Humanitarian Practice Research Articles

‘The violence we live in’: reading and experiencing violence in the field

ABSTRACTAnthropological literature on ethnographic experiences of violence, like Ethnographies under Fire (Nordstrom & Robben, 1995. Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press) and Violence: Ethnographic Encounters (Ghassem-Fachandi, 2009. Violence: Ethnographic Encounters. Oxford: Berg), has mostly approached violence as either a force of destruction and rupture located at the end of politics and the social, or as a thing encountered during fieldwork that alienates the researcher from her object of study. Rarely does this fieldwork literature speak of how we can ethnographically capture violence not only as destructive, but also as a social life force (Thiranagama, 2011. In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press) that transforms and reconfigures subjectivities, suffering and place. How can ethnographies investigate the social and political possibilities that emerge from violence, while also accounting for its detrimental effects?Based on my research on the humanitarian knowledge practices of violence, trauma and the politics of suffering in Lebanon, the author explores in this article what an ethnography of living-in-violence can offer to our understanding and conceptualization of violence. The author shows the need to theorize critically the experience of living-in-violence in relation to dominant portrayals of violence as an experience of encounter. Reading violence in conflict sites is the work of experts who encounter violence ‘in the field’ (like humanitarian workers, ethnographers, psychologists and military personnel/fighters) and communities who live in violence. However, the work of reading violence in the everyday serves to delineate the conditions of possibility for liveability and precariousness. It also serves to normalize experiences of certain kinds of violence while others are produced as traumatic. Drawing from several ethnographic moments and writings on violence, the author asks in this article: How can ethnography capture the experience of living-in-violence? And what is its analytical importance? How can an ethnography of reading violence help us make sense of different experiences of violence as distinct forms of knowledge production?

Discussion Informed by Recurrent Lessons from a Systematic Review on Targeting Practices in Urban Humanitarian Crises.

Introduction:Urbanization has challenged many humanitarian practices given the complexity of cities. Urban humanitarian crises have similarly made identifying vulnerable populations difficult. As humanitarians respond to cities with chronic deficiencies in basic needs stressed by a crisis, identifying and prioritizing the most in need populations with finite resources is critical.Methods:The full systematic review applied standard systematic review methodology that was described in detail, peer-reviewed, and published before the research was conducted.Results: While the science of humanitarian practice is still developing, a systematic review of targeting vulnerable populations in urban humanitarian crises shed some light on the evidence base to guide policy and practice. This systematic review, referenced and available online, led to further findings that did not meet the pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria for evidence set out in the full review but that the authors, in their expert opinion, believe provide valuable insight nonetheless given their recurrence.Discussion:These additional findings that did not meet criteria for evidence and formal inclusion in the full manuscript, but deemed valuable by the subject expert authors, are discussed in this commentary

ПОТЕНЦИАЛ ПСИХОТЕРАПИИ КАК ГУМАНИТАРНОЙ ПРАКТИКИ: ФИЛОСОФСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ

ПОТЕНЦИАЛ ПСИХОТЕРАПИИ КАК ГУМАНИТАРНОЙ ПРАКТИКИ: ФИЛОСОФСКИЙ АНАЛИЗ

Cuban Internationalism and Contemporary Humanitarianism: History, Comparison and Perspectives

The end of the Cold War has introduced important transformations including the practice of humanitarian aid that adjusted to the new world order. The general tendencies of the ‘contemporary humanitarianism’ are well discussed in the scientific literature. Since 1959, Cuba has developed its internationalism policy and has created a post-disaster brigade relief in the late 1990s. However, the subject has been little studied. The objective of this article is to analyze the Cuban humanitarian practices, values and framework in comparison with the contemporary tendency that appears since the end of the Cold War. Based on interviews led with Cubancooperantesand a review of scientific literature, the study proposes that the Cuban post-relief internationalism is profoundly linked with the particular context in which it was created, but it is also functioning in a specific way in practice.

Implantação do programa “enfermagem na comunidade de fé”: relato de experiência

Objective: To describe the implementation process of Faith Community Nursing (FCN) program in Brazil. Data Synthesis: This is an experience report conducted in 2011 on the implementation of the “Faith Community Nursing” program in Brazil. Initially, a partnership between The Adventist University of Sao Paulo and the Church Health Center in Memphis was established. The Church Health Center curriculum was translated, revised and implemented in four modules: spirituality, holistic health, professionalism and community. Two courses were conducted. The first, in 2013, counted with the participation of 34 nurses in full-time. The second, offered in 2016, in blended form, had 20 participants. The implementation of the program has been effective as it enabled the nurses to be equipped to practice care for the whole person in a reflective way in their places of origin, whether in hospitals, clinics or in faith communities, as multipliers of a humanitarian practice that values all the dimensions of the human being. Conclusion: The program has been consolidated in Brazil and can be a bridge to better cope with the health problems encountered in communities.

