Peacekeeping comprises activities intended to create conditions that favour lasting peace. Research generally finds that peacekeeping reduces civilian and battlefield deaths, as well as reduces the risk of renewed warfare.
A failed state is a state that has lost its effective ability to govern its populace. A failed state maintains legal sovereignty but experiences a breakdown in political power, law enforcement, and civil society, leading to a state of near-anarchy.
The International Rescue Committee (IRC) is a global humanitarian aid, relief, and development nongovernmental organization. Founded in 1933 as the International Relief Association, at the request of Albert Einstein, and changing its name in 1942 after amalgamating with the similar Emergency Rescue Committee, the IRC provides emergency aid and long-term assistance to refugees and those displaced by war, persecution, or natural disaster. The IRC is currently working in about 40 countries and 26 U.S. cities where it resettles refugees and helps them become self-sufficient. It focuses mainly on health, education, economic wellbeing, power, and safety.
Humanitarian aid workers belonging to United Nations organisations, PVOs / NGOs or the Red Cross / Red Crescent have traditionally enjoyed both international legal protection, and de facto immunity from attack by belligerent parties. However, ' attacks on humanitarian workers have occasionally occurred, and become more frequent since the 1990s and 2000s. In 2017, the Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) documented 139 humanitarian workers killed in intentional attacks out of the estimated global population of 569,700 workers. In every year since 2013, more than 100 humanitarian workers were killed. This is attributed to a number of factors, including the increasing number of humanitarian workers deployed, the increasingly unstable environments in which they work, and the erosion of the perception of neutrality and independence. In 2012 road travel was seen to be the most dangerous context, with kidnappings of aid workers quadrupling in the last decade, reaching more aid workers victims than any other form of attack.
Humanitarian aid is material and logistic assistance to people who need help. It is usually short-term help until the long-term help by the government and other institutions replaces it. Among the people in need are the homeless, refugees, and victims of natural disasters, wars, and famines. Humanitarian relief efforts are provided for humanitarian purposes and include natural disasters and human-made disasters. The primary objective of humanitarian aid is to save lives, alleviate suffering, and maintain human dignity. It may, therefore, be distinguished from development aid, which seeks to address the underlying socioeconomic factors which may have led to a crisis or emergency. There is a debate on linking humanitarian aid and development efforts, which was reinforced by the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016. However, the conflation is viewed critically by practitioners.
Human security is a paradigm for understanding global vulnerabilities whose proponents challenges the traditional notion of national security through military security by arguing that the proper referent for security should be at the human rather than national level. Human security reveals a people-centred and multi-disciplinary understanding of security which involves a number of research fields, including development studies, international relations, strategic studies, and human rights. The United Nations Development Programme's 1994 Human Development Report is considered a milestone publication in the field of human security, with its argument that ensuring "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" for all persons is the best path to tackle the problem of global insecurity.
Peacebuilding is an activity that aims to resolve injustice in nonviolent ways and to transform the cultural and structural conditions that generate deadly or destructive conflict. It revolves around developing constructive personal, group, and political relationships across ethnic, religious, class, national, and racial boundaries. The process includes violence prevention; conflict management, resolution, or transformation; and post-conflict reconciliation or trauma healing before, during, and after any given case of violence.
The roles of women in the Arab world have changed throughout history, as the culture and society in which they live has undergone significant transformations. Historically, as well as presently, the situation of women differs greatly between Arabic speaking regions, their urban or rural population and age groups. Among other factors, these differences can be attributed to local traditions, culture and religion, women's social or legal status, their level of education, health or self-awareness. Since the 19th century, and notably through the influence of the colonization in North Africa, the Arab Renaissance in Egypt, Lebanon, and Syria, and the end of the Ottoman Empire, the social and economic changes in the Arab world have become greatly accelerated and diversified.
The roles of women in Lebanon have evolved throughout history. The legal status of women improved over the 20th century, but patriarchal norms and conservative versions of Islamic law still limit women's rights in Lebanon.
Sherifa D. Zuhur is an academic and national security scholar of the Middle East and Islamic world. She was most recently a visiting scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies, University of California, Berkeley and is the director of the Institute of Middle Eastern, Islamic and Strategic Studies.
Refugee women face gender-specific challenges in navigating daily life at every stage of their migration experience. Common challenges for all refugee women, regardless of other demographic data, are access to healthcare and physical abuse and instances of discrimination, sexual violence, and human trafficking are the most common ones. But even if women don't become victims of such actions, they often face abuse and disregard for their specific needs and experiences, which leads to complex consequences including demoralization, stigmatization, and mental and physical health decay. The lack of access to appropriate resources from international humanitarian aid organizations is compounded by the prevailing gender assumptions around the world, though recent shifts in gender mainstreaming are aiming to combat these commonalities.
The Secretary's Office of Global Women's Issues is located within the United States Department of State. In 2009, Melanne Verveer was appointed to be the first Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues. From September 2013 to May, 2017, Catherine M. Russell was appointed to this position. From May 2017 through December 2019, there was no ambassador for this office. Kelley Currie, a political appointee, joined the Global Women's Issues Office as U.S. Ambassador-at-Large in January 2020. Geeta Rao Gupta is the current Ambassador-at-Large for the office as of May 18th, 2023.
Women in Syria constitute 49.9% of Syria's population. According to World Bank data from 2021, there were around 10.6 million women in Syria. They are active participants not only in everyday life, but also in the socio-political fields. Syrian women and girls still experience challenges in their day-to-day lives, for example in the area of law and health care.
Aisling Swaine is an associate professor of practice of international affairs, focusing on women, security and development at the Elliott School of International Affairs of the George Washington University.
International reactions to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen of 2015 were mixed. Most other Arab League nations and several Western governments backed the Saudi Arabia-led military coalition, but other governments warned against an escalation in the violent situation in Yemen.
Wanjiru Kamau-Rutenberg is an Executive in Residence at Schmidt Futures. Before that she was Director of African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD). Wanjiru is also the Founder and past Executive Director of Akili Dada, a leadership incubator for African girls and young women and a former Assistant Professor of Politics at the University of San Francisco.
The Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) is a project of the international research group Humanitarian Outcomes. Funded by USAID, it records major incidents, from 1997 to present, of attacks on humanitarian workers worldwide. As cited in the New York Times, "it is widely regarded as an authoritative reference for aid organisations and governments in assessing trends in security threats." Since its inception in 2005 as the first fully comprehensive compilation of this data, the AWSD has been a source of quantitative evidence on matters related to the security of humanitarian operations in conflict, referenced in policy debates and cited in official United Nations statements, United Nations General Assembly resolutions, United Nations Security Council documents, and reports of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Carla Ravi Koppell is an American academic who serves as interim Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. As part of her work she collaborates with the Volcker Alliance to spearhead the University Leadership Council on Diversity and Inclusion in International Affairs. In that role, she works with deans of graduate schools of public policy and international affairs to incorporate attention to diversity and inclusion in their curricula and programs.
Gender and International Aid in Afghanistan: The Politics and Effects of Intervention is a 2009 book by Lina AbiRafeh.
