In her controversial, no-holds-barred expose Linda Polman shows how a vast industry has grown up around humanitarian aid. "The Crisis Caravan" takes us to war zones around the globe, showing how aid operations and the humanitarian world have become a feature of military strategy. Impassioned, gripping, and even darkly absurd, journalist Linda Polman "gives some powerful examples of unconscionable assistance...a world where aid workers have become enablers of the atrocities they seek to relieve" ("The Boston Globe").

Hurricane Katrina shredded one of the great cities of the South, and as levees failed and the federal relief effort proved lethally incompetent, a natural disaster became a man-made catastrophe. As an editor of New Orleans' daily newspaper, the Pulitzer Prize--winning "Times-Picayune," Jed Horne has had a front-row seat to the unfolding drama of the city's collapse into chaos and its continuing struggle to survive.
As the Big One bore down, New Orleanians rich and poor, black and white, lurched from giddy revelry to mandatory evacuation. The thousands who couldn't or wouldn't leave initially congratulated themselves on once again riding out the storm. But then the unimaginable happened: Within a day 80 percent of the city was under water. The rising tides chased horrified men and women into snake-filled attics and onto the roofs of their houses. Heroes in swamp boats and helicopters braved wind and storm surge to bring survivors to dry ground. Mansions and shacks alike were swept away, and then a tidal wave of lawlessness inundated the Big Easy. Screams and gunshots echoed through the blacked-out Superdome. Police threw away their badges and joined in the looting. Corpses drifted in the streets for days, and buildings marinated for weeks in a witches' brew of toxic chemicals that, when the floodwaters finally were pumped out, had turned vast reaches of the city into a ghost town.
Horne takes readers into the private worlds and inner thoughts of storm victims from all walks of life to weave a tapestry as intricate and vivid as the city itself. Politicians, thieves, nurses, urban visionaries, grieving mothers, entrepreneurs with an eye for quick profit at public expense-all of these lives collide in a chronicle that is harrowing, angry, and often slyly ironic.
Even before stranded survivors had been plucked from their roofs, government officials embarked on a vicious blame game that further snarled the relief operation and bedeviled scientists striving to understand the massive levee failures and build New Orleans a foolproof flood defense. As Horne makes clear, this shameless politicization set the tone for the ongoing reconstruction effort, which has been haunted by racial and class tensions from the start.
Katrina was a catastrophe deeply rooted in the politics and culture of the city that care forgot and of a nation that forgot to care. In "Breach of Faith," Jed Horne has created a spellbinding epic of one of the worst disasters of our time.

"From the Hardcover edition."

While military intervention in Iraq was being planned, humanitarian organizations were offered US government funds to join the Coalition and operate under the umbrella of "Operation Iraqi Freedom". In Kosavo, Timor, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan, NGOs had previously been asked to join in "just" wars. Indeed many aid agencies cooperated eagerly, subordinating their specific aims to the greater goal of "peace, democracy and human rights". Few Afghans or Sierra Leoneans regret the interventions. However, the inconvenient victims of these triumphs, those from the "wrong" side, are quickly forgotten. These are individuals whom humanitarian organizations have the duty to save, yet in doing so they must remain independent of the warring parties, and refrain from joining in the "struggle against evil" or any other political agenda. Then there are places where the pretence of providing assistance allows donor governments to disguise their backing of local political powers. Lastly there are those whose sacrifice is politically irrelevant in the wider scope of international relations. In circumstances such as these, what little international aid is available collides head-on with the mutal desire of the adversaries to wage "total" war that may lead to the extermination of entire populations. In this book, international experts and members of the MSF analyse the way these issues have crystallized over the five years spanning the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. The authors make the case for a renewed commitment to an old idea: a humanitarianism that defies the politics of sacrifice.

In 1996, the World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, declared that his organization would henceforth be "the knowledge bank." This statement marks the beginning in earnest of a new discourse of knowledge-based aid, which has spread rapidly across the development field. This book is the first detailed attempt to analyze this new discourse and practice. Through an examination of four agencies--the World Bank, the British Department for International Development, the Japan International Cooperation Agency and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency--the book explores what this new approach to aid means in both theory and practice. It argues that too much of the emphasis of knowledge-based aid has been on developing capacity within agencies rather than addressing the expressed needs of Southern "partners." Moreover, it questions whether knowledge-based aid leads to greater agency certainty about what constitutes good development.

