Aidnography

Writing a “popular” book about global development and humanitarian topics, a book that appeals to an interested general readership without immediately turning away experts, is rather difficult. They often meander between manifesto-style “how to save the planet” approaches, are often far more academic than the academic who wrote the text thought they would be or generalize a place, (part of) a career or a topic to the point where I get itchy in my reading chair.  Jean-Martin Bauer’s The New Breadline-Hunger and Hope in the Twenty-First Century is one of those rare books that you, the academic, should read, your students on different levels could enjoy and even family members who are still struggling to understand what your Ph.D. research was about will most likely find interesting and enlightening. Bauer approaches the topic of humanitarianism and hunger from a unique vantage point: He has been potpourri of war zones and crises, worked for the World Food Programme (WFP), the UN ag...

Every two weeks I am going to feature one of the chapters of our Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality which was published in spring 2024. This week we are taking a closer look at Chapter 01 - Introduction: humanitarianism and inequality – a re-orientation - contributed by Silke Roth, Bandana Purkayastha, and Tobias Denskus. The full chapter is available open access . From the introduction At the time of writing the introduction to this Handbook (May 2023), the war in Ukraine was still going on, the UN Human Rights Council was discussing the conflict in Sudan, while cyclone Mocha landed in Myanmar and Bangladesh affecting millions of people including refugees in the Rohingya refugee camps. Meanwhile, after short intensive media coverage, the earthquake that occurred at the Turkish-Syrian border in February 2023, one of the deadliest in the early twenty-first century costing over 50,000 lives, was hardly mentioned in international news anymore. While we were correcting the c...

Twenty years ago, Emergency Sex and Other Desperate Measures was published. The catchy title ensured that the book became one of the first modern classics of aid worker literary endeavours, mixing autobiographical anecdotes, a bit of fiction and an unfiltered view of what it is really like to be a humanitarian. Mustafa Marwan’s Guns and Almond Milk is a contemporary answer to the question of how we ended up in a hospital in Yemen’s port city of Aden with a lot less sex and a whole lot more desperate measures… But let’s start at the beginning, perhaps even a bit before… When I first saw Marwan’s book, I expected something a bit more light-hearted. After all, “almond milk” has become a trope in aid worker social media circles after someone posted a question about the availability of non-dairy drinks in Lebanon in a large and well-known global aid Facebook group. “Almond milk” turned into a meme for privileged Western expectations of life in “the field”. We are not in Solferino anymore...

NightCafe prompt "Sweden cuts development aid" While the announcements of cuts that large INGOs like International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Save The Children International (SCI) have recently made receive attention in the sector, the developments in Sweden provide a glimpse what the “future of aid” may hold for traditional Western donors and particular their civil society. I agree to a large extent with Will Worley’s assessment that International aid agencies pay the price for boom and bust and that “staff cuts and financial turbulence (…) follow years of aggressive growth (…), even as government aid budgets have fallen” but what we are seeing in Sweden right now is worrisome on a different level. Just over a year ago I wrote about The worrisome shift to the right of Nordic development cooperation and the fall-out has now become quite visible in Sweden, after initially toning down feminist foreign policy and cutting development-related academic research funding. When I ...