International Aid Workers Research Articles

Examining Qatari humanitarian diplomacy: key features, challenges and prospects

In recent years, Qatar has emerged as a key actor in humanitarian diplomacy (HD), which has received limited academic attention. This paper provides an analysis of Qatar’s engagement with HD, drawing on a literature review and extensive interviews with officials and humanitarian workers in Qatar, observations of state activities and humanitarian agencies, and personal interviews with international humanitarian aid workers. The study reveals Qatar’s unique strategy, characterised by its diplomatic stance and the integrated efforts of its governmental and non-governmental sectors, as foundational to its HD efforts. The study also reports challenges hindering those efforts, namely the impacts of the political tensions, the lack of diplomatic immunity for humanitarian workers, and a scarcity of specialised expertise in HD. These are explored in terms of their implications for the effectiveness of Qatar’s efforts, emphasising the critical need for enhanced supportive frameworks, targeted capacity-building initiatives, and well-defined protocols for HD engagement. To add to the dialogue on HD, this paper reflects on Qatar’s engagement in HD, suggesting that smaller nations can meaningfully contribute when leveraging their strengths and international relationships.

“The Brains Are Frozen”: Precarious Subjectivities in the Humanitarian Aid Sector in Jordan

Under the influence of neoliberal policies and marketisation dynamics, the humanitarian sector’s labour conditions become increasingly insecure. Based on one year of fieldwork in Amman, Jordan, and interviews with 39 aid professionals, this article explores the experiences of these insecure and precarious labour conditions of national and international aid workers in Jordan. Precarity in the humanitarian field is often discussed concerning aid recipients, such as refugees. It is, however, understudied in connection to aid professionals and those providing aid and care, and there is a wider lack of research on university‐educated professionals’ experiences of precarity. In line with feminist and decolonial scholars, I understand labour as closely interconnected with other spheres of life and look at precarity through an emotional lens. I explore aid professionals’ emotions around their work conditions to come to a deeper understanding of precarious work and the difficulties of living in precarity. By taking emotions seriously, I show that they are an important yet understudied site of analysis to unravel what generates precarity for aid workers and precarity’s effects on aid workers’ lives and work. I argue that the structural conditions of their work produce precarious subjectivities, which are expressed in feelings such as frozenness, fatigue, and unsafety.

Work Devotion as Identity Armor? How Single Professionals with Relationship Aspirations Use Career Decisions to Manage Their Identities

Although scholarship has established how people with a partner, child, or other domestic obligations account for these responsibilities when making career decisions, we lack conceptual apparatus around how career decision making is informed by personal aspirations. Following a cohort of 89 international aid workers over eight years, I draw on in-depth interview (n = 126), survey (n = 551), and job transition data (n = 228) to detail how career decision making serves as a platform for identity management for single professionals who have aspirations for a long-term intimate relationship. I introduce the possibility space, which conveys how the ability to realize relationship aspirations is constrained for work-devoted professionals, especially for straight women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer (LGBQ) people. Yet, they resist scaling back work. I detail why, presenting the three types of career decisions they made: (1) work devotion as identity armor, protecting and affirming their current aid worker identity; (2) temporary work alterations as identity diversification, carving out time to hopefully realize their desired relationship while postponing the affirmation of their aid worker identity; and (3) durable work alterations as identity restructuring, removing the aid worker identity from their identity network. This article’s model of career decision making as identity management and the broader theoretical explanation of how different behavioral practices can manage temporally distinct identities offers important contributions to scholarship on identity, the work-nonwork interface, labor market inequalities, and career decision making. Funding: This research was supported by the University of Minnesota’s Grant-in-Aid of Research, Artistry and Scholarship and a Stanford University Dissertation Support Grant.

Beyond assumptions of altruism: Examining nonprofit work with a job fit framework and response surface analysis

AbstractScholars frequently investigate how nonprofit employees, as a group, differ from public or for‐profit employees. However, there is less focus on how motivational profiles vary among nonprofit employees. Particularly as the nonprofit sector professionalizes, the reasons why people seek nonprofit employment are diversifying. Recent work highlights a more individualized understanding of employee motivation, which can lead to more nuanced and tailored human resource management techniques. I amplify this stream of scholarship, guided by a job fit framework and introducing a robust methodological approach from organizational psychology that accounts for interactions between an employee's work preferences and work experiences on outcomes of interest. With two waves of original data on international aid workers, I demonstrate that the experience of prosocial work (i.e., work that aims to help other people) is associated with greater job satisfaction for those with strong prosocial work preferences but can be associated with reduced job satisfaction for those without. These findings necessitate nuanced attention to employees' work preferences, moving beyond assumptions that prosocial work will universally motivate nonprofit employee performance.

