The Impact of Integrated UN Missions on Humanitarian NGO Security

Author(s):  
Emizet F. Kisangani ◽  
David F. Mitchell

Abstract Since the end of the Cold War, the UN has extended many of its missions in conflict zones to include political, military, and humanitarian activities. Many humanitarian nongovernmental organizations have been critical of these “integrated” UN missions, claiming that they can blur the distinction between political, military, and humanitarian action, thus placing humanitarian aid workers at risk of retaliation from warring factions opposed to the UN’s political objectives. This proposition is empirically tested using generalized methods of moments statistical analysis of sixty-seven countries that experienced intrastate conflict between 1997 and 2018. When assessing attacks in general—to include the sum of aid workers killed, wounded, and kidnapped—the results indicate that humanitarian aid workers are more likely to come under attack in countries that have an integrated UN mission. However, when the attacks are assessed separately, results show that this relationship holds only with aid workers who are killed in the field.

2016 ◽  
Vol 98 (901) ◽  
pp. 299-314 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Hensch

AbstractWorking in the humanitarian sector as an aid worker has become a dangerous endeavour, with attacks against humanitarian workers becoming more common. In this personal story by a former head of office at an International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) surgical hospital, a short, violent encounter leads to a long journey of recovery. There is an important role for the community in supporting the healing process; the author suggests that an integral and collaborative involvement by organizations like the ICRC is effective in addressing the impact of violence directed towards humanitarian aid workers.


2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynette H. Bikos ◽  
Michael Klemens ◽  
Leigh Randa ◽  
Alyson Barry ◽  
Thomas Bore

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 1191-1213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miranda Visser ◽  
Melinda Mills ◽  
Liesbet Heyse ◽  
Rafael Wittek ◽  
Vincenzo Bollettino

A limited body of research has examined satisfaction with work–life balance of expatriate workers who live abroad, residing outside the typical “family” or “life” domain. This study aims to demonstrate how and under which organizational circumstances job autonomy can increase work–life balance satisfaction of humanitarian aid expatriates. We hypothesize that especially in humanitarian work, trust in management can buffer potential negative effects of high autonomy. We test our hypothesis by means of ordinal logistic regression, using survey data collected among expatriates of the Operational Center Amsterdam of Médecins Sans Frontières ( N = 142). Results reveal that high levels of autonomy are positively related with work–life balance satisfaction when trust in the management of the organization is high. When trust in management is low, the effect of high autonomy on work–life balance satisfaction is negative. This implies that trust in management indeed buffers negative effects of high autonomy among expatriate humanitarian aid workers.


Economies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sena Gnangnon ◽  
Jean-François Brun

This paper investigates the impact of multilateral trade liberalization on resource revenue, using an unbalanced panel dataset comprising 57 countries, including both developed and developing countries, over the period 1995–2015. By means of the two-step system Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) estimator, the empirical analysis suggests that multilateral trade liberalization exerts a negative effect on resource revenue, probably at the benefit of non-resource revenue. However, this effect over the full sample hides a positive effect of multilateral trade liberalization on resource revenue in poorest countries, and a negative effect of multilateral trade liberalization on resource revenue in non-poorest countries of the sample. Additionally, the negative effect of multilateral trade liberalization on resource revenue over the full sample appears to be dependent on the degree of domestic trade liberalization. In fact, multilateral trade liberalization genuinely induces a reducing effect on resource revenue only if countries liberalize their domestic trade regime beyond a minimum level.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dolly Gaur ◽  
Dipti Ranjan Mohapatra

PurposeIn recent years, the Indian banking sector is facing a major cause of concern in the form of Nonperforming Assets (NPA), and the priority sector lending (PSL) is generally recognized as the major factor contributing to it. Thus, the present study has been carried out with the objective of examining the relationship between priority sector lending and GDP growth. Thereafter, the role of PSL and certain other bank-specific, industry-specific and macroeconomic variables in determining NPA has been studied.Design/methodology/approachTaking a sample of 45 scheduled commercial banks, the study has been carried out for 14 years (2004–2018). Granger causality between PSL and GDP has been examined by applying the Dumitrescu-Hurlin test. For the purpose of investigating the impact of PSL and other determinants on NPA, both static and dynamic panel regression have been performed. Under the dynamic panel, system generalized methods of moments (S-GMM) approach has been followed.FindingsThe findings show that there exists a positive correlation and bidirectional causal relationship between PSL and GDP, which implies that PSL brings additional growth for the whole economy. In addition to it, PSL is found to be insignificant for the NPA ratio, and thus, it can be inferred that credit extended to government-specified sectors does not bring any major increase in the bad loan portfolio of banks.Practical implicationsThe policymakers and bank management can take a cue from the findings of this study to decrease the exposure to loan nonrepayment issue. The priority sectors are in need of formal credit for their growth, and since the rising population of the country can find employment in these sectors, banks should meet their credit needs while securing their position with regard to the NPA problem.Originality/valueThe issue of NPA determinants, and in particular, the contribution of priority sector lending in it has not been much explored for Indian banking sector. Also, the present study adds to the literature by using the causality approach for examining the importance of directed credit schemes for economic growth.


Pragmatics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-300
Author(s):  
Kevin McKenzie

Abstract This paper is concerned with the way that laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation in talk among humanitarian aid workers as they describe their professional activities in settings of armed conflict. I first set out to situate my analysis within the tradition of work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM), exploring how that approach differs in significant ways from work in pragmatics and related traditions of discourse analytic research. Unlike the latter approaches, EM examines laughter for the intelligibility it is deployed by speakers to furnish, so that the presumption of laughter’s revelatory nature which characterizes a pragmatically-oriented analysis is seen as a participant resource for rendering the situated significance of actions visible by and for the involved parties of a given episode of interaction. Following this, I examine talk from open-ended interviews with aid agency operatives who work in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, exploring how laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation where the potential accusation of opportunism arises in accounts of personal job satisfaction as against the legitimacy otherwise afforded with an appeal to altruism and self-sacrifice. Where speakers attend to the criticism of humanitarian activity for its significance in affecting outcomes of warfare, the management of these different demands is accomplished in reflexive work to ironize their own and others’ formulations of motivation for pursuing humanitarian work.


2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannele Haggman ◽  
Joyce Kenkre ◽  
Carolyn Wallace

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