Further distribution of all or part of this report is subject to the Distribution Statement appearing on the front cover. / One of the global security challenges the United States faces is disaster coupled with political instability. The U.S. Military‘s ability to rapidly respond to disasters enhances regional and global security and stability. Foreign Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (FHA/DR), increasingly a mission that relies on a significant military component, focuses on the provision of goods and services such as health care, supplies necessary for survival, and infrastructure repair, with the goal of reducing the immediate human suffering. The disaster in this project‘s scenario is catastrophic flooding that occurs in one of Africa‘s most populated and wealthiest countries that threatens the stability and development of West Africa. This project, employing a systems engineering methodology, focuses on the 60 days after the disaster and the requirements to provide this assistance in the form of goods and services. Many system-of-systems architectures were developed to investigate the effectiveness of utilizing a Seabase for the primary delivery of aid. Two simulation tools, SimKit, and STELLA, were used to model and examine these architectures with the former addressing the delivery and throughput concerns while the latter focused on the satisfaction of the population and the limitation of criminal activity. Based on the results of modeling, the team provided recommendations relative to the most effective architectures in influencing the population of this coastal area as well as accomplishing the FHA/DR mission.

As the field of humanitarian aid continues to grow exponentially, the politicization of humanitarian aid is an increasing concern. The European Union's humanitarian aid office (ECHO) is the world's second largest aid donor and widely understood to be unpoliticized due to its multilateral nature, relative institutional isolation, needs-based mandate and use of standardized assessment indicators. Using primary and secondary literature and interview sources, this thesis takes a critical look at the EU's aid program and ECHO's work with operating partners using a framework of four degrees of politicization. These degrees are applied throughout the thesis and in a short case study of the EU's aid programs during the Kosovo crisis of 1999. It finds that while ECHO offers an outstanding example of official policy commitments to unpoliticized aid, in practice, it too is subject to the influences of politicization. The thesis concludes with an assessment of how ECHO might address the politicization of aid to improve future aid programs.

This thesis combines ethnographic methods with feminist political analysis to examine Congolese young people’s decision-making roles in families, households, communities and policy spaces in Kampala and Kyaka II refugee settlement, Uganda. As refugees and young people, research subjects face many structural constraints. However, their diverse experiences defy homogenising discourses of marginality as an inherent, fixed characteristic. Instead, this thesis develops and applies a conceptual framework of political marginalisation as a dynamic process in multiple spaces. Research findings show that young people’s decision-making roles vis-à-vis resource distribution and division of labour are relational and contextual. Their multiple subject positions and relationships in overlapping networks affect differential decision-making roles. In particular, social age and gender are major axes of decision-making processes. Analyses of inter-linkages across patterns of relationships reveal that research subjects in peer networks and intergenerational household networks with independent resources have more decision-making opportunities at household, community and policy levels than their counterparts in intergenerational family networks. This contradicts assumptions that young people without their biological parents are inherently ‘marginalised’, and highlights the political importance of decision-making processes in perceived ‘private’ spaces, such as families and households. Structure and power relationships thus situate decision-making processes and affect available choices, but they cannot solely explain political roles and behaviour. This thesis also stresses the importance of agentic beliefs, intentions and aspirations. As actors in dynamic marginalisation processes, some young people attempt to access central spaces through education, remunerated formal employment and physical mobility. Others use marginal and transitional spaces to provide alternatives to the status quo. Such creativity and productivity occasion possibilities of political change. However, UNHCR’s protection and assistance responses do not facilitate these transformative processes because of their focus on perceived essentialist characteristics of monolithic ‘marginals’. This thesis offers an alternative approach that recognises refugee young people’s political agency, as well as the structural and power dynamics that constrain their decision-making opportunities.

Thesis (M.A.A.S.) -- Air University, 2004. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on April 24, 2009). "June 2004." Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-91).

abstract: Armed violence is a contemporary global challenge especially in the developing world. It impacts immigration policies locally and internationally. Uganda experienced a twenty-four year -long civil armed conflict, which the president of Uganda declared ended in 2008. Following government instruction, displaced persons have been returning home since then. Despite this official closure, in the course of resettlement, youth specific needs and concerns have been ignored. Female youth have been the most affected due to the interlocking nature of their undervalued gender, age, and marital and reproductive statuses. Despite the complexity of female youth’s social location, research and frameworks about armed violence have focused on men as the perpetuators, marginalizing the impact armed conflict has on young women. Using the case of northern Uganda, this dissertation draws on feminist and indigenous epistemologies to examine the experiences of formerly displaced female youth. First, I deconstruct the western dominant construction of the stages of human growth and development including childhood, youth and adulthood. In this research, I prioritize local perspectives on human development; emphasizing the ambiguity of the concept youth, highlighting its age and gendered limited applicability to northern Uganda. I also examine the local understanding of armed conflict centering its forms and causes. Further, I explore the challenges female youth face, and the strategies they adopt to cope in situations of distress. I argue that studying formerly displaced female youth from their standpoint is critical since female youth have been marginalized in previous research and programs with gender-neutral perspectives. They thus provide a new perspective to armed violence given their multi dimensional standpoint. Female youth have different needs and concerns, which may not feature in mainstream programming largely informed by traditional male dominated systems and structures. Young women’s experiences thus deserve to be acknowledged if female youth are to benefit from the post-conflict reconstruction phase. To fulfill this objective, I used qualitative methods of data collection and analysis. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Gender Studies 2016

(English) The thesis focuses on the issue of humanitarian assistance under international humanitarian law. The topic was chosen based on the personal interest of the author of the thesis and also based on the fact that it is a current and very discussed issue. The thesis is concerned with the legal sources governing the concept of humanitarian assistance. It also focuses on the history of the concept paying special attention to its modern development and to the principles on which it is based. Individual chapter is dedicated to the issue of providers and beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance. Special attention is also given to the issue of consent with the facilitation of humanitarian assistance, whether it is necessary to sough such a consent and from whom. Significant part of the thesis focuses on the facilitation and distribution of humanitarian assistance and the obligations of the third states. The first chapter of the thesis is dedicated to the introduction, definition of the term "humanitarian assistance", aims and goals of the thesis, and also to the methods and sources. The second chapter focuses in a great detail on legal sources relevant to the thesis. First, it pays attention to the treaty law. Thus, it describes the relevant provisions of the Geneva Convention IV, the Additional...

