How can a place be built and managed so that it is safe for people to live? Ironically, many governments and citizens keep on asking the same question after every new disaster. Why, even with high levels of investment in increasing government's capacity to manage disasters, do the impacts of disasters continue to increase? What can the governments do differently? What is the role of local communities? Where should aid agencies invest? This book looks into these critical questions and highlights how current capacity development efforts might be resulting in the opposite-capacity crisis or capability trap. The book provides a new approach for the understanding and the developing of effective local capacity to reduce and manage future disaster impacts.

At turns surprising, funny, and gut-wrenching, this is the hopeful story of the ordinary yet extraordinary people who have figured out how to build lasting peace in their communities The word "peacebuilding" evokes a story we've all heard over and over: violence breaks out, foreign nations are scandalized, peacekeepers and million-dollar donors come rushing in, warring parties sign a peace agreement and, sadly, within months the situation is back to where it started-sometimes worse. But what strategies have worked to build lasting peace in conflict zones, particularly for ordinary citizens on the ground? And why should other ordinary citizens, thousands of miles away, care? In The Frontlines of Peace, Severine Autesserre, award-winning researcher and peacebuilder, examines the well-intentioned but inherently flawed peace industry. With examples drawn from across the globe, she reveals that peace can grow in the most unlikely circumstances. Contrary to what most politicians preach, building peace doesn't require billions in aid or massive international interventions. Real, lasting peace requires giving power to local citizens. The Frontlines of Peace tells the stories of the ordinary yet extraordinary individuals and organizations that are confronting violence in their communities effectively. One thing is clear: successful examples of peacebuilding around the world, in countries at war or at peace, have involved innovative grassroots initiatives led by local people, at times supported by foreigners, often employing methods shunned by the international elite. By narrating success stories of this kind, Autesserre shows the radical changes we must take in our approach if we hope to build lasting peace around us-whether we live in Congo, the United States, or elsewhere.

For four consecutive days in early 2010, it was the number one news story in the world.

Ten Americans left the security and comfort of their homes, placed jobs on hold, and left family and friends behind to help Haitian children victimized by the January 12, 2010, earthquake. Despite their admirable intents, the Christians were charged with kidnapping, criminal association, and attempting to arrange "irregular" travel.

What Satan intended for evil, God used for good. Experience their unwavering faith. Experience their reliance on God's sustaining power, His endless grace, and His abiding presence. And trust, as they trust, that God will use their sacrifices to bring about meaningful change in Haiti. The full measure of their service is yet to be realized ...

What does US aid "buy" in the Middle East? Drawing on extensive primary source research, this book examines the role and consequences of US aid to three countries in the Middle East. The author argues that the political survival strategies of incumbent leaders in Egypt, Israel, and Jordan shaped not only the type of aid that these countries received from the US, but also its developmental and geopolitical impact. Leaders who relied heavily on distributing selective benefits to their ruling coalitions were more likely to receive forms of US aid that complemented their distributive political economies and undermined the state's developmental capacity, which simultaneously rendered them more dependent on US resources, and more likely to cede fragments of their sovereignty to their major donor. Non-distributive leaders, however, could reap the full benefits of highly discretionary and technologically sophisticated aid, incorporating it into developmental policies that rendered them progressively less dependent on Washington-and better able to say "no" when it was in their best interest.

Overcoming state fragility is one of the most important international development objectives of the 21st century. Many fragile states have turned into failed states, where millions of people are caught in deprivation and seemingly hopeless conditions. Fragile states lack the authority, legitimacy, and capacity that a modern state needs to advance the development of its peoples, and present deep challenges for the design and implementation of development policy. For instance, how is aid to be designed and delivered in a way that will help people in fragile states if their governments lack capacity to absorb and use aid? And what can be done about adverse side-effects of fragile states on their neighbours and the global community, such as heightened insecurity, rising out-migration, displaced populations, and the destruction of natural resources? This book documents the far reaching global repercussions of state fragility and provides a timely contribution to the international discourse on three dimensions of fragile states: their causes, costs, and the responses required. It will appeal to scholars, policymakers, and donors who are concerned about conflict and development. Its aim is to contribute to our understanding of how strong and accountable states can be fostered-states where government and civil society progressively advance human wellbeing, underpin households' resilience in the face of shocks, and form effective partnerships to maximize the benefits of development assistance.