Going local without localization: Power and humanitarian response in the Syrian war

International aid organizations and donors have committed to localize aid by empowering local actors to deliver and lead in humanitarian response. While international actors do often rely on local actors for aid delivery, their progress on shifting authority falls short. Scholars suggest that while localizing aid may be desirable, the organizational imperatives of international actors and aid’s colonial past and present make it difficult at best. Can localization efforts produce locally led humanitarian response? Adopting a power framework, we argue that localization reinforces and reproduces international power; through institutional processes, localization efforts by international actors allocate capacity to, and constitute local actors as, humanitarians that are more or less capable, funded, and involved in responding to crises in the latter’s own countries. This article interprets aid efforts during the Syria War. In this crucial case, we might expect localization to be “easy” due to the dependence of international actors on local actors because of security concerns and constraints on international access. We draw on fine-grained qualitative data collected through immersive observation and 250 interviews with Syrian and international aid workers in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, as well as descriptive analysis of quantitative data. We reveal the ways Syrians were constituted as frontline responders, recipients of funds or trainings, risk-takers, gateways to access, and tokenistic representatives of the crisis. Our research shows that while the response seemed to “go local” by relying on the labor and risk-taking of Syrians to implement relief, it did not transfer authority to Syrian actors. Findings contribute to current debates in global development and humanitarian scholarship about who holds power within the global aid architecture.

Pure to purpose pipeline: socializing purity in white women’s international aid work

ABSTRACT Purity Culture’s rhetorical positioning of those socialized as young, White women of good and innocent sexual objects created somatic experiences of traumatic shame and dissociation for those inhabiting this location. This experience is inextricably linked to the affective responses that produced compulsive international aid involvement as attempts to maintain the role of young, White womanhood within Christian Nationalism.

Producing and Embodying the Humanitarian Border: The Gendered Geopolitics of Responding to (and Preventing) Gender-Based Violence Among Burmese Displaced in Thailand

ABSTRACT Recent scholarship on forced migration, geopolitics, and the aid industry has built on William Walter’s concept of ‘humanitarian borders’, which refers to the ways in which humanitarian aid delivery becomes entangled with the enforcement of Global South-Global North borders. In this article, I apply a feminist geopolitics lens to expand on this idea, looking at humanitarian action related to the prevention of and response to gender-based violence (GBV) among Burmese who are displaced in Thailand. I ask how humanitarian borders themselves are gendered, produced through gendered violence and implicated in the ways forced migrants navigate exile. Based on ethnographic research conducted on the Thai-Burmese border over a ten-year period, this article analyzes multiple levels of discourse related to GBV intervention, including the perspectives of Global North donors, international aid workers, Thai and Burmese women’s rights advocates, and Burmese forced migrants who work on farms and in the garment industry. Following the work of feminist geographers, I offer a lens that recognises the linkages between multiple forms of violence, especially those between intimate partner violence among Burmese forced migrants in Thailand and the violence of the exploitative living and working conditions faced by Burmese forced migrants outside refugee camps . Through this lens, I show that the humanitarian border operates not only to contain forced migrant mobilities vis-à-vis the Global North, but to affix the border and its insecurities to forced migrants in ways that reinforce gendered geopolitical hierarchies.

Health trajectories of international humanitarian aid workers: growth mixture modelling findings from a prospective cohort study.

