ABSTRACT
Humanitarian assistance has become increasingly familiar through the increased exchange of information and media coverage of both emergencies and their response by local citizen-journalists and new communication technologies. Meanwhile, humanitarian aid grew in scale and scope with new and diverse actors and by expanding the financial and logistical resources available. All such growth was triggered, arguably, by the increased needs of populations affected by conflicts, environmental hazards, disease outbreaks, hunger and famine, and mass displacement. This chapter examines multiple dimensions of humanitarian action, actors, politics, challenges, and debates. Those described here are far from comprehensive, but we aim to illustrate an image of the historical perspective and current state of humanitarian action with its ambitions, achievements, and limitations. However, such a description is not sufficient. Understanding the landscapes and challenges of humanitarianism today is only useful as far as it allows us to critique its shortfalls and plan for course corrections that would carry humanitarianism into the future. This, in addition to understanding the current situation, also requires that we project scenarios of how the future of crises and emergencies might look so that new and effective humanitarian action and actors will be able to tackle those crises of the future.