This book examines the history of Herbert Hoover's Commission for Relief in Belgium, which supplied humanitarian aid to the millions of civilians trapped behind German lines in Belgium and Northern France during World War I. Here, Clotilde Druelle focuses on the little-known work of the CRB in Northern France, crossing continents and excavating neglected archives to tell the story of daily life under Allied blockade in the region. She shows how the survival of 2.3 million French civilians came to depend upon the transnational mobilization of a new sort of diplomatic actor-the non-governmental organization. Lacking formal authority, the leaders of the CRB claimed moral authority, introducing the concepts of a "humanitarian food emergency" and "humanitarian corridors" and ushering in a new age of international relations and American hegemony.

'Commendable - a book that prepares us to think about and react to system failures' - Peter Gelderloos Anarchists have been central in helping communities ravaged by disasters, stepping in when governments wash their hands of the victims. Looking at Hurricane Sandy, Covid-19, and the social movements that mobilised relief in their wake, Disaster Anarchy is an inspiring and alarming book about collective solidarity in an increasingly dangerous world. As climate change and neoliberalism converge, mutual aid networks, grassroots direct action, occupations and brigades have sprung up in response to this crisis with considerable success. Occupy Sandy was widely acknowledged to have organised relief more effectively than federal agencies or NGOs, and following Covid-19 the term 'mutual aid' entered common parlance. However, anarchist-inspired relief has not gone unnoticed by government agencies. Their responses include surveillance, co-option, extending at times to violent repression involving police brutality. Arguing that disaster anarchy is one of the most important political phenomena to emerge in the twenty-first century, Rhiannon Firth shows through her research on and within these movements that anarchist theory and practice is needed to protect ourselves from the disasters of our unequal and destructive economic system.

International and Local Actors in Disaster Response uses the Beirut explosion in August 2020 to explore disaster prevention and response in developing states. Disasters, whether man-made or natural, have always tested governments and their bureaucracies. Despite numerous research efforts, existing empirical literature does not provide conclusive evidence on how multiple aspects of social infrastructure can simultaneously affect disaster preparedness and recovery, and what role the international community can have. This book analyzes the role of international and local organizations in responding to the disaster in Beirut and assesses the interorganizational collaboration between the public and private sectors following the explosion. The author develops a conceptual framework of government/non-profit relations in post-disaster management and examines the long-term disaster response and intervention of both international and local communities in a developing world context. This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers of disaster management and response, public administration, international relations, and the non-profit sector.

This book is designed to educate vulnerable communities, emergency practitioners, and disaster researchers to increase the social and physical capacity of communities to mitigate and adapt to disaster impacts. With climate change escalating the intensity and range of disasters, we have entered an unprecedented time. The tools in this book allow researchers, practitioners, and community leaders to adopt new training techniques that are more engaging and effective, using a bottom-up framework to integrate knowledge, attitude, preparedness, and skills (K.A.P.S). This book is uniquely designed to support instructors, researchers, practitioners, and community leaders in their effort to promote preparedness across marginalized communities. The book contains a full range of templates, worksheets, survey questions, background information, and guidance for carrying out training; the material has been field-validated to meet research standards. The K.A.P.S. Framework outlined throughout the book is designed to serve as an adaptable model that national and international audiences can utilize to better prepare their communities for disasters due to hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes. As climate change continues to ravage communities, the K.A.P.S. training program will prove to be an important tool for community trainers and academics across a range of hazards and disasters.

This book, which brings together scholars from the developed and developing world, explores one of the most salient features of contemporary international relations: South-South cooperation. It builds on existing empirical evidence and offers a comparative analytical framework to critically analyse the aid policies and programmes of ten rising donors from the global South. Amongst these are several BRICS (Brazil, India, China and South Africa) but also a number of less studied countries, including Cuba, Venezuela, the United Arab Emirates, Colombia, Turkey, and Korea. The chapters trace the ideas, identities and actors that shape contemporary South-South cooperation, and also explore potential differences and points of convergence with traditional North-South aid. This thought-provoking edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of international relations, international political economy, development, economics, area studies and business.

An Introduction to Emergency Exercise Design and Evaluation is designed to help practitioners and students of emergency management understand various aspects of the exercise design process. Emergency exercises are an important component of an organization's emergency planning and preparedness, yet few emergency managers and practitioners have training in designing or evaluating them. In this updated and practical handbook, author Robert McCreight explains the essential elements and core principles of exercise design and evaluation. This book focuses on natural disasters and technological emergencies that occur in communities of any size. It provides emergency planners, public health professionals, emergency managers, police officers, and fire fighters with an in-depth look at exercise design issues and an accessible guide to designing and evaluating emergency exercises.

