The modern (after a long pre-modern) history of international humanitarian assistance (IHA) and protection during and after wars of succession, rebellions, and similar conflicts, starts in the Biafra/Nigeria war in the 1960s. Today, governmental donors and agencies of various kinds continue to raise huge amounts of cash and kind for rescue and relief to meet humanitarian crises around the world, yet the controversies about IHA and its institutions and practices continue. Some have to do with its borders with ‘humanitarian intervention' and other military matters. Others arise where the provision of say emergency food and medicine overlaps with human rights and other matters of international law, ‘orientalist' readings of ‘other cultures', media reporting of conflicts it deems ‘ethnic', and the ‘institutional culture of aidland'. Yet further contested issues arise around international aid objectives regarding peace and ‘post-conflict' state re-formation, governance and economic development, let alone simply the capacity, efficiency, credibility and culpability of IHA itself in relief and rescue situations before, during and after conflicts and disasters.

The course objective is to situation, probe and ponder the above areas of controversy so as to better understand, and assess, them through exploring selected aspects of key IHA cases including: ‘famine' and violence in the Horn of Africa; ‘protracted food emergency' in Liberia and Sierra Leone; ‘complex political emergency' in the Sudan; ‘post-genocide' humanitarian action in Rwanda; Cambodian ‘refugee crisis' issues; ‘institutional emergency' in Afghanistan; ‘international-state-social conflict' in former Yugoslavia; ‘imbroglio' in Iraq; tsunami relief and reconstruction aid ‘dilemmas' in South Asia; humanitarian access, ‘space', and ‘international society' and related IR concepts in the Sudan and the Middle East. Weekly lectures and seminar discussions may be supplemented by small group explorations of some features of such topics as: assistance/protection antinomies and complementarities, humanitarian social and impact assessment, war ethics and codes with regard to casualties and their numbers, framing and naming and related issues and their consequences in IHA discursive practices, and the autonomy/semi-autonomy/lack of autonomy of the international governmental and non-governmental organizations with IHA mandates.