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 ...

One of the most influential global development bloggers announced his retirement from blogging and aid work recently and since I was socialized to some extent in German academia I was thinking of a Festschrift -style farewell publication. Only that Duncan is not an old-school professor. And in the democratic tradition of writing things on the Internet I am not his disciple. And as far as I can see, nobody else has written a post in his memory. But you still get the idea, I guess...   Blogs are linked to people, personalities and their writing style, so the retirement of Duncan from Oxfam will be another blow to global development blogging regardless of what will happen to his blog and the Oxfam blogosphere. As I wrote on the occasion of 500 weekly curated Links I Liked  last year, blogging about development is a project riding into the digital sunset and no amount of Substacks (I really like Oliver Kim's Global Developments and Ken Opalo's An Africanist Perspective , of cou...

There is a folder with close to 1,000 Emails in my Outlook that documents the process of publishing our Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality from Silke's first idea in May 2021 to its publication in February 2024! And then there is the space in Teams with more than a dozen folders and hundreds of documents that we used to remotely edit this great volume (criticize Teams all you want, but it has proven to be a very, very useful tool to manage, well, a team across continents, time zones, tasks & a bloody pandemic...). And after all this remote, digital work it was fantastic to open a box with physical copies of the book! The 39 chapter handbook examines how legacies of colonialism, gender, class, and other markers of inequality intersect with contemporary humanitarianism at multiple levels. Authors include academics, pracademics and practitioners and examine a range of contemporary issues including the role of the media and technology, the COVID-19 pandemic, linguistic ...

As I briefly mentioned in the 500th anniversary post at the beginning of December, my weekly Links I Liked post will take a break in the new year. I will briefly discuss some of the personal, content-related and digital challenges that led me to this decision. Maintaining regular blogging during the pandemic was a small writing strategy to maintain important routines, connections and to focus on topics other than Covid-19. But like many of my readers, I am just tired right now. The developments on social media, a key resource to learn about new content, are another factor linked to this fatigue (what Cory Doctorow describes as “enshittification” ). I don’t have to discuss the state of affairs at the platform formerly known as Twitter and even though I enjoy Bluesky it’s not the same and perhaps never will be for global development and humanitarian content. At the end of the day I just want to spend less time on social media in 2024 and not feel guilty that I haven’t collected enough...