This article presents an introduction to the causes and characteristics of armed conflicts. It reviews some of the key humanitarian crises that broke new ground in terms of the technologies and practices that developed at the field level in response to each new complex emergency, with particular focus on the health sector. It introduces the concept of humanitarian governance as a framework for ...

In 1988, the World Health Assembly of the World Health Organization (WHO) resolved to interrupt wild poliovirus (WPV) transmission worldwide, and in 2012, the World Health Assembly declared the completion of global polio eradication a programmatic emergency for public health. By 2013, the annual number of WPV cases had decreased by >99% since 1988, and only three countries remained that had nev...

Vocal actors within policy and practice contend that environmental variability and shocks, such as drought and prolonged heat waves, drive civil wars in Africa. Recently, a widely publicized scientific article appears to substantiate this claim. This paper investigates the empirical foundation for the claimed relationship in detail. Using a host of different model specifications and alternative...

To date, the research community has failed to reach a consensus on the nature and significance of the relationship between climate variability and armed conflict. We argue that progress has been hampered by insufficient attention paid to the context in which droughts and other climatic extremes may increase the risk of violent mobilization. Addressing this shortcoming, this study presents an ac...

Surveys provide crucial information about the social consequences of armed conflict, but armed conflict can shape surveys in ways that limit their value. We use longitudinal survey data from throughout the recent armed conflict in Nepal to investigate the relationship between armed conflict events and survey response. The Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS) provides a rare window into survey dat...

A model of bargaining embedded within a random-walk model of warfare is developed. The conflict model contains aspects of both lottery-based and war-of-attrition models of conflict. Results show that future disputes are less likely to lead to armed conflict following long rather than short wars. Furthermore, should a subsequent dispute lead to armed conflict, the higher the cost and the longer ...

OBJECTIVE There is abundance of literature on adverse effects of conflict on the health of the population. In contrast to this, sporadic data in Nepal claim improvements in most of the health indicators during the decade-long armed conflict (1996-2006). However, systematic information to support or reject this claim is scant. This study reviews Nepal's key health indicators before and after the...

Communication and coordination are considered essential components of successful collaborations, and provision of awareness is a highly valuable feature of a collaborative information seeking (CIS) system. In this article, we investigate how providing different kinds of awareness support affects people’s coordination behavior in a CIS task, as reflected by the communication that took place betw...

Since common ground is pivotal to collaboration, this paper proposes to define collaborative information seeking as the combined activity of information seeking and collaborative grounding. While information-seeking activities are necessary for collaborating actors to acquire new information, the activities involved in information seeking are often performed by varying subgroups of actors. Cons...

We investigated the differences in information seeking behaviours between low and high literacy users on an on-line social service system called the “Adviseguide” website. Ten volunteers participated in the study. Using the UK’s National Skills for Life Survey, five were classified as high literate; five as low literate. Participants had four information search tasks that vary in difficulty: ea...