We examine if and how news coverage influences governments’ humanitarian aid allocations, from the perspective of senior bureaucrats involved in such decision-making. Using rare in-depth interviews with 30 directors policymakers 16 world’s largest donor countries, we found that majority these believed sudden-onset, national can increase levels emergency allocated to a crisis. They said this inf...

There remains a critical gap in understanding challenges faced by humanitarian workers who may be key in providing assistance during complex emergencies. This study examines self-reported views by humanitarian workers working in Palestine concerning three concepts: resilience, generalized self-efficacy, and importance of workplace empowerment. Aid workers in Palestine face unique obstacles plac...

After more than 20 years of sporadic separatist insurgency, the Free Aceh Movement and the Indonesian government signed an internationally brokered peace agreement in August 2005, just eight months after the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated Aceh's coastal communities. This article presents a medical humanitarian case study based on ethnographic data I collected while working for a large aid agen...

BACKGROUND The humanitarian response to the crisis in Darfur is the largest humanitarian operation in the world. To investigate the evolution of the conditions of the affected population, we analysed trends in malnutrition and mortality, the most widely accepted indicators for assessing the degree of severity of a crisis. METHODS We did a meta-analysis of 164 publicly available surveys taking...

BACKGROUND Although the consequences of disability are magnified in humanitarian contexts, research into the difficulties of caring for children with a disability in such settings has received limited attention. METHODS Based on in-depth interviews with 31 families, key informants and focus group discussions in Turkana, Kenya, this article explores the lives of families caring for children wi...

Since the Sphere Project was launched in 1997, it has sought to integrate principles of human rights norms with adherence to technical standards. While the Sphere Handbook has evolved as both a field tool and a resource for articulating human rights, it does not fully offer a rights-based approach to humanitarian assistance. In the handbook's current edition, its Humanitarian Charter asserts an...

Do programs that provide education in emergencies empower those whom they are intended to assist, or do they coerce and control? Is the Interagency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) a global body that seeks to bureaucratize, regulate, and “govern from a distance” (Sobe, this issue), or does it represent the emergence of universally accepted human rights and the triumph of world societ...