Accountability, Empowerment, and the Ethics of Military Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Operations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In addition to the traditional goals of saving lives and diminishing suffering, contemporary humanitarianism demands that practitioners also incorporate social accountability practices into their humanitarian programming.In addition to accountability to affected populations, this requirement places an emphasis on capacity building and sustainability, affording primacy to local participation with the aim to empower-rather than disempower-aid recipients.While this evolution of expectations is clearly visible within the civilian humanitarian sphere, a similar evolution of expectations has also occurred in the joint civilian-military domain of United Nations peace operations.Unfortunately, these social accountability considerations have yet to be widely incorporated into Canadian military doctrine.Accordingly, contemporary Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) operations remain modeled upon the former traditional narrow definition of humanitarian action, simply to save lives and reduce suffering.Moreover, a secondary stated objective of Canadian military HADR operations is to promote a positive image of Canada abroad and at home, suggesting that military HADR is not premised exclusively upon humanitarianism, but that geopolitics and domestic public relations play a significant role.The CAF has been very successful in achieving this secondary objective, with the majority of Canadian citizens strongly supportive of military involvement in HADR.In this dissertation, I explore these theoretical and practical differences between civilian and Canadian military HADR doctrine and practice, with a focus on social accountability and empowerment.I suggest that the doctrinal differences between these two groups can, in large part, be attributed to their respective accountability constructs.The predominantly upwardsoriented vertical accountability model employed by the CAF stands in stark contrast to the downwards-oriented social accountability construct increasingly utilized in the humanitarian sphere.The CAF has not incorporated social accountability considerations into its current HADR doctrine or practice, which raises concerns regarding the potential dis-empowering effects of military HADR, and by extension, the legitimacy of military involvement in the HADR sphere.Accordingly, I suggest that the HADR model currently utilized by the CAF carries ethical risks, which due to the secondary utilization of HADR as a geopolitical and public relations instrument, may ultimately become political risks.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".