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|||| Humanitarianism
and War: Learning the Lessons from Recent Armed Conflicts |
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| text (pdf) | order info | |
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INFO |
 FULL
TITLE: Humanitarianism and War: Learning the Lessons from Recent
Armed Conflicts (Occasional Paper #8)
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ABSTRACT |
| This Occasional Paper contains three chapters. The first reports on a consultation of experts held at the Watson Institute in Providence in April 1991. Participants included officials of UN organizations, governments, private aid agencies, and academics whose discussion of priority research issues helped to shape the formation and the directions of the Humanitarianism and War Project. Convened at a time when Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq was commanding headline attention, the consultation recommended that Brown University seek financial support to pursue a research agenda on specified humanitarian issues. | |
| The second chapter is congressional testimony presented by the Project at a hearing by the Select Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives on July 29, 1991, "The Decade of Disasters: The UN's Response." The statement identified the changed political context due to the passing of the Cold War, offered principles for strengthening the international humanitarian aid system, and concluded with some more operational and institutional suggestions. These issues would constitute the focus of the Humanitarianism and War Project during its initial decade. | |
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The third chapter is an article on "Military Humanitarianism" from the September/October 1991 issue of the journal Survival. Noting the use of military forces for humanitarian operations in the Gulf War and in the response to cyclone and floods in Bangladesh, the article explores the use of military forces in humanitarian work. "Military humanitarianism in Iraq has provided one bridge between Cold War military capabilities and the vision of new world order proponents," the article concludes. "For this once unlikely coupling to endure, soldiers and Samaritans must collaborate more and more often in meeting future humanitarian threats." (68) The dynamics of that collaboration in subsequent crises during the decade have been a continuing preoccupation of the Project, as in Soldiers to the Rescue and Occasional Paper 36.
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KEYWORDS |
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Humanitarian access, humanitarian space, humanitarian principles, coordination, international military forces, warfare, enforcement, peacekeeping, institutional cultures, sovereignty, accountability; Iraq, Bangladesh, Operation Provide Comfort, Operation Sea Angel; UN, UN Security Council, DHA, DPKO, NGOs, the Red Cross Movement.
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-brown university | the
watson institute - -Tufts University | Feinstein International Famine Center - |
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