known to dictate terms. Humanitarian frontliners confront them daily. Some state and nonstate counterparts, guided by military necessity, are deemed so overpowering that it seems impossible to negotiate humanitarian necessity with them. And yet, humanitarians leverage negotiations with quite an edge. They construct working relationships and creative solutions to get access and deliver humanitarian aid to those affected by conflict. Humanitarians shape a responsible approach that can enrich the understanding of negotiation power. Guided by humanitarian principles, they do not exercise a power over anyone but leverage a power of getting things done with counterparts, through relational, transactional, and process moves. The purpose of this article is both descriptive and prescriptive. On the one hand, it provides examples to document humanitarian negotiation practices of empowerment and to contribute to a general theory of negotiation power. On the other hand, the article provides some recommendations from negotiation theory to empower humanitarians. Indirectly, by analyzing and supporting the power of humanitarian frontliners, this article also aims at refining the reflection and action of every negotiator when confronted with tough bargainers.

Missionaries as Humanitarian Mediators after the 1860 troubles in Lebanon

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to examine how the 1860 Crisis in Mount Lebanon and Damascus crisis shaped discourses and practices of humanitarianism among the missions and affected their relations with both local and foreign state actors. Catholic missionaries were witnesses and victims but also in the long run beneficiaries of the events of 1860. They were themselves involved in the distribution of the aid through their participation to the relief committees. As victims they also received relief from the French government, the Œuvre des Ecoles d’Orient and the Ottoman Empire. Their action during this period strengthened their links with diplomatic agents and with the French government, as well as it reinforced the position of the clergy of the Oriental Catholic churches.

The reform of freetown port – lessons from Political Economy Analysis (PEA) to make conflict sensitivity more efficient

ABSTRACT Political Economy Analysis (PEA), which is concerned with the interaction of political and economic processes, is a useful tool to improve the efficiency of development, humanitarian, and peacebuilding practice. However, it has important shortcomings too. Using the reforms in the Port of Freetown as a case study, this paper explores the most important ones while highlighting some of the elements undermining the successful operationalisation of conflict sensitivity. The article suggests that both tools should be mainstreamed within organisations as the first step to improve their effectiveness, which in turn requires a re-thinking of its operational and decision-making structures.

Do No Harm: The Role of Humanitarian Aid and Neutrality in Protracting Civil Wars

ABSTRACT We review the impact of humanitarian actors in civil war through the examination of the concepts of neutrality and impartiality – embedded within the ‘do no harm’ principle. We argue that despite the rationale of principles seeking to detach international action from the embodied dynamics of conflict, these governing tenets have effectively served to reinforce power discrepancies between authoritarian regimes, opposition forces, and civilians in civil wars. Because humanitarian practices have so often been co-opted to strengthen the position of authoritarian regimes and inflict harm, we trace their impact in conflict networks and assess whether they serve to further protract and unbalance civil war.

Role of Humanitarian Logistics Management Practices on Drought Management Response in Kenya

Humanitarian Logistics is a critical set of actions that takes place during natural or man-made disasters to save lives and property. However, the subject is under-researched in comparison to business logistics in profit-making firms where profit is the primary motivation for existence. The main goal of this study was to examine the role of humanitarian logistics management practices on drought management response in Kenya, with the following specific objectives of the study: to examine the role of transport management drought management response in Kenya, to evaluate the role of inventory management drought management response in Kenya, to examine the role of order processing drought management response in Kenya, and to establish the influence of information flow on drought management response in Kenya. The study used a cross-sectional survey. The study's target population was 270 personnel from the National Drought Management Authority in 23 Arid and Semi-Arid Lands counties. A semi-structured questionnaire was distributed via e-mail survey and hand delivery. Secondary data was gathered from both public and unpublished records. The questionnaire's validity and reliability were assessed. The data was analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies with the help of the SPSS software program version 25. The study discovered that both transport management practices, inventory management practices, order processing, and information flow as humanitarian logistics management practices played a significant role in drought management response in Kenya; thus, the study recommended that managers in humanitarian organizations. Kenya should include humanitarian logistics management practices in their strategic plan, particularly investment in transport management practices, inventory management practices, order processing, and information flow, which may make it easier to bring about innovation in the organization and good information sharing to both suppliers and clients.

