Leading Humanitarian Bureaucracies: Current Challenges and Essential Skills - Einzelansicht

This seminar will expose students to the real world challenges of leading one of today’s transnational humanitarian bureaucracies. It will draw on the seminar leader’s experience of humanitarian leadership in the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as a Board Member of Oxfam GB and the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development (CAFOD), and as a long-time scholar of international humanitarian studies.

 The seminar will be organized around three parts.

Part One on the history and institutional expansion of the modern humanitarian sector will track the emergence, bureaucratization and significant global expansion of Western financed humanitarian institutions between the nineteenth and twenty first centuries. It will map and analyse the main players and dynamics in what is called today the ”international humanitarian system”. In the process, it will specifically track the ICRC’s corporate journey through this period.

Part Two will focus on today’s main challenges of climate crisis, war and institutional change. It will examine how humanitarian institutions have specialized in ”war humanitarianism” in the last 30 years and largely copied the principles and methods of the ICRC in the process. It will then explore how the humanitarian sector must now shift to a new specialism of ”climate humanitarianism” which can meet the major new challenge of climate crisis that looks set to create unprecedented human need in the next 20 years. The seminar will dissect the particular normative and operational approaches of war humanitarianism and also spell out the emerging field of climate humanitarianism that is trying to find the best way to aid millions of people affected by more frequent and intense floods, droughts, extreme heat and wildfires. The seminar will then look at four areas of institutional change pressing on humanitarian leaders today: their financing; their struggle to achieve collective action; the call for their ”localization” and ”de-colonizing”, and their adoption of new technologies.

Part Three of the seminar will explore the hard and soft skills required to be a humanitarian leader today, such as vision, strategy, motivation, and internal and external communications of various kinds, deep change management and crisis management.

Dozent: Dr. Hugo Slim, Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford:
Dr Hugo Slim is a Senior Research Fellow at the Las Casas Institute for Social Justice at Blackfriars Hall at the University of Oxford and at the Institute of Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government. His career has combined academia, policymaking, diplomacy and frontline humanitarian operations. Hugo has worked for Save the Children, the United Nations, Oxfam GB, hd Centre and the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD). From 2015 to 2020 he was Head of Policy and Humanitarian Diplomacy at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). His books include Solferino 21: Warfare, Civilians and Humanitarians in the Twenty First Century (Hurst, 2022), Humanitarian Ethics: The Morality of Aid in War and Disaster (Hurst, 2015) and Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War (Hurst, 2007).

ALNAP, 2022; State of the Humanitarian System at https://www.alnap.org/help-library/2022-the-state-of-the-humanitarian-system-sohs-%E2%80%93-full-report-0

Development Initiatives, 2022, Global Humanitarian Assistance 2021, Development Initiatives, at https://devinit.org/resources/global-humanitarian-assistance-report-2022/

Knox Clarke, Paul (2014) Between Chaos and Control: Rethinking Operational Leadership, ALNAP, London.

Caroline Moorehead, 1999, Dunant’s Dream: War, Switzerland and the History of the Red Cross,   Harper Collins, London.

Patrick Sais et al, 2021, Rethinking Humanitarian Reform: What will it take to Truly Change the System, Centre for Global Development, Washington DC at https://www.cgdev.org/publication/rethinking-humanitarian-reform-what-will-it-take-truly-change-system

Hugo Slim, 2022, Solferino 21: Warfare, Civilians and Humanitarians in the Twenty First Century, Hurst, London.

Hugo Slim, 2015, Humanitarian Ethics: A Guide to the Morality of Aid in War and Disaster, Hurst, London.

Students will be required to do three exams:

1. A Group Exercise that requires them to produce and present a diplomatic strategy on a specific scenario they might face if working for the ICRC.
2. A Role Play exercise in which students will work in teams in a 6 hour real-time exercise.
3. A Term Paper addressing a question on a humanitarian topic of their choice and agreed with the seminar leader.