Humanitarian aid workers increasingly remain present in contexts of violence and are injured, kidnapped, and killed as a result. Since 9/11 and in response to these dangers, aid organizations have ...fortified themselves to shield their staff and programs from outside threats. InAid in Danger, Larissa Fast critically examines the causes of violence against aid workers and the consequences of the approaches aid agencies use to protect themselves from attack.Based on more than a decade of research,Aid in Dangerexplores the assumptions underpinning existing explanations of and responses to violence against aid workers. According to Fast, most explanations of attacks locate the causes externally and maintain an image of aid workers as an exceptional category of civilians. The resulting approaches to security rely on separation and fortification and alienate aid workers from those in need, representing both a symptom and a cause of crisis in the humanitarian system. Missing from most analyses are the internal vulnerabilities, exemplified in the everyday decisions and ordinary human frailties and organizational mistakes that sometimes contribute to the conditions leading to violence. This oversight contributes to the normalization of danger in aid work and undermines the humanitarian ethos. As an alternative, Fast proposes a relational framework that captures both external threats and internal vulnerabilities. By uncovering overlooked causes of violence,Aid in Dangeroffers a unique perspective on the challenges of providing aid in perilous settings and on the prospects of reforming the system in service of core humanitarian values.
The brutal murder of 17 national staff members of Action Contre le Faim (ACF) in Sri Lanka in August 2006 and ambushes, kidnappings, and murders of aid workers elsewhere have captured headlines. This ...article reviews the prevailing explanations, assumptions, and research on why humanitarian actors experience security threats. The scholarly literature on humanitarian action is fecund and abundant, yet no comparative review of the research on humanitarian security and scholarly sources on humanitarian action exists to date. The central argument here is twofold. First, an epistemic gap exists between one stream that focuses primarily on documenting violence against aid workers — a proximate cause approach — while a second literature proposes explanations, or deep causes, often without corresponding empirical evidence. Moreover, the deep cause literature emphasizes external, changing global conditions to the neglect of other possible micro and internal explanations. Both of these have negative implications for our understanding of and therefore strategies to address security threats against aid workers.
The scale of attacks on healthcare has become more visible and its impact greater in recent armed conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar. In these conflicts, combatants systematically target health ...facilities and ambulances. We need to ensure that attacks on healthcare do not become the new norm amongst governmental troops and non-State armed groups. There is limited evidence about why and how attacks on healthcare have become "normal" practice amongst many combatants, despite the likely tactical and strategic costs to themselves. We are convinced that the problem now needs to be tackled like any other public health issue by assessing: the scale of the problem; who is the most at risk; identifying risk factors; developing new interventions to prevent the risks or address the issue; and evaluating the effectiveness of these interventions.
Attacks on health care represent an area of growing international concern. Publicly available data are important in documenting attacks, and are often the only easily accessible data source. Data ...collection processes about attacks on health and their implications have received little attention, despite the fact that datasets and their collection processes may result in differing numbers. Comparing two separate datasets compiled using publicly-available data revealed minimal overlap. This article aims to explain the reasons for the lack of overlap, to better understand the gaps and their implications.
We compared the data collection processes for datasets comprised of publicly-reported attacks on health care from the World Health Organization (WHO) and Insecurity Insight's Security in Numbers Database (SiND). We compared each individual event to compile a comparable dataset and identify unique and matched events in order to determine the overlap between them. We report descriptive statistics for this comparison.
We identified a common dataset of 287 events from 2017, of which only 33 appeared in both datasets, resulting in a mere 12.9% (n = 254) overlap. Events affecting personnel and facilities appeared most often in both, and 22 of 31 countries lacked any overlap between datasets.
We conclude that the minimal overlap suggests significant underreporting of attacks on health care, and furthermore, that dataset definitions and parameters affect data collection. Source variation appears to best explain the discrepancies and closer comparison of the collection processes reveal weaknesses of both automated and manual data collection that rely on hidden curation processes. To generate more accurate datasets compiled from public sources requires systematic work to translate definitions into effective online search mechanisms to better capture the full range of events, and to increase the diversity of languages and local sources to better capture events across geographies.
