DRR pioneer interview with Thea Hilhorst

Purpose: The transcript takes you on a journey of the book mapping vulnerability and the developments thereafter. Design/methodology/approach: The transcript and video was developed in the context of a United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) project on the History of DRR. Findings: This interview highlights how DRR is central to conflict settings as well. Originality/value: The interview provides reflections on DRR in conflict settings.</p

Dorothea Hilhorst provides expert briefing to the UN on sexual violence response in the DRC

On Wednesday 27th January, Professor Dorothea Hilhorst will give an expert briefing in New York at the UN on a major forthcoming report co-funded by the Justice and Security Research Programme (JSRP), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC). The briefing will take the form of a brownbag lunch, and will cover the main findings of ‘Getting the balance right? Sexual violence response in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A comparison between 2011 and 2014’, written by Nynke Douma, Dorothea Hilhorst and Jocelyn Matabaro, which builds on an earlier study by Douma and Hilhorst. The executive summary of the forthcoming report can be read below

Humanitarianism:Navigating between resilience and vulnerability

This chapter explores how humanitarianism navigates between resilience and vulnerability to set boundaries around what can and cannot be done in the name of humanitarian action. Humanitarianism has widely adopted a resilience approach, yet vulnerability remains a key indicator in targeting, although its application is increasingly complex. The chapter first outlines the complexities of who decides about vulnerability, using as examples humanitarian crises where disaster meets conflict. It then calls attention to the importance of critically analysing the technologies of vulnerability that humanitarians use, i.e. indicators, categories, and algorithms. While seemingly technocratic or science-based, these technologies tend to obscure power relations and throw up additional barriers for accountable humanitarian action.</p

From humanitarian diplomacy to advocacy: a research agenda

In the humanitarian domain, advocacy has mainly been associated with activities of humanitarian actors on behalf of populations in need. While the emergence of humanitarianism was related to large advocacy movements, it has lately become associated with humanitarian diplomacy that is grounded in international humanitarian law and aims to maximise support for operations and programs towards humanitarian objectives. This chapter seeks to broaden and revitalize the concept of humanitarian advocacy as the activities of affected communities and their advocates to articulate, advance, and protect their rights (i.e., entitlements to assistance and citizenship rights more broadly), needs, views, and interests'. The chapter proposes an agenda for research and argues that we need to reimagine humanitarian advocacy, in line with current changes in humanitarian action, and open to discover the meaning of advocacy in a bottom-up manner by exploring actors, political contacts, strategies, scope, and aims

Research on Politics of Disaster Risk Governance: Where Are We Headed?

This thematic issue aims at unravelling how the global consensus towards a shift to risk reduction and inclusive disaster governance evolves in everyday governance practices, where roles and responsibilities are evolving and negotiated, permeated by politics of power and legitimacy. It identifies three different dimensions of disaster governance. The first is the formal dimension: the way governance arrangements are designed or meant to work. The second is ‘real’ governance: the way in which formal governance arrangements manifest and evolve in actual practice. The third is invisible governance: an amalgam of household and neighbourhood-level activities and networks for disaster response that happen outside of the gaze of the formalized governance arrangements. The 21 articles in this issue address the politics of governance based on thorough empirical work, while theoretically contributing to several themes relating to the politics of disaster governance. The outcomes of the thematic issue are: 1) The three governance dimensions are useful to reveal what the roles and room for manoeuvre is of different actors, including governments, international community, experts, non-state actors and affected communities; 2) Technical solutions for risk reduction and disaster response crucially rely on socio-technical, political, and administrative systems and processes and hence need to be adjusted to the specific context; and 3) The political nature of disaster governance calls for a deeper understanding to advance accountability to affected populations

The contribution of armed conflict to vulnerability to disaster:Empirical evidence from 1989 to 2018

Disasters and armed conflicts often occur together, leading to severe consequences for affected populations. While qualitative investigations have explored how conflict can influence vulnerability to disasters, there is still a lack of systematic quantitative studies that provide broader evidence on the contribution of conflict to vulnerability. Although existing qualitative work has made progress in understanding potential mechanisms, large-scale quantitative studies are crucial for comprehending the scope of this relationship and attempting to isolate associations between specific variables. This study presents a statistical model using extensive large-N, cross-country data to address this research gap and analyse the conflict-disaster relationship. Analysing data from 157 countries between 1989 and 2018, we found a strong positive correlation between armed conflict and disasters. The results remained consistent across various model specifications and robustness checks. In countries experiencing armed conflict, disaster occurrence was observed 5% more frequently, disaster-related mortality per year was 34% higher, and deaths per million inhabitants were 16% higher compared to countries without conflict. While there is evidence that conflict can occasionally intensify disaster hazards, there is a greater evidence suggesting that the relationship between conflict and disaster operates through mechanisms that negatively affect vulnerability and response capacity