Journal of International Humanitarian Action最新文献

{"title":"Humanitarian governance as an arena: (In)formal coordination and localised humanitarian action in Cúcuta, Colombia.","authors":"Rodrigo Mena, Gabriela Villacis Izquierdo","doi":"10.1186/s41018-026-00204-4","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s41018-026-00204-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines how humanitarian governance in Colombia is shaped through the interaction of formal coordination mechanisms and informal, everyday practices. Using the humanitarian arena framework, alongside debates on localisation and the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, the article analyses humanitarian governance in Cúcuta, a border city affected by overlapping crises linked to armed conflict, migration, and structural inequality. Based on qualitative research including interviews, group discussions, and field observations, the study identifies a flexible and context-specific model of humanitarian governance that differs from conventional internationally led approaches. Findings show that humanitarian action in Cúcuta extends beyond emergency relief to include longer-term support for livelihoods, social protection, and community resilience. Humanitarian governance relies on both formal coordination structures and informal mechanisms, particularly <i>las mesas</i>, which facilitate negotiation, collaboration, and locally adapted responses. Nexus-oriented practices emerge organically from the realities of protracted crisis rather than through externally designed frameworks. The article contributes to debates on humanitarian governance by showing that negotiated humanitarian governance remains central even in contexts where state institutions retain significant regulatory authority. Rather than replacing formal governance arrangements, informal and everyday practices interact with them to shape humanitarian responses in complex crises.</p>","PeriodicalId":31899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Humanitarian Action","volume":"11 1","pages":"25"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13577995/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148983564","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An analytical framework for examining the ethical dimensions of innovative humanitarian finance.","authors":"Laila Zulkaphil","doi":"10.1186/s41018-026-00195-2","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s41018-026-00195-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Despite the increasing exploration of innovative financing mechanisms to address the widening humanitarian funding gap, scholarly engagement with innovative humanitarian finance remains remarkably scarce. Many of these mechanisms adopt blended finance models, in which public or philanthropic funds are used to de-risk and attract private investment into fragile contexts. While such arrangements raise fundamental questions about the compatibility of profit motives with humanitarian values, their ethical implications are not well understood. This article addresses these gaps by introducing a novel analytical framework for examining the ethics of using market-based financing mechanisms for humanitarian action. The framework integrates three interdisciplinary ethical perspectives - market ethics, humanitarian principles, and normative moral philosophy - to form a layered and comprehensive approach. The article demonstrates the application of the framework through the case of impact bonds - an outcome-based financing mechanism in which investors provide upfront capital and are repaid with interest if projects achieve their intended outcomes.</p>","PeriodicalId":31899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Humanitarian Action","volume":"11 1","pages":"9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13098990/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147783301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Time in refugee studies: a conceptual literature review and prospects from a social theory lens.","authors":"Nanor Karageozian","doi":"10.1186/s41018-026-00196-1","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s41018-026-00196-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Within social sciences, the concept of time has gained some attention in migration studies, among other fields, especially in the last couple of decades. While a few articles and books have focused on reviewing and conceptualizing the time dimension within the broader field of migration studies, they have rarely focused specifically on the subfield of refugee studies, even though many works in this subfield, mostly of empirical nature, have touched upon the concept of time explicitly or implicitly. This paper first reflects on what unpacking the time dimension would add to the study of refugee experiences and policies. Subsequently, the paper examines how some key conceptualizations of time in social theory have been addressed in and are relevant for some selected works within refugee studies. It specifically focuses on reviewing how different dimensions of time - timing; sequence (or order); frequency (or rhythm), including (a)synchronization; speed (or tempo); duration; and past, present and future - manifest at the micro, meso and macro levels of the social world pertaining to forced displacement. Recognizing the intertwined nature of these levels, the paper ends with some brief initial reflections on why and how to advocate for a balanced approach between mobility and immobility, agency and structure, informality and formality, and haphazardness and purposiveness, when studying or trying to understand temporalities in refugee lives and policies.</p>","PeriodicalId":31899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Humanitarian Action","volume":"11 1","pages":"16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2026-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13242441/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148206558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Examining the applicability of hard data protection law on demographically identifiable information (DII): the case of humanitarian UAV/drone images in Malawi.","authors":"Rogers Alunge Alunge Nnangsope","doi":"10.1186/s41018-025-00174-z","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s41018-025-00174-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Research carried out in Northern Malawi concluded that protecting and ensuring responsible use of drone-collected data in disaster-risk areas should be left entirely to the humanitarian organisations collecting these data, with little participation expected of the affected residents, mostly because they will always be coerced into giving up their data in exchange for assistance. One way to guarantee this protection is by applying national rules of data protection law to these drone data processes in the country. However, aerial drone data (e.g. high-resolution images) of a community would usually be demographically identifiable information (DII) which, unlike personally identifiable information (PII), is not substantively regulated by contemporary hard data protection law, i.e. the 2023 Malawi Data Protection Bill (MDPB) which leaves drone DII without any binding regulatory framework and hence less legal protection. Faced with this regulatory obstacle, this paper sets out to propose and evaluate methods through which the data processing principles and rights provided by the MDPB could nevertheless be applied to regulate drone DII collected and processed by humanitarian organisations in Malawi. First, it sought to establish the feasibility of their application among the humanitarian community: to this end, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with humanitarian officials operating in the country, with results showing that these officials largely believed the MDPB principles and rights could effectively govern their drone data processes. The paper then proposes some regulatory modifications or 'nudges' which, if adopted by Malawian regulators, could probe humanitarian organisations towards applying the MDPB principles and rights to their drone DII processes, and examines how these principles and rights could be reflected in concrete, drone-related internal policies adopted by these organisations.