Compromising Aid to Protect International Staff: The Politics of Humanitarian Threat Perception after the Arab Uprisings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Scholars expect operational compromises by humanitarian organizations to follow attacks on aid workers. However, in response to the War in Syria, organizations compromised aid and adopted clandestine, cross-border, remote management, and conflict-actor aligned approaches, which best protected international aid workers. This was despite declining rates of attack against them, relative to their national staff counterparts. This article asks why international aid workers were withdrawn and aid was compromised in the wake of the Arab Uprisings by traditional risk-taking organizations: Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Drawing on political ethnography and interviews with aid workers, I show that shocking violent events, everyday insecurity, and changes in the nature of threat have significant effect on threat perception and explain compromises where rates of attack do not. This paper offers a picture of the micro- and field-level foundations of organizational threat perception and decisions about whose security matters.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".