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 ...

Thursday, 30 Jan 2025
Trump Vol. 2 Will Impact Global Development

The United States is by far the world’s largest provider of foreign aid, but it is completely unclear whether and how this will continue. Trump speaks of quickly achieving peace but at the same time he threatens neighboring countries. One thing is certain, however: Trump will not prioritize climate issues. ...

Friday, 22 Nov 2024
Authorship and Involuntary Attribution: How and Why Should We Contest AI Manipulation?

Technology is radically changing the work and role of scholars and the function of academic publishing. Fake and fabricated content (data, facts, arguments, claims, conclusions) undermines the foundations of knowledge in a democratic society. Faking publications and citations undermine the way we as a community of knowledge producers have organized ...

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 ...

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 ...

Tuesday, 9 Apr 2024
The AI Dilemma: Can Artificial Images of War and Suffering Stir Empathy?

Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert explores the pitfalls and potentials of the use of AI to provide windows into humanitarian crises and human rights abuses. AI-generated images have already been used by charities and human rights organizations to illustrate mass suffering and abuse. A lot is potentially at stake as we become ...

Tuesday, 13 Feb 2024
Forgotten Victims: Gaza's Journalists & UN Workers

The war in Gaza is the most deadly in modern times for journalists and UN personnel. Despite the seriousness of the situation, these killings are under-reported. The war in Gaza is an exceptionally gruesome conflict, as shown by all the relevant statistics. Since Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) attacked ...

Wednesday, 7 Feb 2024
The Ambivalent Juridification of Humanitarian Space

While humanitarians remain sceptical of legal regulation, litigation, and lawyers, the sector is going through a process of juridification. This blog post takes stock of the ambivalence to law and emergent shifts in the sector and calls for international law scholars to pay more attention. ‘We have a toxic relationship ...

Monday, 27 Nov 2023
Ethical Dilemmas in Humanitarian Negotiations

This blog provides reflections from both humanitarian practitioners and researchers on the ethical dilemmas associated with humanitarian negotiations and how humanitarian organisations respond to them. The blog post includes the following contributions: Ethical dilemmas in humanitarian negotiations, by Kristoffer Lidén and Kristina Roepstorff Challenges to neutrality and impartiality, and their ...

Friday, 20 Oct 2023
Reflections on Humanitarian Negotiation

This blog provides reflections on the study and practice of humanitarian negotiation, delving into ethical considerations such as power, representation, compromise, competition and tacit aspects of negotiation. People have probably always held humanitarian negotiations in human history as they have asked and argued for the right to help people in ...

Monday, 18 Sep 2023
We Could Have Prevented Thousands of Deaths in Libya

As Libya’s death toll rises due to the massive floods triggered by Hurricane Daniel, it’s normal to wonder if such a catastrophe could have been prevented. New research published this month gives a better understanding of how and why countries affected by armed conflict are more vulnerable to disaster. Over ...

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 ...

Friday, 1 Sep 2023
Ungovernable or Humanitarian Experimentation? Generative AI as an Accountability Issue

Kristin Bergtora Sandvik and Kristoffer Lidén discuss the type of accountability challenges generative AI, such as Chat GPT, represents for humanitarian governance. A need to recalibrate humanitarian accountability discussions In the summer of 2023, as the UN convened to discuss generative AI, there were calls for an ethical and responsible governance framework ...

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, 14 Jul 2023
AI in Aid: Framing Conversations on Humanitarian Policy

Kristin Bergtora Sandvik and Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert identify a problematic lack of engagement with AI in the humanitarian strategies of donor countries and offer a set of pointers for framing conversations on AI in aid policy. At present, no major donor country engages extensively with artificial intelligence in their humanitarian ...

Friday, 17 Feb 2023
Governance and Survival after the Earthquake: The Political Complexities of Humanitarian Assistance

The earthquake in Turkey and Syria on 6 February is tragic beyond what we are able to fathom. The World Health Organization’s Europe branch has labelled the 7.8 magnitude earthquake and a secondary 7.6 magnitude aftershock as the region’s “worst natural disaster” in 100 years. By 17 February, there have ...

