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Raging floods, massive storms and cataclysmic earthquakes: every year up to 340 million people are affected by these and other disasters, which cause loss of life and damage to personal property, agriculture, and infrastructure. So what can be done? The key to understanding the causes of disasters and mitigating their impacts is the concept of 'vulnerability'. Mapping Vulnerability analyses 'vulnerability' as a concept central to the way we understand disasters and their magnitude and impact. Written and edited by a distinguished group of disaster scholars and practitioners, this book is a counterbalance to those technocratic approaches that limit themselves to simply looking at disasters as...
Dorothea Hilhorst provides for the first time an empirically rooted and theoretically innovative understanding of the actual internal workings, organizational practices, and discursive repertoires of NGOs. Her evidence and insights lead to a different picture of NGOs from the one prevailing in the literature. Her model of NGOs--not as clear-cut organizations, but often with several different faces, fragmented, and consisting of social networks whose organizing practices remain in flux--is helpful to understanding not just these bodies, but official development agencies too.
We think vulnerability still matters when considering how people are put at risk from hazards and this book shows why in a series of thematic chapters and case studies written by eminent disaster studies scholars that deal with the politics of disaster risk creation: precarity, conflict, and climate change. The chapters highlight different aspects of vulnerability and disaster risk creation, placing the stress rightly on what causes disasters and explaining the politics of how they are created through a combination of human interference with natural processes, the social production of vulnerability, and the neglect of response capacities. Importantly, too, the book provides a platform for ma...
Humanitarian crises - resulting from conflict, natural disaster or political collapse – are usually perceived as a complete break from normality, spurring special emergency policies and interventions. In reality, there are many continuities and discontinuities between crisis and normality. What does this mean for our understanding of politics, aid, and local institutions during crises? This book examines this question from a sociological perspective. This book provides a qualitative inquiry into the social and political dynamics of local institutional response, international policy and aid interventions in crises caused by conflict or natural disaster. Emphasising the importance of everyda...
This book explores what attracts people to aidwork and to what extent the promises of aidwork are fulfilled. 'Aidland' is a highly complex and heterogeneous context which includes many different occupations, forms of employment and organizations. Analysing the processes that lead to the involvement in development cooperation, emergency relief and human rights work and tracing the pathways into and through Aidland, the book addresses working and living conditions in Aidland, gender relations and inequality among aid personnel and what impact aidwork has on the life-courses of aidworkers. In order to capture the trajectories that lead to Aidland a biographical perspective is employed which rev...
The field of humanitarianism is characterised by profound uncertainty, by a constant need to respond to the unpredictable, and by concepts and practices that often defy simple or straightforward explanation. Humanitarians often find themselves not just engaged in the pursuit of effective action, but also in a quest for meaning. That is the starting point for this book. Humanitarian action has in recent years confronted geopolitical challenges that have upended much of its conventional modus operandi and presented threats to its foundational assumptions and legal frameworks. The critical interrogation of the purpose, practice and future of humanitarian action has yielded a rich new field of e...
Civil-military cooperation has always been a key factor in both peace and conflict situations, and is vital in today's political climate. This indispensable volume analyzes the various types of civil-military cooperation across different settings and contexts, to include humanitarian operations such as emergency relief following tsunami, earthquakes and refugee crises, as well as stability and reconstruction operations such as those in Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The book contains contributions from both senior academics and practitioners such as military officers and humanitarian personnel and discusses the benefits and logistics of civil-military cooperation. It closes with recommendations that will be of value to both academics and practitioners, making it a must read for anyone interested or involved in these operations.
Humanitarianism as a moral concept and an organized practice has become a major factor in world society. It channels an enormous amount of resources and serves as an argument for different kinds of interference into the "internal affairs" of countries and regions. At the same time, and for these very reasons, it is an ideal testing ground for successful and unsuccessful cooperation across borders. Humanitarianism and the Challenges of Cooperation examines the multiple humanitarianisms of today as a testing ground for new ways of global cooperation. General trends in the contemporary transformation of humanitarianism are studied and individual cases of how humanitarian actors cooperate with o...
Civil–military cooperation has always been a key factor in both peace and conflict situations, and is vital in today's political climate. This indispensable volume analyzes the various types of civil–military cooperation across different settings and contexts, to include humanitarian operations such as emergency relief following tsunami, earthquakes and refugee crises, as well as stability and reconstruction operations such as those in Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The book contains contributions from both senior academics and practitioners such as military officers and humanitarian personnel and discusses the benefits and logistics of civil–military cooperation. It closes with recommendations that will be of value to both academics and practitioners, making it a must read for anyone interested or involved in these operations.
Providing a critique of the ways that complexity theory has been applied to understanding organizations, and outining a new direction, this book calls for a radical re-examination of management thinking.