How should humanitarian organisations respond when their aid goes awry? Should they stay and remain engaged with the needy, or should they withdraw and leave? Investigating the choices involved and the judgements required when tackling these questions, this book explores the unique ‘Humanitarian Exit Dilemma’ that confronts humanitarian organisations. Humanitarian practitioners often are too concerned with the outcome of action but fail to recognise that there are other equally weighty moral considerations they should consider. Focusing simply on the results of projects, such as the number of lives saved alone, is inadequate. To address this problem, this book highlights three value-based normative considerations, namely humanitarian aid workers’ special relationships with those whom they are assisting, humanitarian organisations’ causal responsibility to assist those they have made vulnerable, and humanitarian organisations’ obligations to fulfil reasonable expectations of those assisted. Together, these three non-instrumental reasonings serve as the main arguments of the author's value-based normative account, the ‘Non-Consequentialist Approach’, to address the Humanitarian Exit Dilemma. Offering a unique perspective on how humanitarian organisations should navigate the Humanitarian Exit Dilemma, this book will be of interest to scholars and practitioners in the field of Humanitarian Studies, African Studies, Refugee Studies, political philosophy, humanitarian action, and human rights.

Aid sector staff work in some of the world’s most challenging environments, from conflict zones to sites of natural disaster and refugee camps. For a long time, the aid worker was typified by the lone white male, flying from place to place and seeing his family during the holidays. But now, as the world changes and the sector diversifies, how can family life be reconciled with the challenges and travel commitments of this particularly difficult career? This book delves deep into these challenges, exposing the problems that persist and pointing a path for organisations to adopt a more human-centred, staff-centred, parent-centred, feminist approach to humanitarian and development work. Drawing on the author’s own experiences as an aid worker, as well as extensive original interviews and desk research, the book looks at the challenges faced by those who aspire to a family life, from finding a partner who is willing and able to live in the same location, to dating in difficult contexts, to being away from home and extended family, finding child care, and settling children in new countries and cultures. Local workers face their own challenges, often suffering from a lack of support in comparison to their international colleagues. For many, the cost is too great, and the sector suffers from a brain drain as experienced staff leave. It doesn’t need to be this way. The book points a way for organisations to adopt policies that support mothers and fathers. As well as being a useful guide for aid professionals who are themselves navigating these issues, the book will be perfect for organisations looking to reform and for students wishing to understand the realities of a career in aid.

This book demonstrates how a focus on children’s rights can help practitioners to safeguard children during humanitarian crisis. Child Rights in Humanitarian Crisis focuses on understanding and advancing child rights through practical applications of a child rights perspective in crisis response. The book establishes that with accessible, child-friendly participatory means, crisis response can improve from a child rights perspective and even advance children’s rights whilst also supporting and furthering the development of a child’s agency. The volume presents the reader with a clear focus on children from a range of backgrounds, including those most marginalised, such as children with disabilities. Drawing on expertise from the field as well as academia, and providing practical examples which link case studies to legal policies in recent and protracted humanitarian responses, such as in Turkey and at the Lithuania–Belarus border, this book is a treasure trove of advice from some of the humanitarian and development sector’s most experienced professionals. Combining insights from both research and practice, this book will be an essential read for humanitarian students and practitioners.

The long-term consequences of COVID-19 have been tough for children around the world, but even more so for young children already in humanitarian crisis, whether due to conflict, natural disasters, or economic and political upheaval. This book investigates how organizations around the world responded to these dual challenges, identifying solutions, and learning opportunities to help to support young children in ongoing and future crises. Drawing on research and voices from the Global South, this book showcases innovations to mobilize new funds and re-allocate existing resources to protect children during the pandemic. It provides important evidence on understudied and overlooked vulnerable populations, recognizing that researchers from the Global South are best positioned to fill these research gaps, contextualize findings, and support the uptake and adoption of recommendations by local decision-makers and practitioners in those same contexts. The findings in this book will be important for practitioners, policy makers and donors working in or interested in humanitarian contexts, on early childhood development, or early childhood education. The book will also be useful to students and researchers working in these fields. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

States face multiple ongoing and emerging challenges, from climate change to global disease, mass atrocities to forced displacement, humanitarian crises to entrenched global poverty, and are constrained by material and political limits to the amount of resources that they can devote to these issues. How should states decide which issues to prioritize and which crises to address? Prioritizing Global Responsibilities answers this question by proposing a two-level account of just prioritization that aims to be both philosophically sound and practically relevant. The authors assess several potential prioritization principles, including diversification, culpability, urgency, disadvantage, and national interest, and argue that states should prioritize issues where they can assist most effectively and where they can help those who are most underprivileged.

A Field Manual for Palliative Care in Humanitarian Crises represents the first-ever effort at educating and providing guidance for clinicians not formally trained in palliative care in how to incorporate its principles into their work in crisis situations. A Field Manual for Palliative Care in Humanitarian Crises represents the first-ever effort at educating and providing guidance for clinicians not formally trained in palliative care in how to incorporate its principles into their work in crisis situations.

Humanitarians are required to be impartial, independent, professionally competent and focused only on preventing and alleviating human suffering. It can be hard living up to these principles when others do not share them, while persuading political and military authorities and non-state actors to let an agency assist on the ground requires savvy ethical skills. Getting first to a conflict or natural catastrophe is only the beginning, as aid workers are usually and immediately presented with practical and moral questions about what to do next. For example, when does working closely with a warring party or an immoral regime move from practical cooperation to complicity in human rights violations? Should one operate in camps for displaced people and refugees if they are effectively places of internment? Do humanitarian agencies inadvertently encourage ethnic cleansing by always being ready to 'mop-up' the consequences of scorched earth warfare? This book has been written to help humanitarians assess and respond to these and other ethical dilemmas.