Several of the preceding articles reflect optimism about humanitarian reform and cite successes of the cluster approach. However, many within the humanitarian community – practitioners, donors and analysts – harbour doubts, often not publicly aired, which they shared with FMR…
Fundamental humanitarian values are shared by all cultures. Not so, however, the baggage, the cultural differences and the power relations that come with the Northern-dominated humanitarian relationship. The humanitarian enterprise, which spends on average some US$10bn per year, remains a…
Every hour, around fifty to one hundred Iraqis are being forced to leave their homes. UNHCR believes that some 4.5 million Iraqis – one in six of the population – have now left their homes, up to half a million…
Escaping death threats, kidnappings, torture and military attacks, thousands of Iraqis have settled in the Cairo suburbs, Alexandria and smaller governorates. The handful of Iraqi refugees that had been arriving in Egypt since 2001 quickly turned to a flood following…
Essential to effective planning in an emergency is knowing the scope of the disaster, the number of civilians who died, and from what cause. Yet in the Darfur emergency, it has proved particularly difficult to affirm with any certainty the…
CODHES and the Episcopal Conference of Colombia calculate that over 3.8 million people have been displaced in the last 20 years. Accurate figures are difficult to come by as official records suffer from gross underreporting. Studies indicate levels of underreporting…
Bhutanese Hindus of Nepalese origin – an estimated one sixth of the population of Bhutan – were arbitrarily stripped of their nationality in the early 1990s and either were forcibly expelled from the tiny Himalayan kingdom or fled in order…
Alfred is a 16-year-old unaccompanied asylum seeker from Kosovo. Frightened and confused, he looks even younger. He has been detained at the immigration detention centre in Sofia since May 2007, held under the same regime as adults. No officials from…
In 2002 the humanitarian community was shaken out of a complacent acceptance that international aid ‘does good’ into a recognition that it can also ‘do harm’. The West Africa sex-for-aid scandal exposed an entrenched pattern of sexual exploitation of refugee…
‘Protection through presence’ has become a popular term to describe a situation whereby an international humanitarian presence provides humanitarian assistance and possibly deters abuses of human rights. However, what does it mean in practice to provide protection in conflict-related displacement…