Across the humanitarian sector, “data” permeate and inform responses to violence, disaster, and health-related crises. Delivering health care in humanitarian emergencies or conflict contexts requires ...many types of data: numbers and narratives about patients, staff, disease, treatment, and services. Multiple demands drive data collection at various levels, too often resulting in a mismatch between the tenets of data minimization (collect only what you need) and usage (use all you collect). Donors mandate specific data collection via both official reporting and ad hoc, informal requests, and humanitarians share data with other humanitarians and with donors. In this essay, I examine the specific issue of sharing data between and among humanitarians and donor governments. I pay particular attention to governance and the often-overlooked relational dimension of data, their implications for trust, as well as the ethical questions that arise in light of existing debates about localization and decolonizing the humanitarian sector.
Attacks on health care in armed conflict, including those on health workers, facilities, patients and transports, represent serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. ...Information about these incidents and their characteristics are available in myriad forms: as published research or commentary, investigative reports, and within online data collection initiatives. We review the research on attacks on health to understand what data they rely on, what subjects they cover and what gaps exist in order to develop a research agenda going forward.
This study utilizes a systematic review of peer-reviewed to identify and understand relevant data about attacks on health in situations of conflict. We identified 1479 papers published before January 1, 2020 using systematic and hand-searching and chose 45 articles for review that matched our inclusion criteria. We extracted data on geographical and conflict foci, methodology, objectives and major themes. Among the included articles, 26 focused on assessment of evidence of attacks, 15 on analyzing their impacts, three on the legal and human rights principles and one on the methods of documentation. We analyzed article data to answer questions about where and when attacks occur and are investigated, what types of attacks occur, who is perpetrating them, and how and why they are studied. We synthesized cross-cutting themes on the impacts of these attacks, mitigation efforts, and gaps in existing data.
Recognizing limitations in the review, we find there have been comparatively few studies over the past four decades but the literature is growing. To deepen the discussions of the scope of attacks and to enable cross-context comparisons, documentation of attacks on health must be enhanced to make the data more consistent, more thorough, more accessible, include diverse perspectives, and clarify taxonomy. As the research on attacks on health expands, practical questions on how the data is utilized for advocacy, protection and accountability must be prioritized.
In violent contexts, intervenors face dangers and are sometimes targets of violence themselves. Data and discussion about these risks and strategies to address them are missing from the peacebuilding ...literature. This article begins to address this gap. I argue that existing conflict analysis models provide a foundation for risk analysis, but they do not recognize the interplay between an organization's policies and intervention approaches and its security. I review two generations of conflict analysis frameworks and then present an approach that identifies various dimensions and types of risk and vulnerability for third-party
The emergence of 'big data' and calls for 'evidence-based decision-making' to increase the effectiveness of peacekeeping, humanitarian, and development programming have resulted in an ...often-unadulterated embrace of the promise of data as a solution to a diverse set of problems facing these sectors. At the same time, however, the increasing and widespread collection of data - by researchers, policymakers, and operational actors - directly contrasts with the sense that data are often collected yet not used. Taking a step back, this article examines the epistemologies of data collection and use from the perspectives of the scholar/researcher, and the practitioner/operational actor to illustrate how these perspectives elicit a series of data divergences. I argue that the collection and use of data replicate and are poised to extend the theory-practice divide that exists between researchers who study violence - those working 'on' conflict - and the peacekeepers, peacebuilders, and aid workers who work 'in' the midst of it. Differing conceptions of the purpose and use, sources and characteristics, and time frames of data reflect role-based positionalities that shape practices of collection, affect their interoperability, and limit their possible use, even as combining these types of data could also address their inherent limitations.
This paper documents current understanding of acceptance as a security management approach and explores issues and challenges non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) confront when implementing an ...acceptance approach to security management. It argues that the failure of organisations to systematise and clearly articulate acceptance as a distinct security management approach and a lack of organisational policies and procedures concerning acceptance hinder its efficacy as a security management approach. The paper identifies key and cross‐cutting components of acceptance that are critical to its effective implementation in order to advance a comprehensive and systematic concept of acceptance. The key components of acceptance illustrate how organisational and staff functions affect positively or negatively an organisation's acceptance, and include: an organisation's principles and mission, communications, negotiation, programming, relationships and networks, stakeholder and context analysis, staffing, and image. The paper contends that acceptance is linked not only to good programming, but also to overall organisational management and structures.
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