Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication

Lilie Chouliaraki, Anne Vestergaard, Lilie Chouliaraki, Anne Vestergaard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138230576
• eBook ISBN: 9781315363479
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to research in the academic sub-field of humanitarian communication. It is broadly focused on communication that presents human vulnerability as a cause for public concern and encompasses communication with respect to humanitarian aid and development as well as human rights and "humanitarian" wars.
Recent years have seen the expansion of critical scholarship on humanitarian communication across a range of academic fields, sharing recognition of the centrality of media and communications to our understanding of humanitarianism as an agent of transnational power, global governance and cosmopolitan solidarity. The Handbook brings into dialogue these diverse fields, their theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches as well as the public debates that lie at the heart of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism. It consolidates existing knowledge and maps out this emerging field as an important site of interdisciplinary knowledge production on media, communication and humanitarianism.
As such, the Handbook is not simply a collection of texts sharing a similar theme. It is a coherent intellectual contribution which systematizes current critical scholarship in terms of Domains, Methods and Issues and sets an agenda of emerging and evolving research priorities in the field. Consisting of 26 chapters written by international scholars, who have contributed to laying the foundation of the field, this volume provides an essential guide to the key ideas, issues, concepts and debates of humanitarian communication.

Part I Domains

1 Disaster Aid

Mervi Pantti

DOI: 10.4324/9781315363493-2

Disasters are the most visible domain of humanitarian communication, with images of floods, hurricanes and earthquakes, and the resulting destruction, death and shock, frequently used by different media sources and genres to generate attention, promote compassion and facilitate disaster relief. They intermittently expose people to consequences that fall outside the normalcy of everyday life. As Beck in Risk Society (1992) argues, disasters reveal the risks facing contemporary society – risks that emerge as side-effects of modernisation and are global in their present impacts. There is agreement among scholars that, due to the worsening climate crisis (among others) disasters and other catastrophic events have become more common but also more destructive and complex in terms of both their impacts and humanitarian, political and emotional responses. Disasters have become an integral, and most likely increasing, part of social reality not only in the global South but in the world's richer countries as well (Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen and Cottle, 2012; Warner, 2013, p. 80).

High-profile disasters, often described as being extraordinary, unthinkable or unprecedented, are today met with immediate and intense global media coverage. Consequently, they also represent the best opportunities for creating global communities of solidarity and for accumulating private donations and government funds. As Chouliaraki (2006, p. 188) observes, while they sustain pre-existing power relations between rich and developing nations, natural disasters can also bridge the distance between ‘us’ and distant sufferers because of the acute awareness of common vulnerabilities they create. This chapter argues that disasters offer an exceptional lens through which to examine the workings and dilemmas of humanitarian communication, understood here as referring to the myriad communicative and discursive practices of transnational actors that turn public attention towards and mobilise action on human suffering caused by different kinds of disasters (Chouliaraki, 2012).

To be sure, a vast array of communicative and media activities by multiple actors precedes, accompanies and follows a disastrous event. In the literature on crisis communication, the ‘disaster communications’ that precede disasters put emphasis on disaster warnings and actions that individuals and communities can take in anticipation of a disaster (Rodríguez et al., 2007); communications during disaster response provide critical information that individuals and communities can use to survive, facilitate collaboration among different actors engaged in relief activities, and mobilise the public to act; in the recovery phase, disaster communications focus on informing individuals and communities of the aid available from a variety of governmental, non-governmental and private sector sources that they can use to help rebuild their lives (Haddow and Haddow, 2014). However, it is argued here that the intersection between disasters, media and communication exceeds this strategic level, instrumentally focused as it is on effective disaster management or effective delivery of humanitarian aid.

Communication and media are profoundly entwined with disasters, inscribing them with different cultural meanings, shaping the political projects of control and societal change that emerge from such events, and motivating solidarity and political action through images and stories of suffering (Cottle, 2014; Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen and Cottle, 2012). Changes in media technologies have accelerated scholarly interest in the role of media and communication in both constituting and shaping today's disasters. The increasingly diverse and networked nature of contemporary digital media, together with the changing nature of the events themselves, has raised new questions about the role of humanitarian communication in enabling new forms of solidarity, empowerment and voice, and sustaining or correcting the power imbalances present in humanitarianism. While humanitarian organisations have been identified as leading actors in the promotion of global humanitarianism (Cottle and Nolan, 2007), academic research has also critiqued humanitarian organisations as being increasingly entangled with various political, economic and military interests which aim to maintain existing power structures (Duffield, 2016).

Along this line, this chapter draws attention to the theoretical and empirical work on how media and communications affect the manner in which a disaster is responded to. The chapter is organised around four major themes which address the relationship between communication, disasters and power from different perspectives. The first section, ‘The power to define disasters’, explores the conceptual dimension of humanitarian communication. Over time, conceptions of disasters have radically changed, in particular, shifting the responsibility for them from God to nature and, finally, to politics and human acts. This section addresses the definitional power of humanitarian discourses, arguing that the ways in which disasters are conceptualised and categorised by researchers and various humanitarian actors impact actual responses to humanitarian crises. The second section, ‘Media and the politics of disaster’, offers insights into the political dimension of humanitarian communication. It examines the politicisation of disasters in order to understand the role of media and communication in sustaining various political and economic interests and existing power relationships or, alternatively, facilitating projects of social change following a disaster. The third section, ‘The new visibility of disasters’ explores the technological dimension of humanitarian communication. It asks to what extent new media technologies have contributed to the democratising of visibility, mobilising global publics and empowering disaster-affected people. The cultural dimension of humanitarian communication is considered in the fourth section, ‘Cultural scripts and moral storytelling’. Drawing on contemporary cultural research on disasters, this section addresses the powerful systems of meaning that are evoked by and circulated in disaster narratives. Together, these four perspectives provide broad insight into the literature on the role media and communications play in the ‘construction’ of disasters – shaping the meaning-making and political action in relation to them.

