This ePaper explores the endeavours and motivations of the leading figures of the Japanese Red Cross Society, which forms the streams of the Red Cross Movement that get overshadowed in the ...Eurocentric narrative of its history. Using various primary sources from archives and studying the historical context of the time, the paper highlights how the main protagonists with similar backgrounds to the founders of the International Committee of the Red Cross proactively sought to establish and develop the movement both at the national and international level from 1867 to 1919. Moreover, a close examination of their backgrounds as well as their thoughts as expressed in their writings suggests that their motivations to engage in Red Cross work were multiple and in part, if not entirely, shaped by various needs to fulfil their own desire and sense of obligation. We extend our heartfelt thanks to the Vahabzadeh Foundation for financially supporting the publication of best works by young researchers of the Graduate Institute, giving a priority to those who have been awarded academic prizes for their master’s dissertations.
Since its launch in 2021, the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations (the Charter) has been signed by hundreds of humanitarian actors across the world, including local and ...national organizations, United Nations agencies, National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and large international NGOs. The Charter's development grew out of a sector-wide recognition that humanitarians have a role to play in addressing the crises of climate change and environmental degradation, and that fulfilling this role would entail changing how they work. Two years into its existence, the Charter has helped build momentum towards this change and has provided a useful measurement tool for how much remains to be done. This paper traces the origins, inspiration and process of the Charter from the perspective of the present authors, who co-led the Charter's development. The article highlights some of the challenges that we faced and how these were addressed. In taking stock of progress towards the Charter's goals, the article flags areas where further effort is needed to adequately strengthen the humanitarian response to the climate and environmental crises.
•The value of forensic humanitarian action in the identification of decedent migrants.•Challenges and opportunities in the recovery and identification of marine fatalities.•Review of mechanisms of ...marine taphonomy.•Illustration of discussed marine taphonomy through case examples.
The number of annual maritime fatalities reported in the Mediterranean has more than doubled in the last two years, a phenomenon closely linked to the increase of migrants attempting to reach Europe via the Mediterranean. The majority of victims reportedly never gets recovered, which in part relates to the fact that the mechanisms and interaction of factors affecting marine taphonomy are still largely not understood. These factors include intrinsic factors such as whether the individual was alive or dead at the time of submergence, the individual’s stature and clothing, as well as extrinsic factors such including ambient temperature, currents, water depth, salinity and oxygen levels. This paper provides a compilation of the current literature on factors influencing marine taphonomy, recovery and identification procedures for submerged remains, and discusses the implications for the retrieval and identification of maritime mass fatalities as part of the humanitarian response, specifically humanitarian forensic action, to the consequences of the current migration phenomenon.
In the face of climate change, development and humanitarian practitioners increasingly recognize the need to anticipate and manage multiple, concurrent risks. One prominent example of this increasing ...focus on anticipation is the rapid growth of Forecast-based Financing (FbF), in particular within Red Cross and Red Crescent (RCRC). To evaluate how anticipatory efforts managed multiple compounding risks during the COVID-19 pandemic, we examine how 14 RCRC Societies adapted their Early Action Protocols to COVID-19. Though many National Societies successfully adapted to the onset of the additional hazard of COVID-19, we find that multi-hazard risk management can be improved by: proactively developing guidelines that enable rapid adaptation of existing plans; more flexible funding mechanisms; surge capacity to provide additional human resources; and increasing local capacity and ownership for implementation to ensure supplies, skills, and decision-making authority are available when communication or travel is restricted. These findings align with wider recommendations for improving development, humanitarian, and climate adaptation practice towards local capacity and agency. They also add urgency to broader calls for more flexible disaster financing and more practitioner-oriented investment in climate risk and multi-hazard management.
Approximately one million refugees of the Rohingya minority population in Myanmar crossed the border to Bangladesh on 25 August 2017, seeking shelter from systematic oppression and persecution. This ...led to a dramatic expansion of the Kutupalong refugee camp within a couple of months and a decrease of vegetation in the surrounding forests. As many humanitarian organizations demand frameworks for camp monitoring and environmental impact analysis, this study suggests a workflow based on spaceborne radar imagery to measure the expansion of settlements and the decrease of forests. Eleven image pairs of Sentinel-1 and ALOS-2, as well as a digital elevation model, were used for a supervised land cover classification. These were trained on automatically-derived reference areas retrieved from multispectral images to reduce required user input and increase transferability. Results show an overall decrease of vegetation of 1500 hectares, of which 20% were used to expand the camp and 80% were deforested, which matches findings from other studies of this case. The time-series analysis reduced the impact of seasonal variations on the results, and accuracies between 88% and 95% were achieved. The most important input variables for the classification were vegetation indices based on synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscatter intensity, but topographic parameters also played a role.