Since the late 1980s the international relief community has seen its resources and personnel stressed beyond capacity by humanitarian crises--large-scale, man-made catastrophes such as the conflicts in Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Zaire, and elsewhere. Waged within collapsing states, political and ethnic strife targets civilians, causes mass population dislocation and widespread human rights abuses, and impedes the efforts of relief organizations to respond effectively. Covering topics ranging from emergency public health measures to the psychological trauma of relief workers, this volume presents both a seasoned assessment of current practice and proposals for improving operational efforts in the future. The discussion also raises important questions relating to the definition and direction of the overall humanitarian mission.

First Published in 1993, this is part of the Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva series. This study looks at whether scholars of international politics attempt to understand cooperative behavior in the light of the theories developed by the observers of both conflict and of cooperation. This volume expands the short list of such works and does so with insight, a wide range of scholarship and a willingness to test particular cases against existing theory. The author has written a book which expands the knowledge of, but also a thoughtful improvement of existing theoretical approaches. Uvin's universe of enquiry excludes military power and its application. It concentrates on the long-term, complex organization of cooperative transnational behavior and its rationale. Its focusses on functional issues involving world hunger, a haunting background and result, and perhaps even one cause, of the dreadful violence that characterizes our world even as the threat of catastrophic nuclear warfare has declined.

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, or ongoing crises like Haiti, Libya, Darfur and Somalia, the contributors analyse the complexity of humanitarian diplomacy and the multiplicity of geographies and actors involved in it. By investigating the transformations that both diplomacy and humanitarianism are undergoing, the authors prompt us towards a critical and eclectic understanding of the dialectics of humanitarian space. Negotiating Relief aims to present humanitarianism not only as a relief delivery mechanism but also as a phenomenon in dialogue with both localised crises and global politics.

The international development community invests billions of dollars to improve organisational capacity. But real-life practice is poorly understood and undervalued as a distinct professional domain. Written by practitioners, this innovative publication is designed to make capacity development more professional and increasingly effective in achieving development goals. This title includes practical illustrations that draw on experiences from the civic, government and private sectors. A central theme is to understand capacity as more than something internal to organisations. This book shows how capacity also stems from connections between different types of actor and the levels in society at which they operate. The content is crafted for a broad audience of practitioners in capacity development - consultants, managers, front-line workers, trainers, facilitators, leaders, advisors, programme staff, activists, and funding agencies.

Rapid and profound changes are taking place in international development. The past two decades have promoted the ideals of participation and partnership, yet key decisions affecting people's lives continue to be made without sufficient attention to the socio-political realities of the countries in which they live. Embedded working traditions, vested interests and institutional inertia mean that old habits and cultures persist among the development community. Planning continues as though it were free of unpredictable interactions among stakeholders. This book is about the need to recognise the complex, non-linear nature of development assistance and how bureaucratic procedures and power relations hinder poverty reduction in the new aid environment. The book begins with a conceptual and historical analysis of aid, exposing the challenges and opportunities facing aid professionals today. It argues for greater attention to accountability and the adoption of rights based approaches. In section two, practitioners, policy makers and researchers discuss the realities of power and relationships from their experiences across sixteen countries. Their accounts, from government, donors and civil society, expose the highly politicised and dynamic aid environment in which they work. Section three explores ways forward for aid agencies, challenging existing political, institutional and personal ways of working. Authors describe procedural innovations as strategic ways to leverage change. Breaking the barriers to ensure more inclusive aid will require visionary leadership and a courageous commitment to change. Crucially, the authors show how translating rhetoric into practice relies on changing the attitudes and behaviours of individual actors. Only then is the ambitious agenda of the Millennium Development Goals likely to be met. The result is an indispensable contribution to the understanding of how development assistance and poverty reduction can be most effectively delivered by the professionals and agencies involved.

