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Introduction By its very nature – ostensibly, that of responding to natural and human-made crises – humanitarian, peacebuilding and (to a lesser extent) development work occurs in close proximity to potential danger. The degree of risk and danger to staff carrying out this kind of work in ‘the field’ has increased greatly over recent decades, due in part to the changing nature of conflict and in part to the rapidly increasing number of local and
Introduction Public health information available in humanitarian crises is, in general, inadequate and … its application is [often] secondary to reasoning and incentives of a political nature , thus contributing to the recurrent failings of humanitarian action. 1 After a decade in which the threat seemed to recede, famine recurred with a vengeance in Somalia in 2011. Between 2016 and 2020, at least
order goes much deeper than this core liberal principle about the equal worth of all human lives. Liberal space is constitutive of the international political system as a whole. Consider the second Red Cross principle, ‘neutrality’: ‘In order to continue to enjoy the confidence of all, the Movement may not take sides in hostilities or engage at any time in controversies of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature’ ( ICRC, 2016 ). This liberal space exists above and beyond political space, a space where, regardless of one
US$21.9 billion ( UNOCHA, 2018 ). None of this complexity is new. The sector has historically responded to emergencies where local conflict collides with weak social systems, high-threat pathogen outbreaks, natural hazard disasters and a shortfall in financial or moral will from the international community to act ( Development Initiatives, 2018 ; Salama et al. , 2004 ). What has changed, however, is the nature of this
Introduction Despite increasing attention to gender issues in the humanitarian sector, the notion of gender equality as a humanitarian goal remains largely rejected. Some humanitarians argue that transforming gender relations goes against the humanitarian principles (see Fal-Dutra Santos, 2019 for a critique of this position). This is only part of the argument, which also emphasises the cultural nature of gender norms and the duty to respect
journalists and opposition politicians and violent attacks against Tutsi. In January 1993, both Human Rights Watch (HRW) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) participated in a ten-member panel of international experts that investigated human rights abuses in Rwanda and published a devastating report that linked the government to all recent cases of anti-Tutsi ethnic violence and considered, given their nature, whether they might constitute genocide, though they suggested that the numbers killed might not reach the threshold to be labelled genocide
advertising as well as invented stories that masquerade as news reports. Attempting to add clarity to the debate, journalism commentator and researcher Claire Wardle (2017) suggests that we should distinguish between different types of fake news, paying attention to: 1) the nature and type of the content, 2) the motivation of the producer and 3) how it is disseminated. From this analysis, Wardle suggests there is a spectrum of fake news: at one end is satire and parody – content that has no intention to cause harm but can potentially fool
-size-fits-all interventions, humanitarian agencies should constantly change organisational form according to the nature of the emergency involved. This requires situating the design process within the lived experience of all key actors. Apart from those directly affected by the disaster, this includes the practitioners working within the system as well as those actors ancillary to it ( ibid .: 48). The aim is to identify the key ‘touch points’ that offer the least resistance to reform. To illustrate the ideal process, HPG has constructed a number of behavioural
to accepted levels of safety informed by a probabilistic analysis of risk. However, in the context of this discussion and the normal everyday vocabulary of the sector, ‘safe’ is understood to mean engineered to withstand most of the hazards that nature will throw at it, and built to an acceptable quality. It might also imply that it has been built to comply with codes, standards or guidelines. In a humanitarian response, need always outstrips limited resources. Inevitably, hard decisions must be made that hinge on a balance between quality and quantity: a few
political and historical context of the region as well as the recent epidemic response. We then examine three local debates surrounding the DRC-EB-001 trial: the fact it was a second vaccine; its selected locations; and the experimental nature of the vaccine itself. In the third section, the article examines how local debates surrounding the DRC-EB-001 trial were situated in concerns about inequality and exclusion in a tense political environment, as