Brown Journal of World Affairs
20.2 Spring/Summer 2014
http://www.bjwa.org/index.php?subpage=currentissue
The Changing Face of Humanitarian Crises
Frederick M. Burkle, Jr., Gerald Martone & P. Gregg Greenough
The scale and cadence of crises that demand international humanitarian response is increasing. The cumulative frequency and severity of climate change on large populations, rapid and unsustainable urbanization, decreasing biodiversity, and the impending realities of resource scarcities and the armed conflicts they might catalyze are only some of the challenges that loom ahead. It is ironic that while human civilization today possesses the most advanced technologies, global prosperity, and abundance, we face the greatest absolute number of people lacking access to clean water, food, shelter, and basic healthcare.1 Worldwide standards of living show that health status, life expectancy, child survival, democratization and political participation, literacy and matriculation, and gender equality are at their best while the incidence of armed conflicts is at the lowest level in human history.2 Yet despite the improvement in global standards, the shortcomings in worldwide accessibility to basic needs make the preparation of the humanitarian complex even more urgent in the face of emerging crises.
Critical masses of evidence indicate that the frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme events affecting populations are on the rise.3 These “mega-catastrophes” are attributable to a number of converging megatrends, defined here as global, sustained, and often slow to form forces that will define our future. An increasing number of droughts on every continent; rapid and unsustainable urbanization plagued by insufficient public health infrastructure and social protections; scarcity of water, food, energy, and arable land; and the loss of biodiversity systems that serve as the biological oxygen of the world and the major safeguard against infectious diseases exemplify the megatrends of climate extremes. These megatrends may lead to an additional and potentially explosive
trend where conflicts increasingly emerge as populations desperately compete for limited resources necessary for survival.
Informal Workers’ Struggles in Eight Countries
Rina Agarwala
On 24 April 2013, an eight-story building in Bangladesh collapsed, killing and injuring hundreds of workers.1 Over half of the victims were women and children, and nearly all of them were low-income garment workers producing cheap clothes for 29 different Western brands. The workers operated in five garment factories that were built without permits on the top floors of the building and lacked standard safety features. They were told to come to work even though other occupants of the building were evacuated when cracks in the building were discovered the day before. The accident, now known as the deadliest garment factory accident in history, rocked the world with appalling pictures of trapped workers reaching out for help. It unveiled the plight of the growing group of unregulated, unprotected workers who are often hidden from the public eye, but form the bedrock of contemporary global economic production.
Since the turn of the last century, the world’s workers have struggled to institute a social contract that could eradicate the type of unprotected work found in the Bangladeshi garment factories by regulating working conditions and protecting all workers’ dignity and human rights. While the resulting social contracts that emerged during the twentieth century varied across countries—in substance and in enforcement—the contracts shared, at the very least, an expressed commitment to holding capital responsible for decommodifying workers’ productive and reproductive labor in the form of minimum wages, job security, work contracts, and in some cases health care and old-age benefits. In return for the formal recognition of work and attached benefits, workers provided their labor. The state was held responsible (usually by organized labor) for enforcing this contract between capital and labor. So how did the thousands of unprotected Bangladeshi garment workers in the fated building emerge?
Can Cities Save the Future?
Seth Kaplan
Fragile states remain among the international community’s biggest challenges. Efforts to address their governance problems have mostly failed, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Somalia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Foreign aid has not fixed economies, international troops have not brought security, and elections have not produced responsive governments. Furthermore, the dangers fragile states pose appear to be on the rise. Syria is the new hotbed of extremists, Somali terrorists threaten to overturn East Africa’s fortunes, and instability in Libya has spilled over into Mali and the Sahel countries. Meanwhile, the problem is broadening: an increasing number of the world’s poor live in these fragile states, with the share “set to rise to half in 2018 and nearly two-thirds in 2030.”1
Fragile states—some 60 countries that are plagued by deeply entrenched sociopolitical and institutional problems—are not like other states. They function—albeit barely—according to a different set of sociopolitical dynamics due to their internal divisions and weak institutions. As such, they face uniquely formidable obstacles to stability, development, and democracy, trapping them in a vicious cycle whereby instability and underdevelopment feed on each other with little hope for change. Social divisions hold back efforts at improving governance and economic opportunity, which in turn creates discontent and a zero-sum competition for power and resources.
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