Humanitarian action as envisaged by Henry Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross Movement, is both simple—it is based on the natural human tendency to respect a fellow human—and original—Dunant wished to apply that common sense principle in systematic fashion, even in war.

A fleeting glance at the past will help us appreciate what was original about humanitarian action as conceived by Dunant, why it goes beyond good intentions or mere charity. Until September 11, 2001, there was no reason to believe that the international community would be tempted by a simplistic view of the world to...

There is a need for the implementation of existing ethical and legal standards,¹ especially regarding the fundamental guarantees of human life and dignity.

International instruments of human rights and of international humanitarian law are not the only sources providing these fundamental guarantees.² International law is only one of the many sources of humanitarian standards. Legal mechanisms alone are insufficient to provide for an effective protection of fundamental human values. Many different approaches can contribute to the promotion of respect for fundamental human values in today’s conflicts. Historical considerations, including spiritual and ethnic research,³ could also be among the remedies for...

Radio communication is vital in a relief and humanitarian setting; it is relatively cheap to establish—after the initial purchase of hardware—and costs nothing to run. Radio frequencies are normally allocated to various humanitarian actors by the national government; sometimes channels are shared, but more often than not humanitarian actors operate on different frequencies.

Interventions in camp settings become more complicated due to the vast array of humanitarian actors who are involved. Services provided include camp management; health, water, and sanitation; child protection; food distribution; education; shelter, and the list continues. There are many different agencies, both national and...

Technology is among the most difficult topics to tackle in a chapter designed to be relevant for more than a few months. The digital revolution has brought, and is still bringing, many positive changes to the world. In the humanitarian sector, technology has revitalized worldwide volunteerism through crowdsourcing, driving closer cooperation between the humanitarian and the for-profit sectors. It has empowered people who receive humanitarian aid and improved the way we manage information.

These changes have challenged old assumptions and reshaped existing systems in deep and unexpected ways. In this chapter, I will set out what new technology offers us...

The construction of a new world order and the evolution of the United Nations after World War II have been guided by the principle: Never again! The Nazis’ unprecedented crimes became a benchmark for an international community founded on certain basic values: opposition to genocide, the search for world peace, and respect for human rights. However, over the years, that determination has been replaced by pragmatism. The United Nations, rendered powerless as a result of superpower hostility, found its role restricted to the provision of development aid. The end of the Cold War raised again the idea of an international...

Torture has been and remains a constant in human society; its history is closely linked to the evolution of state powers and the exercise of authority.¹ In all circumstances, the notion of torture has two essential elements: the purposeful infliction of pain, usually described as excruciating, and an ulterior motive in the interests of the authority responsible for the torture.² The pain can be either physical or psychological in nature, and most authorities would accept that provoking intense fear through mock executions or threats to family members can be considered a form of acute psychological pain. Furthermore, the notion of...

Two key issues dramatically affect the lives of women and children caught in the chaos of complex humanitarian emergencies: protection and equal access to relief goods and services. Equal access means that women and girls have the same access and rights to relief items, shelter, health services, access to clean water, sanitation facilities, training, employment, and education opportunities. Protection’s role includes safeguarding displaced people—women and girls, in particular—from rape, abduction, forced sexual slavery, genital mutilation, forced marriages, exploitation, torture, and murder.

Conflict is the main reason people become refugees or internally displaced. Women and children comprise an estimated...

The semantics of studies on terrorism seem to strive more for political correctness than for presenting an accurate picture of the soil in which these terrible acts are usually born, gestate, and explode. Definitions divorced from reality offer, at best, a two dimensional view of a multifaceted problem. To focus solely on acts of desperate individuals and to not equally consider official or state terrorism is not only a simplistic approach but also one that fails to make the obvious linkage of violence to violence.

I have served as a humanitarian worker for refugees and displaced persons, and as a...

Human rights are often used by governments as a cloak to put on or cast off according to political expediency, and the UN is often powerless to render states accountable for their adherence to international law and human rights performance. In the words of Michael Ignatieff: “Human rights treaties, agencies, and instruments multiply and yet the volume and scale of human rights abuses keep pace. In part, this is a problem of success—abuses are now more visible—but it is also a sign of failure. No era has ever been so conscious of the gap between what it practices...

Displacement in all its manifestations, internal and external, has become a global crisis of grave and escalating magnitude. Since the end of the Cold War, the number of people displaced within the borders of their own countries has soared to an estimated twenty to twenty-five million, and the number of refugees is now estimated at over eleven million. Statistics indicate that although the number of refugees appears to be declining, the internally displaced populations worldwide seem to be increasing, a trend that suggests a correlation: As governments restrict the right of asylum, potential refugees join the ranks of the internally...

