Humanitarian Governance

A world in turmoil: governing risk, establishing order in humanitarian crises

This special issue of Disasters on humanitarian governance focuses on risk and order. Its contributions show the tensions between humanitarian normative ideals and practical consequences, as many of ...

Toward a New Global Security Paradigm. Task Force 06: Strengthening Multilateralism and Global Governance

Amidst increasing global connectivity and accelerating global change, the global security framework has become insufficient, contributing to a crippling dysfunctionality in international cooperation. The current security framework, focused almost exclusively on a narrow notion of military security, is insufficient to address escalating ‘threats without enemy,’ such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution, which increasingly endanger the lives and dignity of all populations. This policy brief recommends a global social-ecological security framework, rooted in the science informed understanding of social and biophysical realities, to address the evolving needs and challenges of the 21st century. Our recommendations to operationalise this paradigm include: a reinvigorated commitment to multilateralism and peace as a pre-requisite; public participation in shaping the new inclusive international governance framework; development aid and green finance as key levers; a focus on building resilience (especially food security); and, strengthening anticipation of and response to interconnected global shocks. We propose a G20-initiated formation of a high-level working group to catalyse the creation of this new framework. Such a process must involve relevant stakeholders, leveraging new possibilities afforded by technological tools (such as AI). Implementing this ambitious agenda will be challenging, but continuing on a business as- usual trajectory is a ‘lose-lose’ spiral likely to trigger social and ecological crises. Bold leadership from the G20 is needed more than ever to reinvent multilateralism and thus ensure sustainable well-being for all.

A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance

Ideas for a Changing World.

Metrics for biodiversity and health policy integration

Despite over a decade of progressive commitments from parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), integrated biodiversity and health indicators and monitoring mechanisms remain limited, hampering achievement of the sustainable development goals and improvements in health and well-being. Adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (2022) and the Global Action Plan on Biodiversity and Health (2024) provide a renewed entry point to shape the way governments approach health and wellbeing and address the environmental burden of disease. This is a critical opportunity that scholars at the health-environment nexus should not miss. This Perspective outlines building blocks to mobilize the field, starting with essential terminology and a scope of metrics needed by governments. We then evaluate elements to be considered in the construction of integrated metrics, including concepts, overarching challenges, a review of scientific hypotheses from an ecological perspective, as well as a set of principles and characteristics for indicators. To raise awareness across parallel communities of practice working at the health-environment nexus, we then briefly examine four approaches to integrated metrics developed by: conservationists, Indigenous scholars, One Health experts, and planetary health experts. We conclude with actionable steps to enhance governance, mobilize funding, and apply integrated indicators in national and global strategies. A broad science community is needed to support national governments to meet global commitments to address biodiversity loss and the environmental burden of disease concurrently. The overall aim of this paper is to contribute to addressing biodiversity loss by effectively linking policy and transdisciplinary practice at the health-environment nexus.

The Political Declaration — UNODA

Political Declaration on Strengthening the Protection of Civilians from the Humanitarian Consequences Arising from the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas

How to choose a governance system for your organization

Is your nonprofit, small business, or volunteer group looking for a new way to make decisions? Many groups are questioning our mainstream systems — and that includes the systems by which we make decisions. Governance used to be one of the things we’d all take for granted, and now it’s one of the cho