Dialogue of cultures in continuous education teacher

The problem of continuing education teacher updated understanding of the need to create conditions of self-knowledge, the formation of the author's professional position. The interaction is considered as a Dialogue of Cultures participants of training courses, including the moderator and the texts «became» culture. Reveals the potential humanitarian practices aimed at identifying barriers to professional development, refinement of faculty values and meanings of their own activities and the discovery of the bases for the construction of individual development trajectory.

African expatriates and race in the anthropology of humanitarianism

Anthropological critiques of humanitarianism in Africa emphasize the workings of power, usually along lines of cultural, class, economic, and political difference. While these critiques often mention race, they engage less explicitly with structural racism and white supremacy as intimately woven into humanitarian professional practice. Such an engagement requires looking at how structures of inequality, white supremacy among them, shape the everyday practices of humanitarianism: from recruitment and hiring practices to reception and expectations by local staff. Drawing on work experience (7 months, 2003–2004) and ethnographic data from post-conflict Sierra Leone (20 months, 2005–2007) and recent in-depth interviews with former colleagues (2012), I focus on African expatriates working in African countries in which they are not ‘native’ to re-format critical analyses that have emphasized translational or intermediary roles for African elites. I argue that African expatriates navigate multiple levels and scales in their work and operate under conditions in which assessments of their expertise, mobility and professional ‘success’ are racialized. Ultimately, I suggest that expatriate Africans operate as figures that call into question the metaphors of direction and scale implied in a discussion of studying up in Africa, while they also compel anthropologists to examine how institutions embody and reproduce inequalities.

Humanitarian Demining and Sustainable Land Management in Post-Conflict Settings in Sri Lanka: Literature Review

<p>Systematic humanitarian demining carried out with care is an essential prerequisite for sustainable land management in post conflict settings. Degradation of land and pollution of water, soil and vegetation, as well as poisonous gas emissions that may even contribute to climate change, can be reduced significantly by humanitarian demining practices. Such practices simultaneously conserve natural resources and increase yields which results to sustainable land management. Mine Risk Education which is a major component of humanitarian demining, will have a lasting impact on people’s knowledge, attitudes and practices related to landmines making a positive contribution towards sustainable land management. This paper utilizes research publications from refereed journals and mine action authorities as well as ground information using the systematic literature review (SLR) method. The study investigates relations between humanitarian demining and sustainable land management in post conflict settings with a classic example from North East Sri Lanka. The practical implications for demining operators are that they can implement the strategies to improve the prevailing sustainable land management conditions of the communities in Sri Lanka and elsewhere.</p>

Assembling the Fabric of Life: When Settler Colonialism Becomes Development

This article brings attention to the political geography of settler colonialism and the ways in which the Palestinian built environment materializes in space, consolidating uneven and racialized landscapes. It argues that settler-colonial space is intimately related to the building of infrastructures structured by development and humanitarian practices. More specifically, the discussion explores how roadscapes are materially and symbolically constructed; it also examines the ways in which development, rather than constituting a tool of empowerment, becomes a mechanism to manage the short-term "humanitarian" needs of Palestinians that arise from the imperatives of settler colonialism. Problematizing road infrastructure allows us to explore the relationship between Palestinian and donor agendas, and concomitant discourses on economic development and state building; in other words, how settler infrastructures are normalized through their association with tropes of modernity, progress, humanitarianism, and development.

Smart Humanitarianism: Re-imagining Human Rights in the Age of Enterprise

A paradigmatic shift around the central role of ‘social entrepreneurs’ is captivating a broad, diverse range of social actors refashioning the institutional landscape of human rights and humanitarian practices. For this special issue dedicated to ‘Re-imagining Human Rights’, we explore some of the implications of these revolutionary changes in human rights practices, and their consequences for sociological study and political critique in the 21st century. Following a discussion of the state of the sociology of human rights practices, we describe the remaking of the human rights arena into a site of technocratic organizations with an emphasis on the ‘triple bottom line’ (financial, social and environmental sustainability). This market-led rights paradigm also promotes a new kind of empathy required for social problem-solving and humanitarian action – one less sentimental, much more technocratic and managerial. We offer some critical observations on this ‘smart humanitarianism’, which emphasizes the human-machine partnership via online technologies, apps, and expert systems management strategies; they redistribute the cognitive responsibilities of determining and delivering goods for greatest measurable impact with a quid-pro-quo of reframing inequality. We introduce the other contributing articles, signposting notable elements and the implications for wider socio-political critique, especially regarding ‘smart humanitarianism’.