The importance of involving the poor recipients in planning and implementing development policies has long been recognized, and has been the official aim of large donors, including the World Bank and major donor agencies. This text assesses their success and the results of the "primary stakeholder participation" achieved. It analyzes the institutional changes necessary for stakeholders to participate in decision-making, and the strategies and behaviour of other parties involved, including NGOs. From this review and analysis, it draws an important range of lessons for future donor and NGO policies and organizational reform.

This report reveals that recent trends in global aid since 2001 demonstrate the foreign policy priorities of donors in the global "war on terror." The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have captured more than a third of the new aid resources allocated by donors since 2001. While recent aid resources have been diverted, new aid pledges made in 2005 still fall far short of the urgently needed financing to meet even the minimal Millennium Development Goals. In 2007 the international community has an opportunity to replace rhetoric and policy "slights-of-hand" with policies and resources that could truly make a difference for a decade devoted to ending global poverty and creating conditions for peace.

Community Resilience: Practical Applications to Strengthen Whole Communities in Disaster blends resilience theory and empirical analysis with lessons learned from recent activities to implement and test community resilience strengthening strategies and measure resilience progress. Contributions from key settings and disciplines on the role of resilience theory and science in local implementation are included, providing a stronger operational framework for resilience science than has previously been offered. The book also elevates the discussion by integrating theory where practical handbooks have missed those considerations.

After 30 years of ever increasing aid, most African countries are no better off than they were at independence - indeed, many are slipping back and earlier economic and political achievements are being undermined. This book attempts to answer the questions: Why? What went wrong" The author argues that the widespread theory of "putting the last first" is fine in theory but that in practice the "last" is unaffected He looks at aid as an essentially "top-down" exercise and discusses the failure of ambitious projects because of over-ambitious targets and inadequate controls. He also tackles the thorny question of whether aid to Africa shouldd be stopped so that the continent's economic evolution should be allowed to proceed at its own pace, without outside attempts to short-circuit the process. He looks at various approaches: aggressive intervention, greater financial accountability as a condition of aid, long stays in the field by donor staff, and finally and most radically the ultimate in "bottom-up" approaches: direct cash transfer. All these issues are informed by the author's long experience as a development official in Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

This volume is the second attempt by a joint international research team (consisting of Bulgarian, Chinese, Russian and American ethnologists) to contribute to the domain of ecological anthropology. The editors of and contributors to this collection share the understanding that catastrophic events challenge society to rework a specific methodology, and to activate a specific resource, to adapt to and cope with crises ecologically, socially and ideologically. The main aim of this volume is to reveal the important role of studying and taking into account the cultural stereotypes in this process. Through detailed analysis of different case studies, the contributors further generalize the definition of disasters and critical situations as situations that arise from the violation of a balance in individual and collective life, as any deviation from "normality" in the particular context of each discreet culture.This interpretation informs a structural grouping of the materials in this collection into three main parts. The section on "Cultural Responses to Natural and Biological Disasters" (specific case studies) follows the "Conceptualization of Cultural Knowledge about Disasters". The contributors to the collection share the conviction that the ecology of social crises (presented in the volume's third section on "Cultural Management of Social Crises") is a valuable and necessary addition to the field of natural and technological, bio- and man-made disasters. They believe this is proved by the texts presented in this volume.The empirical data employed in the volume and the forms of disasters researched include materials from the Tibetan Pastoral area and the Pamir Plateau in Asia, the Rhodopes and Strandja Mountains in the Balkans, Macedonia and Central and Western Bulgaria, to ethnic minority areas in Central and Western China, Ukraine and Moldova.

This work, produced by the Task Force on African Famine of the American Anthropological Association, is the first of a multi-part project dealing with the long-term and ongoing food crisis in Africa primarily at the level of local production - the microperspective. It offers a series of anthropological and ecological views on the cause of the current problem and on coping strategies used by both indigenous people and developmental planners.;The three sections of this volume review current explanations for food problems in Africa, focusing mainly on production and consumption at the household level, they offer a number of perspectives on the environmental, historical, political, and economic contexts for food stress, and include a series of case studies showing the ways in which Africans have responded to the threat of drought and hunger. This work should be of interest to all persons concerned with this ultimately global dilemma, particularly those involved in planning and relief efforts.