Blog post archive

Monday, 24 Mar 2025
What Now for Humanitarian Studies?

Humanitarianism has long been in crisis, but since early 2025 the sector has been experiencing an unprecedented organizational, institutional, normative, and political collapse. As scholars active in the broad, inter-, and multidisciplinary field of humanitarian studies, we must try to understand and analyze the impact of this collapse and address ...

Tuesday, 19 Nov 2024
Israel Has Escalated Its Shadow War Against UNRWA. What Happens Now?

On 4 November, the Israeli Foreign Ministry cancelled the agreement the country signed with UNRWA in 1967. A week earlier, the Knesset had passed legislation banning UNRWA from operating in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Why is Israel doing this, and what could the consequences be? UNRWA a free ...

Thursday, 12 Sep 2024
Is China Truly a Neutral Development Actor? 

China presents itself as a different kind of development actor compared to Western donors — more equal and with less imposition and interference in national affairs, based on the belief that economic development leads to peace. However, many doubt this is the case. A look at Pakistan shows that local ...

Wednesday, 14 Aug 2024
Community Initiatives to Mitigate Group Tensions: Reflections from Uganda

Forced displacement places increased pressure on host communities. Refugees are often hosted in resource-scarce areas with high unemployment and poverty. Local, national and international collaboration is therefore crucial to mitigate social conflict and prevent instability from traveling with those fleeing war. Uganda, with its progressive refugee policies, is often presented as a ...

Thursday, 30 Nov 2023
Unlocking Opportunities: Income Generation for Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh

The Rohingya are an ethnic group, the majority of whom are Muslim. They have lived for centuries in Myanmar, which is a predominately Buddhist. Rohingya struggle The Rohingya have endured decades of violence, discrimination, and persecution in Myanmar. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), nearly a ...

Thursday, 19 Oct 2023
UNRWA: In Anticipation of a Double Collapse

There is a looming infrastructural collapse of parts of UNRWA, the UN’s relief agency for Palestinian refugees. Such a collapse could bring down the Palestinian Authority (PA) in its wake. That would be a catastrophe for the situation on the occupied West Bank. On the Israeli-occupied West Bank, things are ...

Thursday, 14 Sep 2023
Morocco’s Response to French Aid After the Earthquake: Reverse Humanitarian Diplomacy?

Morocco was hit hard by the earthquake in the evening of September 8th, and has been scrambling to organize rescue and first aid operations to the affected areas since – notably the hard-to-reach and most badly hit villages of the Atlas mountains. On Monday 11 September, it was announced that ...

Thursday, 31 Aug 2023
Six Years as Refugees and Still No Refuge

“What is happening with the Rohingya refugees? We heard so much about all the horrible things, but how are they now?” These are questions I often get when I talk to people about my research. What is the situation for the Rohingya? The situation is terrible. I have visited the ...

Tuesday, 1 Aug 2023
Taking Stock: Generative AI, Humanitarian Action, and the Aid Worker

Kristin Bergtora Sandvik discusses the broader implications of evolving AI for humanitarian action, aid work, and aid workers. Generative AI: From same, same but different to different In the summer of 2023, the UN declared that the International Community Must Urgently Confront New Reality of Generative, Artificial Intelligence. The emergence of generative ...

Friday, 23 Sep 2022
A Perfect Storm? The Impact of the Ukraine War on Donor Priorities

Two seemingly unrelated global events in September – the devastating floods in Pakistan and the Russian closure of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline – intersect on the issue of funding for humanitarian relief. The surge in power prices, the fall in European currencies, and the fears of economic downturn ...

Thursday, 3 Jun 2021
Russia Readying for Compromise on the UN Humanitarian Aid to Syria

The UN Security Council is due to make a decision on a particular and particularly controversial issue pertaining to the humanitarian disaster in Syria by July 10, and Russia positions itself as the key part of the problem and a necessary contributor to a solution. The discord in the UN ...

Tuesday, 2 Feb 2021
The Politics of Refugee Relief: UNRWA and the Ongoing Funding Crisis

On 9 November 2020 Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner General of UNRWA, tweeted: “I am pained to announce that despite all efforts to raise the resources for @UNRWA 2020, I informed our 28,000 staff that we do not have enough funds to pay their salaries in full this month”. This is ...

Thursday, 29 Oct 2020
The World Food Program won the Nobel Peace Prize. Does food aid boost peace?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee named this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, recognizing the World Food Program (WFP) for “for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and ...

Wednesday, 28 Oct 2020
The World Food Program Won the Nobel Peace Prize. Does Food Aid Boost Peace?

The Norwegian Nobel Committee named this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, recognizing the World Food Program (WFP).

Monday, 12 Oct 2020
A Path to Peace and Stability Through Food Aid

This piece was originally posted on the PRIO blog in 2018. We’re reposting it now in 2020 on the occasion of the World Food Programme winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Constant war drove Fazle, his wife and four children away from their home and farm in the Khyber region of ...

