Uniformed Pediatricians and Humanitarian Assistance

Burma and the challenge of humanitarian assistance.

www.thelancet.com Vol 370 October 27, 2007 1465 the community are homogeneous. The authors also assume that their single rural site in South Africa is typical. Although models must be intuitively plausible and qualitatively accurate, model validation does not necessarily follow from a good fi t to the available data, because many complex models can fi t limited data quite well. Many people in t...

Governing catastrophes: security, health and humanitarian assistance

Recent catastrophes, and predictions of an increasing potential for more, have stimulated thinking about the best policy responses to these threats. This article explores how security concepts influence catastrophe governance. The article considers how globalization affects thinking about catastrophes and describes ways in which catastrophes have been conceptualized as governance challenges, su...

Blocking humanitarian assistance: a crime against humanity?

A blueprint for professionalizing humanitarian assistance.

International humanitarian response to crises employs 210,000 people and accounts for nearly $15 billion in spending globally each year. Most action is carried out by not-for-profit organizations working with United Nations (UN) agencies, military organizations, and commercial entities. UN agencies employ many technical experts, often retaining them for five or more years. As yet there is no in...

Between war and peace: humanitarian assistance in violent urban settings.

Cities are fast becoming new territories of violence. The humanitarian consequences of many criminally violent urban settings are comparable to those of more traditional wars, yet despite the intensity of the needs, humanitarian aid to such settings is limited. The way in which humanitarian needs are typically defined, fails to address the problems of these contexts, the suffering they produce ...