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Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Singapore. In 2019, Trump and Kim met again in Hanoi, and with ROK President Moon Jae-in at the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), but these summits and meetings have not resulted in significant, concrete changes to the situation on the Korean peninsula. Moon met with Kim three times in 2018, resulting in increased inter-Korean cooperation including in the areas of sport, management of the DMZ, and transport. In 2019, Seoul channelled US$10 million in funding for humanitarian aid through UN bodies, including US$5.5 million to the World Food
Throughout the 1990s, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) was forced to face the challenges posed by the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis and a succession of major outbreaks of political violence in Rwanda and its neighbouring countries. Humanitarian workers were confronted with the execution of close to one million people, tens of thousands of casualties pouring into health centres, the flight of millions of others who had sought refuge in camps and a series of deadly epidemics. Where and in what circumstances were the MSF teams deployed? What medical and non-medical assistance were they able to deliver? Drawing on various hitherto unpublished private and public archives, this book recounts the experiences of the MSF teams working in the field. It also describes the tensions (and cooperation) between international humanitarian agencies, the crucial negotiations conducted at local, national and international level and the media campaigns. The messages communicated to the public by MSF’s teams bear witness to diverse practical, ethical and political considerations. How to react when humanitarian workers are first-hand witnesses to mass crimes? How to avoid becoming accomplices to criminal stratagems? How to deliver effective aid in situations of extreme violence?
This book is intended for humanitarian aid practitioners, students, journalists and researchers with an interest in genocide and humanitarian studies and the political sociology of international organisations.
Introduction Large-scale humanitarian emergencies are increasingly stretching the international community’s ability to meet critical humanitarian needs. This includes contexts such as Yemen, Syria, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Iraq, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Nigeria and Somalia, as well as many others. In many of these complex emergencies, humanitarian aid workers, medical workers and healthcare facilities are themselves targets of attack, which not only puts aid workers at risk, but can threaten the provision of humanitarian assistance when resources are either
gender equality. In this paper, we clarify ten common misconceptions about conflict and displacement-related sexual violence against men and boys based on existing evidence and our collective field experience in twenty-seven countries as humanitarian aid workers and academics. The ten misconceptions relate to the nature and scope of sexual violence against men and boys, its gendered impact on survivors, and the development of effective humanitarian responses to
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.
The Introduction opens with a description of the book’s intent and my position as an anthropologist examining the humanitarian field. I introduce the story of one war victim – Ismael – who presents in microcosm the unique aspects of the patients in the MSF Reconstructive Surgery Programme (RSP). I go on to explore the invisibility of the war-wounded, especially those who have never participated in combat. The Introduction continues with a discussion on the delivery of humanitarian surgery, a specific field in the larger world of humanitarian aid. I touch briefly on the history of MSF surgical programmes and capture some of the history of MSF’s surgical practices, which go back to the very origins of the organization itself. RSP is a programme that reflects the cumulative MSF experience. The Introduction concludes with an in-depth description of MSF’s RSP in Amman, Jordan. Currently, patients in the RSP, who often sustain critical injuries years before they are admitted to the hospital, have various levels of disability or have lived with significant post-surgical complications. The Introduction explores several of the aspects that make the RSP unique. Among them are surgical procedures focused on functional improvements, the months and sometimes years-long rehabilitation undergone by patients away from their home countries, the scale of the programme, and the multi-disciplinary treatment provided.
, track, quantify and monitor the physical bodies of populations affected by disaster and conflict, although these populations have little say or control over them ( Lupton, 2015 ). Humanitarian technology has become a field of considerable scholarly interest, and this raises many issues with respect to the ‘do no harm’ aspect of humanitarian aid ( Sandvik et al. , 2017 ), what it means to be neutral ( Sandvik et al. , 2014 ), the proper role and relevance
unnoticed in mainstream public discourse despite having no legal basis or strictly agreed upon definition. Supposed to allow the unobstructed deployment of humanitarian aid and/or the evacuation of civilians, humanitarian corridors have most frequently been used in contexts of armed conflicts to secure passage through disputed territory. Their existence is grounded in what constitutes a core objective of the law of war: protecting civilian populations from military operations. But the fact that they are by definition temporary and limited in geographical scope
, for the relationship between humanitarian aid workers and the populations they seek to help, and for the implementation of humanitarian organisations’ social missions. The Distinction between ‘Staff Security’ and ‘Civilian Protection’ in Policy and Practice The grey literature on civilian protection identifies threat reduction and vulnerability reduction as protection objectives ( IASC, 2016 : 3; Slim and Bonwick, 2005 : 52–3). Threat
cooperation) between them, and between some of the questions they are asking – for example, questions about the modalities of humanitarian aid; about how, and under what conditions, studies are conducted; about the roles and capacities required of people who serve as intermediaries between the investigators (analysts and practitioners) and the subjects of – or local actors in – conflicts (e.g. current members of armed groups, former combatants, citizen activists and movement spokespeople); about gathering and evaluating witness accounts; and about how difficult it is to