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. If humanitarian certainties have been upended, it is not in Sri Lanka, or even Syria or Afghanistan, but in the NGO response to the migration crisis in Greece and in the Mediterranean. For here, whether they like it or not, when they rescue people at sea who are trying to get to Europe, relief NGOs are involved not just in caritative work, whose deontology is relatively straightforward ethically; here, they are important actors in a profound political struggle, whose outcome, along with the response or non-response to climate change, is likely to
‘irreducible uncertainties’ of the situations encountered by teams on the ground. As Champy argues ( Champy, 2018: 17 ), ‘when action is required in highly singular and complex situations, common solutions that can be automatically inferred from routines, rules or scientific knowledge, might lead to mistakes and damages. Indeed, the singularity of the situation may imply that… the situation does not allow for a high degree of certainty’. In such situations, transmission of knowledge between
violence to economic prosperity, are ‘presented as unambiguous and objective’ because they ‘are grounded in the certainty of numbers’. Such a conception of numbers is encapsulated by Desrosières (2001 : 348) when he talks of ‘metrological realism’. This viewpoint holds that ‘computed moments (averages, variances, correlations) have a substance that reflects an underlying macrosocial reality, revealed by those computations’. In other words, numbers reveal something about the
, and even physical presence of the verifying actor at the site of attack. The WHO’s SSA aims to capture ‘any and all attacks’ ( 2018 : 5), but pairs their relatively inclusive approach with strict verification protocols and a certainty-level differentiation method, without reflecting on the potential consequences of this approach ( 2018 : 19). Verification also leads to less incorporation of attacks among other initiatives, as visible
extensive experience in situations of human distress such as armed conflicts, epidemics and natural disasters in lower income countries – were completely unprepared to face a crisis of this magnitude. From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the few certainties was that the risk of serious disease increased with age and comorbidities, therefore older residents in care homes would be particularly vulnerable. In these centres, many residents live together in closed spaces
and the many other push and pull factors that played a part in these demographic changes (as described above). Consequently, it is impossible to determine the extent of MSF’s direct impact on demographic trends with any degree of certainty, or how it interplayed with people’s specific circumstances. In a country where people have endured more than fifty years of large-scale internal movement, war-induced displacement, independence-induced resettlement, labour as well as
). They present this kidnapping of minors as an element of the genocide that the Russian Federation is committing against the Ukrainian nation ( VOA , 2022 ). 1 How can we make sense of the movement of Ukrainians to Russia in the context of the war? Currently it is impossible to know with any certainty which share of the Ukrainians who moved to Russia since February did so voluntarily and for what reasons. We know that the Russian occupation of Ukrainian territories has seriously endangered the
to think about whether those loans were apt. As it is not my aim to single out any particular colleague or media outlet, I will use a few of my own errors and questions by way of example. One of the certainties and obvious facts I took with me during my early investigations in the Congo was this: that there was a distinction between civilians and combatants. My reasoning went more or less as follows: ‘Once I’m there, I’ll start with an article on civilian
); the COVID-19 pandemic only underlines how humanitarians, in our certainty that we can be solutions to crises of all kinds, can exhibit an inability or indeed unwillingness to perceive our own position within matrices of colonialism, white saviourism and gendered power relations – we can literally become the problem, bringing sickness with us from abroad to areas previously not affected by it. There is a clear need for a different framing of security threats based on a more
. 10 See, for example, the report from the journalist Sir Philip Gibbs: ‘One thing I can say with certainty to dispel the doubts of many people whose sense of charity is killed by dreadful suspicion. It is absolutely certain that any money and any food sent out to Russia for famine relief will actually reach the suffering children, and not be seized by the Soviet government for the use of Red soldiers or their own officials. I saw the handling of the famine relief from port of Riga to the hunger zone away beyond the Volga’ ( 1921 : 104). Works Cited