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.

The magnitude of refugees movements in the Third World, widely perceived as an unprecedented crisis, has generated widespread concern in the West. This concern reveals itself as an ambiguous mixture of heartfelt compassion for the plight of the unfortunates cast adrift and a diffuse fear that they will come "pouring in." In this comprehensive study, the authors examine the refugee flows originating in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and suggest how a better understanding of this phenomenon can be used by the international community to assist those in greatest need. Reviewing the history of refugee movements in the West, they show how their formation and the fate of endangered populations have also been shaped by the partisan objectives of receiving countries. They survey the kinds of social conflicts characteristic of different regions of the Third World and the ways refugees and refugee policy are made to serve broader political purposes.

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.

This is an important and innovative book which was well-received and attracted much media attention when it appeared in hardback in 1990. It advocates a new approach to the relief of famine and hardship in developing countries by addressing the political issues that prevent fair distribution of resources, rather than by simply seeking to provide more food and services. As such this book could prove extremely influential, and, in paperback, will be more easily available to relief agencies and third world charities, as well as to students and concerned individuals.

Amartya Sen, the co-author is internationally eminent - he is a former delegate and Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford, and he recently won the Fiat-sponsored Giovanni Agnelli Prize for promoting the understanding of ethical issues in modern society. Lengthy articles about Sen and his books have appeared in The Independent, the Times Higher Education Supplement, and the New York Review of Books, to name a few.

Food aid has played a key role in responding to the extreme poverty and disasters afflicting millions of people in the developing world. It is at the centre of much political discussion, both nationally and internationally, and there have been notable successes, yet there is doubt and criticism about the appropriateness of food aid and confusion about the deep-rooted problems which perpetuate these calamities. Is food aid doing more harm than good? Can food aid help, not hinder, long-term development and self-reliance? Would a cheque not be better than food?;This book is designed to give a clear insight into the key issues, presenting a balanced assessment of the uses and misuses of food aid and relating these to the complex realities of the international economy. It is aimed at first-degree courses in development economics, scholars and policy-makers in the field and the general reader concerned with these issues.

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.

In 1998, on the lookout for adventure and willing to take a risk, John Burnett left the comforts of the mainstream and became a UN relief worker in Somalia. He was completely unprepared for the realities of working in a country without government or law, where the only authority comes from a loaded gun. Held at gunpoint by a child soldier, having to watching a baby die of malaria in his arms, the experience profoundly changed the way he saw the world.

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.

After war, many countries, such as Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, or Iraq, the transition to a democratic market economy extremely difficult. This failure to thrive, "Dead Ends of Transition" demonstrates, is often the result of national reliance on foreign aid. Rentier states, the contributors to this study argue, have few incentives to respond to the needs of their societies. Taking a closer look at the policies of rentier economies, this book further identifies new ways in which these countries and their international partners could work together to ease the critical transition to democracy.