As humanitarian needs continue to grow rapidly, humanitarian action has become more contested, with new actors entering the field to address unmet needs, but also challenging long-held principles and precepts.

This volume provides detailed empirical comparisons between emerging and traditional humanitarian actors. It sheds light on why and how the emerging actors engage in humanitarian crises and how their activities are carried out and perceived in their transnational organizational environment. It develops and applies a conceptual framework that fosters research on humanitarian actors and the humanitarian principles. In particular, it simultaneously refers to theories of organizational sociology and international relations to identify both the structural and the situational factors that influence the motivations, aims and activities of these actors, and their different levels of commitment to the traditional humanitarian principles. It thus elucidates the role of the humanitarian principles in promoting coherence and coordination in the crowded and diverse world of humanitarian action, and discusses whether alternative principles and parallel humanitarian systems are in the making.

This volume will be of great interest to postgraduate students and scholars in humanitarian studies, globalization and transnationalism research, organizational sociology, international relations, development studies, and migration and diaspora studies, as well as policy makers and practitioners engaged in humanitarian action, development cooperation and migration issues.

About the Author
Zeynep Sezgin is Lise-Meitner Fellow of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and leads the research project "Legitimacy of Faith-Based Humanitarian Organisations in Austria, Germany and Pakistan" at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria. Dennis Dijkzeul is Professor of Conflict and Organisation Research at the Social Science School and the Institute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV) at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

Reviews

"In the humanitarian world the norm of all societies is acceptable; crises happen, the norm slips and the good humanitarian steps in with temporary action to return society to the straight and narrow. But the received wisdom, the history, the model, is now stretched beyond credulity. The real world of crisis and crisis response is far more diverse, messy, shot with tensions and contradictions. The New Humanitarians in International Practice describes and explores the real humanitarian world in all its uncomfortable diversity from politicized donors to profit seeking companies, taking in the fighting humanitarians and evangelists on the way. It explores the regional and local humanitarian groups contrasting them with the romantic image of the international patriotically-neutered agency of the TV adverts."-Peter Walker, Chatham University, USA

"This important book is a superb blend of scholarship on and real-world experience with contemporary humanitarian action. Sezgin and Dijkzeul have brought together an exceptional group of contributors - both scholars and practitioners - to examine the implications of an array of emerging new players of an increasingly fragmented humanitarian system. The book's eight "new" humanitarianisms offer a bold critical perspective on the aims and activities of a variety of new humanitarian actors and their impact on humanitarian principles and practices. An excellent and much needed look at what is happening to the humanitarian system - it should be required reading for scholars and policymakers of humanitarian action!"-James P. Muldoon Jr., The Mosaic Institute, Canada

"The New Humanitarians in International Practice provides novel, empirically grounded insights into the diversified, contemporary humanitarian system...For contemporary humanitarians as well as humanitarian studies scholars and students, Sezgin and Dijkzeul's book should be required reading as it provides much-needed food for thought concerning the role and limitations of traditional humanitarian actors and their uneasy relationship with structures of the Global South and non-traditional humanitarian players." - Claudia Breitung, Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), Global Policy November 2016

Book Information
ISBN 9780815394242
Author Zeynep Sezgin
Format Paperback
Page Count 396
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Inc
Weight(grams) 453g