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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.
essential role. In one MSF project in Masisi, for instance, the promo santé team travelled to rural areas to raise awareness ( sensibiliser ) about MSF’s medical services, and to communicate MSF’s values, using ‘strategies’, such as theatre or workshops. One Congolese health promoter, Prudence, described the team as ‘intermediaries’ who ‘help pass MSF’s message’ and prevent ‘misperceptions’ to help ‘security’. In Prudence’s words, she learnt to ‘speak humanitarianism’ and translate it to others. Congolese staff also help interpret or ‘read’ ( Pottier, 2006 ) the
on moral intent to a newly ‘scientific’ humanitarianism. It also saw those in Britain who protested the rights and duties of humanity yoke their own emancipatory, liberationist and democratic struggles to an image of the downtrodden but fiercely independent Boers. This was no more apparent than in the articulation of a radical feminine critique which saw concern for suffering humanity
secure costumers’ loyalties ( Richey and Ponte, 2011 ; Tornhill, 2019 ). Female celebrities have also sought to use their visibility and fame to address the specific needs of women and girls in the global South and conflict zones, often locating their activism within notions of maternal care and cosmopolitanism ( Bergman Rosamond, 2016 , 2020a , 2020b ). Our focus on corporate and celebrity humanitarianism is thus intended to bridge and speak to strands of feminist
about: her ship, the international law of the sea, Europeans’ moral responsibilities, and conditions faced by migrants in Libya. At the same time, she convincingly claimed that she preferred her actions to do the talking for her. The role of Rackete has also been important in that it deflected emotions away from the migrants rescued by the NGOs – and thus away from an asymmetrical extension of compassion – towards the rescuers. The deflection of emotions away from the migrants may also have helped to subvert humanitarianism’s tendencies to perpetuate ‘the neo
. The relationship between data collection on attacks and advocacy is hence anything but straightforward, and moderated by a number of concerns. Practically, it limits access to the perspectives of healthcare providers who are angry, political and unwilling to compromise their perspectives to the measured lingo associated with humanitarianism. When some healthcare workers referred to a ‘genocide’ in their statements on Aleppo, their perspective was
In this interview, Celso Amorim, former Brazilian foreign minister, discusses changes in global governance and their likely impact on international cooperation. He critically reflects on his experiences in positioning Brazil on the world stage and democratising human rights. And he considers whether the influence of Brazil and other Southern states is likely to continue expanding.
giving voice to affected populations in the form of testimonies is a widespread phenomenon in the humanitarian sphere. The article concludes that the prism of solidarity can help reinvigorate the concept of témoignage, helping reconcile reason with emotion, combining practices of advocacy with those of activism, in turn creating the foundations of a more solidarist humanitarianism. Rise of a Humanitarian témoin Témoignage has been woven into the fabric of
quantitative data are more highly valued than other approaches or knowledges’ ( Read et al. , 2016 : 7). At a meta level the ethos of humanitarianism innovation itself is suspect. The start-up mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ (the original motto of Facebook) is the opposite of what we want to achieve, since breaking things is how humanitarian crises are created, not how they are resolved – and the ethics behind such a motto are questionable ( Sandvik et al. , 2017 ). Yet there
community. They are all being developed in established medical settings, so we should just draw on these technologies. It is the application and to know that you can use the technology in a humanitarian setting that is the problem; it’s conceptual. I know professionalising the humanitarian sector is again another issue that poses problems for some people about what is meant by that. Well, I would like to think that you could combine professionalism and humanitarianism. There