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previously in the area I was intervening, to compare the scale of the disasters, etc. I managed to retrieve few documents from previous expatriates, whom I contacted by mail through my personal network. But it is primarily thanks to key Malawian staff, who had kept operational documents on their personal hard drives and who remembered the mission, that I managed to reconstitute a little of the history of previous interventions. Institutional memory is fleeting in MSF. There was no policy on archiving
outbreak in refugee and displacement settings. COVID-19 has illustrated the risk posed by pandemics in close-confine settings, but decades of analysis and introspection have mainly identified, rather than addressed, the racial and power hierarchies in aid work. If addressing plague requires trust and cooperation, experiences with Ebola response demonstrates that this is in short supply in areas with generational memories of colonial medicine and exploitations. Questions of trust and
aftermath of the events in Biafra – in particular, the emergence of different types of humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and use of the word ‘genocide’ – and memory of the Holocaust – to internationalise a cause and mobilise against extreme acts of violence. Hakim Khaldi, Abdulkarim Ekzayez and Ammar Sabouni were all aid workers during the Syrian conflict and all analysed the situations they observed in the field. Khaldi, as a member of an international humanitarian organisation, tells of the
actors to ‘do no harm’ as they prevent, respond to and ease suffering in times of crisis, taking a moment to reflect on various aspects of that response and to consider the humanity within humanitarian action can only be a positive step. Put simply, there is great value in asking what happened? How can we translate the considerable knowledge that has been accumulated in the humanitarian sector (from institutional memory to experiential learning) into informed decision
not need a camera to etch realistic depictions of brutality in The Disasters of War . Completed between 1810 and 1820, they were published in 1863, a year after Henry Dunant’s impassioned plea for the humanitarian reform of war-making in A Memory of Solferino . Goya’s images of suffering and atrocity, as Sharon Sliwinski aptly puts it, were ‘informal training for the spectator of human rights’ (2011:12). Even if the visual culture of humanitarianism precedes the birth of photography, it is
. In limiting the application of humanitarian law, the use of corridors also further enables political instrumentalisation and manipulation of humanitarian access by armed actors on all sides. In this, the author provides a useful, historically grounded analysis of the risks of mobilising this language and the challenges to humanitarianism presented by its increasingly common – and uncritical – use. In the interview with Tony Redmond and Gareth Owen, Roísín Read leads us through an exploration of the role of history and memory in shaping communities of practice
approaches for crisis translation include technological developments like translation memory, glossary apps and MT engines ( O’Brien, 2019 ). 8 A translation memory is specialist software that allows a translator to reuse previous translations easily and speedily: as the translator types, the software proposes translations previously stored in its database. These technologies are standard in commercial translation settings and aim to increase translation quality while reducing time and costs
. Taithe , B. and Borton , J. ( 2016 ), ‘ History, Memory, and “Lessons Learnt” for Humanitarian Practitioners ’, European Review of History: Revue européene d’histoire , 23 : 1–2 , 210 – 24 . Wylie , N. ( 2002 ), ‘ Review Article: The Sound of
forgotten to institutional memory, remain under-represented in subsequent Hine scholarship, and were essentially ‘lost’ in photographic archives. 2 I regard the lack of circulation as the result of a complex set of historical contingencies, competing ideologies, and agendas, that would ultimately see refugees visually displaced by domestic interests that included a redirection of focus onto local American social welfare and humanitarian issues. To begin, I present the ARC’s 1918 wartime use of Hine’s photographs in The Red Cross Magazine to explore the way refugees
agreement regarding the governance of Syrian refugees in Lebanon. This was reflected in the Government of Lebanon’s (GoL) policy that demonstrates lack of interest in meeting the minimum standards for the treatment of refugees ( UNHCR, 2010 ). The GoL justifies the ‘disinterest-policy’ by referencing the repercussions of the mass influx on the country’s weak economy and its dilapidated infrastructure, on bitter memories associated to the Palestinian refugee