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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.
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
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
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
decreasing their financial burden ( Corno and Voena, 2016 ). As well as these drivers, existing academic and non-governmental organisation (NGO) literature outlines how child marriage may be driven by social norms – unwritten rules for expected behaviour – which are often gendered. Within social norms theory, social norms are defined as beliefs about (1) what others do (descriptive norms) and (2) the extent to which others approve of a given action (injunctive norms); failing to comply with norms may result in sanctions ( Cislaghi and Heise, 2018 ; Chung and Rimal, 2016
the UK more generally has reduced its commitment to global solidarity, as demonstrated by its budget cuts. Thus any transformative potential this theory of change might have had is bound to be diminished. The issue ends with two reviews of relevant literature focusing on the potential for solidaristic humanitarianism not least in times of evidence-based policymaking, and how this is connected to representations of suffering. In the first review article, Claire interrogates the potential
for those in charge. Finally, this topic cannot be touched upon without reminding ourselves of the elephant in the room when it comes to humanitarian data: security, ownership and sharing. These are heavy subjects, covered in depth in the literature, and yet the answer to managing all three remains slippery. International teams, working outside of their own country but to the standards of their home nation, handling patient data on the invitation of the host country in circumstances where patients
paid to the use of tracking devices in the Global South, and none at all to their use in the humanitarian context. As noted by Ruckenstein and Schüll, the health-wearables literature focuses on the Global North, where there is ‘relatively broad embrace of the Internet and self-tracking technology by citizens; a cultural model of the ideal citizen as digitally literate and self-advocating; and a robust public debate around the ethical, legal, and social implications of big
comprehensive databases for ‘grey’ literature, including evaluation reports. The available resources regarding evaluations in South Sudan suggest that only a few evaluations are publicly available. For example, one evaluation database (discussed in more detail below), which is updated to 2015, identifies only three evaluations related to South Sudan. In 2016, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) compiled an ‘Evaluation Portrait’, outlining 24 evaluations (covering 2010 to 2015), which appears to be the most extensive collection of evaluations conducted in