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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.
Introduction Artist–academic collaborations are becoming increasingly popular in socially engaged research. Often, this comes from a drive to ‘have impact’ outside of academia, as creative pieces are often seen as more engaging and accessible for non-specialised audiences. The impact on collaborators (both on the collaborating ‘researchers’ and ‘creatives’) also comes into play here, as interdisciplinary work could be a form of re-thinking how we
( Fédération Internationale des Droits de l’Homme et al. , 1993 ). Just over a year later, of course, supporters of the Rwandan government launched a wave of violence whose status as genocide could not be disputed. In just over three months, soldiers, police, and civilian militia groups killed an estimated 80 per cent of the Tutsi then living in Rwanda. In the aftermath of this horrific violence, HRW and FIDH undertook a joint research project to explain how genocide on this magnitude could be possible just a few decades after the pledge of ‘never again’ that emerged from
interdependencies – often invisible to the reader – that influence the accounts of such conflicts. 2 Drawing on my own experience as a journalist and independent researcher who has worked regularly – though not exclusively – in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) since 2012, I considered the work of a journalist reporting on the DRC from four different perspectives based on: my experience as a journalist who wrote articles on armed conflict in
, 2015 : 399–400), laying shaky ground for how the lives of refugees and internally displaced populations (IDPs) are depicted in gender analysis. Through gender analysis, narratives about refugees and IDPs become institutionalised. Gender analysis narratives in this paper appear primarily in ‘grey’ literature originating from humanitarian actors, including research reports, assessments, baselines, evaluations and technical guidance. In this paper, ‘dominant’ narratives are the
(2016) uses memoirs to explore the ethical impulses that drive people to engage in humanitarian work and RóisÃn Read (2018) examines what humanitarian memoir can tell us about gender identity in humanitarianism. Emily Bauman analyses the growth in humanitarian memoir and argues it ‘generates an aura of authenticity much-needed by an industry reliant on public donations and on the perception of its status as a player outside the systems of state sovereignty and global capital’ ( Bauman, 2019 : 83). This small but growing body of research highlights the need to take
Introduction The labelling of a crisis makes new types of action and intervention possible. In her analysis of the West African Ebola epidemic (2014–16), Kelly (2018) describes the ‘epistemic shift’ which followed the declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), making it possible to fast-track clinical research in new ways. During the epidemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) concluded that, in a context of
is often filtered through expert and professional opinions. Historically, disaster studies have failed to ground research in local realities ( Gaillard, 2018 ; Altbach, 2004 ) and research on post-disaster recovery and resilience is usually done about people experiencing risk rather than being done by or with them ( Jigyasu, 2005 ). In addition, local actors are often stripped of their political agency and reduced to victims that are merely surviving or recovering from hazards ( Sou, 2021 ; Chandler, 2012 ; Bohle et al. , 2019). These troubling trends led a
activities to the DPRK, which has varied depending on the political climate. In recent years, the international humanitarian system has been subject to restrictions in the form of unilateral and United Nations Security Council (UNSC) sanctions. As of 2017, Americans must also apply for US government permission for DPRK travel. This paper goes beyond the policy of sanctions exemptions and asks how sanctions are affecting humanitarian work in practice. The following subsection reviews the methodology used in the research. A literature review rounds out the introduction
refugees and an internet economy characterised by informality, precarity and indecent working conditions. I have followed the evolution of digital livelihoods as a field of humanitarian and development practice through my own research and through consultancy work with international organisations operating in this field. As most major aid organisations are now innovating new approaches to digital refugee livelihoods, they all grapple with some version of the same