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.
•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.
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.
‘Rights‐based approaches’ (RBAs) have become a well‐established concept over the past two decades, informing the work of diverse actors involved in development and humanitarian aid. Faith‐based ...organisations have increasingly embraced the RBA, although not without contestation. Drawing on new qualitative data from Pakistan, this paper examines how ‘global’ RBA norms are operationalised in ‘local’ contexts characterised by great normative diversity and identifies three dominant normative frameworks used by non‐governmental organisations in the translation of RBAs: humanitarian standards; citizens' rights; and Islamic principles. It utilises a case study of RBAs in Pakistan and reveals the significance of religion and religious entities in the translation of rights. From this example, the paper makes a conceptual distinction between ‘instrumental’ and ‘substantial’ modes of engagement, a framing that allows for a more detailed analysis of how humanitarian actors deal with religion and rights than what is often found in studies of humanitarian action.
نبذة مختصرة
أصبحت “النُهج القائمة على الحقوق” مفهومًا راسخًا لتوجيه عمل الجهات الفاعلة المتنوعة في مجال التنمية والمساعدات الإنسانية منذ 1990. لقد تبنت المنظمات القائمة على العقيدة هذا المفهوم بشكل متزايد، وإن لم يكن ذلك بدون نزاع. يبحث هذا البحث في كيفية تفعيل معايير RBA “العالمية” في السياقات “المحلية” بالاعتماد على البيانات النوعية الجديدة من باكستان التي تتميز بتنوع معياري كبير وتحدد ثلاثة أطر معيارية سائدة تستخدمها المنظمات غير الحكومية في تجربة المقاربات الإقليمية: المعايير الإنسانية وحقوق المواطن والمبادئ الإسلامية. هذه الورقة تعتمد على دراسة حالة المؤسسات القائمة على الأعمال في باكستان وتكشف عن أهمية الدين و ممثلين الدين في ترجمة الحقوق. من هذا المثال, تقدم المقالة تمييزا مفاهيميا بين أنماط المشاركة الفعالة و الأساسية, وهو إطار يسمح بتحليل اكثر تفصيلا لكيفية تعامل الفاعلين الإنسانيين مع الدين والحقوق مما هو موجود غالبا في دراسات العمل الإنساني.
كلمات دليلية: حقوق الإنسان، العمل الإنساني، باكستان، الدين، النهج القائمة على الحقوق
摘要
自二十世纪九十年代以来，“基于权利的方法”（RBA）这个概念已广为人知，为不同的发展和人道主义援助参与者的工作提供信息。尽管对此仍有争议，但是越来越多以信仰为基础的组织接受了这个概念。本文利用来自巴基斯坦的最新定性数据，研究在各地情况差异巨大的情况下，RBA全球性的标准该如何运行，同时确定非政府组织在实践 RBA 时使用的三个主要规范框架：人道主义标准、公民权利，和伊斯兰原则。本文借鉴了巴基斯坦 RBA 的案例研究，揭示了宗教和宗教行动者在权利转变中的重要性。从这个例子中，本文阐述了工具性参与模式和实质性参与模式之间的概念区别，借此可以对人道主义行动者如何处理宗教和权利问题进行更详细的分析。
关键词： 人权、人道主义行动、巴基斯坦、宗教、基于权利的方法
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.
The Unitarian Service Committee was one of the most important US aid agencies involved in assisting refugees in the World War II context. In the article I analyse the origins of its action in Europe, ...focusing on a practically unknown aspect which as its intervention in favour of Spanish Republicans who had fled from Spain and the threat of Francoism in 1939. The Unitarian Service Committee (USC) began its operations in the spring of 1940 and an office of the Unitarian Service Committee would be established in Marseilles in 1941. From this office active work was focused mainly on medical help for the camp inmates in the south of France. The USC had an aid program dedicated exclusively to the Spanish refugees. This program was supported by funding from another American organization, the Joint Antifascist Refugee Committee closely linked to socialist and communist circles and whose chairman, Edward Barsky, was a former international Brigadier who had participated in the Spanish Civil War. I will analyse the links between these two organizations and their connections with international relief networks.
PDF
