Chapter

The Future Is Now: Futuring to Transform the World’s Largest Humanitarian Network

January 2022

In book: Design for Social Innovation: Case Studies from Around the World
Publisher: Routledge

Authors:

Carnegie Mellon University

This case study describes how the international Red Cross/Red Crescent used a multi-faceted experiential futures campaign to introduce and ultimately institutionalise a foresight capacity at the heart of the largest humanitarian organisation in the world. Co-written by the Head of Futures and Innovation at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, Shaun Hazeldine, and a Founding Member of the IFRC Foresight Advisory Board, experiential futurist Stuart Candy. Invited contribution to the Routledge collection "Design for Social Innovation", edited by Mariana Amatullo, Bryan Boyer, Jennifer May, and Andrew Shea.

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Anticipatory action to manage climate risks: Lessons from the Red Cross Red Crescent in Southern Afr...

January 2023 · Climate Risk Management

Anticipatory action (AA) is a growing area of climate and disaster risk management that emphasizes the use of climate services and risk analyses to predict where crises might strike and enable action to prevent or mitigate impacts before disasters occur. Based on interviews with stakeholders involved in Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) AA programs in 18 countries, we identify common benefits and ... [Show full abstract] challenges associated with AA programs. We find that RCRC AA programs have built capacity within National Societies, leading to more proactive operations and expedited humanitarian response. Initial investments in AA can also develop key partnerships and facilitate later scaling-up by other organizations. AA can also overcome common challenges in climate services by providing a framework and decision-making and resources for early action. Despite these benefits, AA practitioners struggle with challenges common to climate services, development, and humanitarian aid, including local project ownership, capacity and infrastructure, integration with existing systems, data availability, forecast uncertainty, and monitoring and evaluation. Given these challenges, we reflect on how AA might be able to address challenges of ownership and capacity building and what donors can do to facilitate shifts toward longer-term capacity building.

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From Empathy to Shame: The Use of Virtual Reality by Humanitarian Organisations

December 2022

[...]
Valérie Gorin

Since the UNHCR’s movie Clouds over Sidra , filmed in 2015 in the Zaatari refugee camp, the use of Virtual Reality (VR) has increased among humanitarian organisations for raising funds or awareness. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), among others, have relied on 3D and 360-degree images to enhance emotional resonance among audiences, including ... [Show full abstract] diplomats, military groups or decision-makers. Marketed as the ‘ultimate empathy machine’, VR operates through immersive reality. Yet the necessity to see and feel reality ‘as it is’ is not unprecedented in the visual history of humanitarianism. Therefore, this chapter first critically examines the immersive experience of humanitarian VR movies and their performative and affective potential. Indeed, VR claims to erase the distance and to elicit empathetic connections do not prevent this innovative technology from adopting a voyeuristic or aesthetic gaze, long associated in humanitarian imagery with self-centeredness rather than other centeredness. Then, building on recent VR movies who draw on outrage and indignation, such as The Right Choice (ICRC, 2018) or Not A Target (MSF Switzerland, 2016), this chapter opens new lines of inquiry in the capacity of immersive technologies to mobilise shame rather than empathy.

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Zgoda państwa jako przesłanka działalności Polskiego Czerwonego Krzyża

December 2022

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Kaja Kowalczewska

This article reflects on the role of representatives of public trust professionals and social organizations in the face of legal and humanitarian crises. Using the example of attitudes towards the Polish Red Cross, the author is critical of the lack of knowledge and the public’s tendency towards panic in the face of difficult and time-consuming measures, especially regarding the relation between ... [Show full abstract] the Polish Red Cross and state authorities. In the first part, the basic principles of neutrality and independence that characterize the Red Cross movement are presented. The second, on the other hand, presents the misunderstandings that arose in public discussion after the Polish-Belarusian border crisis and the aggression of Russia and Belarus against Ukraine.

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Migrating through the Corridor of Death: The Making of a Complex Humanitarian Crisis

September 2022 · Journal on Migration and Human Security

Drawing on the concept of a “complex humanitarian crisis,” this paper describes how outflows of migrants from Central America were transformed into such a crisis by intransigent immigration and border policies enacted in both Mexico and the United States. We describe the origins of the migration in U.S. Cold War interventions that created many thousands of displaced people fleeing violence and ... [Show full abstract] economic degradation in the region, leading to a sustained process of undocumented migration to the United States. Owing to rising levels of gang violence and weather events associated with climate change, the number of people seeking to escape threats in Central America has multiplied and unauthorized migration through Mexico toward the United States has increased. However, the securitization of migration in both Mexico and the United States has blocked these migrants from exercising their right to petition for asylum, creating a growing backlog of migrants who are subject to human rights violations and predations both by criminals and government authorities, leading migrants to label Mexican routes northward as a “corridor of death.” We draw on data from annual reports of Mexico's Red de Documentación de las Organizaciones Defensoras de Migrantes (Network for the Documentation of Migrant Defense Organizations) to construct a statistical profile of transit migrants and the threats they face as reported by humanitarian actors in Mexico. These reports allow us to better understand the practical realities of the “complex humanitarian crisis” facing undocumented migrants, both as unauthorized border crossers and as transit migrants moving between the southern frontiers of Mexico and the United States. Policy Recommendations Policy makers need to address: Governments must recognize that the humanitarian crisis facing migrants is not confined to border regions but unfolds at places of both origin and destination as well as within extended geographies of transit in-between. The current refugee protection regime and asylum system are ill-matched to the needs and vulnerabilities of today's migrants. In an era of rapid climate change, rising state failures, and escalating violence, people are not moving so much to advance economically as to escape a growing array of threats not covered by the 1951 Refugee Convention, which needs to be updated. Developed nations must honor rather than elide their obligations under international law to accept asylum applicants and fairly adjudicate their cases, Since a large fraction of the Central Americans arriving at the southern US border have relatives in the United States, creating a pathway to legal status for unauthorized US residents would relieve a lot of the pressure on the asylum system by enabling authorities to release applicants to the support and care of legally resident relatives rather than placing them in an overburdened detention system. Governments need to scale back the securitization and criminalization of migration, which have made human mobility an increasingly precarious and risk-filled activity that contributes to rather than forestalls the proliferation of crime and violence. Human rights and humanitarian agencies need to revisit their missions to derive new ways of working conjointly and in parallel with each other and with governments to better understand and meet the needs of migrants in the 21 st century.