Aidnography

As a brand new book on The Rise and Fall of the Department for International Development hits virtual & physical bookshelves these days, my colleague Pascal Corbé of CorbeComs shares some interesting reflections about the future of the German aid structure that I am re-posting here as a guest post. Will the last OECD-DAC member lose its independent ministry for development cooperation as discussions of a merger with the Foreign Office gain momentum? Or will the ministry weather yet another storm as it may be needed as a political bargain chip after the next federal elections in 2025? Well, things can't possibly be turn as bad as under the leadership of Dirk Niebel, the only minister for development cooperation who was featured twice here on the blog in 2011 when I wrote his endorsement of an arms deal with Saudi-Arabia and the broader militaristic mindset during his tenure... The BMZ still has its official headquarters in Bonn, in the building of the former West German cha...

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 02 - Humanitarianism andcolonialism - contributed by Aoife O’Leary McNeice . From the introduction There are many moments that have been identified as the birth of modern humanitarianism: the popular anti-slavery movement of the late-eighteenth century; the foundation of the Red Cross in 1863; the emergence of professional NGOs in the twentieth century ( Barnett, 2011 : 1–5; Haskell, 1985a ; 1985b ). However, scholarship has largely moved away from traditional narratives that identify a single episode marking the birth of Western humanitarianism. Rather, Western humanitarianism is conceived as having emerged incrementally as part of modern European colonialism; the two projects were co-dependent ( Baughan and Everill, 2012 : 727; Skinner and Lester, 2012 : 732). Early-modern humanitarianism ...

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...