I offer personal, field-based perspectives on the often fraught relationship between education¹ and child protection in armed conflict. This personal perspective, garnered from years working in the protection field, will remove us from the world of guidelines and policies and return us to the flesh-and-bone realities around the globe, where students, their teachers, and their communities often find themselves in the midst of armed conflict.

At the start of my career in child protection with UNHCR in Central Africa, I was only “theoretically” aware of the role of education in protecting children from harm and abuse during conflict and post-conflict...

With very few exceptions, it has been considered self-evident among those in the humanitarian community that to achieve a reasonable measure of success humanitarian action in conflict zones should be predicated upon notions of neutrality and impartiality. In recent years, particularly following the outbreak of numerous local and regional armed conflicts in places such as Angola, Afghanistan, the Balkans, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Chechnya, Colombia, and East Timor, an increasing number of observers have challenged this traditional presumption of humanitarian action, arguing that “humanitarian actors are deeply involved in the political sphere.”¹

For anyone familiar with the...

If the hope for human progress and for a better world can be said to rest on anything, it rests on the great documents of international law that have been promulgated since the end of the Second World War. These include, first and foremost, the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But while these documents offer a global vision of what the world might become if humanity is lucky, they remain more hope than reality. In contrast, the corpus of international humanitarian law, that is, the rules governing armed conflict, have actually proved its utility again...

In matters of peace and security, as in medicine, prevention is self-evidently better than cure. It saves lives and money and it forestalls suffering. Since the end of the Cold War, preventive action has become a top priority for the United Nations.

From the beginning, a preventive role had been envisaged for the Organization. Article 1 of its Charter had stated that one of the purposes of the United Nations was “to take effective collective measures forpreventionand removal of threats to the peace” (emphasis added). But the Cold War reduced almost to zero the Organization’s capacity to take...

On January 17, 2002, one of Africa’s most active volcanoes unexpectedly erupted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). As lava rapidly advanced toward the lakeside city below, fuel depots erupted into slow burning fires, tremors and shocks crumbled buildings and collapsed houses, heat and lava flows destroyed water and electrical systems, ash covered the landscape and lava-turned-to-rock covered parts of the lake.

As a result, about 400,000 of Goma’s 500,000 habitants were forced to flee to unstable areas of the DRC and Rwanda, where rebel elements remained active. Nine died, and one hundred were wounded. About 40 percent of...

If I were a doctor examining the health of the world today, I would be greatly alarmed at the state of my patient. The international community, vibrant in its resolve to achieve a strong, stable, and healthy political environment as the post–Cold War era began, has been drained and weakened by one bout after another of violent conflict during the last decade. In Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, and elsewhere, it has had to weather the massive displacement of people, extensive loss of life, and irreparable damage, which are conflict’s concomitants. Clearly, this is a pattern that must...

9/11 challenged the American way of life in a manner that is unprecedented, and it is evolving with a significance of which we are only beginning to grasp. To uphold the blessings of democracy, we must start with the understanding that as members of a constitutional republic, we are citizens and not subjects. Subjects discharge their political responsibilities to society by unconditionally obeying the government. Citizens face a more complex challenge. Their need, especially in periods of crisis, is to strike a balance between loyalty and patriotism on one side and conscience and independent judgment on the other. A passive...

Humanitarian action is ordinarily understood to involve a response to the needs of individuals and communities afflicted by different kinds of calamities, both those that are natural, like earthquakes and typhoons, and those that are the result of human intervention, like wars and political repression. Some calamities, of course, represent a convergence of natural disasters and human mischief; famine, for example, can be the result both of climactic changes in a particular region and a flawed distribution system created by a world market dominated by a profit motive.

Humanitarian action can also be understood in a broader sense, namely the...

It is remarkable how much the preambles of constitutions have in common. Even when their authors come from different historical, religious, and cultural traditions, these documents extol the dignity of all citizens and defend the exercise of freedom and rights while proclaiming the unity of a people in a national politic. Founders of nations and their successors invariably appeal to universal sentiments common to all humankind. No doubt some of the constitution writers are sincere in evoking aspirations that elicit a general will to work for the common good. Other founders may be more cynical or manipulative, knowing full well...

For the media, a disaster is not a tragedy. It is a challenge, an opportunity. A challenge for the traditional media to find out what is happening, how to get there, what is at stake, who is to blame. For the nontraditional media, the tweeters, Facebook friends, and bloggers, it is how to get the message out, who to include, when to retweet someone else’s tweet. And for all of them, there is the chance to inform, to activate, or to enrage, for a vast audience always turns to the media whenever a disaster strikes.

Those are some of the...