Thursday, 30 Jul 2020
The Politics of Humanitarian Aid to Myanmar

I felt like I had defeated the dictators when I walked out of Yangon’s Mingeladon airport for the first time, more than 20 years ago. Unnoticed, I had sneaked out of the queue and avoided the mandatory exchange of three new, unfolded, and spotless 100-dollar bills into the FEC monopoly ...

Thursday, 16 Apr 2020
Humanitarian Wearables and the Future of Aid in the Global Data Economy

Kristin Bergtora Sandvik examines the politics of humanitarian wearables to understand more about how digitization is reshaping the nature and relations of aid. Utopian visions for change The rise of a global data economy has engendered intense engagements with new patterns of digital extraction and surveillance, giving rise to terms such as ‘data ...

Wednesday, 8 Apr 2020
“We are all fragile, but we are not all equally fragile”: Humanitarian operations amidst the COVID-19 pandemic

This piece is part of our blog series Beyond the COVID Curve. COVID-19 has quickly changed everything from our daily routines, to the policies of governments, to the fortunes of the global economy. How will it continue to shape society and the conditions for peace and conflict globally in the near ...

Tuesday, 19 Nov 2019
Humanitarian governance and localization: What kind of world is being imagined and produced?

While localization is high on the agenda for humanitarian actors, at present, humanitarian governance does not support the localization agenda. To understand better why, we explore three issues underpinning humanitarian governance: the problem construction, consolidation and growth of the sector, and the sorting of civilians. We conclude that the localization ...

Wednesday, 23 Oct 2019
How Conflict Leads to Biased Development Aid

With two special reports (which can be found here and here) released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just after the summer, the awareness of the consequences of climate change and the measures needed to limit these impacts is higher than ever before. Regrettably, there is not a one-to-one relationship ...

Wednesday, 5 Jun 2019
Eid Celebrations and Muslim Generosity

Today is Eid, the Muslim festival that marks the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. Families and friends will gather today to enjoy good food and each other’s company. Many Norwegian Muslim children look forward to celebrating Eid, and for many people the social aspects are just as important ...

Wednesday, 15 May 2019
Safeguarding women after disasters: some progress, but not enough

Hundreds of Mozambicans were killed and thousands made homeless recently by Cyclones Idai and Kenneth. Almost immediately, there were reports of a sadly familiar story: women being forced to trade sex for food by local community leaders distributing aid. Globally, international organisations appear to be grappling with the issue more seriously than before. Yet reports about ...

Wednesday, 22 Aug 2018
Eid, Islamic finance and the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

Muslims all over the world are celebrating Eid-ul-Adha, the ‘festival of sacrifice’ or the Greater Eid. The other Eid, Eid-ul-Fitr is the festival which marks the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. This is when many Muslims pay their annual zakat – a religious tax equivalent to 2.5 percent ...

Friday, 23 Feb 2018
Aid Agencies Can’t Police Themselves. It’s Time for a Change

The spreading “Oxfam scandal” will affect the entire humanitarian sector painfully. It brings into plain sight what observers of the internal workings of NGOs have known for a long time: NGOs have an organisational reflex of banning outsiders from their kitchen, and keeping their potentially dangerous secrets hidden. Abuses of ...

Tuesday, 1 Dec 2015
Attacks on Humanitarian Aid Workers: Five New Findings

More aid workers are being targeted in violent attacks than ever before, but the roots of humanitarian insecurity have nuanced and surprising causes. Syria. Afghanistan. Mali. Central African Republic. Today’s complex conflicts seem to be defined by insurgents, terrorist groups and other violent actors with ideologies that increasingly disregard the ...

Tuesday, 1 Dec 2015
The Brazilian Aid Paradox

While the Norwegian overseas aid budget has been debated intensely here at home, Crown Prince Haakon was recently on an official visit in Brazil, from 16-19 November. Brazil is unquestionably the largest recipient of Norwegian aid, while simultaneously donating aid itself to poorer countries. This paradoxical situation tells us much ...

Thursday, 16 Jul 2015
Most Muslims Celebrate Eid

Now that Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, is ending, most Muslims – in Oslo, as elsewhere in the world – celebrate the festival of Eid. It is a time for celebration. For many Muslims, it is also a time to help those less well-off than themselves, either through the ...

Friday, 10 Apr 2015
Emergency Exit for the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict

The tragedy in Syria bears witness to the deep crisis afflicting the international commitment to the “protection of civilians”. But there is a way out. Against the background of a politically divided Security Council, there is a need for a new international strategy to protect civilians caught up in armed ...

Friday, 19 Dec 2014
Foreign Helpers

While a small number of young Norwegian Muslims have travelled to Syria to join militant groups as “foreign fighters”, far greater numbers of young Muslims are supporting humanitarian efforts. Most media attention is focused on young people travelling abroad to fight, rather than on young people’s humanitarian work. Throughout the ...

Monday, 28 Jul 2014
Muslim Charity for the Poor

Fasting and celebration At this time Muslims all over the world are celebrating Eid – Islam’s most important religious festival. Eid marks the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. After the Eid prayer, families and friends gather to celebrate. This is a time for dressing in fine clothing, eating ...