OBJECTIVE Access to affected people pays an important role in United Nation Organization for Coordination and Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The aim of this article is to identify the main obstacles of humanitarian access and the humanitarian organization responses to these obstacles and finally suggest some recommendations and strategies. METHODS In this narrative study the researchers searche...

Wars and interventions bring to the fore certain ethical issues. For instance, NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in  raised questions about the moral import of UN Security Council authorization (given that the Council did not authorize the action), and the means employed by interveners (given NATO’s use of cluster bombs and its targeting of dual-use facilities). In what follows, I consider the ...

During humanitarian response efforts, the mass media serves as the primary informational intermediary informing donors, policy makers, and the non-affected public. A lack of professional standards within the current culture of journalism, the politics of media ownership, and media manipulation by governments has distorted reporting on humanitarian crises, with possible detrimental effects on re...

It is anticipated that humanitarian crisis situations will continue to occur in countries of the Eastern Mediterranean Region affecting large segments of vulnerable populations. Subsequently the magnitude and effectiveness of the humanitarian response, particularly for food and nutrition, must be based on best practices and sound information of affected populations. To bridge the burgeoning gap...

Prior research has developed and tested a theoretical framework that links the skills and attributes of individual logisticians to logistics performance in the humanitarian, military and commercial fields. Using this framework, this paper analyses the job advertisements for humanitarian logisticians working in the “last mile” (as distinct from those based in regional headquarters) in order to a...

This paper looks at the three-way relationship between the Government of Chad, humanitarians, and the United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT) from 2004 until June 2011. Chad was never comfortable with the international presence of either humanitarians or peacekeepers and asserted its sovereignty increasingly during this period. MINURCAT was deployed in 2008 to...

BACKGROUND Attention is increasingly shifting towards the role of daily stressors in explaining mental health outcomes in humanitarian emergencies. AIMS To assess the role of current perceived needs in explaining the association between past traumatic exposure and distress in humanitarian settings. METHOD A series of mediator analyses were conducted, using data from Jordan (displaced Iraqi ...

4 155 Amidst all of the debate about controlling the proliferation and misuse of small arms, there is a glaring, fundamental omission—the human face. Research and policy tends to focus on supply-related issues such as production and the mismanagement of stockpiles, interstate transfers and the illicit trade, technical aspects of weapons tracing, marking, collection and destruction, and on legal...

The objective of this report was to show how the Center for Humanitarian Emergencies (the Center) at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia USA) has trained graduate students to respond to complex humanitarian emergencies (CHEs) through innovative educational programs, with the goal of increasing the number of trained humanitarian workers. Natural disasters are on the rise with more than twice as m...

4 155 Amidst all of the debate about controlling the proliferation and misuse of small arms, there is a glaring, fundamental omission—the human face. Research and policy tends to focus on supply-related issues such as production and the mismanagement of stockpiles, interstate transfers and the illicit trade, technical aspects of weapons tracing, marking, collection and destruction, and on legal...