Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality - Chapter 01 - Introduction: humanitarianism and inequality - a re-orientation

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 copy-edited chapter (October 2023), earthquakes hit Morocco and Afghanistan and the conflict in Israel and Palestine experienced another escalation of cruelty and humanitarian crisis. Humanitarian emergencies, whether they include violent conflicts or disasters like earthquakes or floods occur on a daily basis around the world, but whether they find media attention in the Global North, which is crucial for international humanitarian assistance, is another matter. In contrast, refugees who are fleeing from conflicts or who are displaced by disasters are regularly in the news, though the focus is primarily on issues around (il)legal border crossings and the presumed ‘burden’ on the countries and communities hosting them or the countries they might wish to settle in, rather than the plight of those fleeing disasters and conflicts. Moreover, the mainstream news in high-income countries rarely address that the vast majority of refugees and internally displaced people are hosted by neighbouring countries, often low(er) income countries.1 Instead, the portrayal of the refugee crisis fuels and reflects populism whose messages are becoming mainstreamed by many media (Mondon and Winter, 2020). Larger and smaller humanitarian crises are addressed by a wide range of humanitarian actors, which include governmental and inter-governmental, national non-governmental organisations (NGOs), international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), faith-based, and secular organisations, as well as diaspora networks and self-organised volunteers. These different actors have access to different types of resources which shape their actions as resources are both enabling and constraining (Roth and Saunders, 2024). They also have differing knowledge about crises, which has consequences for the people and communities who are served by humanitarian actors. So far, the literature on humanitarian actors has primarily focused on the United Nations and on INGOs which originated in the affluent countries of the Global North (Barnett, 2011; Krause, 2014; Salvatici, 2020; see Chapter 8 by Stroup on Humanitarian organisations in this volume).

Note on contributors
Silke Roth is professor of sociology at the University of Southampton in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology.
She is working on the intersections of political sociology and the sociology of work. The red thread that runs through her work is the question how organisations overcome and perpetuate inequality through the in- and ex-clusion of different constituencies in membership and leadership, and through their goals and objectives. She studies various forms of engagement in historical and biographical perspectives. Her latest book co-authored with Clare Saunders is Organising for Change. Social Change Makers and Social Change Organisations (Bristol University Press, 2024).

Bandana Purkayastha is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Asian & Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut.
Her research on human rights, intersectionality, migrants, violence, and peace appears in over 75 books, articles, and chapters. She has been recognised for research excellence and teaching and mentoring, including American Sociological Association’s Jessie Bernard award, ‘which recognises significant contributions to improving the lives of women’. She serves on the executive committee of International Sociological Association.

Tobias Denskus is an associate professor in development studies at Malmö University in Sweden co-directing the blended learning online MA program in Communication for Development which was established in 2000.
He has an interdisciplinary profile in peace and conflict, development and media and communication studies. His research focuses on digital development and humanitarian communication topics, and he is also interested in aid worker (auto)biographies as an emerging literary genre.