Geographical Imaginations of Humanitarian Disasters and Rationalities of Aid Organisations

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Hans Gebhardt
• Subject Area: Human Geography
• Term: from 2012 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 230446898

More than 3.000 humanitarian organisations are competing for the attention of donors on the German market for charitable donations. These humanitarian organisations are to a large extent dependent on donations by individuals. It is striking that especially donations for different humanitarian disasters vary strongly. While some disasters lead to high donation amounts, others trigger much less charitable enthusiasm. Whereas giving after the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004 reached 670 million euros from German donors alone, the interest in the flooding in Pakistan in 2010 or the drought in East Africa in 2011 remained relatively low.Taking these striking differences in donation behaviour as a starting point, this research project seeks to investigate from a poststructuralist discourse-theoretic perspective how representations of the needy other are created after disasters in the media, how geographical imaginations about disaster regions and humanitarian aid are produced and reproduced and which alternative views are marginalised by these framings. Furthermore, it analyses how hegemonic discourses affect the rationalities of humanitarian organisations, i.e. to what extent geographical imaginations influence the choice of regions where humanitarians imply their aid and how humanitarian practitioners handle the conflict between their dependency on charitable giving and the contrasting representations of disasters. It thereby contributes to geographical development research. The research project analyses and compares media reports, such as news broadcasts, newspaper reports etc. about humanitarian disasters and examines which arguments are used in favour of humanitarian aid in the specific cases and how thereby geographical imaginations of disaster regions are discursively constituted and re-produced. The results of the media analysis then serve as a starting point for qualitative interviews with experts of humanitarian organisations in order to examine the influence of geographical imaginations and representations of humanitarian aid on the rationalities of humanitarian practitioners.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants