ABSTRACT
Reflecting and responding to the growing centrality of communication in the humanitarian field, over the last two decades a growing body of research has explored how forms of humanitarian communications shape and are shaped by humanitarian practices in the 21st century. This chapter focuses on one of the key areas within the field of humanitarian communication, namely the symbolic construction of distant suffering in image, text and sound. In particular, the chapter examines humanitarian communication produced by humanitarian non-government organizations (NGOs) for raising awareness, mobilizing public and government agendas for humanitarian action, securing support and legitimacy for their operations and raising funds from the public and major donors. The discussion reviews two central approaches to the study of humanitarian communication: the ethical promise of representation, which focuses on analysis of humanitarian messages and humanitarian communication as a practice, looking at NGOs’ production and audiences’ reception of humanitarian communications. It is argued that humanitarian communication can be best understood by combining these approaches and highlighting their tensions as inherent to humanitarianism itself.