The conceptual dimension of humanitarian communication: The power to define disasters

A ‘humanitarian disaster’ refers to an event that affects a large number of people and results in the loss of lives and livelihoods, massive suffering and displaced populations. Typically, humanitarian disasters are defined as ‘major disasters’ caused by ‘natural’ phenomena (such as storms, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanic eruptions, droughts or landslides) or industrial accidents (explosions, chemical spills, etc.) and aggravated by social, economic and political conditions. In today's interconnected world, a combination of powerful processes, including climate change, accelerating population growth, urbanisation and technological development, have all increased the likelihood of humanitarian disasters (Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen and Cottle, 2012). As De Smet, Lagadec and Leysen (2012, pp. 139–140) observe, contemporary disasters are both quantitatively and qualitatively distinct from those which occurred in previous eras, having a more devastating impact on society and its infrastructures and producing increased suffering for affected populations. These trends are transforming the domain of humanitarianism through increasing humanitarian needs, putting new demands on humanitarian action and involving new actors in the humanitarian domain. Consequently, contemporary disasters should be approached as global phenomena, as they are spatially transgressive, have global impacts, often require global forms of response, and have become profoundly dependent on transnational cultural mediation (Beck, 1992; Cottle, 2014; Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen and Cottle, 2012).

Humanitarian disasters have been studied from a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives. Indeed, disaster studies started to proliferate in the early 1950s across many fields, including sociology, geography, psychology, anthropology and communication studies. Accordingly, scholars have produced conceptions of disaster which prompt different questions about power and decision-making with respect to disaster response and recovery. Traditional approaches in disaster research have been characterised by an instrumentalist rationale that constructs disasters as isolated and manageable subjects (Tierney, 2007). The orientation of such ‘realist’ disaster studies towards effective management, planning and response has overlooked the ‘symbolic politics’ of disasters – that is, the role that symbols, narratives and rituals play in their dynamics (‘tHart, 1993). Moreover, the ‘realist’ perspective has neglected the critical questions of how disasters are entangled within wider economic, political and social processes, or how communicative practices shape and constitute disasters (Chandler, 2001; Cottle, 2009; Olson, 2000).

Since the 1980s, scholars have embraced social constructionist insights that emphasise the pre-existing social conditions that interact with disasters. Social constructionist approaches have also drawn attention to the discursive nature of disaster typologies, such as ‘natural disasters’, ‘technological disasters’ or ‘man-made disasters’. Reflection on the social construction of definitions of disaster is important for understanding why some disasters and not others might generate media attention and mobilise aid organisations and states (Calhoun, 2010; Cottle, 2014; Tierney, 2007). It is now understood that the origins of disasters and their outcomes are never ‘natural’, as various human actors are complicit in all their phases and aspects, from causes to relief and reconstruction (Matthewman, 2015; Pantti, Wahl-Jorgensen and Cottle, 2012; Quarantelli, 2005; Tierney, 2014). Social constructionist perspectives have stressed that disasters are outcomes of pre-existing vulnerabilities (rather than solely of physical agents such as earthquakes) that make some people more likely than others to be affected by a disaster (Quarantelli, 2005; Tierney, 2007). Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, has been frequently cited as an example of a disaster that was an outcome of multiple existing vulnerabilities, including the physical (a hurricane-prone area and the inadequately engineered levees) and the socio-economic (racialised poverty and inequality) (Cupples and Glynn, 2014).

Thus, emphasis on the social origins of disasters has called into question traditional definitions of disasters as sudden, isolated events with disruptive social consequences (Perry, 2007, p. 6). Current theorisations highlight the view of disasters as long-lasting and open-ended processes involving economic, political, social and cultural factors (e.g., De Smet, Lagadec and Leysen, 2012; Matthewman, 2015; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman, 2002). The ways in which disasters are understood and narrated inevitably shape how they are responded to. Scholars have pointed out that even declaring an event a ‘disaster’ or ‘catastrophe’ is not without political implications, since such a declaration performatively shapes the way in which these events are responded to by governments, international agencies, humanitarian NGOs, corporations and the media (Calhoun, 2010; Warner, 2013). Ultimately, this suggests that humanitarian actors and the media have a power to name whose lives ought to be saved and whose suffering should be acted on (Barnett, 2013; Fassin, 2007).

Both humanitarian actors and the media have traditionally addressed disasters as unique events with a temporal structure comprising a beginning, middle (the emergency phase) and end (the recovery phase). Accordingly, humanitarian aid is still predominantly focused on short-term emergency management, rather than disaster risk reduction or long-term development (Benthall, 2017; Calhoun, 2010). What Calhoun (2010) refers to as ‘emergency imagination’ positions emergencies as exceptional – concealing their social, economic and political causes and relations. Scholars have argued that discourses on the ‘naturalness’, ‘suddenness’ or ‘uniqueness’ of disasters function to disregard human responsibility and overlook suffering as an ongoing global problem (Cupples and Glynn, 2014; ten Have, 2014). As media and communication scholars have pointed out, media coverage of disasters has also been event-focused rather than process-orientated. In mainstream media, disasters – except...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributors
• Introduction: Humanitarian communication in the 21st century
• PART I Domains
• PART II Methods
• PART III Issues
• Index