Streamlining humanitarian and peacekeeping supply chains: Anticipation capability for higher responsiveness
N Merminod, J Nollet, G Pache
Society and Business Review, 2014, Vol. 9 Iss: 1, pp.4 – 22

Abstract
Purpose – Over the last decade, temporary supply chains (TSCs) have become a well-recognized logistics model. In TSCs, supply chain members are organized for an ad hoc project; they pool resources in order to make the project successful. Although it might be perceived that TSCs are unstable due to their temporary nature, this paper aims to discuss how TSCs can be managed so as to be both stable and agile, while achieving the stated objectives; since the stability-agility context could be really challenging in humanitarian and peacekeeping supply chains, this is the one that has been selected.

Design/methodology/approach – The authors reviewed the literature, research reports and electronic documents on humanitarian and peacekeeping supply chains, to understand the main challenges in terms of managerial and social impacts of logistical operations in a disaster context.

Findings – The disaster context is very peculiar, since it requires tremendous agility when a natural or man-made catastrophe hits, so that as many lives as possible can be saved and that the situation could get back rapidly to a relatively normal level. The paper shows that TSCs require an advanced level of time and organizational stability of the human and material resources involved in order to be highly flexible. In other words, an efficient TSC relies on “anticipated responsiveness”, a major managerial challenge in the years to come.

Originality/value – The paper clarifies the management of humanitarian and peacekeeping supply chains and identifies the importance of anticipation capability to improve logistical responsiveness.

Book: Conflict and Catastrophe Medicine – A Practical Guide
http://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4471-2927-1
Editors: James M. Ryan, Adriaan P.C.C. Hopperus Buma, Charles W. Beadling, Aroop Mozumder, David M. Nott, Norman M. Rich, David MacGarty
ISBN: 978-1-4471-2926-4 (Print) 978-1-4471-2927-1 (Online)

Excerpt from Foreword
…It seems then that wars, confl icts and humanitarian calamities will be exercising our thoughts for the coming decades at least. The world too has become a dangerous place for humanitarian volunteers who face kidnap and murder by extremists and criminals with little sympathy for humanitarian ideals. The term “failed states” has entered the language of diplomacy, anthropology, politics and the media. When we edited the fi rst edition in 2002, we knew much of this – what we did not know was how the problem would grow and threaten to engulf us. Never has there been a greater need to prepare and plan for humanitarian interventions in a wide variety of hostile environments. Never has there been a greater need for properly trained humanitarians to work in these challenging environments. We hope that the third edition of this textbook will play a role in this preparation…

Book: Disaster Relief in the Asia Pacific: Agency and Resilience
Routledge Contemporary Asia Series
Editors: Minako Sakai, Edwin Jurriëns, Jian Zhang, Alec Thornton
Routledge, 2014  256 pages

A UN report recently found that the Asia Pacific is the world’s most disaster-prone region. Indeed, considering that the region accounts for more than half of the total number of disasters in the world, building capacity and resilience to mitigate the devastating impact of disasters is a pressing task for local actors.

This book takes a regional, multidisciplinary and multi-actor approach to improve understandings of how various actors respond to natural and human-induced disasters in the Asia-Pacific region. It examines the ideas and activities of four different categories of agents: civil society; military and state institutions; local cultural knowledge and the media; and economic initiatives, and these themes are approached from various academic disciplines, ranging from anthropology and cultural studies to economics, human geography and political science. The contributors draw their findings from a variety of countries in the region, including China, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Japan, Myanmar and Samoa, and importantly, focus on the interconnection between vulnerability and resilience. In turn, the book highlights how the nature and magnitude of disasters are influenced by social conditions, and aims to contribute to policies that prioritize development opportunities to enhance resilience. Further, it explores the complicated and multifaceted role of agency in building resilience, and presents a comparative framework for analysis and key findings from the Asia-Pacific region.

The focus of this book on recent and ongoing disasters makes it a topical and timely contribution to the growing field of disaster management, and as such it will appeal to students and scholars of environmental studies, development studies and Asian politics.

Ethics and images of suffering bodies in humanitarian medicine
Philippe Calain

Social Science & Medicine, 2013, vol. 98, issue C, pages 278-285
Abstract: Media representations of suffering bodies from medical humanitarian organisations raise ethical questions, which deserve critical attention for at least three reasons. Firstly, there is a normative vacuum at the intersection of medical ethics, humanitarian ethics and the ethics of photojournalism. Secondly, the perpetuation of stereotypes of illness, famine or disasters, and their political derivations are a source of moral criticism, to which humanitarian medicine is not immune. Thirdly, accidental encounters between members of the health professions and members of the press in the humanitarian arena can result in misunderstandings and moral tension. From an ethics perspective the problem can be specified and better understood through two successive stages of reasoning. Firstly, by applying criteria of medical ethics to the concrete example of an advertising poster from a medical humanitarian organisation, I observe that media representations of suffering bodies would generally not meet ethical standards commonly applied in medical practice. Secondly, I try to identify what overriding humanitarian imperatives could outweigh such reservations. The possibility of action and the expression of moral outrage are two relevant humanitarian values which can further be spelt out through a semantic analysis of ‘témoignage’ (testimony). While the exact balance between the opposing sets of considerations (medical ethics and humanitarian perspectives) is difficult to appraise, awareness of all values at stake is an important initial standpoint for ethical deliberations of media representations of suffering bodies. Future pragmatic approaches to the issue should include: exploring ethical values endorsed by photojournalism, questioning current social norms about the display of suffering, collecting empirical data from past or potential victims of disasters in diverse cultural settings, and developing new canons with more creative or less problematic representations of suffering bodies than the currently accepted stereotypes