Tracing the boom of local NGOs since the 1990s in the context of the global political economy of aid, current trends of neoliberal state restructuring, and shifting post-Cold War hegemonies, this book explores the "associational revolution" in post-socialist, post-conflict Serbia. Looking into the country's "transition" through a global and relational analytical prism, the ethnography unpacks the various forms of dispossession and inequality entailed in the democracy-promotion project.

There are many books about aid and development, but most of them either assume a good deal of prior knowledge about the subject, or are written to make the case for or against aid. The first part of this volume is intended to put aid and development into their historical and political context, beginning with the post-World War Two settlement, showing how they have been shaped by that context and in particular by the Cold War and the decolonisation process. It shows how the end of the Cold War led to new development priorities and a new aid compact with a much stronger emphasis on issues like governance, rights and democratisation, beginning with the countries of eastern and central Europe and then more generally. It traces the path by which the reduction of poverty has taken centre-stage as the key objective of aid and development over the past quarter of a century, and looks at priorities for a new set of Sustainable Development Goals that will provide the framework for aid and development efforts for the next 15 years. It looks at the shifting balance of global power, and suggests ways in which international institutions need to adjust to reflect that balance. The second part is a Compendium of key words and concepts mentioned in Part One, and further background on some of the major international organisations and institutions with a role in aid and development.

This book provides insights into the education and schooling of Syrian and Palestinian Syrian children inside and outside Lebanese refugee camps. It describes what is happening to these children and young refugees in terms of their schooling. Investigating the perspectives of children, their parents, teachers, community leaders, and state politicians and bureaucrats on the schooling provisions and educational opportunities for refugee children in Lebanon, this book reveals the condition of social disadvantage that Syrian and Syrian Palestinian refugee children and their families are experiencing in Lebanon. Maadad and Rodwell propose the idea of the pedagogy of the displaced that recognises socio-economic disadvantage and refocuses the nature of the learner and their learning and the philosophy of teaching. A collaborative action of society - the refugee families, the schools, the communities, the host state, the international aid agencies and the rest of the world - in addressing the barriers to education and schooling of the refugee children must break ground and be sustained.

This textbook examines a wide range of humanitarian action issues in five parts, presented by specialists from different academic fields. The respective parts reflect the five core modules of the International NOHA Joint Master's Programme "International Humanitarian Action": a) World Politics, b) International Law, c) Public Health, d) Anthropology, and e) Management. The book serves as a common basis for teaching at all NOHA universities and aims at imparting the basic knowledge and skills needed to excel in a complex interdisciplinary and international learning context. It provides in-depth information on key international humanitarian principles and values, professional codes of conduct, and the commitment to their implementation in practice. The book will thus be useful for all students of the NOHA Joint Master's Programme and participants of any courses with a similar content, but also for academics and practitioners affiliated with entities such as international organisations and NGOs. It may also serve as an introduction to anyone with an interest in understanding the numerous and inter-linked facets of humanitarian action.

Ambitious humanitarian military, economic and social interventions, undertaken by Western actors acting in defence of liberal values, have today become indelible features of Africa's engagement with the world. Yet the continent's long, complex historical relationship with Western humanitarian intervention, dating back to the origins of imperial engagement with the continent, is often overlooked in the study of contemporary African security and development issues. This volume responds to a need for greater historical grounding in the study of humanitarian intervention, by bringing together a wide and interdisciplinary range of contributors who explore the history, theory, and practice of humanitarian intervention in Africa. In doing so, it traces continuities in the discourse and practice of the concept as it evolved from the colonial past to the present, and argues that the West's colonial relationship with Africa is crucial for better understanding humanitarian intervention and how the legacies of colonialism continue to impact emerging international policy.