Refugee Voices: Exploring the Border Zones between States and State Bureaucracies

Settled people have been forced to move and nomads have been coerced into settling for as long as there has been history. Until the emergence of the Westphalian concept of the nation (where the state corresponded to the nation, groups of people united by language and culture), movement and mobility were largely recognized and accommodated. However, most contemporary academic disciplines as well as public institutions adopt a particular sedentist perspective on the nation-state. It is commonly recognized that people are displaced and move when political states collapse; they return when political security is restored. The liminal “state” outside the defined territory of the nation-state, where the displaced are found, is regarded as a threat to the world order.1 Predominant theory has been that people must be tied to territory, and thus the durable policy solutions advanced are frequently about resettlement. Reality does not support either current forced migration theory or humanitarian aid practices, however, and an epistemological change in thinking about forced migrants is urgently required. This means looking beyond the nationstate— the purview of most academic work in this area— and beyond traditional barriers between disciplines, to give cross-disciplinary attention to the self-expressions and experiences of forced migrants. Furthermore, the forced migrant creates a dilemma in how aesthetic expression is displayed, as their forms of expression cannot be squarely identified with one state or another. The dispossessed and displaced are changed by their experiences in the grey zones between states, and their migrations cannot be neatly catalogued as belonging to one state or culture.

Do Catastrophes in Poor Countries Lead to Event-Related Policy Change?: The 2010 Earthquake in Haiti

Prompted by Birkland and Warnement’s (2014) findings that the earthquake was not a significant focusing event in Haiti, the author reassessed the issue. Using the 2010 earthquake as the starting point, a detailed content analysis of evaluation and strategy report and DRR and developmental plans to find the level of policy adopted and implemented after the earthquake. Using the criterion of event-related implementation as a proxy for event-related policy change the author judges whether and to what extent was the earthquake a focusing event. Among the findings are that not only were there event-related policy change inside and outside of Haiti. Many policy changes were significant in the way they shaped development policy, disaster risk reduction policy and practice as well as humanitarian policy and practices and the tools and methods used in planning for and responding to catastrophes. The more fundamental question is whether, once adopted and implemented, the policy changes can be sustained. Findings show significant challenges in that regard.

Punctuated Humanitarianism: Palestinian Life between the Catastrophic and the Cruddy

With a more than sixty-seven-year displacement, the Palestinian refugee case is an extreme instance of a widespread phenomenon: the need for humanitarian organizations that are oriented toward emergency to respond to circumstances that are “protracted.” Humanitarian practice does change as needs on the ground change, but long-term need and displacement poses both definitional and practical challenges for this work. The broad trajectory of Palestinian refugee experience has moved from “crisis” to chronic needs—what Elizabeth Povinelli calls “cruddy” conditions. Povinelli specifically contrasts suffering that is “catastrophic, crisis-laden, and sublime” with that which is “ordinary, chronic, and cruddy.” Palestinians share experiences of poverty and immobility with others around the world who are part of what is sometimes referred to as the “precariat.” It is this sort of suffering, which often persists below the threshold of an “event,” that Povinelli terms cruddy.

Humanitarian Dispossession: Celebrity Activism and the Fragment-Nation of the Sudan

This paper examines U.S. actor George Clooney’s activism on the Sudan to show how the intersection of human rights and humanitarian politics constructs a grand narrative of rescue and salvation that is both potentially positive and problematic. In the case of Africa in general, and the Sudan in particular, celebrity activism produces subaltern actors whose voices are submerged in the fragmented stories of suffering and salvation presented by humanitarian outsiders. I show how this master narrative overshadows the post-Cold War politics and confrontation among different national and transnational actors. To highlight this point, I demonstrate how Clooney’s activism counters the rescue vision of the Sudanese Islamist regime, with both narratives celebrating transnationality on different moral grounds. While Clooney’s activism employs a salvation narrative rooted in human rights and humanitarian practices, the Islamist state’s narrative envisions regional alliances based on pan-Islamism. The two narratives however work through the assimilation and/or exclusion of other political visions and strategies of struggle. I take Clooney’s celebrity activism as an entry point to examine these complex dynamics: to explore the historical and neoliberal contexts that produce the clashing narratives of Islamism and humanitarianism, the limited effects of humanitarian visibilities, and the counter-narratives of Sudanese activists.