The legal humanitarian regime, set out in the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols, strives to alleviate human suffering through the provision of emergency goods and services, such as food supplies, water, temporary shelter, and medical treatment. This thesis examines how international non-government organizations (INGOs) contribute to the contestation of this regime in political emergencies, the effects of this contestation, and the factors driving INGO contestation. The thesis develops an analytical framework for understanding the nature and functioning of the legal humanitarian regime, and argues that INGO contestation occurs through the two processes of regime interpretation and regime implementation. It then goes on to identify the substantive content and effects of contestation, and the factors driving INGO contestation of the regime, through a detailed study of the policies and practices of CARE, Médecins Sans Frontiers, Oxfam, and World Vision, in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, from 1990-2010. The thesis argues that contestation has constitutive effects, as it re-defines the meaning of the formal humanitarian regime, and the underlying rules and norms that specify the regime’s function, scope, and operating principles. Contestation also has causal effects, as it can make INGOs participants in the conflict, eroding thereby the basis on which they negotiate access and their ability to respond to humanitarian needs, and the security of their staff. It has also facilitated the subordination of humanitarian assistance by donor states and combatants to their political and security objectives. INGO identity - expressed in terms of the constituent rules and norms that define INGO membership, their mandate and goals, and the manner in which they distinguish themselves from other actors - is argued to be a necessary factor for explaining INGO contestation. The focus on identity highlights the agency of INGOs in shaping the humanitarian regime and demonstrates that INGOs are not simply at the mercy of more powerful actors or external constraints.

Food aid and domestic food production capacities in Zimbabwe have been compromised by the poor performance in the country’s agricultural sector, which has necessitated an increase in and a continual need for humanitarian assistance over the past decade. The country’s commercial cereal food import capacity has not been an exception as it has also been greatly affected by the poor performance of the agricultural sector and the shortage of foreign currency that hit the country in the past few years. Secondary data on food aid, commercial cereal imports and cereal food production was obtained from World Food Programme (WFP), Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the Grain Marketing Board (GMB) of Zimbabwe and from Zimbabwe Statistics (ZimSTATS) databases. This time series data was then analysed in the Vector Autoregression (VAR) analysis. Trends observed in the time series data reveal that commercial cereal food imports and cereal food aid inflows to Zimbabwe had been increasing between 1988 and 2008. Domestic cereal food production levels however were observed to have been declining within the same period. The restricted VAR model which was specified to investigate the short and long term effects of food aid on food production and on commercial food imports in the country revealed a low statistically significant positive relationship between domestic food production and food aid volumes. Results from the model also indicated a negative relationship between commercial food imports and food aid volumes. This means that as food aid volumes to Zimbabwe increase, the volume of commercial cereal food imported into Zimbabwe falls. This result therefore suggests that food aid in the country had a displacement effect on commercial cereal food imports in the short term. The results of the Granger causality test and the estimation of the Impulse Response Functions also helped to confirm and reinforce these findings from the vector error correction model. The conclusions drawn from the study were that the responsiveness of domestic food supply, that is, cereal production, to food aid inflows in the short term has been elastic. That is to say, an increase in food aid inflows would influence an increase in the level of domestic food production in the short term. However, in the long term, findings confirm that food aid does indeed discourage domestic food production in the country. Also, for the relationship between food aid and commercial food imports, it can be concluded from the study findings that food aid in the short term has caused a reduction in commercial food imports whereas in the long term, food aid inflows have actually stimulated the commercial food import capacity. In recommendation, the Government of Zimbabwe, the private and public institutions as well as the Non-Governmental Organisations should partner and work together in defining the criteria for vulnerability assessment, food aid targeting and distribution, and in the implementation of strategies for ensuring national food availability. Such partnerships would help in ensuring the sustainability of food aid and food security in Zimbabwe, which is the main goal.

Throughout 2015, the European Union’s response to the large number of migrants crossing the Aegean Sea became increasingly securitised. It translated to the policing of non-governmental search and rescue organisations (SAR NGOs) active in the Aegean Sea. This thesis investigates the impact of policing on the ability of SAR NGOs to deliver humanitarian assistance in the Aegean Sea between 2015-2022. It employs social constructivist deviance theory to investigate the limiting effects of policing and its potential to generate resilience and resistance. Semi-structured interviews with five staff members and volunteers who worked with SAR NGOs in the Aegean Sea between 2015-2022 explore the research question. The findings were triangulated with existing scholarly literature to address the limited sample size. The study finds that policing limits SAR NGOs’ activities and fosters resilience and resistance. Resilience and resistance may have prolonged SAR NGOs’ ability to operate. Yet, over time, the increasing severity of policing, combined with intra- and inter-organisational fragmentation undermining resilience and resistance, forced SAR NGOs to end their humanitarian assistance in the Aegean Sea. Currently, no SAR NGOs are active in the Aegean Sea, resulting in a lack of search and rescue and human rights monitoring. Consequently, the risk of deaths and human rights abuses in the Aegean Sea has increased.

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