Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
“blurred distinctions between the roles of military and humanitarian organisations; political manipulation of humanitarian assistance [and the] perceived lack of independence of humanitarian actors from donors or from host governments”.
Michael Neuman • Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience
Adaptation and resilience will have to be revisited through the creation of grounded, situated, and pervasive design capacity by communities themselves who are bound together through culture and a common will to survive when confronted with threatening conditions, not by global experts, bureaucrats, and geoengineers who can only recommend the busin
... See moreArturo Escobar • Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
and the Jamuna are effectively dead. India and China have also witnessed, in recent years, the large-scale depletion of groundwater aquifers, the loss of biodiversity, the destruction of forests, and the decimation of fish-stocks.
Ramachandra Guha • Environmentalism
“[…] the glass of anthropological knowledge has become darkened by despondency, dystopian, and extinction theories. The earth is exhausted, and ontologies are dying. Many anthropological monographs read as funeral rites for communities. Alternatively, anthropologists offer hyper-micro studies of specific communities and their life worlds that still
... See moreBut by treating people without challenging the political and social origins of their exclusion, is MSF not confining itself to the role expected of it by the authorities?
Michael Neuman • Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience
Eight years after the publication of In the Shadow of Just Wars,6 it examines the precept that the political exploitation of aid is not a misuse of its vocation, but its principal condition of existence.
Michael Neuman • Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience
ideology, ignorance, and inertia—the three I’s—on the part of the expert, the aid worker, or the local policy maker, often explain why policies fail and why aid does not have the effect it should.