Viewing humanitarian project closure through the lens of an ethics of the temporary

PurposeIn this paper, the authors propose a new lens to examine international humanitarian organizations' responsibilities in the context of project closure, what authors call “an ethics of the temporary”. The authors offer this as an orienting ethical ideal to facilitate the moral imagination of humanitarian planners, practitioners and stakeholders.Design/methodology/approachThe authors drew on recent philosophical work on responsibilities for global justice to analyze an ethical concern inherent to humanitarian practice, the proper scope of responsibility in the context of closure of humanitarian projects.FindingsThe ethics of the temporary includes four elements: situating humanitarian action temporally with attention to the past and how it shapes a current crisis and crisis response, focusing attention on anticipating and seeking to mitigate potential harm, promoting sustainability and greater equity going forward and emphasizing inclusive, collaborative approaches. The authors propose a set of questions that can foster discussion and reflection about the scope of humanitarian responsibilities at project closure.Practical implicationsAlthough the authors' work is primarily conceptual, it has many practical implications for humanitarian policy and practice. It can support critical reflection and offers a process for considering the scope of responsibility at project closure and decisions around how to close a given intervention in a manner that avoids causing harm and advances equity.Originality/valueVery little work has been done on ethical closure of humanitarian projects. Most literature offers critiques. This essay contributes a new approach to closure, the ethical ideal and practice of an ethics of the temporary.

Engaging the humanitarian marketplace: Values, valuations and the making of humanitarian geographies

This article argues that humanitarian procurement and supply activities create geographies that are underpinned by valuations and the various values these arrange. The article draws from interviews with global procurement, commodity and supply chain leads for European and North American humanitarian organisations providing emergency humanitarian assistance and development programming as to how they engage with values and valuations in their professional practice. The article draws from economic sociology and its focus on valuation as a situated social process to explore how different values are recognised, negotiated and ordered within humanitarian procurement and supply practices. By paying attention to reflections on self-described practice, we can see the importance of standard procurement principles in accommodating different values, economic and normative, and how these organise market arrangements for different goods and services. This approach crucially allows for the possibility for new values to be accommodated (such as sustainability). It also shows the conflicts and strains that arise when existing processes and arrangements that have been legitimised by practice are questioned, namely through the localisation agenda and its reimagining of the values which underpin the flow and control of resources and the challenges this can make to international humanitarian arrangements and the sector’s colonial legacy. The article prompts further thought as to what values will continue to resonate in the sector and which new values will be realised through procurement and supply decisions in the future. The article highlights the importance of thinking with values and valuation processes in the making of humanitarian geographies. By extension, this highlights the importance of diverse theoretical bases for understanding value and valuation as a critical geographical practice.

Humanitarian expertise as a method of socio-humanitarian engineering (introduction to the ontology of humanitarian design)

The paper presents the conception of humanitarian expertise practice as a method. It is justified that the so-called post-non-classical situation allows coexistence of various ontologies and ontological patterns. It is presumed that these ontologies are project and human-created. The accustomed approaches of learning the world through objects and mastering the world in a necessary way are being replaced with an approach which measures, on the one hand, the constant transformation of the worlds, on the other – the metamorphoses and authors of the projects that go through their own process of changes together with humancreated worlds. The article presents the method of humanitarian expertise understood as the method of socio-humanistic engineering which implies construction and alteration of social worlds and management of metamorphosis of these changes. The author demonstrates that the transition to non-classical situation of self-determination is related to the replacement of the principle of human-sizedness of the world and the principles of objectivity, rationality and cognizability of the world with other patterns: that the world is not objective, not humanscaled, not sensible or rational. It is diverse – depending on the patterns of the designer. The article presents the principle scheme of this method. It describes the situation of launch and initiation of the project aimed not only at creation of new worlds but management of the metamorphosis of the changes in the authors of these changes. It is the unique feature of humanitarian projection and social engineering that differs from previously described experience and practice of the application of the project approach, where the authors of the projects were not the subject of reflexive self-projection.

Midrash and sophism in the context of transformation scientific and educational traditions in the 21st century

