International Relations
In armed conflicts around the world, armed escorts are increasingly used by civilian actors in the delivery of humanitarian assistance. These escorts, at times, include peacekeepers, counter-insurgents, armed forces, armed groups or even private security companies. The use of armed actors, however, remains a critically underexplored issue. This paper will assess the theory and practice of the use of armed escorts by humanitarian actors, uncovering the legitimising discourse and the impact that armed escorts have on humanitarian principles and acceptance by local communities. It accomplishes this through a critical analysis of humanitarian guidelines and policy documents and draws from the limited research on armed escorts. The article draws from fieldwork in Sudan in 2022 to empirically show these trends in Darfur, demonstrating that the use of armed escorts by one non-governmental organisation can cause a knock-on effect to others, and that once in place, there is a lock-in effect.
Humanitarian innovation is occurring in a wide range of organisational contexts, from innovation labs and hubs, to specialised units within humanitarian organisations, to small social innovation startups and through intersectoral partnerships. Ethical considerations associated with innovation activities have been the source of increased discussion, including critiques around inclusion in the definition of problems, imposition of solutions, introduction of new risks for people in crisis situations and potential for exploitation. To promote ethical innovation, various initiatives have sought to articulate guiding values and to create resources and frameworks to integrate values in project design and implementation. A distinctive yet complementary line of ethical analysis is offered by the approach of positive organisational ethics, which considers the features of organisations that promote and sustain conditions supportive of ethical action. In this paper we examine three dimensions of an organisation’s ethical infrastructure: the resources that are established, such as policies and statements of organisational values; the practices that are enacted, such as methods of onboarding new staff; and the capacities that are fostered and accessed, including ethics knowledge and skills. Attention to these features constitutes an important means of laying the groundwork for organisational conditions that are supportive of ethical humanitarian innovation.
Internally displaced persons (IDPs) have suffered multiple disadvantages and experienced social exclusion due to involuntary movement to new communities where they struggle to find opportunities for social inclusion. This study examined the political dimensions of social inclusion which focus on engaging IDPs in decision-making on issues that concern them. The study used the democratic participatory theory as a framework for political participation through decision-making. The qualitative exploratory study used in-depth interviews to collect data from twelve IDPs, comprising five females and seven males, who were resident in Benue State, Nigeria. Findings show that government does not incorporate the decisions and choices of IDPs when designing humanitarian measures for protection and assistance; IDPs are not communicated with on issues of interest to them; and IPDs lack sustainable opportunities for interaction with host communities. The study concludes that not incorporating the decisions of IDPs in issues of interest to them creates a culture of humanitarian aid dependency. The study recommends democratising solutions by using grassroots bottom-up measures for sustainable social inclusion of IDPs where solutions emerge from IDPs who are the end beneficiaries of the interventions. A discussion of the study findings is followed by concluding recommendations.
Diverse SOGIESC issues (sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics) are seldom discussed in humanitarian work but are emerging as an important gap to fill in both knowledge and practice. This review’s objective is to provide a clearer picture of how SOGIESC issues are included in humanitarian practices. A socio-ecological approach is used to identify the different settings in which these issues are present and should be addressed by the humanitarian sector. The review is based on a search of three databases covering peer-reviewed articles and grey literature that link SOGIESC issues and populations with humanitarian work. The fifty-one documents included in this review provide insights into its three main results. (1) SOGIESC concepts must be clarified in the humanitarian sector, which has been partially aware of these concepts and related issues. Two good governance principles should be prioritised and reviewed. (2) The inclusion of SOGIESC issues lacks clear ‘Direction’ (strategic planning) for the reduction of SOGIESC-based discrimination beyond short-term disaster management. (3) Diverse SOGIESC communities lack ‘legitimacy and voice’ to address their needs and participate in emergency responses. Transformative practices are identified to palliate those gaps but, most importantly, to connect humanitarian work to diverse SOGIESC peoples.
Thanks, in part, to RAND, the Kennedy administration, Albert Wohlstetter, and advances in new weapons technologies, the ambition to achieve ‘pinpoint’ precision returned to the forefront of American warfare. From Desert Storm to Kosovo, the War on Terror to modern drone warfare, the Epilogue explains how the century-long pursuit for precision continues to impact warfare today. Yet there is a warning. As Albert Wohlstetter argued in 1988 – ‘high-tech is not an American monopoly’ – and precision technologies are now spreading around the world to a record number of hostile state and non-state actors. What can the history of precision teach us about the global proliferation of precision technologies and the future of precision threats?
Why attempt to achieve precision in warfare? The Prologue explains what precision is and why it has been ardently pursued by a select group of US military thinkers and defence intellectuals for well over a hundred years. Yet where are the gaps in this history? And what can the history of precision tell us about the rise of precision weapons and drone warfare today?
In March 2022, intercommunal fighting forced Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to suspend its activities after nearly fourteen years of operating in Agok, a small town located in the disputed Abyei Special Administrative Area (ASAA) on the border between Sudan and South Sudan. After the shock of having to close a 185-bed hospital unexpectedly came questions about the unintentional consequences of MSF’s presence. With the benefit of hindsight, the organisation deemed it important to examine the potentially destabilising influence it might have had on the local environment. This article builds on an internal capitalisation exercise conducted with the aim of documenting MSF’s experience and critically reflecting on the potential of aid being a factor in disrupting local balances, or worse, a factor in fuelling violence. By exploring the premises that MSF was an anchor factor for the population and that the economic fallouts made Agok a place worth fighting for, the author investigates the long-term, unintended impact of MSF’s presence on the local political economy of conflict, as well as the organisation’s possible share of responsibility for aggravating intercommunal grievances. Based on the observation that aid inevitably benefits some more than others, the author also asks to what extent MSF was aware of the adverse consequences of its presence and whether more awareness would have led to different operational choices and mitigating measures. This questioning does not detract in any way from the project’s achievements in terms of providing high-quality secondary healthcare in a context where there was none, in one of the poorest countries in the world.
The COVID-19 pandemic has proved to be much more than a health emergency, with serious social, political and economic consequences. The diverse challenges for people and communities, specifically in low- and middle-income and fragile contexts, have necessitated multi-sectoral responses from international humanitarian and development actors. For many international faith-inspired organisations (IFIOs), these responses included a faith dimension. Drawing on interviews with staff working in IFIOs during the pandemic, this paper will argue that the COVID-19 pandemic saw many, although not all, IFIOs engage with local faith actors and local communities of faith more quickly, and in increasingly diverse and meaningful ways, than during previous comparable public health crises. This shift in willingness to engage with faith and religion at the local level has been reflected, to some extent, by the broader humanitarian sphere. The COVID-19 pandemic therefore marks an important step towards more faith-literate humanitarian responses, with many IFIOs at the forefront of this progress.
While health misinformation is important to address in humanitarian settings, over-focusing on it can obfuscate a more holistic understanding of a community’s needs in a crisis. Through Médecins Sans Frontières’ experience of deploying a platform to tackle health misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, this field report argues that, while important, health misinformation became a diversionary topic during COVID-19, which represented a lack of trust between communities, humanitarian organisations and health institutions, rather a fundamental obstacle to effective humanitarian interventions.
From our practitioners’ viewpoint, we reflect on the deployment of the ‘MSF Listen’ platform in our programmes and how it evolved from a purely misinformation-focused digital tool to a broader workflow and approach to understanding community needs in crises through accountable management of community feedback.