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This chapter will outline the academic literature that has developed around the Prevent policy. The chapter argues that, for the most part, the literature has, historically, failed to go beyond the political debates and policy narratives articulated in the previous chapter . The first section will demonstrate that the literature has often presented the ‘solution’ to Prevent to be one of separating its identity and security strands. It is a literature that therefore, like the policy’s internal debates, positions the
others, rendering specific actors legitimate and others illegitimate, structuring humanitarian institution and practices. A small but relatively coherent body of literature has emerged that critically examines this phenomenon of quantitative humanitarianism. Within this nascent field, four books stand out. Peter Andreas and Kelly Greenhill (2010) provide an excellent edited volume Sex, Drugs and Body Counts that documents the politics and processes
the mediatisation of this system is fully embraced. These three articles are followed by an interview with Irina Mützelburg who discusses the politics of numbers in the current war in Ukraine, paying particular attention to the difficulties and implications of counting of refugees, evacuees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). To set up the arguments in these four pieces, this introduction draws on a rapidly growing literature on humanitarian numbers
Carver, 2022 ; Gingerich and Cohen, 2015 ). In this article, we focus instead on the ethical registers and everyday practices of humanitarianism. Based in a literature review, we explore acts of civic and socially embedded humanitarianism and identify main features of those broader humanitarian acts, particularly associated with their relationality. We aim to make visible a wider register of assistance that takes place in crises. We argue that for genuine localisation
metrics to measure civil–military engagement. Previous literature on the subject has described some of the benefits and potential risks of different types of engagement between military and humanitarian actors. Numerous case studies on engagement in specific emergency settings also exist. To date, however, quantifiable data on how civil–military engagement unfolds and which factors influence the effectiveness of coordination is lacking. This paper aims to make a contribution to addressing the gap in the data by outlining a framework of indicators that can be used to
other options for seeking the needed support. In a review of literature related to humanitarian project closure, Pal and colleagues (2019) identified ethical considerations for project closure in relation to responsible planning, collaboration, adaptability, transparency, minimising harms, sustainability and fairness. They propose that addressing the ethical dimensions of project closure is supported by the development and practice of certain ethical capacities among
This article describes and analyses the tensions linked to the flaws in the system of a randomised clinical trial conducted by Epicentre, an epidemiological research centre created by the non-governmental organisation Médecins Sans Frontières, in southern Niger. It presents an ethnography of the practice of therapeutic experimentation in the context of a clinical trial in which we observe the meticulousness of a set of monitored practices, framed by a bureaucracy and a hierarchy specific to the medical profession, intended to reduce bias as much as possible in order to produce reliable data. Based on an ethnographic survey with the combined use of participant observations (interviews as part of the real-time follow-up of this clinical trial), this article is part of the literature of Science and Technology Studies (STS), which consists in describing the science in the making (Callon, 1986, 2003; Latour and Woolgar, 2006; Pestre, 2010). It shows the difficulties of a trial that has not taken into account the local contexts of its implementation, the ‘real life’ and its unexpected effects.
local actors and communities, a strong ethical aspect ties this issue together. The responsibility of humanitarian organisations to evaluate the impact of their presence, be it through the advent of new technologies, different forms of local engagement, or indeed the reflecting on their impact long after departure, remains ever pressing. Darryl Stellmach, Margaux Pinaud, Margot Tudor and Larissa Fast contribute the special section’s first paper, a review of the literature
questions. How does the policy and practice of ‘civilian protection’ differ from that of ‘staff security’? Why do they differ in this way? What are the consequences of this distinction? In addressing these questions, I draw on and contribute to a range of literature, not only on staff security and civilian protection but also on the nature and evolution of the humanitarian project more broadly. The literature outlined above on best practices and institutional
While issues of ‘gender’, notably ‘gender programming’ and ‘gender mainstreaming’ have been prominent in the humanitarian sector for some time, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the ways in which the sector itself is gendered. Gender is often seen as an operational problem and much of the humanitarian literature which deals with this is, thus, problem-solving in nature. Critical approaches which interrogate and question the ways in which gendered logics structure the