</p><p><strong>Supplementary information: </strong>The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s41018-025-00174-z.</p>","PeriodicalId":31899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Humanitarian Action","volume":"10 1","pages":"12"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12279557/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144699687","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Humanitarian observatories: insights for reforming humanitarianism from below.","authors":"Dorothea Hilhorst, Kaira Zoe Alburo-Cañete, Juan Ricardo Aparicio, Patrick Milabyo Kyamusugulwa, Tadesse Kassa Woldetsadik","doi":"10.1186/s41018-025-00172-1","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s41018-025-00172-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the last few decades, there has been a marked turn to \"humanitarianism from below\" in thinking about and organizing humanitarian action, which is among other expressed in the localization agenda of humanitarian action. In the last years, there have been many initiatives to strengthen national actors as well as initiatives that are directed to organization, advocacy, and collective action. This paper theoretically positions the role of national and local service providers in the humanitarian arena and politics of knowledge production and then presents a specific initiative of humanitarian observatories in three countries. The paper brings out a number of issues relevant for other initiatives aiming to strengthen the role of national and local actors, namely that humanitarians are not the only relevant actors to deal with humanitarian crises, that context matters, the importance of agenda-setting, and the importance of sideways interaction between observatories in different crisis-affected regions.</p>","PeriodicalId":31899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Humanitarian Action","volume":"10 1","pages":"10"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12133920/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144235400","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gender and intimate partner violence considerations for cash transfer programming in South Sudan.","authors":"Allison Jeffery, Angelina G Akol, Kate Mieth, Morjan Robert Kenyi Duku, Vanessa Saraiva, Shannon Doocy, Gerbrand Alkema, Kevin Savage, W Courtland Robinson","doi":"10.1186/s41018-025-00181-0","DOIUrl":"10.1186/s41018-025-00181-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>As the use of cash and voucher assistance increases in South Sudan, there is a continued need to understand its potential interactions with gender norms and intimate partner violence. This paper is part of a larger, mixed methods study whose aims were to measure the association between cash transfer program participation and intimate partner violence (IPV) in Gogrial West, South Sudan; to understand how receipt of cash transfers and the way they are delivered may affect gender relations, power dynamics, and IPV in receiving households, and to identify ways to improve design of cash transfers to mitigate IPV risk and enhance positive effects on gender relations. This paper presents results from qualitative research to investigate gender norms and intimate partner violence in the context of cash programming in Gogrial West, South Sudan. Forty-one key informant interviews, 12 focus group discussions, and 30 individual in-depth interviews were conducted over two rounds of data collection between October 2019 and December 2021. The most common gender norms and IPV behaviors included those relating to livelihoods and unmet needs, household decision-making and household stress, family structures, marital disagreements, and perceived acceptability of IPV. Qualitative analysis suggests that the cash transfer program did not particularly disrupt gender dynamics within households, a situation that would heighten risks of intimate partner violence. More participants reported that the cash program decreased intimate partner violence by reducing household stress, but overall evidence on the direct association of this cash program with IPV is limited.</p>","PeriodicalId":31899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Humanitarian Action","volume":"10 1","pages":"18"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2025-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12672747/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145678764","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Gender dynamics in humanitarian leadership: navigating COVID-19 and beyond","authors":"Annika Bode","doi":"10.1186/s41018-024-00150-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-024-00150-z","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":31899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Humanitarian Action","volume":"76 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141643099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Refugee voices vs. humanitarian choices: how much can refugee-led organizations redefine power and agency in post-2019 Lebanon?","authors":"J. L. Diab, Simona Jasiukaitis, Yara El-Zakka","doi":"10.1186/s41018-024-00151-y","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-024-00151-y","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":31899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Humanitarian Action","volume":"117 23","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-07-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141665472","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"EDUBox: finding suitable locations for offgrid mobile classrooms in the context of underserved communities","authors":"A. Martinetti, Nina Trauernicht, Margot Dietrich, Peter Chemweno","doi":"10.1186/s41018-024-00149-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-024-00149-6","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":31899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Humanitarian Action","volume":"33 12","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140656310","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Disaggregation of humanitarian data by disability: a realist evaluation of the use of the Washington Group Questions to support more inclusive practices","authors":"Claire F O'Reilly, C. Jagoe","doi":"10.1186/s41018-023-00147-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1186/s41018-023-00147-0","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":31899,"journal":{"name":"Journal of International Humanitarian Action","volume":"18 21","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140450877","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}