Most staff stay healthy during humanitarian work, although some worsen. Mean scores on health indicators may be masking individual participants struggling with health issues. To investigate different field assignment-related health trajectories among international humanitarian aid workers (iHAWs) and explore the mechanisms used to stay healthy. Growth mixture modelling analyses for five health indicators using pre-/post-assignment and follow-up data. Among 609 iHAWs three trajectories (profiles) were found for emotional exhaustion, work engagement, anxiety and depression. For post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, four trajectories were identified. The 'healthy/normative' trajectory had the largest sample size for all health indicators (73-86%). A stable (moderate) 'ill health' trajectory was identified for all health indicators (7-17%), except anxiety. An 'improving' trajectory was found for PTSD and anxiety symptoms (5-14%). A minority of staff (4-15%) worsened on all health indicators. Deterioration continued for PTSD, depressive symptoms and work engagement 2 months post-assignment. A strong sense of coherence was associated with higher odds of belonging to the 'healthy' trajectory. Female biological sex was associated with higher odds of belonging to the 'worsening' depression and anxiety trajectories. Extended duration of field assignment was related to higher odds of belonging to the 'worsening' depressive symptoms trajectory. Most iHAWs stayed healthy during their assignment; a stable 'ill health' trajectory was identified for most health indicators. Sense of coherence is an important mechanism for understanding the health of all iHAWs in the different health trajectories, including the 'healthy' profile. These findings give new possibilities to develop activities to prevent worsening health and help strengthen iHAWs' ability to remain healthy under stress.

How do international humanitarian aid workers stay healthy in the face of adversity?

International humanitarian aid workers (iHAWs) are motivated strongly to travel abroad to help communities affected by war, famine, disaster and disease. They expose themselves to dangers and hardships during their field assignments. Despite working under such challenging circumstances, most workers remain healthy. The objective of the present study was to unravel the mechanism that enables workers to remain healthy under the same circumstances that affect these communities. We hypothesised that the different components of the Sense of Coherence (SOC) health mechanism mediate the relationship between field stressors and post-assignment health. The stress-health model was tested among 465 international aid workers using a longitudinal pre-post assignment study design and structural equation modelling for path analyses. The (health) outcome variables were PTSD, anxiety, depression, emotional exhaustion, and work engagement. Our findings highlight the importance of being healthy before aid assignment and the negative health impact of field stressors that were not potentially traumatic. The SOC components mediated the relationship between field stress and post-assignment health, with males and females using different SOC components to alleviate stress. Males are more likely trying to understand the nature of the stressor, whereas females mobilise their resources to manage stressors. In both groups, a high level of meaningfulness of the work was an important component in maintaining health. Regarding using the SOC concept for understanding the process of maintaining health, our findings indicated that SOC is best considered context-specific and multidimensional. In addition to good pre-mission health, the SOC components help prevent field assignment-related negative health effects in iHAWs. Our findings support the idea to compose gender-balanced teams of iHAWs to maintain and promote health. The findings can be used to develop or refine health conversation tools and SOC based health interventions to promote health and wellbeing and prevent ill-health among aid workers and other stress-exposed populations.

Structural barriers and facilitators to mental health services for international aid workers.

Structural barriers and facilitators to mental health services for international aid workers.

Korean Buddhist International Aid Work: A Critical Comparison of the Join Together Society and the Global Community Association (Good Hands)

This paper critically scrutinizes the history and activities of South Korea’s two largest Buddhist international aid organizations, namely, the Join Together Society, founded in 1991 by Venerable Pomnyun, leader of Korea’s independent Jungto Society order of lay Buddhists, and the Global Community Association (Jiguchon Gongsaenghoe, Good Hands), founded by former Jogye Order president, Venerable Wolju (1935–2021). It examines the origins, organizations, and activities of both organizations, followed by a comparison of their similarities and differences, along with a discussion of their respective relationships to Korean Buddhist mainstream life and the advantages and disadvantages of each. They are significant, not only for the many benefits they have brought to their target communities abroad but also for what they represent to the Korean Buddhist community at home. As the Korean Buddhist establishment continues to grapple with a prolonged crisis of falling membership and loss of relevance within Korea’s increasingly agnostic society, the long-term sustainability of Korean Buddhist international efforts remains an open question. Nevertheless, the two organizations represent new visions for the modes of meaningful Buddhist praxis and engagement with the modern world that have a strong appeal to Korea’s younger, urbanized Buddhist laity. The further support and expansion of such activities by the Buddhist establishment might aid in reversing the current downward trends of belief.

Working as a surgeon with Doctors without Borders

Als internationale medizinische Nothilfeorganisation steht Ärzte ohne Grenzen Menschen bei, die durch bewaffnete Konflikte, Naturkatastrophen oder Epidemien in Not geraten. Ein Chirurg teilt seine persönlichen Erfahrungen im internationalen Hilfseinsatz und ermöglicht so einen Einblick in die schönen wie auch herausfordernden Seiten der Projektarbeit.

