国际援助：闪耀人性之光(英文)

地震给四川人民的生活带来了巨大的损失。来自五湖四海的志愿者和捐助者们奔赴灾区。帮助当地人民重建家园。     

Humanitarian Crisis as Everyday Life

Contemporary scholarship understates the resilience of everyday life in humanitarian crisis. Disaster may seem like a fleeting moment—colloquially, we say “the world stood still” or “everything changed in a blink”—but in the Buduburam Refugee Camp, a predominately Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, people experienced calamitous tragedy accumulated over years of daily activities. Though they remained politically and economically “out of place,” residents constructed buildings and other ordinary material objects to forge a new lived environment. As residents engaged with this new lived environment—from building homes to managing rainwater—they regularly participated in moral boundary work that helped establish how “good” people ought to act in inhumane circumstances. Moral boundary work did not obviate inequality or conflict, but it did help mediate between immediate bodily needs and the wider social order. More broadly, the study documents the crucial role that seemingly mundane material objects play in moral boundary work. Material objects like signs, garbage cans, and homes can operate like sociospatial props in the stories that people tell about their daily lives. These stories reinforce the moral boundaries that divide “good” and “bad” people and ultimately help make a shared moral order possible.     

Constructing Humanitarian Selves and Refugee Others

Contributing to ongoing debates about what happens when feminism is institutionalized in global governance, this article examines how gender equality is given meaning and applied in humanitarian aid to refugees, and what the implications are with regard to the production of subjectivities and their positioning in relations of power. Drawing on Foucauldian and postcolonial feminist perspectives, the analysis identifies two main representations of what it means to promote gender equality in refugee situations. Gender equality is represented as a means to aid effectiveness through the strategic mobilization of refugee women's participation, and as a project of development, involving the transformation of “traditional” or “backward” refugee cultures into modern societies. The subject positions that are produced categorically cast refugees as either passive or problematic subjects who need to be rescued, protected, assisted, activated, controlled and reformed through humanitarian interventions, while humanitarian workers are positioned as rational administrators and progressive agents of social transformation. In effect, gender equality is used to sustain power asymmetries in refugee situations and to reproduce global hierarchies.     

Report on the Workshop on Practical Protection in Humanitarian Crises

With a global crisis of approximately 15 million refugees and an estimated 20 to 25 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) in need of protection, the current protection regime is under increased scrutiny. "Practical Protection" is a fairly new concept. Those pursuing it aim to expand understanding and responsibilities for protection beyond those institutions with a specific protection mandate. "The Workshop on Practical Protection in Humanitarian Crises" was organized to bring the practical protection concept to representatives from a wide range of international agencies, governmental agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), who discussed its implications for their work in humanitarian crises.
Organizations with specific protection mandates, primarily the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), work to protect uprooted groups through legal tools and recognized principles, often in the context of assistance programmes that provide shelter, food, water, medical care, education and other forms of humanitarian assistance. They work in collaboration with NGOs and other international organizations that focus primarily on assisting forced migrants. These latter agencies have traditionally avoided overt involvement in protection activities. When UNHCR and ICRC are not present or are over-extended, gaps in the protection regime emerge. The gap is particularly evident with regard to internally displaced and other war-affected populations, but it is present in most refugee situations as well.     

Mind the Gap! UNHCR,Humanitarian Assistance and the Development Process

This article provides a historical critique of the initiatives taken by UNHCR to link its refugee and returnee assistance programs with longer‐term development efforts in low‐income countries. Such initiatives include the integrated zonal development approach of the 1960s; the refugee aid and development strategy of the 1970s and 1980s; the returnee aid and development strategy of the 1990s; and, most recently, the Brookings process. The article concludes that these initiatives have generally been flawed in their conceptualization and implementation and have consequently failed to meet their intended objectives.     

Toward a Descriptive Model of Humanitarian Assistance Coordination

This paper argues that the operating environment of humanitarian assistance is best conceived as an interorganizational social network or regime and that the problem of power and authority in such situations must be re-founded or reconceived accordingly. This contention is developed to contribute to an important ongoing dialogue among analysts concerning how humanitarian aid may most effectively be delivered in the context of a realistic appraisal of the structural and operating conditions in which it is offered. The paper first outlines the primary elements of the organizational environment in which humanitarian efforts must proceed, next suggests a way of thinking about how one might conceive of those conditions that builds on recent work, and then sketches the elements of a strategic contingency approach to the humanitarian assistance coordination dilemma. This analytical frame leads one to rethink assumptions concerning how best to conceptualize both the environment and the behavior of humanitarian organizations engaged in providing assistance in emergency situations and to suggest that theory building for this domain of study should now turn to a network-based and strategically contingent perspective for its foundation.

The Need for Military Intervention in Humanitarian Emergencies

I have been a keen student of international intervention since long before my command of the United Nations forces in Cambodia. My military career has spanned much of the Cold War years and has taken me to places like Malaysia during the period of confrontation over its formation, Vietnam, Europe at the height of the strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction, and most of Southeast Asia. I was an instructor at the British Army Staff College at the time of the establishment of UNIFIL – the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon – a serious aberration in the determinedly passive international peacekeeping approach to that time. The earlier intervention in the Congo in the 1960s seemed to have warned the UN off anything forceful in disrupted states, leaving it to former colonial powers to extract themselves from their former areas of engagement with as much saving grace as they could muster. Many of them did not do this very well.