This article argues that paying attention to music can help humanitarians understand self-protection strategies, especially as music can create space for discussion even about emotive or political topics that cannot be verbalised in other ways.
Protection of artists during times of conflict has no specific framework in international humanitarian law. However, cultural sites, artefacts and institutions are protected. This article contributes empirical evidence from South Sudan to reveal how artists experience the protection gap and how they become informal protection stakeholders.
Humanitarians have recently championed faith actors as valuable resources in delivering humanitarian aid. This paper explores how faith has been entangled within the dynamics of two spatially connected crises: Ugandans fleeing post-Amin reprisals in the mid-1980s, and South Sudanese fleeing civil war from 2013.
Many contemporary humanitarian organisations derive their legitimacy from their claims to protect civilians. Yet, what these organisations do in its name includes a diverse and contested range of activities that are often far from what global publics and affected populations understand as constituting protection. We review what three well-known humanitarian organisations publicly say they have done to protect strangers across three violent protracted crises.
Recent wars have brutally shown that civilians are not safe. This is despite high-level global commitments and multi-billion-dollar humanitarian spending to keep civilian strangers protected. The high civilian death tolls in recent armed conflicts are prompting new questions about how and if we can protect civilians in times of war, and what the real politics of such protection is. In this introduction, authors argue that it is essential to pay attention to civilians’ actual experiences of protection and their own strategies for staying safe.
Risk Communication and Community Engagement (RCCE) is a critical component of cholera outbreak response. Sharing insights, strategies, and best practices for RCCE from national and regional efforts to combat cholera can enable actors to co-create solutions to common challenges and help pave the way towards stronger and more empowered communities.
One in a series of UN Women gender alerts begun at the start of the war in Gaza, this one focusing on WASH services.
A ‘Public Anthropologist’ blog by Heidi Mogstad, a researcher for the ‘War and Fun: Reconceptualizing Warfare and Its Experience’ research project.
Allegra essayists write that the facts of war can no longer be disputed; instead, what is at stake is how violence and harm are framed.
This commentary highlights the impact of armed conflict on children at the Gaza-Israel border.
In this article, one of our SSHAP fellows from Sudan, Mariam Sharif, shares an update on the conflict and three ways in which the healthcare infrastructure has been compromised.
Ethiopia is currently experiencing several intersecting humanitarian crises including conflict, climatic shocks, COVID-19, desert locust infestation and more, affecting nearly 30 million people. This brief outlines important contextual factors and social impacts of the Northern Ethiopian crisis and offers key considerations to improve the effectiveness of the humanitarian response.