Their Side Is Organized; We Need to Be Organized, Too

Trump and his far-right acolytes wield their power to disinvest from public services, terrorize our neighborhoods with ICE agents, and ensure that opposition to genocide becomes a fireable, and deportable, offense. In the face of these grim and terrifying developments, it could scarcely be more urgent that we learn lessons from movements and organizing traditions that confronted repression, surveillance, and powerful opposition in the (recent and distant) past. We’ve put together a reading list of key books to help inform ongoing efforts to build and sustain durable organizations, and forge effective strategies, for both short term survival and long term social transformation. What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe. “Anyone trying to rebuild an effective U.S. labor movement needs to read Class Struggle Unionism by Joe Burns. He lays out the fundamental principles that UE has tried to uphold for the last 85 years. For a union to be worthwhile to the working class, it needs to know which side it is on and it has to recognize that the fight itself is what allows workers to gain the knowledge and power they need.”—Carl Rosen From two co-founders of the largest tenants union in the country, this deeply reported account of the resurgent tenant movement centers poor and working-class people who are fighting back, staying put, and remaking the city in the process. A collection of essays from the Stop Cop City movement on the fight for police abolition and for a liveable planet for all, with gripping reporting from activists on the ground and rousing articles from renowned radical academics. In this remarkable collaborative work, leading scholar-activists Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie surface the often unrecognized genealogies of queer, anti-capitalist, internationalist, grassroots, and women-of-color-led feminist movements, struggles, and organizations that have helped to define abolition and feminism in the twenty-first century. This guide, based on the collective experience of organizers and workers in non-unionized workplaces, is a critical tool to help you and your coworkers organize for justice at work.  Drawing from over twenty years of activism on local and national levels, this striking book offers an organizer’s perspective on the intersections of immigrant rights, racial justice, and prison abolition. At a political moment when Liberatory Harm Reduction and mutual aid are more important than ever, this book serves as an inspiration and a catalyst for radical transformation of our world. Even the River Starts Small is a collection from the movement to stop construction of the Line 3 pipeline through northern Minnesota, featuring anonymous writing, art, and photos spanning nearly a decade, and including reflections on many of the diverse experiences that made up this grassroots resistance. “Tracing revolutionary uprisings from 1989 to 2019, this book is a map of resistance and resilience in the face of tremendous odds. The case studies, as well as the introductory essay, lead us through situations where the victory of capitalism over humanity was anything but assured. And yet the book is not a wistful history about what could have been. Rather, it is a strategic assessment of near-victories to prepare us for the fire next time.” —Tithi Bhattacharya As isolated individuals, debtors have little influence. But as a bloc, we can leverage our debts and devise new tactics to challenge the corporate creditor class and help win reparative, universal public goods. Individually, our debts overwhelm us. But together, our debts can make us powerful. What does the politics of solidarity look like in practice, and how can left-wing organizations grow—in numbers and power—while remaining accountable to the broader movements of which they are a part? An oral history and critical genealogy of “accountability,” the complex abolitionist concept that pushes us to ask: just what do we mean by “community?” Environmentalism from Below takes readers inside the popular struggles for environmental liberation in the Global South. These communities—among the most vulnerable to but also least responsible for the climate crisis—have long been at the forefront of the fight to protect imperiled worlds. This volume—the Socialist Register’s first-ever reader—grapples with the question of whether political organization is a necessary part of the struggle by the working-class to overthrow capitalism. In pieces published over the course of publication’s entire history contributors, from Ralph Miliband to Jean-Paul Satre, examine various aspects of this theme. The Socialist Challenge Today presents an essential historical, theoretical, and critical perspective for understanding the potential as well as the limits of three important recent phenomena: the Sanders electoral insurgency in the United States; the Syriza experience in Greece; and Corbyn's leadership of the Labour Party in the United Kingdom. This book surveys revolutionary socialist ideas and engages a gallery of contentious political thinkers, offering an indispensable assessment of the place of revolutionary collectives in this radical tradition. A trenchant history of community organizing and a must-read for the next generation of organizers seeking to learn from the successes, failures, and contradictions of the past. In an era of stark racial injustice, Aaron Dixon dedicated his life to revolution, founding the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 at age nineteen. In My People Are Rising, he traces the course of his own radicalization, and that of a generation. SNCC: The New Abolitionists influenced a generation of activists struggling for civil rights and seeking to learn from the successes and failures of those who built the fantastically influential Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.  Detroit: I Do Mind Dying tracks the extraordinary development of the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers as they became two of the landmark political organizations of the 1960s and 1970s. It is widely heralded as one the most important books on the Black liberation movement. A landmark account of a key radical feminist organization, offering lessons for today’s women’s liberation movement. Boston Female Liberation member Nancy Rosenstock expertly weaves together the reflections of her fellow-activists, describing how they became feminists, recounting the breadth of their organizing work, and linking their achievements and experience to contemporary struggles against sexism. In this rousing and insightful participant's account, Hal Draper recounts the now iconic events of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. From the impromptu speak out atop a police car after the administration decided to clamp down on students “distributing communist literature,” to the inspiring Student Strike that shut down the entire campus, Draper's narrative captures the energy and dynamism of each twist and turn in the struggle, and offers invaluable analysis along the way. From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. During the first two decades of the twentieth century the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism developed into a major influence within the trade union movement. Committed to destroying capitalism through direct industrial action and revolutionary trade union struggle, the movement raised fundamental questions for activists across the world. In this thorough, concise, and accessible introduction to Lenin’s theory and practice of revolutionary politics, Paul Le Blanc gives a vibrant sense of the historical context of the socialist movement (in Russia and abroad) from which Lenin’s ideas about revolutionary organization spring. What emerges from Le Blanc’s partisan yet measured account is an image of a collaborative, ever adaptive, and dynamically engaged network of revolutionary activists who formed the core of the Bolshevik party.

We Do This 'Til We Free Us

New York Times Bestseller “Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you’re going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to.” What if social transformation and liberation isn’t about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In this timely collection of essays and interviews, Mariame Kaba reflects on the deep work of abolition and transformative political struggle. With a foreword by Naomi Murakawa and chapters on seeking justice beyond the punishment system, transforming how we deal with harm and accountability, and finding hope in collective struggle for abolition, Kaba’s work is deeply rooted in the relentless belief that we can fundamentally change the world. As Kaba writes, “Nothing that we do that is worthwhile is done alone.”

