This book is based on a three-year international comparative study on poverty reduction and sustainability strategies . It provides evidence from twenty case studies around the world on the power and potential of community and higher education based scholars and activists working together in the co-creation of transformative knowledge. Opening with a theoretical overview of knowledge, democracy and action, the book is followed by analytical chapters providing lessons learned and capacity building, and on the theory and practice of community university research partnerships. It also includes lessons on models of evaluation, approaches to measuring the impact and an agenda for future research and policy recommendations. The book overviews the concept of engaged scholarship and then moves to focus on community-university research partnerships. It is based on a global empirical study of the role of community-university research partnerships within the context of poverty alleviation, the creation of sustainable societies and, broadly speaking, the Millennium Development Goals. The book frames the contribution of community-university research partnerships within a larger knowledge democracy framework, linking this practice to other spaces of knowledge democracy. These include the open access movement, new acceptance of the methods of community-based and participatory research and the call for cognitive justice or the need for epistemologies of the Global South. It takes a particular look at the variety of structures that have been created in the various universities and civil society research organizations to facilitate and enhance research partnerships.
The World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) in Istanbul in May 2016 brought the theme of innovation to the fore yet again. Innovation in a broad sense has arguably always been at the heart of any humanitarian action, at least in the basic sense of the word, as having to constantly adapt and adjust to complex and unexpected situations – to ‘innovate’, in other words. In the understanding of the WHS and within the UN system more broadly, innovation was to be strongly linked to cost effectiveness and
1 Knowledge, democracy and action: an introduction Budd L. Hall In the city where I live, Victoria, Canada, a wealthy city in a wealthy country, there are 1,500 women and men (in a population of 250,000) who do not have a place to sleep at night. In spite of the creation of a Coalition to End Homelessness, the numbers of people who suffer from poor health, violence, substance abuse as a result of poverty and homelessness continues at about the same level. In India, one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, 600 million people live without literacy
4 Moral discourse and action in relation to the corpse: integrative concepts for a criminology of mass violence Jon Shute Introduction: the moral–emotional ‘work’ of serious crime in peacetime and in conflict In stable, late-modern societies, crimes are adjudicated breaches of morality formally defined in law. They are variable in content across place and time, and do not always have a readily identifiable victim or definitions that have the informal moral support of the population; however, many of the most serious offences against the person and property
the public peace’. 36 To follow the symbiotic model noted earlier, when the synergy of witchcraft beliefs held by the elite and popular segments of society ends, the two largely go their separate ways, as the two views about what happens in Great Paxton in 1808 underscores. The assaults on Izzard as ostensive action 37 To put the Izzard case into the sort of perspective in which non-European witchcraft
The Journal of Humanitarian Affairs is an exciting, new open access journal
hosted jointly by The Humanitarian Affairs Team at Save the Children UK, and
Centre de Réflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires MSF (Paris) and the
Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute at the University of Manchester. It
will contribute to current thinking around humanitarian governance, policy and
practice with academic rigour and political courage. The journal will challenge
contributors and readers to think critically about humanitarian issues that are
often approached from reductionist assumptions about what experience and
evidence mean. It will cover contemporary, historical, methodological and
applied subject matters and will bring together studies, debates and literature
reviews. The journal will engage with these through diverse online content,
including peer reviewed articles, expert interviews, policy analyses, literature
reviews and ‘spotlight’ features.
Our rationale can be summed up as
follows: the sector is growing and is facing severe ethical and practical
challenges. The Journal of Humanitarian Affairs will provide a space for serious
and inter-disciplinary academic and practitioner exchanges on pressing issues of
international interest.
The journal aims to be a home and platform for
leading thinkers on humanitarian affairs, a place where ideas are floated,
controversies are aired and new research is published and scrutinised. Areas in
which submissions will be considered include humanitarian financing, migrations
and responses, the history of humanitarian aid, failed humanitarian
interventions, media representations of humanitarianism, the changing landscape
of humanitarianism, the response of states to foreign interventions and critical
debates on concepts such as resilience or security.
achieving humanitarian goals. However, gender-transformative humanitarian action must build on and support existing cultural values, practices and movements that challenge patriarchy. Finally, I also recognise that engaging in gender-transformative action requires humanitarian actors to challenge patriarchy within the sector itself. Due to limited space, the references cited in this text may not do justice to the richness of existing literature, especially by feminist scholars
Introduction The modern global humanitarian system takes the form it does because it is underpinned by liberal world order, the post-1945 successor to the imperial world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the global political and economic system the European empires created. Humanitarian space, as we have come to know it in the late twentieth century, is liberal space, even if many of those engaged in humanitarian action would rather not see themselves as liberals. To the extent that there is something constitutively
the matter more starkly, be allowed to continue as currently constituted) than the other elements of that system. The reason for this should be self-evident: humanitarian action is an integral part of the system; indeed, it can be argued that for at least thirty years, the actions of relief agencies, above all the international private, voluntary ones, have served as the moral warrant for liberal globalisation. Only the human rights movement has been more central in this regard. 1 To be sure, the perceived need for relief NGOs to play this