International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Humanitarian and refugee crises, over the course of the past decades, have attracted ever greater international attention and often triggered international response efforts that were intended to help the individuals affected by these crises, alleviate their suffering, and restore their situation from the plight of crisis to some level of normality. This essay reviews the literature on these international crisis responses by laying out their different mechanisms and actors and their development, covering the explanations for their existence and operation, discussing the problems and criticisms of international crisis response in the literature, and indicating the areas of debate and avenues for future research on the topic. International responses to humanitarian and refugee crises typically bring together a large and diverse set of actors – the United Nations (UN) and its specialized agencies, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and its national societies, national and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the governments of third states. This multitude of actors, each with their particular mandates, capacities, and constituencies, holds the potential that a response that they mount together constitutes swift, effective, and comprehensive crisis relief. At the same time and for the same reasons, however, such a response ... log in or subscribe to read full text