Project Announcement: HumGlobal

We are delighted to announce that after much preparation HumGlobal, the eighth TUDiSC-subproject, will commence on 01.05.2023 led by Dr. Patricia Ward. Over the next three years the project will explore the organization and effects of an increasingly important area of global supply chain management: humanitarian logistics. HumGlobal strives to account for how the latter addresses – but also delineates and constructs what constitutes – ‘social problems’ in society. We are looking forward to seeing how this exciting project unfolds and are excited to discover the insights it brings to light.

Project Description:

What is humanitarian logistics precisely and what are its effects on society? How does the movement and ordering of things (e.g., material goods, money, ideas) in humanitarian supply chains shape the scope and perceptions of what constitutes (1) ‘good’ humanitarian practice and (2) ‘social problems’ more broadly?

These are just some of the questions that the DFG-funded project led by Dr. Patricia Ward and titled “Many Moving Parts: Continuity, Disruption and Change in Global Humanitarian Aid Relations” (HumGlobal) will explore over the next three years to understand broader questions of how aid and logistics mitigate but also produce social inequalities.

The scope and meanings associated with ‘humanitarian logistics’ remain loosely defined and ambiguous. HumGlobal therefore investigates this ambiguity as its point of departure to see how it first, may reflect competing and changing logics between state and non-state, private sector actors regarding ‘how’ humanitarian aid should be organized to prevent and respond to ‘social problems’ (e.g. human displacement from conflicts and disasters). Second, drawing upon critical scholarship on logistics in other sectors, this project looks at how this ‘how’ (the organization and contestation of what humanitarian logistics entails) produces ‘the what’ (social problems). In other words, how humanitarian logistics contributes to understandings of what constitutes social problems in the first place.

Empirically, HumGlobal brings particular attention to so-called ‘non-Western’ and ‘global South’ relations that largely remain unaccounted for in social science scholarship despite their international significance in this field (The Gulf, for example, is a case in point: boasting the largest facility for the warehousing and coordination of humanitarian relief supplies globally!). It is anticipated that this research will contribute to more rigorous understandings of the social effects of humanitarianism and logistics on society, and may ‘disrupt’ assumptions undergirding ‘how aid works’ beyond Global North-South explanations. 

HumGlobal is affiliated with the TUDiSC network and the Department of Sociology at TU Dresden and officially commences on 01.05.2023.