Yet, refugees and relief agencies alike often underestimate or feel too overworked to incorporate the importance of cultural factors in assistance programmes. Potential cultural conflicts between refugee communities, host communities and relief agencies are of course important. Less often recognised,…
This matters because of the crucial role that music-making plays in human life, such as the way it brings people together in special relationships, its capacity for emotional expression, its importance in enculturation and its role in the articulation of…
Although the displaced populations concerned may be in dire need of assistance and protection, and could benefit immeasurably from outside support, few or no steps are taken, or strategies developed, to gain access to them. Whereas conflict is the inhibiting…
Humanitarian crises are increasing in number, duration and their impact on civil society. In the first half of the 1990s, 70 states were involved in 93 wars. More than half of these conflicts lasted over five years, forty percent lasted…
There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, there is a perception of greater insecurity with more personnel being injured or killed. Although trends cannot be accurately assessed as most agencies do not keep proper records, it is the…
I have lived overseas for six years now, including stints in Uganda, Serbia, Bosnia and now Liberia. I have thought of security in different terms in each of these countries. In Uganda when there was a barrage of home robberies…
The conflict environment too has changed considerably. For example, the chain of command among combatants has weakened to the point where it is often difficult to distinguish between the armed forces and gangs of bandits. All these factors combined make…
Peace Brigades International (PBI) is an international NGO, with headquarters in London and national groups in 12 countries, which maintains teams of international observers in conflict areas where a request for international human rights protection has been made by the…
If one were to randomly select a hundred people from any disaster situation or emergency environment, the demographic composition of this group would reveal a wide range of different people from different backgrounds. The attitudes and actions of each in…
There appear to be four distinct categories of urban refugee: (1) those few who are officially defined as refugees and have permission to reside in cities; (2) those officially defined as refugees but lacking legal rights to urban residence; (3)…