Clashes of cultures in an international aid organisation: Information cultures, languages and the use of information systems

AbstractInternational non‐governmental organisations (INGOs) bring together actors from three very different backgrounds: international aid workers, national aid workers generally from the urban middle classes and disadvantaged communities. However, the ways national aid workers negotiate their cultural encounters and use accountability tools and information systems have not been the objects of much research. In this article, we analyse how the Bangladeshi employees of an INGO with headquarters in the United Kingdom and a country branch in Bangladesh are using accountability tools and information systems developed by and for English speakers and how they are coming up with work practices that are more attuned with their cultural and linguistic preferences.

Haunted Archives: Presence and Absence in the Audio-visual Record of Conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina

This paper examines the potential consequences of the loss of raw rushes of historical events on collective memory. It examines two sets of rushes from 21 August 1993 that survived against the odds, of the arrival of the first humanitarian aid convoy in the besieged enclave of east Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina. These rushes were compared with edited accounts and examined for elements that, in the words of Dai Vaughan, could generate “meanings oblique, peripheral or even antagonistic to the text as understood.” 
 According to a well-worn maxim, “journalism is the first rough draft of history”. This is certainly true for audio-visual media: typically, archives preserve edited, “finished” films, and rushes often get lost from the record. This highlights a sometimes overlooked form of exclusion from the archive: the selection of footage in the editing room. In commercial news archives economic pressures determine which footage will be digitised, and a diminishing pool of well-known images tend to be re-used in a “feedback loop of historical footage”. 
 Examining the rushes of the aid convoy to Mostar reveals how much the news coverage is coloured by the media spectacle accompanying the convoy. The clear emphasis on the humanitarian aspects of the story downplays the political stakes of the warring parties, and incongruous jokes to the camera provide unexpected glimpses of the pressures and the privileges of the international journalists and aid workers producing the images. These are insights that could only have been gleaned from the raw rushes of the situation, and are an indication of the kind of insights into comparable events that may have been “narrativised” out of the historical record, and lost on the cutting room floor.

From sport-for-development to sports mega-events: conflict, authoritarian modernisation and statecraft in Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan has considerable energy resources and exports oil across the world. Some of the resultant wealth has been reinvested, primarily centralised in Baku and concentrated on specific projects. This has shaped ambitious nation-building efforts including staging major events. Baku hosted the 2019 men’s UEFA Europa League final and four UEFA Euro 2020 matches. This article analyses these sporting events in relation to Azerbaijan’s political system, providing a lens through which Azerbaijani statecraft and authoritarian modernisation is examined. It also explores a 2004 sport-for-development project implemented 320 kilometres from Baku. This juxtaposition and frame of reference emphasises some key issues facing Azerbaijan and contextualises the subsequent modernisation and impact of hosting events. Data are examined from interviews conducted in 2004, 2019 and 2021 comprising international aid workers, civilians, translators and event spectators. This longitudinal study investigates Azerbaijan’s political context and conflicts, sport-for-development, energy wealth, modernisation projects, sports event hosting and statecraft.

Compromising Aid to Protect International Staff: The Politics of Humanitarian Threat Perception after the Arab Uprisings

Abstract Scholars expect operational compromises by humanitarian organizations to follow attacks on aid workers. However, in response to the War in Syria, organizations compromised aid and adopted clandestine, cross-border, remote management, and conflict-actor aligned approaches, which best protected international aid workers. This was despite declining rates of attack against them, relative to their national staff counterparts. This article asks why international aid workers were withdrawn and aid was compromised in the wake of the Arab Uprisings by traditional risk-taking organizations: Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Drawing on political ethnography and interviews with aid workers, I show that shocking violent events, everyday insecurity, and changes in the nature of threat have significant effect on threat perception and explain compromises where rates of attack do not. This paper offers a picture of the micro- and field-level foundations of organizational threat perception and decisions about whose security matters.

“Saving” Muslim Women from Their Own Culture: Three Case Studies of Humanitarian Intervention

After the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the initiation of the War on Terror, the image of oppressed Muslim women has been used to justify foreign intervention into Islamic worlds. Yet this portrayal is not new. It dates back to origins of humanitarianism, its tendency to universalize its concepts and identifying women as helpless victims. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of humanitarian efforts inspired by Western principles of emancipation in comparison with indigenous relief efforts. Specifically, cases relating to Muslim women will be shown to exemplify general problems associated with humanitarian efforts on behalf of “other women.” This paper argues that Western humanitarian interventions are at risk of being ineffective acts of cultural imperialism, and that interventions by local women’s agencies, combined with international support and media coverage, yield much better results. In the end it proposes that international aid work should be grounded in the local cultures, whereas local NGOs should adopt Western modes of operating.

