Trumanitarian

In the fourth episode of the Ukraine series Yuliia and Lars Peter take stock of the discussions so far and agree that the two main themes emerging from the conversations are around purpose - the role that humanitarian action plays in Ukraine - and Power - the relationship between and relative power of the national and international actors. To explore these issues, and to round off the series they speak to Frederic Larsson from the NGOResource Center in Ukraine and Ewa Wieliczko the ACAPS team lead in Ukraine.

In episode three Yuliia and Lars Peter explore the relationship between civil society and government in Ukraine and asks the question: How does a vibrant civil society, which in normal time advocate and challenge the government, pivot to adapt its role when war breaks out? The hosts speak to Yuliya Sporych, CEO of the national Ukrainian NGO Divchata and with Oleksandr Riabtsev, Head of Demining in the Ministry of Reintegration of the Temporary Occupied Territories. 

The first Russian invasion in 2014 led to a nation-wide grassroots mobilization of Ukrainians to support military effort and provide humanitarian aid. The 2022 invasion propelled these efforts to new heights and mobilized overwelming levels of international support for humanitarian action.In the second episode on Ukraine Yuliia Chykolba and Lars Peter Nissen explore how the organic, agile and evolving Ukrainian civil society response and how it interacts with the international humanitarian sector. They talk to actors from very different ends of the humanitarian sphere: Anastacia Teplyakova, a Ukrainian teacher who has risked everything to support her fellow Ukrainians since 2014, and to Rasmus Sturh Jakobsen, the CEO of CARE Denmark who shares his thinking on Cares work in Ukraine. The gap between the work of Anastacia and Rasmus i the main theme of the episode.

In this first episode out of four on humanitarian action in Ukraine the hosts Yuliia Chykolba and Lars Peter Nissen explore what the humanitarian principles mean in Ukraine today. They agree that the principles of humanity and impartiality are the foundations of humanitarian action but have different position on neutrality. Yuliia argues that the principle is outdated and does not work in Ukraine. Lars Peter worry that letting go of the neutrality will erode the core of humanitarian action.They speak to Marc Dubois an independent consultant and Fiona Terry from ICRC about the principles for humanitarian action.This episode was produced with support from Care Denmark.

Paula Gil Baizan, Meg Sattler and Lars Peter Nissen struggle to make sense out of the humanitarian chaos of 2022 and try to figure out how 2023 might be different.

Dominic Naish has worked for various humanitarian agencies as a contextual analysts. The contexts were different, the organisations were different, but he always had the feeling of being more of an irritant than a help to the people he worked for. In the end he decided to leave the humanitarian sector. He has described his experience in a blogpost “Not a priority” for the Humanitarian Practice Network. You can find the blogpost here: https://odihpn.org/blog/not-a-priority-the-lack-of-contextual-understanding-in-humanitarian-missions/You can read more aobut Dominic on his linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominic-naish-a1524387/

In this episode Lars Peter Nissen - a practitioner - gets stuck into a discussion surrounding the use of data in humanitarian aid with Joël Glasman, an academic. Joel is a historian and author of the book Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs: Minimal Humanity. Joel poses a strong and uncomfortable argument in his book, and in the conversation; humanitarian statistics is flawed and data of poor quality, and for some reason we hype our need (and our ability) for evidence-based decision making and the importance of statistical data.The conversation is essentially about the quality of our data and knowledge and may lead you to question the data revolution in humanitarian aid. Moreso though, it is about biases in our system, about reliance on one type of evidence and about targeting the needs of humanitarian institutions, not affected populations. It raises some fundamental questions about which intrinsic moral values humanitarian aid project in to into our statistics, tools and technology. And what this means for the decision we make and how we make them. Does our evidence base lead to better and more neutral, impartial, and independent aid, or have we become prisoners of our own thermometer and use our evidence to legitimize our actions more than to improve them.

This weeks episode is a recording of a keynote given by Benjamin Lang and Lars Peter Nissen at CartONGs GeOnG conference in Chambery on 24 October, 2022. The debate is moderated by Sandra Sudhoff, the technical director of CartONG.You can watch the entire opening ceremony on CartONGs YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QteGAp8gD7Y

Siri Melchior Tellier had a long and varied career in international development cooperation, humanitarian action and teaching. She passed away in October 2022 and this conversation with Lars Peter Nissen was recorded in August 2020 during the Pandemic.It is a conversation about public health, data, standards, trust, learning and failing and having the courage to make yourself part of the mess and make a difference in the world.

Gareth Owen is the humanitarian Director of Save the Children UK. In this conversation with Lars Peter Nissen he discusses the trade-offs between quality and scale, between his humanitarian heart and his humanitarian realist.The fundamental question posed by the conversation is whether you “Can you change the master’s house with the master’s tools?” Gareth is in his own words “an establishment guy” who sits the “at the apex of the problem” but he still believes that is the right thing to do and that it is possible to achieve change from within the system.