The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st cen-tury is characterized by multiple crises in most aspects of human existence, among which the education crisis is one of the most noticeable. The usual logic of problematizing and seeking ways to overcome the education crisis is linked to changes in the nor-mative-legal and economic conditions of educational activities, and much less attention is paid to the ontological problems of education. In this regard, the first task of this study was to con-ceptually formulate a request regarding the resources and tools for overcoming the ontological crisis in education. In the context of studying the main stages and results of three decades of re-forms in the field of Russian education, three interconnected re-quests have been identified: 1) Individualization and differentia-tion of the content of education while maintaining basic value-semantic unity; 2) Ensuring the social and economic relevance of the content of education, ensuring its demand and feasibility; 3) Rooting the content of education in social and humanitarian tra-ditions that are capable of influencing and transforming modern social and humanitarian practices. The categories of “midrash” and “sophism” emerged at roughly the same time (around the 5th century BCE) and represent complex phenomena of oral cultures that developed in the Eastern Mediterranean: midrash in the con-text of the Jewish religious tradition, and sophism (as well as the syllogism that gave rise to it) in the ancient city-state tradition. Moreover, each of these phenomena fully corresponds to the re-quirements listed above. 1) Reconceptualization of the educa-tional attitude as a means of ensuring intergenerational connec-tion and continuity; 2) Inherent duality of cultural and education-al traditions in their relationship with “text” and “language” (to which modern culture adds “visible image”); 3) The need to modernize the system of educational standards based on dia-chronic traditions and synchronic cultural-anthropological mod-els; 4) Actualization of issues and tools for ensuring dialogue and "openness" of traditions, identifying their contextual meanings and requests addressed by current socio-humanitarian practices; 5) Integration of projects, socio-educational initiatives and prac-tices around identified scientific and educational traditions and cultural-educational models underlying them.

Securitisation, humanitarian responses and the erosion of everyday rights of displaced Venezuelan women in Brazil

ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered securitisation of humanitarianism through the lens of Venezuelan women who have fled to Brazil, as part of the largest migration flow in South America. By the end of 2022, the number of displaced Venezuelans had grown to seven million, half of whom were women and girls. Alongside humanitarian programmes, measures of migration control, policing and deterrence are now routinely implemented. This article explores the interplay between securitised policies and humanitarian programmes in the everyday experience of rights of Venezuelan migrant women and girls. We ask: what happens when migrant women reach Brazil, a supposed place of safety? Do they experience rights restitution and protection, or do they continue to be subject to everyday gendered humiliations? Building on fieldwork in Boa Vista and Manaus in 2020–2022, we explore migrant women and girls’ experiences with shelter and healthcare, two central pillars of humanitarian programmes. Contributing directly to literatures on migration management, humanitarianism and control, this article focuses on ‘the receiving end’ of securitised humanitarian practices and deploys a gender lens to reveal how securitised humanitarianism reproduces disciplinary dynamics of governance and creates gendered risks and vulnerabilities that erode migrant women and girl’s rights and agency in everyday life.

When Stars Are Scattered. By Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed.

When we hear stories about refugees, we tend to hear first about numbers. Big numbers. We hear that there are now more than 100 million forced migrants in the world. And while we have long known that there are problems with numbers (Crisp 1999; Krause 2022), we can still get lost in them. It can be especially hard for younger readers as numbers tend to obscure the actual experiences of refugees. This is also true when we think of individual situations, such as the Dadaab refugee complex in Kenya. Since its establishment in the early 1990s, Dadaab has been one of the most researched refugee situations in the world. While this work has brought us important new understandings of the politics of humanitarian practice (Hyndman 2000) and the coping strategies of refugees (Horst 2007), most of this research is not produced by people who live in Dadaab. We tend to only hear about Dadaab in fleeting moments, such as when the Government of Kenya threatens to close the camps or at times of acute need or crisis in the camps. What happens between these moments of attention? How can a younger reader begin to understand daily life for someone their own age in Dadaab?

The Effect of Structural Characteristics of Design on Social Use and Interaction in Public Spaces -The Case of the Theater Square in Algeria

This paper addressed the issue of the impact of structural characteristics such as accessibility and visibility on social use and interaction in public spaces and public squares, for the contribution of this type of behavioral and environmental research in understanding the social interaction between the user and the space to ensure the effectiveness of designs that are based on social understanding and a permanent response to the needs of users. Where the study aims to lay the foundations and principles for public Squares in Algeria. The methodology is based on analyzing the theater square in Batna-Algeria through the theory of space syntax, and conducting a monitoring and monitoring process to compare the space organization plans resulting from the Depthmap program and the Post Occupancy Evaluations resulting from the tracking of users. The results showed that: accessibility and visibility are key elements in the proposal to design this square. Human behavior in public spaces depends greatly on the structural characteristics resulting from the formation of the environment, as the results show that the use of the square depends greatly on the possibility of visual access through the connectivity and integration of the spaces of the square with its neighboring areas, and the results indicated that there is a strong correlation. The structural characteristics of the design and the user's behavior, and that, it is the reason for choosing the spaces to carry out specific humanitarian activities and practices.