04/12/2017 by Jana Simon

There are 38 wars in the world. Then there is the “Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue” (HD) in Geneva. As soon as shots are fired anywhere, its employees try to bring the warring parties back to the table. Jana Simon accompanied two of them.

Cookies are good, whiskey is sometimes even better. There needs to be something to relax the interlocutors, to raise their spirits when negotiations start. Sugar or alcohol. Almost everyone can agree on that.

On a very hot day at the end of June 2016, David Gorman entered the Civil Protection Agency in Kiev carrying several plastic bags full of cookies. Everything in the agency is brown: chairs, tables, and walls. The projector dimly lights the wall. “Ecological risks in the Donbass region”, it says. On one side of the table, there are men from the Civil Protection and from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and on the other, men from the Norwegian, Swedish and British embassies are waiting. They have not yet met, but soon they are supposed to fight side by side. In the middle is David Gorman, offering cookies and making initial connections. The men smile and sit down. Gorman is 47 years old and more than 1.90 metres tall; when seated, he bends his back, trying to appear smaller. He does not want to tower over those around him. The way he is perceived can be decisive for the direction of the talks. Is he too loud or too quiet? Too reserved or too resolute? Not only must he keep an eye on the person opposite him, but also constantly monitor himself. In Asia, his handshake must not be too tight, whereas in the Middle East, it cannot seem too weak. What is respected in one country may upset people in another.

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05/09/2017 by Jovan Kurbalija. Throughout history, humanity has relied on different critical resources. Oil was one such resource, which spurred economic growth, as well as conflicts over access and control.

Today, as The Economist argued, data is the new oil. It is at the core of modern developments, and is increasingly shaping political and economic lives. As more data is stored and processed digitally, the governance of this data is having an impact on diplomacy, just as the politics of oil has been doing over the past 100 years.

How does data impact diplomacy? First, data impacts the environment in which diplomats operate. The flow of data shapes the flow of money. It influences and creates new data-driven geopolitics and geo-economics.

Second, data brings new topics to the negotiation and policy-making tables, from privacy and data protection, to digital commerce and trade. Third, data provides diplomats with new tools to make diplomatic activities more efficient and effective, including data mining and artificial intelligence.

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April 2017.

The Practical Guide to Humanitarian Law was published for the first time by Françoise Bouchet-Saulnier in 1998. Regularly reedited and translated in several languages, the latest edition was published in December 2013 and makes up the content of this website.

Written from the perspective of victims and those who provide assistance to them, the Practical Guide presents the rules of humanitarian law applicable to the protection and assistance of victims of conflicts and crisis in accessible and reader-friendly alphabetical entries.

It analyzes how international humanitarian law has evolved in the face of new challenges to international peace and human security related to the war on terror, new forms of armed conflict and humanitarian action, the emergence of international criminal justice, and the reshaping of fundamental rules in a multipolar world.

An unprecedented work, intended for journalists and citizens, policy makers and opinion leaders, relief workers, members of humanitarian organizations and practitioners, war leaders and servicemen…

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05/04/2017. A growing share of aid is spent by private firms, not charities. But they need to diversify.

“THE gold rush is on!” That is how a cable from the American ambassador to Haiti described the descent of foreign firms upon Port-au-Prince in early 2010. An earthquake had flattened the city and killed hundreds of thousands. But a deluge of aid presented an opportunity. The message, released by WikiLeaks, noted that AshBritt, a Florida-based disaster-recovery firm, was trying to sell a scheme to restore government buildings, and that other firms were also pitching proposals in a “veritable free-for-all”.

During the following two years $6bn in aid flooded into a country of 10m people, for everything from rebuilding homes to supporting pro-American political parties. Of $500m or so in aid contracts from the American agency for international development (USAID), roughly 70% passed through the hands of private companies.

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05/10/2017 by Mark Parker.

It’s an odd job for a man who says he’s averse to acronyms. The UN’s new humanitarian chief, overseeing a sprawling department and a plethora of acronym-heavy mechanisms, will be Mark Lowcock, until now the top British civil servant in the Department for International Development (DFID), the UK’s aid ministry.

Lowcock takes over as famine threatens four countries, humanitarian principles are trampled in Syria, his UN department slashed and the Trump administration plans swingeing cuts to UN agencies.

Two well-placed sources say Lowcock’s name emerged only after the UN secretariat had rejected at least one other name proposed by British government. This happened in 2015, when Ban Ki-moon rejected former UK minister Andrew Lansley, in a diplomatic spat that became public.

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04/28/2017 by Peter Ford. A leaked State Department budget document lays out proposals for a 30.8 percent cut in development aid and plans to sharply cut back

When President Donald Trump’s budget director, Mick Mulvaney, presented the outlines of the new US administration’s first budget last month, he made no bones about its purpose.

“This is a hard power budget. It is not a soft power budget,” he told reporters, referring to Mr. Trump’s preference for military firepower over the influence he might wield through development aid.

Now the rest of the world is getting a glimpse of just what that will mean. A leaked State Department budget document lays out proposals for a 30.8 percent cut in development aid and plans to sharply cut back USAID, America’s premier foreign aid agency, by closing many of its projects.

Even critics of the current US aid program such as Richard Sokolsky, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, are shocked. “This is the wrong approach,” he says. “Nobody is asking the right questions about how resources are related to our objectives. They are just taking a meat ax to the aid budget.”
Foreign aid’s critics and advocates have long argued over its usefulness.

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04/27/2017; With fighting intensifying on numerous fronts in Syria over the past months, the top United Nations humanitarian official today urged consolidation of the nationwide ceasefire, most importantly a pause in fighting on the outskirts of Damascus, to enable the delivery of aid.

“The Secretary-General has said time and again that there will be no military end to this conflict. Yet, military might continues to be used against civilians in a way that defies all reason, let alone morality or the law,” Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Stephen O’Brien told the Security Council.

He said that the use of “abhorrent chemical weapons” on 4 April in Khan Shaykhun was yet another horrific account of such brutality. “I wish I could say mindless brutality – but no, it was deliberate, planned, predetermined, by other humans against their own fellow human beings, sheer unbridled cruelty by leaders and commanders. And we await the investigation to confirm which ones.”

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