Aidnography

I submitted my slightly revised short review of Jason Stearns' The War That Doesn’t Say Its Name – The Unending Conflict in the Congo to Global Responsibility to Protect (GR2P) at the end of 2024. Since the review has not been published yet and the situation in Congo deteriorating as I write this, I find it important to highlight the book. Although published in 2021, it provides an important background to the complexities of the conflict and to the challenges of (liberal) peacebuilding and thereby is a very timely book to pick up! The humanitarian situation in North Kivu is dire with close to three million displaced people in the province,” the truce statement said. “The recent expansion of fighting in North Kivu has prevented humanitarian workers from reaching hundreds of thousands of IDPs in the area around Kanyabayonga and displaced more than 100,000 people from their homes," the statement added. The M23 have almost completely encircled Goma, the capital of North Kivu ...

The beautiful thing about blogging is that it remains such an evolving, flexible and reflective genre for me. Almost three weeks after my recent post on the impact of dismantling USAID -one of the most viewed posts in a very long time, I have thinking about a follow-up post. And then I read Ken Opalo's post What will become of international development after the end of the aid paradigm? with great reflections and advice on what the current crisis means for careers in global development. And then I read Kristof Titeca’s long-read Ali Kony and the twilight of the Lord’s Resistance Army on Joseph Kony’s son who deserted the infamous LRA. And then I browsed through my archive and found a post I wrote almost exactly 13 years ago, in March 2012, 5 questions for a post-Kony 2012 debate . I wrote: How can we channel the energy, ideas and good intentions of young people into sustainable change for communities at home and abroad? Both the number of viewers of the Kony 2012 documentary and...

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 10 – Diaspora assistance   – contributed by Anjana Narayan and Lise-Hélène Smith. From the introduction The role of diasporas as key humanitarian actors in their countries of origin is a burgeoning area of research among scholars and policy makers. This chapter builds on the existing body of literature to provide critical insights into the complex relationships between diaspora assistance, immigrant experiences, and notions of belonging to native homelands. We begin with a critical review of the ways diaspora humanitarianism and philanthropy has been theorised and examine key debates and discussions in the literature. A distinctive part of the diasporic humanitarianism literature focuses on Christian, Jewish, and Islamic humanitarianism. Because the existing template is based on Semitic r...

What is happening to USAID now is an unprecedented attack on global development and humanitarianism. If we zoom out a little bit it is also an almost unparalleled moment to revisit some of the great paradoxes of giving aid, of two things being true at the same time and the many shades of grey in-between. The bigger picture that is emerging, not just in the US, but across OECD donors, is that the global, post WWII development consensus is being dismantled and most of the legitimate criticism about the aid-industrial complex is replaced with vindictive, right-wing politics. I am convinced that very little good will come from this “disruption” and that more people globally will be worse off in the aftermath than benefit from short-term notions of cutting off overpaid Western consultants from the taxpayers’ purse. And yet, giving and receiving aid has always be a complicated endeavor and I am going to look at some of the paradoxes that are coming to light right now. Paradox (Merriam-Webst...

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 09 - Faith actors in humanitarianism: dynamics and inequalities - contributed by Olivia Wilkinson and Jennifer Philippa Eggert. From the introduction Wider debates on humanitarianism tend to overlook or underestimate the role of religion ( Wilkinson, 2019 ), and discussions of inequalities and humanitarian work often do not include questions of religion ( Allouche et al., 2020 ). Analyses of how religions and religious dynamics create new or shape and reinforce existing inequalities in humanitarian contexts are rare. This is the case despite the important role religions play in the everyday lives of many, if not most, people in humanitarian settings ( Hackett and Grim, 2012 ). Yet in the last 15 years or so, there has been a renewed interest in religious beliefs and practices in humanitarian sp...

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 08 - Humanitarian organisations: behemoths and butterflies - contributed by Sarah S. Stroup. From the introduction One of the fascinating and sometimes frustrating aspects of international humanitarian response is that anyone can do it. According to the Good Humanitarian Donorship Initiative, humanitarian action seeks to ‘save lives, alleviate suffering and maintain human dignity during and in the aftermath of man-made crises and natural disasters, as well as to prevent and strengthen preparedness for the occurrence of such situations’ ( GHD, no date ). This emphasis on behavior (‘humanitarian action’) highlights that the humanitarian response comes from corporations, relief, and development NGOs, Western governments, Red Cross agencies, local religious groups, and many others ( Barnett, 2011 ...

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 07 - Human rights and humanitarianism - contributed by Bandana Purkayastha. From the introduction This chapter examines the convergence and divergence of human rights and humanitarian visions and actions. Both human rights and humanitarianism emphasise the humanity of all people and broadly intend to support human beings’ ability to survive with material resources and freedoms that enable them to build lives of human dignity. Yet, the relationships between the action to sustain human rights and humanitarianism are both complementary and contradictory since safeguarding human rights has also been used as rationale to justify actions that generate significant humanitarian crises. The chapter focuses on the rhetoric and the realities, and discusses how inequalities arise and are sustained, despi...