There is a tendency, in a world of increasingly ephemeral attention spans, to pay greater attention to the “latest and greatest” developments to generalize about current topics. Behavioral psychologists and economists call this the “availability heuristic.” The well-publicized tensions between nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and particularly the U.S. military at various times would suggest that civil-military coordination in humanitarian crises has been perpetually poor. However, when the span of these relations is examined both horizontally across the globe and vertically through time, a more assuring picture comes into view. By and large, the humanitarian civil-military relationship has had more stories of...

Disaster assessment is defined as the “survey of a real or potential disaster to estimate the actual or expected damages and to make recommendations for preparedness, mitigation and relief action.”¹ In natural disasters, such as rapid onset earthquakes and cyclones, the health consequences are usually the direct results of injury or death. Often, however, the greatest toll on humans comes from the unappreciated long-term secondary effects as seen with slow moving droughts and massive flooding.

Zwi has defined complex emergencies as “situations in which the capacity to sustain livelihood and life are threatened primarily by political factors and, in particular,...

Effective team functioning in disasters is often underestimated until it can no longer be ignored. The importance of teamwork to the success of a mission cannot be overemphasized. In the urgency of a disaster or a sudden public health threat everyone’s energy and focus is given to the technical components. WatSan engineers plan how best to provide life-supporting water to affected communities; logisticians organize how to reach them; health experts collect data, assess risk and set out options of how governments and the humanitarian community ought to respond. Only later in the after action reports are people cognizant of the...

In times of war, still photography retains a singular ability to transfix and disturb. From the carefully crafted and sometimes dissembled compositions by the legendary annalists of the American Civil War to the “trophy shots” of torture and abuse of Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib, war photography can chronicle the horrors of conflict and the vulnerability of its victims with breathtaking power and emotion.

Among the most arresting images from the military operation (Operation Cast Lead) that Israel waged in Gaza in December 2008–January 2009, are a series that illustrates both sides of the artistry of the photojournalist. They...

The Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction in 2011 found that “a lot of knowledge about climate adaptation is not reaching those who need it the most.” How much more of a challenge is it, then, to get information, good practices, and capacity-building tools into the hands of indigenous communities using nonmainstream languages, so that they can adapt what has been learned to their ways of life? This challenge is alluded to in the international blueprint for disaster risk reduction agreed and endorsed by all United Nations Member States, the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA), which prioritizes the use of...

Throughout the centuries, those who survive disasters have offered memorials to the dead, and they have done so with different tools and different skills: Picasso did it for the victims of Guernica with oil paints. Verdi mourned the poet/patriot Manzoni with a musical masterpiece. Graveyards and public squares are full of sculpture and architecture dedicated to those we loved and those we honor as fallen heroes. Many of us, however, still record our losses and deepest sorrows with words.

I’ve always been fascinated by words, by the challenge of trying to capture an essence in a well formed phrase, an...

Humanitarian assistance workers may find themselves hopelessly confused by the range of problems facing a society struggling to move from war to peace. These problems can be approached from many directions: the shift from emergency relief into longer-range development assistance; the religious, cultural, and psychosocial models for dealing with trauma, recovery, and reconciliation; conflict management and conflict resolution methods; the place of civil society organizations; the challenges of refugee repatriation and internally displaced people; the role of international peacekeepers and outside military forces; the connection between peace, democracy, and development.

This chapter will survey the various approaches and try to...

In postconflict situations, the first challenge is to identify the sequence of events preceding conflict resolution, and how one classifies what has apparently ended is of utmost importance. Was it really a conflict? Then, what kind of conflict was it? An international police operation, a foreign aggression, a regional war, a civil war, a state collapse, all of the above, none of the above? Depending on the answers to these questions, humanitarian conditions, popular perceptions, and the kind of postconflict settlement one should work to devise and implement are substantially different in each case.

The Germans at the end of...

There is no democracy in which justice and the rule of law are not axiomatically assumed to be foundational principles. In 1895, Professor A. V. Dicey, the great English legal philosopher, defined the principles of the Rule of Law. One of them, he declared, was that “no man is punishable or can be made to suffer in body or goods except for a distinct breach of law.”¹ Almost a century later, Professor Archibald Cox expressed the opinion that it is “the genius of American constitutionalism which supports the Rule of Law.”²

The South African Constitution of 1996 was the product...

The eighth Jubilee Edition ofTropical Medicine: A Clinical Textconcludes with some personal reflections on my own professional journey. When the initial chapters of my first book were serialized in theNew York State Journal of Medicinein 1961, I was a young physician who had been introduced to tropical infections on a fellowship in Calcutta, India. I was fascinated by the history of epidemic diseases, by the dramatic clinical presentations, and by the diagnostic and therapeutic challenges they pose.

In Calcutta, I fell in love with a way of life, seeming to find romance in settings that others...