Humanitarian aid turns to AI as crises outpace capacity

Purpose-designed AI agents with a focus on safety can provide critical assistance to vulnerable populations.

Governance Archaeology: Research as Ancestry

Abstract. This essay presents the idea of governance archaeology, an approach to learning from the past to inform the politics of the future. By reporting on a prototype historical database, we outline a strategy for co-producing a global commons of collective governance practices that can inspire institutional learning and experimentation, particularly in the face of rapid technological change and vexing global crises. Embedded in our approach is an orientation of ancestry whereby practitioners cultivate relationships of accountability and responsibility to the legacies they learn from, recognizing the harm from past patterns of exploitation. By taking seriously a wide range of historical governance practices, particularly those outside the Western canon, governance archaeology seeks to expand the options available for the design of more moral political economies.

Fanning the Flames

Since the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began in Sudan in April 2023, countless civilians have been killed, millions have been internally displaced, and millions face famine. There is a large and growing body of credible evidence documenting how, during their conduct in the conflict, the warring parties have committed widespread war crimes, crimes against humanity, and serious human rights violations, including in the Darfur region. For example, Human Rights Watch, among others, has documented devastating ethnic cleansing in West Darfur. Given the prevalence of such atrocities in the conflict, Human Rights Watch has called for the renewal and expansion of the existing arms embargo on Darfur to the rest of Sudan to prevent warring parties acquiring weapons or equipment likely to be used to perpetuate serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, harming civilians.

Mass Killings Reported in Sudan as RSF Seizes El Fasher; 460 Killed at Hospital

Sudan’s military is accusing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces of killing at least 2,000 people since seizing control of El Fasher in the Darfur region, including some 460 at the Saudi Maternity Hospital. Meanwhile, tens of thousands have fled. “What’s happening is no less than a … campaign of destruction and annihilation,” says Mathilde Vu, Sudan advocacy manager at the Norwegian Refugee Council, speaking to Democracy Now! from Kenya. What’s unfolding in El Fasher is “the sum of all our fears,” adds Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health. He urges the United States to put pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which has backed the RSF in the civil war as the group carries out “acts that are tantamount to genocide.”

Olivier De Schutter

Olivier De Schutter is a Belgian legal scholar specialising in economic and social rights, with a specific focus on the role of social rights in the fight against poverty and their status in European integration: he coined the term "the Social Constitution of Europe" to describe the role of the European Social Charter on the European continent. He served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food from 2008 to 2014. He is a professor of international human rights law, European Union law and legal theory at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, as well as at the College of Europe and at Sciences Po in Paris. He was a regular visiting professor at Columbia University between 2008 and 2012 and has regularly contributed to the American University Washington College of Law's Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. He is the first chair of the Belgian Advisory Council on Policy Coherence for Development and he co-chairs the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food), a group of experts from various disciplines and regions who work together towards developing proposals for food systems reform. A Member of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights between 2015 and 2020, he was appointed the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, and took up his functions on May 1, 2020.

Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees

The Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, also known as the 1951 Refugee Convention or the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951 is a United Nations multilateral treaty that defines who a refugee is and sets out the rights of individuals who are granted asylum and the responsibilities of nations that grant asylum. The convention also sets out which people do not qualify as refugees, such as war criminals. The convention also provides for some visa-free travel for holders of refugee travel documents issued under the convention.

How May the ‘Anthropocene’ Enable and Constrain Cybersystemic Governance? The ‘Anthropocene Problematique’

A growing awareness of the need for cybernetics and systems thinking (cybersystemic) in praxes of governance to improve human-biosphere relationships in the Anthropocene has become apparent. Nonetheless, mainstream governance informed by linear-causality seems to perpetuate an increasingly inadequate paradigm of dominant first-order/systematic thinking in governing complex interactions between humans and their natural environments. This conundrum is explored through the second-order lens of a systemic inquiry, using an integrative literature review. We discuss limitations of the Anthropocene metaphor and make the case for a reframing of our situation (humans’ co-evolutionary dynamic with the biosphere) as the ‘Anthropocene problematique’. This reframing as a systemic-duality offers more conducive affordances for trajectory-shifting cybersystemic governance to emerge. Aligning with a body of literature evidencing the influence of language on human cognition, we argue that by joining up the strengths of both ideas, ‘Anthropocene problematique’ may form a conceptual device amenable to changing worldviews and guiding practical action in governing human-biosphere relationships. We suggest a conceptual framework for practitioners to design and enact purposeful systems of cybersystemic governance with potential to improve situated Anthropocene problematiques. This framing and theoretical proposal are motivated by a need for shifts towards a social purpose of healing human-biosphere relationships in current governance systems in the Anthropocene-world.