Risky Business: Race, Nonequivalence and the Humanitarian Politics of Life

Analyses of humanitarian imagery generally highlight how images are used to mobilize empathy and collective action. Recent critical ethnographic accounts of humanitarianism have either disregarded or underplayed the role of race in the practice of humanitarianism, focusing on risk as crucial to a “humanitarian politics of life.” In this article I suggest that combining textual and visual analysis deepens the evidentiary base for claims linking race, risk and humanitarianism. I argue that heroism and humanitarianism are often conflated, and that this conflation relies on racialized perceptions of risk, in which blackness is a central mediator.

Objects and Spaces of Aid: An Introduction

ABSTRACTLisa Smirl (1975–2013) was a scholar of international relations and former aid worker who brought a deep understanding of the business and practice of aid alongside a rich appreciation of theories and concepts to make sense of them. Her life was ended by cancer a few years after completing her PhD and taking up a lectureship at the University of Sussex (UK). Despite the brevity of her academic career, she had acquired a burgeoning reputation amongst colleagues studying humanitarian aid, conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction. Lisa was fascinated by the social world of aid and how its objects and spaces shaped humanitarian and development practice. Many of the questions which Lisa addressed in her academic work are now the subject of lively inter-disciplinary debate across anthropology, sociology, development studies and political science. This set of papers by contributors to a workshop as part of the International Studies Association annual convention held in Toronto in March 2014 is a direct engagement with Lisa's work and constitutes a series of studies of the objects and spaces of international aid. One of the papers is a posthumously published paper of Lisa's whilst the other three papers are written by peers who worked with and knew Lisa during her career.

Humanitarianisms in context

This introduction describes the rapidly expanding history of non-state humanitarianism in terms of three themes. First, it argues that we should think about humanitarianism less in terms of ruptures or breaks, and focus more on the moments of acceleration and the continuities that shaped that narrative: how the relationships among local, national and international discourses were played out in the shift between imperial and post-colonial worlds, in the dialogue between religious and secular traditions, and in the transformative processes of decolonization, de-regulation and globalization. Second, we suggest the need to re-think the geography of non-state humanitarianism. Drawing attention to the transnational contexts and traditions in which ideas of humanitarianism have been articulated not only adds to our understanding of transnational action and the strength of global civil society beyond the West, we argue, it allows us to better appreciate the myriad languages and practices of humanitarianism employed in a global context. Finally, this introduction also re-visits the question of motivation. By looking beyond the state, we argue, we can better understand the variety of motives that shaped the act of giving: from compassion to capturing markets, the search for efficiency, and the construction of local, national and international identities.

Who are the ‘international community’? Development professionals and liminal subjectivity

ABSTRACTThis article explores international development space at the micro-level through the career stories and discursive representations of three aid workers—two nationals, one expatriate—who worked together on the same project in Tajikistan in 2008–9. Findings bear witness to the ‘liminal subjectivity’ of development where professional aid workers are, vocationally and socially, culturally and politically, neither domestic nor foreign. Aid workers’ careers demonstrate the resilience of ‘the international’ in contemporary humanitarian practice. At the same time, their biographies are not easily sutured into emergent cosmopolitanism as they remain encumbered by the boundaries of the national and international. Moreover, the article demonstrates that, while the rhetoric of international development and its putative leaders are criticized within the community itself, the international community may be formed by subordinate individuals in their liminal subjectivities.

Thinking Beyond Humanitarian Borders

The language of humanitarianism has played a central role in political and media debates about undocumented migrants/refugees crossing into Europe and North America over the last few years. This essay argues that humanitarianism at the border is not good enough, often producing more harm than good; in particular, the article discusses the limits of central principles and practices of humanitarianism, including the search for innocence, the limits of emergency, and the inadequacies of compassion. The underlying goal of the essay is to make space for new affective and political grammars in response to suffering, injustice and death.

Teaching Russian Children to be Safe When Using Social Networks

This paper is devoted to a new sphere of the Russian humanitarian knowledge and practice of ensuring the media security of children on social networks, which can be considered as the prior channel ...