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'Sharing the Front Line and the Back Hills'points to a crisis facing international institutions and the media who seek to alleviate and report human suffering throughout the world. The goals of the editor are to tell the story of thousands of individuals dedicated to helping others; and to integrate issues of protection and care into all levels of planning, implementing and evaluating international intervention and action. The book identifies approaches that have proven useful and explores and suggests future directions.

From Bosnia to Somalia, and most recently from Rwanda to Angola and the Sudan, humanitarian aid and international interventions have gone awry. Although the need for humanitarian assistance has not diminished in the wake of the Cold War, success stories will almost certainly be harder to come by. This book addresses that grim prospect. Based on sch

In The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki shifts the focus of the study of humanitarian intervention from aid recipients to aid workers themselves. The anthropological commitment to understand the motivations and desires of these professionals and how they imagine themselves in the world'out there,'led Malkki to spend more than a decade interviewing members of the international Finnish Red Cross, as well as observing Finns who volunteered from their homes through gifts of handwork. The need to help, she shows, can come from a profound neediness—the need for aid workers and volunteers to be part of the lively world and something greater than themselves, and, in the case of the elderly who knit'trauma teddies'and'aid bunnies'for'needy children,'the need to fight loneliness and loss of personhood. In seriously examining aspects of humanitarian aid often dismissed as sentimental, or trivial, Malkki complicates notions of what constitutes real political work. She traces how the international is always entangled in the domestic, whether in the shape of the need to leave home or handmade gifts that are an aid to sociality and to the imagination of the world.

History and Hope: The International Humanitarian Reader provides a better understanding—both within and outside academia—of the multifaceted demands posed by humanitarian assistance programs. The Reader is a compilation of the most important chapters in the twelve-volume International Humanitarian Affairs book series published by Fordham University Press. Each selected chapter has been edited and updated.In addition, the series editor, Kevin M. Cahill, M.D., has written, among other chapters, an introductory essay explaining the academic evolution of the discipline of humanitarian assistance. It focuses on the “Fordham Experience”: its Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA) has developed practical programs for training fieldworkers, especially those dealing with complex emergencies following conflicts and man-made ornatural disasters.

For more than fifty years, Dr. Cahill has been helping to heal the world, as a leading specialist in tropical medicine and as a driving force in humanitarian assistance and relief efforts around the globe. In this revised and expanded edition, he chronicles extraordinary achievements of compassion and commitment. Bringing together a rich selection of writings, he crafts a fascinating memoir of a life devoted to others. The book includes front-line reports from places under siege—Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Nicaragua, Gaza, and Ireland; there are also visionary essays from the origins of the AIDS epidemic and landmine crises, and no less passionate concerns of his own experiences of pain and suffering—as well as of joy and beauty—in the worlds in which he has traveled. As the distinguished neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, M.D., notes in his endorsement, “These essays, by turns elegiac, lyrical, funny, tender, nostalgic, and vehemently impassioned, come together in an ongoing tapestry, a portrait of a dedicated physician who has dared to make a difference.”

Natural and human-made disasters are increasing around the world. Hurricanes, typhoons, earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, and resultant famine, floods, and armed conflicts are constant reminders of the frailty of our human race. Global warming may cause whole island states to be submerged as the oceans rise. In the past these acute and recurring crises have been met by the international community responding to UN andmedia appeals. The economic collapse of nations is now a reality; some of those most affected had been traditional, generous donors to disaster relief operations. It is unlikely—probably impossible—that they will beable to continue to contribute overseas when their own domestic needs are unmet.A recent New York Times front page report suggested that one of the few domestic issues to have bipartisan support was to cut the foreign aid budget. This book analyzes the global economic forecast and the UnitedNations pattern of philanthropy, provides a case study of how one nation with a tradition of giving will cope in the face of a marked reduction in flexible funds and then provides thoughtful chapters on new approachesto disaster preparedness and disaster response.

Understanding the complex nature of international humanitarian action—particularly following natural disasters or armed conflicts—has been the mission of this unique series. This book explores the cutting-edge concerns that will affect how assistance is offered in the future.Featuring twelve original essays by leading practitioners, policymakers, and scholars, the book is a state of the field report on problems, threats, and opportunities facing relief efforts in today's world.With contributions from such authorities as Bernard Kouchner, founder of Doctors Without Borders, Charles McCormick, CEO of Save the Children, and physicians, military leaders, field workers, and others, the essaysconfront the most critical issues facing the delivery of effective relief.The issues include military and civilian cooperation in large-scale disasters, with special attention to the growth of private armies. How traditional nongovernmental organizations and faith-based agencies adapt to newchallenges is also explored. Ways to strengthen security for humanitarian workers, refugees, and internally displaced persons and those in transition after wars are also considered.Bringing together diplomatic, military, medical, legal, political, religious, and ethical perspectives from experiences in Darfur, West Africa, Iraq, Pakistan, and other areas, the essays offer an authoritative inventory of where humanitarian relief has been, and how it must change to save lives and communities in peril.

For more than fifty years, Dr. Cahill has been helping to heal the world, as a leading specialist in tropical medicine and as a driving force in humanitarian assistance and relief efforts around the globe. In this revised and expanded edition, he chronicles extraordinary achievements of compassion and commitment. Bringing together a rich selection of writings, he crafts a fascinating memoir of a life devoted to others. The book includes front-line reports from places under siege—Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan, Nicaragua, Gaza, and Ireland; there are also visionary essays from the origins of the AIDS epidemic and landmine crises, and no less passionate concerns of his own experiences of pain and suffering—as well as of joy and beauty—in the worlds in which he has traveled. As the distinguished neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, M.D., notes in his endorsement, “These essays, by turns elegiac, lyrical, funny, tender, nostalgic, and vehemently impassioned, come together in an ongoing tapestry, a portrait of a dedicated physician who has dared to make a difference.”

Regeneration and peacebuilding in war-torn societies is a fast-growing area of interest in world politics. The book is an original and timely contribution to the study of post-conflict transition through an examination of various aspects of regeneration and detailed analysis of examples of intent. Four issues are highlighted in particular: - the legacies of modern conflict in the transitions to relative peace - the question of ownership and accountability in the interactions between internal and external actors - the need for coherent responses to regeneration - the importance of case-specific approaches. The book's purpose is to encourage students, policy-makers and practitioners (in governments, intergovernmental organisations, international and local non-governmental organisations) to understand and reflect on processes designed to promote social stability and relative peace - and to re-examine the nature of the tasks they confront and their responses. The authors represent perspectives from law, political economy, social work, development studies, anthropology and international relations.