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Like Jason and his Argonauts, humanitarians often seem to be looking for the Golden Fleece. This book analyzes humanitarian action over the past century and a half, with a view to understanding how humanitarian endeavors seem to have veered from the values of a past golden age of independence, impartiality and neutrality. As the contributors to this collection show, although humanitarian thinking and practice have evolved significantly over the past 150 years, this golden age is as imaginary as a Greek myth. The problems faced by the humanitarian enterprise today are not new but the appearance of humanitarianism in crisis may simply be owing to an increase in the number of worldwide crises, ...
*Uses Afghanistan as a case-study that can be applied internationally *Contributors have direct political and human rights experience in the field The prevailing wisdom about post-conflict reconstruction is centered on the notion of nation-building. In the globalized post-September 11th world, can military might and technological solutions foster stability by enforcing democracy from the outside? Written by key practitioners and analysts involved in the Afghan crisis, Nation-Building Unraveled? explains how emerging international ordering practices affect the role and policy of international actors, such as United Nations agencies and international NGOs, their interaction with national authorities and local communities, and their ability to generate just and social outcomes.
Humanitarianism: Keywords is a comprehensive dictionary designed as a compass for navigating the conceptual universe of humanitarianism. It is an intuitive toolkit to map contemporary humanitarianism and to explore its current and future articulations. The dictionary serves a broad readership of practitioners, students, and researchers by providing informed access to the extensive humanitarian vocabulary.
Coordination between different United Nations (UN) entities has become an issue of increasing concern for scholars and practitioners. With the UN taking on ever more ambitious roles in countries emerging from conflict, no single unit can master the task of post-conflict reconstruction alone. However, efforts at reorganizing the way the UN works in peacebuilding have not yielded the desired result of ensuring a more effective UN presence. To offer fresh inputs for the debate, Organizing Peacebuilding looks at coordination from a theoretical perspective. It develops a framework for interorganizational coordination and applies it to the UN and to two selected case examples, the UN missions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. The research suggests that in order to improve coordination, the UN should acknowledge its network character and cultivate those social and structural control mechanisms which facilitate coordination in networks.
Humanitarians are required to be impartial, independent, professionally competent and focused only on preventing and alleviating human suffering. It can be hard living up to these principles when others do not share them, while persuading political and military authorities and non-state actors to let an agency assist on the ground requires savvy ethical skills. Getting first to a conflict or natural catastrophe is only the beginning, as aid workers are usually and immediately presented with practical and moral questions about what to do next. For example, when does working closely with a warring party or an immoral regime move from practical cooperation to complicity in human rights violations? Should one operate in camps for displaced people and refugees if they are effectively places of internment? Do humanitarian agencies inadvertently encourage ethnic cleansing by always being ready to 'mop-up' the consequences of scorched earth warfare? This book has been written to help humanitarians assess and respond to these and other ethical dilemmas.
While humanitarianism is unquestionably a fast-growing subject of practitioner and scholarly engagement, much discussion about it is predicated on a dangerous dichotomy between 'aid givers' and 'relief takers' that largely misrepresents the negotiated nature of the humanitarian enterprise. To highlight the tension between these relationships, this book focuses on the 'humanitarian spaces' and the dynamics of 'humanitarian diplomacy' (both 'local' and 'global') that sustain them. It gathers key voices to provide a critical analysis of international theory, geopolitics and dilemmas underpinning the negotiation of relief. Offering up-to-date examples from cases such as Kosovo and the Tsunami, o...
In this hugely influential book, originally published in 2001 but just as - if not more - relevant today, Mark Duffield shows how war has become an integral component of development discourse. Aid agencies have become increasingly involved in humanitarian assistance, conflict resolution and the social reconstruction of war-torn societies. Duffield explores the consequences of this growing merger of development and security, unravelling the nature of the new wars and the response of the international community, in particular the new systems of global governance that are emerging as a result. An essential work for anyone studying, interested in, or working in development or international security.
This edited volume by Karen Guttieri and Jessica Piombo explores various aspects of the newly emerging range of interim regimes, focusing on issues of legitimacy, conflict management, and the increasing participation of the international community in transitions from war to peace. Through a set of theoretical and case-study chapters, they and the volume s contributing authors ask and answer key questions: What sorts of interim governments are in use around the world today, and how do they affect the quality of regime that results once the interim period has ended? How does international involvement affect the balance of power between domestic elites? How does the type of interim regime affect the nature of the post-transition government? Is democracy always the outcome?Timely, insightful, and compelling, "Interim Governments" provides important insights in a world where terms such as regime change and nation building have become common currency and will be a valuable tool for practitioners and academics alike. "
This book explores the contradictions that emerge in international statebuilding efforts in war-torn societies. Since the end of the Cold War, more than 20 major peace operations have been deployed to countries emerging from internal conflicts. This book argues that international efforts to construct effective, legitimate governmental structures in these countries are necessary but fraught with contradictions and vexing dilemmas.. Drawing on the latest scholarly research on postwar peace operations, the volume: addresses cutting-edge issues of statebuilding including coordination, local ownership, security, elections, constitution making, and delivery of development aid features contribution...
The end of the Cold War was a "big bang" reminiscent of earlier moments after major wars, such as the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the end of the World Wars in 1919 and 1945. Here John Ikenberry asks the question, what do states that win wars do with their newfound power and how do they use it to build order? In examining the postwar settlements in modern history, he argues that powerful countries do seek to build stable and cooperative relations, but the type of order that emerges hinges on their ability to make commitments and restrain power. The author explains that only with the spread of democracy in the twentieth century and the innovative use of international institutions--b...