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
This roundtable was convened on 5 July 2022 and built on five years of collaborative work in Cambodia and ongoing collaborations within the Centre de Reflexion sur l’Action et les Savoirs Humanitaires (CRASH) at Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) between Bertrand Taithe, Mickaël le Paih and Fabrice Weissman. The central question raised in this discussion relates to two profoundly intermeshed issues for humanitarian practitioners and organisations: the use of history for humanitarian organisations, and the need for them to preserve and maintain archives.
was in the ARC’s interest, even their responsibility, to make and circulate photographs of its relief activities. American entry into the War was predicated largely on humanitarian action ( Irwin, 2013 ). For an organization that began its international assistance efforts only ten years earlier, photo-essays such as this were as important to the agency as to the recipients of their aid. To frame the refugees as victims in need of assistance contributed to building the ARC’s profile as America’s foremost relief agency. Through this straightforward syntactical
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
cover for governments and institutions to co-opt and channel criticism ( de Waal, 2015 : 31–6). In humanitarian action, activism manifested in the form of the Cambodian March for Survival, in 1980, when many aid representatives organised a demonstration at the Thai-Cambodian border to allow cross-border assistance into Cambodia ( Weissman, 2011 : 179). While activism is a confrontational form of realising change, advocacy relies on building relationships
numerous changes in meaning in architectural semantics before being picked up by other fields such as biology and geography, where it was used in a more or less metaphorical sense to designate a passage, most often long and narrow, connecting two spaces. It is difficult to date the exact time when the image was applied to humanitarian action but worth highlighting that the idea to supply or evacuate a besieged city is not specific to humanitarianism. Even when such operations made it possible to save human lives, they were first implemented by States themselves in the
does not necessarily lead to improved humanitarian action, but we argue that PM analysis can help improve (a) information and early warning, (b) programme decision-making, while helping humanitarians think more carefully about (c) conflict mitigation, and (d) the current policy debates around the localisation of humanitarian action and leadership. 3. To what extent does humanitarian assistance contribute to the dynamics of PMs, and to what extent do elites in these