Mental and physical health of international humanitarian aid workers on short-term assignments: Findings from a prospective cohort study

Research findings show humanitarian work impacts one's health. We conducted a prospective observational study among 618 international humanitarian aid workers (iHAWs)’ recruited from 76 countries to investigate health changes and ill-health risk factors after mostly short-term (<1 year) medical emergency assignments. The aid workers were assigned to 27 countries. Data collected between 2017 and 2020.We also compared a gold-standard clinical interview with self-report questionnaires to assess whether self-report scores overestimate the prevalence of clinical anxiety, depression and PTSD. Analyses consisted of repeated measures ANOVAs and adjusted odds ratios, using pre-assignment (T1), post-assignment (T2) and two-month follow-up data (T3). Humanitarian workers experienced on average, 2.6 experienced and witnessed potential traumatic events, and 4.8 male and 5.6 female assignment-related stressors. Self-report health indicators demonstrated a significant increase in emotional exhaustion, loss of vitality, decreased social functioning and emotional well-being between T1 and T2, all of which improved between T2 and T3. PTSD, depression, experienced role limitations, physical functioning, pain, and general health – remained stable. Anxiety levels decreased significantly between T1 and T2. The presence of DSM-5 disorders anxiety (6.6 %), depression (1.3 %) and PTSD (0.3 %) was low compared to norm populations, except for alcohol-use disorder (13 %). None of the reported T2 risk factors was significant at T3. Compared to the clinical interview, self-report cut-off thresholds inflated the presence of a potential anxiety disorder (3×), PTSD (8×) and depression (25×). Humanitarian work is highly stressful but most iHAWs remained healthy. Looking into how iHAWs stay healthy may be a more useful way forward.

Barriers to accessing psychosocial support for humanitarian aid workers: a mixed methods inquiry.

International and national humanitarian aid workers were recruited for this study via purposive sampling techniques using social media. Eight interviews and one focus group discussion were carried out (n=13), and a survey disseminated (n=62), to garner a broad range of perspectives on barriers to aid workers seeking out and accessing psychosocial support. A thematic analysis was performed on the transcriptions of the interviews and focus group discussion. The hypothesis was that participants would describe a variety of personal, professional, and environmental obstacles, with 'tough-guy macho culture' and/or 'martyr culture' being the strongest deterrents. Fourteen barriers in total were identified: accessibility; appropriateness; attitude; availability; confidentiality and trust; duty of care; guidance; normalisation; experience; repercussions; self-awareness; self-reliance; stigma; and time. It is recommended that organisations improve the provision of quality, appropriate psychosocial support for staff, and that it is communicated regularly, and they train staff in pinpointing when others are in need of assistance.

South Sudanese Perceptions of Justice

Abstract During an outbreak of violence in July 2016, a South Sudanese journalist was killed and international aid workers were brutally raped by government soldiers at the Terrain compound in South Sudan. Following intense international pressure, 11 soldiers were found guilty of various crimes by a specially created military court martial in 2018. As the first widely reported case in which perpetrators of conflict-related sexual violence were held accountable in South Sudan, this verdict is an important milestone. However, for the other countless South Sudanese victims of rampant sexual violence, the path to justice remains uncertain. This article explores the current pursuits of accountability for sexual violence in South Sudan and why they have failed to advance justice. After considering the factors that led to the Terrain prosecution in a military court, this article explores the impact of this case on South Sudanese perceptions of justice. The trial intensified the desire of many South Sudanese for accountability and increased knowledge of conflict-related criminal prosecutions. The justice system also marginally built its capacity and independence. However, there were serious due process concerns that led many to question the impartiality and credibility of the proceedings. This article argues that this case set a precedent that shows the international community will demand accountability in the wake of attacks on international aid workers. The threat of accountability may deter perpetrators from committing violence against this group, but will not necessarily protect South Sudanese victims. Finally, the article identifies lessons learned from the Terrain case and provides recommendations on how South Sudanese and others impacted by sexual violence can benefit from accountability efforts in the future.