Hurricane Katrina blasted the Gulf Coast in 2005, leaving an unparalleled trail of physical destruction. In addition to that damage, the storm wrought massive psychological and cultural trauma on Gulf Coast residents and on America as a whole. Details of the devastation were quickly reported-and misreported-by media outlets, and a slew of articles and books followed, offering a spectrum of socio-political commentaries and analyses. But beyond the reportage and the commentary, a series of fictional and creative accounts of the Katrina-experience have emerged in various mediums: novels, plays, films, television shows, songs, graphic novels, collections of photographs, and works of creative non-fiction that blur the lines between reportage, memoir, and poetry. The creative outpouring brings to mind Salman Rushdie's observation that, "Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that tells itself stories to understand what kind of creature it is." This book accepts the urge behind Rushdie's formula: humans tell stories in order to understand ourselves, our world, and our place in it. Indeed, the creative output on Katrina represents efforts to construct a cohesive narrative out of the wreckage of a cataclysmic event. However, this book goes further than merely cataloguing the ways that Katrina narratives support Rushdie's rich claim. This collection represents a concentrated attempt to chart the effects of Katrina on our cultural identity; it seeks to not merely catalogue the trauma of the event but to explore the ways that such an event functions in and on the literature that represents it. The body of work that sprung out of Katrina offers a unique critical opportunity to better understand the genres that structure our stories and the ways stories reflect and produce culture and identity. These essays raise new questions about the representative genres themselves. The stories are efforts to represent and understand the human condition, but so are the organizing principles that communicate the stories. That is, Katrina-narratives present an opportunity to interrogate the ways that specific narrative structures inform our understanding and develop our cultural identity. This book offers a critical processing of the newly emerging and diverse canon of Katrina texts.

'This fine collection of essays demonstrates in a very articulate way why EU State aid law has taken the centre stage of EU law. In eighteen chapters the reader is provided with a fascinating snapshot of the main issues and developments of the law. The key elements of the EU policy are analysed in a critical way often leading to new insights. In addition the book contains a wealth of material greatly facilitating further research.' - Piet Jan Slot, University of Leiden, the Netherlands 'European state aid law needs more self-questioning and more intellectual debate. In my view, this Research Handbook is a very valuable contribution to this necessary process. It correctly identifies the most intellectually problematic issues within state aid law and asks the right questions. This may be due to the balance in the excellent selection of contributors, coming both from the academia and from practice. This guarantees, on the one hand, that the questions are relevant in practice and not purely theoretical but also provides, on the other hand, for a rigorous analytical approach when confronting the issues. The result is a fresh and interesting new look to many of the basic issues of state aid law.' - Jose Luis Buendia Sierra, Garrigues, Brussels, Belgium, and King's College London, UK This timely new Handbook reflects on current issues that confront State aid law and policy in the EU. State aid was a neglected area of competition law until attempts to modernize it became central to the Lisbon process 2000 where the aim was to encourage 'intelligent' State aid by reducing aid to specific sectors and by making better use of aid for horizontal projects central to EU integration concerns. This policy framework has underpinned the new approach to State aid policy in the EU in recent years and informs many of the chapters in this book. Contributions from leading academics, regulators and practising lawyers, discuss topics devoted to modernization, problems faced by recent enlargements of the EU, the role of State aid in the fiscal crisis and recession, the role of the private market investor test, regional aid, environmental aid and the review of the Altmark ruling. Perspectives on State aid law and policy from the disciplines of economics and political science are also explored in detail. Research Handbook on European State Aid Law will appeal to academics, regulators, national and EU government officials, practitioners and postgraduate students who are involved in State aid law. Contributors: C. Ahlborn, A. Bartosch, A. Biondi, A. Birnstiel, M. Blauberger, L. Coppi, M.-A. Dittel, M. Everson, M. Farley, L. Hancher, H. Heinrich, H.C.H. Hofmann, K.-O. Junginger-Dittel, J. Kavanagh, T. Kleiner, M. Krajewski, R. Kramer, A. Lykotrafiti, C. Micheau, A. Morini, P. Nebbia, G. Niels, D. Piccinin, S. Pilsbury, F. Salerno, M. Schutte, E. Szyszczak

A comprehensive analysis of how European development policy was shaped, this book explores the role of former colonial officials in shaping the policy agenda and explores this example of 'recycled empire'. Veronique Dimier argues that this post-colonial agenda only changed as a result of pressure from the OECD and World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s."

Originally published in 1986, this book evaluated the review of the Australian Overseas Aid Program (the 1984 Jackson Report) and discusses the significance of Australia's contribution to overseas aid for the future. The book focusses on the overall context of the Jackson report; discusses the geographical distribution of aid proposed by the report and examines aid administration in its more specific bureaucratic context and with broader questions of community participation in developmental processes.