Attempts to shift the ways disasters have traditionally been managed away from authoritarian, top-down approaches toward more bottom-up and inclusive processes often involve incorporating viewpoints ...from marginalised and vulnerable groups. Recently as part of this process, there have been calls for greater inclusion of Indigenous peoples in disaster management. In theory, this also suggests a shift in power structures, towards recognising Indigenous peoples as experts in disaster management. However, in popular imagination and policy Indigenous peoples often appear to be caricatured and misrepresented, for instance through tropes of Indigenous peoples as custodians of the environment or especially vulnerable to environmental change. These framings matter because they can result in disaster management policies and practices that do not capture Indigenous peoples’ complex realities. However, these framings have not been analysed in the context of disasters. In this article, we aim to better understand these framings through a critical discourse analysis of how Indigenous peoples in disasters are represented in the expert news media. We identify five discourses, including a dominant one of disasters as natural phenomena to be addressed through humanitarianism and technocratic interventions. Such discourses render Indigenous peoples helpless, depoliticize disasters and are justified by framing governments and NGOs as caring for Indigenous peoples. However, we also identify competing discourses that focus on systems of oppression and self-determination in disaster management. These discourse recognise disasters as political and include discussion of the role of colonialism in disaster creation. As care emerged as a means through which intervention was justified, we conclude by asking questions of who is cared for/about in disasters and how that care is performed.
This systematic review synthesizes the current state of literature on community-level child protection in LMICs. The aim of the review is to present available evidence and effective strategies that ...implementing agencies can use to support community-level structures, practices, resources and processes. Multiple database searches were conducted, using search terms to capture community-level approaches to child protection in LMICs. The search identified 1,549 unique published articles and 1,745 grey literature resources. After a screening process based on pre-defined inclusion and exclusion criteria, 38 published articles and 204 grey literature resources were analyzed. The review highlights (1) a practice-research gap related to community-level approaches generally and more specifically in humanitarian settings; (2) the important role of different socio-ecological levels when implementing community-level interventions; and (3) a number of recommended strategies that implementing agencies can adopt in their work, such as ensuring ownership at community level increasing the potential of sustainability of an approach; linking with existing processes and structures; being inclusive in the approach; and carefully negotiating possible tension between traditional mechanisms and rights-based frameworks. Further studies, with a focus on outcomes for children, families and communities, are needed to broaden the current evidence-base and research on the applicability and effectiveness of community-level approaches in humanitarian settings is recommended to steer implementation in the sector.
Abstract Analyses of the humanitarian principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence often focus on the principles’ meanings and/or the challenges of applying them in practice. ...This article, by contrast, steps back to address foundational but somewhat neglected questions about whether these principles can accurately be designated “the” humanitarian principles; about how they came to govern the whole humanitarian sector; about their legal character and normative content; and, more fundamentally, about whether the principles can even have objective character and content. It begins by defining “humanitarian principles” and determining whether and on what basis certain principles constitute “the” humanitarian principles. The article then traces the history of how the principles came to govern the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and diffused from there to non-governmental organizations and the United Nations system. It then analyzes the principles’ legal character and normative content for each of the above-mentioned categories of actor plus States, demonstrating that the principles do not – and, legally, cannot – have fixed legal character and normative content. While humanitarian actors share common understandings of the principles, legally the character and content of each principle flows from its source for the actor in question.
Anticipatory action (AA) is a growing area of climate and disaster risk management that emphasizes the use of climate services and risk analyses to predict where crises might strike and enable action ...to prevent or mitigate impacts before disasters occur. Based on interviews with stakeholders involved in Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) AA programs in 18 countries, we identify common benefits and challenges associated with AA programs. We find that RCRC AA programs have built capacity within National Societies, leading to more proactive operations and expedited humanitarian response. Initial investments in AA can also develop key partnerships and facilitate later scaling-up by other organizations. AA can also overcome common challenges in climate services by providing a framework and decision-making and resources for early action. Despite these benefits, AA practitioners struggle with challenges common to climate services, development, and humanitarian aid, including local project ownership, capacity and infrastructure, integration with existing systems, data availability, forecast uncertainty, and monitoring and evaluation. Given these challenges, we reflect on how AA might be able to address challenges of ownership and capacity building and what donors can do to facilitate shifts toward longer-term capacity building.
This article aims to acknowledge and articulate the notion of “humanitarian experimentation”. Whether through innovation or uncertain contexts, managing risk is a core component of the humanitarian ...initiative – but all risk is not created equal. There is a stark ethical and practical difference between managing risk and introducing it, which is mitigated in other fields through experimentation and regulation. This article identifies and historically contextualizes the concept of humanitarian experimentation, which is increasingly prescient, as a range of humanitarian subfields embark on projects of digitization and privatization. This trend is illustrated here through three contemporary examples of humanitarian innovations (biometrics, data modelling, cargo drones), with references to critical questions about adherence to the humanitarian “do no harm” imperative. This article outlines a broad taxonomy of harms, intended to serve as the starting point for a more comprehensive conversation about humanitarian action and the ethics of experimentation.
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