THIS IS ANOTHER in our series of reports designed to keep the stakeholders of the Humanitarianism and War Project and its increasingly wide circle of users current on our work. This report covers the period since September 10, 1996.

Assessment & Planning
Research
New Publications
Project Support

In the months since our last report in mid-September, the independent review of the project conducted by Giles Whitcomb has been completed. Based on interviews with about 36 contributors and users, Whitcomb concluded that its work during the first six years (1991-1996) has been well regarded, timely, and useful. At the same time, he recommended that in order to enhance its utility and influence, the project during its next phase, which begins this month, articulate more precisely its purpose, goals, and target audiences, shaping its activities and products accordingly.

Informed by the results of the review, planning for Phase 3 is proceeding. We envision continuing to conduct first-hand field research on humanitarian action in selected countries. We also intend to review the process and results of institutional changes made by humanitarian organizations in the early post-Cold War period. By doing this, we will have an opportunity to revisit some of the conflicts analyzed earlier and to formulate conclusions about how reforms in the humanitarian system do and do not take place. We also are placing a premium on deepening collaborative relationships with practitioner organizations and on producing materials useful to them.

We already are undertaking a number of changes in our communications and publications. We have formatted our bibliography in a more user-friendly fashion, which is linked to this site. Extracts from the evaluation report also are linked.

Humanitarian Action and Politics: The Case of the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict will be available in the coming weeks, first on the web site and thereafter in printed form. Written by S. Neil MacFarlane and Larry Minear on the basis of interviews conducted in Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and elsewhere last year, the case study reviews the intrusion of politics into the response of the international community to the war in Nagorno-Karabakh. The report was the subject of debriefings for U.S. government officials and NGOs in Washington in December 1996. Together with last year's studies on Georgia and Chechnya, the Nagorno-Karabakh report is the third to examine the challenges and constraints facing humanitarian action in the Caucasus. A reprint of the executive summary is available on this site.

Work is proceeding on an edited volume to be published later this year, Civilian Pain and Political Gain: The Humanitarian Impacts of Economic Sanctions. The first product in a multiyear review of sanctions issues, the book reflects a collaborative initiative of the Humanitarianism and War Project with the University of Notre Dame's Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Fourth Freedom Forum of Goshen, Indiana. The volume is edited by Thomas G. Weiss, Larry Minear, George A. Lopez, and David Cortright, with a foreword by Lakhdar Brahimi, a former UN under-secretary-general for the secretary-general's Preventive and Peacemaking Efforts. It provides a framework for analyses by individual researchers of multilateral economic sanctions in South Africa, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, and Haiti. The team is also preparing a report on economic sanctions for the UN InterAgency Standing Committee.

Linked to this site are two new publications. Haiti Held Hostage: International Responses to the Quest for Nationhood 1986 to 1996, published in October 1996, was a joint undertaking with the United Nations University (UNU). Led by Robert Maguire, a team comprised of Edwige Balutansky, Jacques Fomerand, Larry Minear, William O'Neill, Thomas G. Weiss, and Sarah Zaidi carried out research in Haiti in January 1996. Circulating widely in Haiti and beyond, the report was the subject of debriefings in October in Washington at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Haitian Embassy. Debriefings in New York for UN ambassadors, secretariat staff, and NGOs were sponsored by the Canadian Permanent Mission and the New York office of UNU. A French translation will be available shortly.

War and Humanitarian Action in Chechnya by Greg Hansen and Robert Seely became available at the Project's web site several weeks before the murder of six International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) workers outside Grozny in December 1996. The report and a subsequent op-ed by Greg Hansen analyze the context within which the murders took place. With tragic prescience, the report calls for urgent action on the international diplomatic and political front to create and protect humanitarian space and greater attention to nurturing respect for the humanitarian ethos in the region, a task which, ironically, the ICRC itself had undertaken.

Also linked is an op-ed from the Providence Journal-Bulletin by Thomas Weiss entitled "In Rwanda, Good Intentions Are Not Enough."

The project is pleased to announce a contribution to its work from the UN World Food Programme (WFP). WFP was a contributor to Phase 1 of the project and to the predecessor case study of Operation Lifeline Sudan. Special financial support for one aspect or another of the economic sanctions undertaking described above has been received from five UN organizations (DHA, FAO, UNDP, UNICEF, and WFP), the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the MacArthur Foundation.

We hope that institutional supporters of the project who have not already indicated a commitment to assist in funding Phase 3 will consider this Status Report as a reminder of our need for continued support. We intend to contact organizations on an individual basis as well.