Joost Herman

Building on the Capacities of Crisis-affected Populations: from Victims to Actors

Attempts to consolidate humanitarian actors into a humanitarian system are occurring simultaneously with efforts to generate greater coherence between humanitarian action and development and peace-building. Whether a strengthened humanitarian system can adhere to the humanitarian principles while engaging in post-conflict societal reconstruction is unclear. This would require humanitarian action to address the victimhood mentality when dealing with affected populations and to seek out capacities as well as needs. In so doing the inherent political nature of humanitarian action and the manner in which it is prone to instrumentalization needs to be recognized. This would assist in generating the sensitivity required in order to ensure that humanitarian action ultimately supports rather than undermines reconciliation and the building of democratic institutions. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Humanitarian Action: Global, Regional and Domestic Legal Responses

Humanitarian assistance occurs when local or regional crises prompt international action to alleviate human suffering. In contrast to development aid, humanitarian aid is defined by its short-term focus and the immediacy of intervention. Given its crisis management character, humanitarian assistance presents a pressing challenge for international law because the provision of assistance operates under circumstances which depart from common state-centric understandings of how inter- national politics and international law usually work.To be sure, in the context of humanitarian emergencies processes of inter-state negotiation and consensus-building are dramatically limited by the urgency of the need to assist populations vulnerable to the consequences of natural disaster or armed conflict. Humanitarian Action: Global, Regional and Domestic Legal Responses directly responds to this pressing challenge by providing the first in-depth exploration of legal problems posed by contemporary humanitarian practice. Through two points of departure – one which explores the law and politics of humanitarian action, and the second which explores normative frameworks – this book provides legal professionals, scholars and policy-makers with a unique multidisciplinary resource that will help inform the theory and practice of humanitarian assistance.

Curbing the lifestyle disease pandemic: making progress on an interdisciplinary research agenda for law and policy interventions

By 2030, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) will be the leading cause of death in every region in the world. While law and policy have an important role to play in curbing this pandemic, our current understanding of how they can most effectively be used is still limited. This contribution identifies a number of gaps in current research and insists on an interdisciplinary research agenda between law, health science and international relations aimed at designing concrete proposals for laws and policies to curb the NCD pandemic, both globally and domestically.

Chinese experiences and lessons learnt in agricultural development since 1949

The Chinese agricultural development has made remarkable achievements, especially in recent four decades, while as several issues also emerged at the same time. This paper uses a historical view to find out the facts that exist in the agricultural development experiences in China since the People`s Republic of China founded in 1949, both achievements and major issues. In this paper, the Chinese development experiences have been divided into three phases in accordance with the developmental characteristics in each stage, and then to search for the main achievements in the past decades and problems that need to solve currently.