Working Paper 11 July 2015 Reed M. Wood and Christopher Sullivan Humanitarian assistance is intended to ameliorate the human costs of war by providing relief to vulnerable populations. Yet, the introduction of aid resources into conflict zones may influence subsequent violence patterns and expose intended recipients to new risks. Herein, we investigate the potential negative externalities assoc...

United States foreign assistance to Pakistan has always been driven by security considerations. By 2010, US counter-terrorism and stabilisation objectives resulted in Pakistan becoming the second largest recipient of US foreign aid globally. Given the policy impact of the assumption that aid promotes US security objectives in Pakistan, there is surprisingly little analysis or evidence of its ef...

This analysis of the social and political orientations of the Swedish humanitarian field, comprising here both NGOs active in humanitarian projects and the governmental Swedish International Cooperation Development Agency (SIDA), reveals once more the dominance of the Swedish social democratic model. This research is based on a selection of 23 humanitarian organizations from a survey of some 20...

Does performance measurement improve the performance in humanitarian aid? Approaches from the private sector are analyzed with their application to the humanitarian sector. One central finding is that performance measurement is more than the collection of data – approaches that are able to combine the process-oriented perspective with performance measurement are needed (e.g. the SCOR-model).

In the last ten years, international organizations have defined more clearly the role and the tasks of humanitarian aid in contemporary international relations. The case of Bosnia and Herzegovina is a good illustration of the advantages but also of the disadvantages of today’s humanitarian operations. The peacekeeping operation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is the largest operation of this kind tha...

On 12 January 2010 at 4.50 pm local time (the middle of the night in Europe), the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault awoke. The earth began to shake, thick white dust rose above Port-au-Prince while a terrifying noise echoed out. Complete silence followed only to be broken by the screaming and crying of hundreds of thousands of Haitians. When the news reached us at Groupe URD we were in the proce...