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 ...

Wednesday, 25 May 2022
Pets and Humanitarian Borders

As a humanitarian crisis, Ukraine may be a game changer for pets and animal protection rules – and for how we understand pets as a humanitarian protection problem. A striking imagery coming out of Ukraine is that of a mass flow of displaced pets, accompanied by continuous updates about abandoned ...

Thursday, 28 Apr 2022
Digital Humanitarianism in a Kinetic War: Taking Stock of Ukraine

The war in Ukraine – which can be described as an info-kinetic conflict – is the first war in a society with a relatively mature digital economy, a substantial tech sector (including a diaspora tech sector) and a high adoption rate of technology and digital platforms. From a peace and conflict studies perspective, ...

Monday, 21 Mar 2022
The Taliban, International Law and the Rest of the World

The population of Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian catastrophe. Twenty-three million Afghans, more than half of the population, are starving. The UN warns of a risk that a million Afghan children will die. In this situation, there is no way of avoiding cooperation with those in control of the country, namely ...

Saturday, 5 Mar 2022
Forced Displacement from Ukraine: Notes on Humanitarian Protection and Durable Solutions

The Russian invasion of Ukraine February 24 2022 marks the start of a new displacement crisis. In a statement on February 24, Filippo Grandi, the High Commissioner for Refugees, emphasized that ‘The humanitarian consequences on civilian populations will be devastating. There are no winners in war, but countless lives will ...

Tuesday, 1 Mar 2022
People on the Move in the Face of War in Ukraine

More than half a million people have fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the country’s borders to neighbours in Central and Eastern Europe as of 1 March. In a context of war in Europe, and the human suffering it brings, this blog post offers some rough reflections on mobility ...

Monday, 14 Feb 2022
What Happens to Childhood Vaccine Rates in Conflict Zones? This Analysis Found Some Surprises

We examined more than 200,000 records in 15 African countries. As more coronavirus vaccines begin to reach the developing world, global health authorities are pointing out the need for other vaccines as well. UNICEF recently launched a record $9.4 billion emergency appeal to help more than 327 million people — including 177 million children — affected ...

Wednesday, 24 Nov 2021
European Union-Belarus Border Crisis: Why the narrative of “hybrid warfare” is dangerous

The 2021 EU-Belarus border crisis was preceded by a rapid deterioration of the already strained European Union (EU)-Belarus relations, in most part due to the Ryanair 4978 incident and the concomitant wide-ranging sanctions imposed by the EU on the authoritarian government of the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has often been referred by the media ...

Tuesday, 12 Oct 2021
Migrants Are Dying in the Forests on the EU’s Eastern Borders

The humanitarian crisis on the Poland-Belarus border has claimed several lives. On 30 September, the Polish parliament extended the state of emergency in a three-kilometre-deep strip of land along the border. It is hard to assess the situation in detail, as neither the media nor humanitarian organizations have access to ...

Friday, 10 Sep 2021
Broadening the Concept of Humanitarian Accountability

Since the 1990s, Western humanitarian organizations have increasingly been concerned with developing tools to assess the efficiency of aid delivery, to establish minimum standards and benchmarks for aid projects, and to convincingly communicate their organizational transparency and accountability to stakeholders. As an extension of these debates, attempts have been made ...

Thursday, 26 Aug 2021
Contingency Planning in the Digital Age: Biometric Data of Afghans Must Be Reconsidered

The situation in Afghanistan changes by the minute. In this blog post, we want to call attention to a largely overlooked issue: protection of Afghan refugees or other Afghans who have been registered biometrically by humanitarian or military agencies. Having collected biometrics from various parts of the Afghan population, for ...

Monday, 12 Jul 2021
Humanitarian Biometrics in Yemen: The complex politics of humanitarian technology

The introduction of biometrics in Yemen is a prime example of challenges related to the use of biometric solutions in humanitarian contexts. The complexity of the situation in Yemen needs to be acknowledged by policy makers and other stakeholders involved in the humanitarian crisis unfolding in the country. The humanitarian ...

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 ...