Governing Blocks: Building Interagency Consensus to Coordinate Humanitarian Aid

The Building Blocks of Consensus

Consensus is an important building block for building replicated systems, and many consensus protocols have been proposed. In this paper, we investigate the building blocks of consensus protocols and use these building blocks to assemble a skeleton that can be configured to produce, among others, three well-known consensus protocols: Paxos, Chandra-Toueg, and Ben-Or. Although each of these prot...

Governing catastrophes: security, health and humanitarian assistance

Recent catastrophes, and predictions of an increasing potential for more, have stimulated thinking about the best policy responses to these threats. This article explores how security concepts influence catastrophe governance. The article considers how globalization affects thinking about catastrophes and describes ways in which catastrophes have been conceptualized as governance challenges, su...

Three Approaches to Gender in Humanitarian Aid Findings from a Study of Humanitarian Aid to Refugees in Thailand and Bangladesh

Editorial Humanitarian Aid on the move

On 12 January 2010 at 4.50 pm local time (the middle of the night in Europe), the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault awoke. The earth began to shake, thick white dust rose above Port-au-Prince while a terrifying noise echoed out. Complete silence followed only to be broken by the screaming and crying of hundreds of thousands of Haitians. When the news reached us at Groupe URD we were in the proce...

Controlling humanitarian aid cowboys in Afghanistan.