| email | search | about | publications | status reports | people | links |
| ||
|
||
|
|
|
||||
Humanitarian Action: Social Science Connections |
|
| text (pdf) | order info | |
 |
INFO |
|
|
|
|
ABSTRACT |
| This study explores the contributions that social scientists and humanitarian practitioners may make to increasing the effectiveness of each other's work. The subject was addressed at a conference held at Brown University in April 1999. Four conference papers, revised to accommodate the points raised in the discussion, are reprinted, along with a summary of the discussion itself. | |
|
Papers by Jeff Crisp of UNHCR and Susanne Schmeidl of the Swiss Peace Foundation deal with enumerating refugees and internally displaced persons, with particular attention to issues of methodology and politicization. Papers by Stephen Lubkemann and Marc Sommers review how the absence of insights from the social sciences limited the effectiveness of assistance to Mozambican refugees in South Africa and Burundian refugees in Tanzania, respectively. The conference concluded that rather than seeking to create a new and hybrid practitioner-cum-social scientist, the desideratum is for each profession to be more fully attuned to the insights that the other may provide.
|
|
|
KEYWORDS |
|
social science, anthropology, demography, statistics, humanitarian principles, humanitarian access, urban refugees, IDPs, warfare, reconstruction, RENAMO, politicization, civil society, professionalism; Burundi, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe; UNHCR, UNDP, FINNIDA, NGOs, Norwegian Refugee Council, US Committee for Refugees, NGOs, the Red Cross Movement.
|
|
||||
|
-brown university | the
watson institute - -Tufts University | Feinstein International Famine Center - |
||||
|
|
FULL
TITLE: Humanitarian
Action: Social Science Connections (Occasional Paper 37)