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Instructor
Senior Researcher
Email: antonio.donini@tufts.edu
Donini works on issues relating to the future of humanitarian action. From 2002 to 2004 he was a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. He has worked for 26 years in the United Nations in research, evaluation, and humanitarian capacities. His last post was as Director of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Assistance to Afghanistan (1999-2002). Before going to Afghanistan he was chief of the Lessons Learned Unit at OCHA, where he managed a program of independent studies on the effectiveness of relief efforts in complex emergencies. He has published widely on evaluation, humanitarian, and UN reform issues. In 2004 he co-edited the volume Nation-Building Unraveled? Aid, Peace, and Justice in Afghanistan (Kumarian Press) as well as several articles exploring the implications of the crises in Afghanistan and Iraq for the future of humanitarian action.
FIC Reports
Aid and Violence
— The Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) launched its "People's War" in 1996. The Maoists' rise to power was impressive by any standard. After a successful showing at the polls for the Constituent Assembly in April 2008, they became the strongest organized political force in the country. At the same time, foreign aid has been a fixture of Nepal's development efforts since the 1950s: the donor community has been the key partner in Nepal's development successes and failures. How did these two realities—the insurgency and foreign aid—interact?
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Humanitarian Agenda 2015 -- Nepal Country Study
— This study is the twelfth and final country case study of the "Humanitarian Agenda 2015: Principles, Power and perceptions" (HA2015) research project. As with the other case studies it attempts to capture the "view from below": it analyzes local perceptions of the four issues of universality, terrorism and counterterrorism, coherence and security of staff in relation to the activities of the humanitarian enterprise in Nepal. At the same time, because of the idiosyncratic nature of the international response to the Nepali crisis, some additional issues are explored. These relate to the role of development agencies in the response to the crisis and more generally to the relationship between development policies and conflict.
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Humanitarian Agenda 2015 -- The State of the Humanitarian Enterprise
— Humanitarian Agenda 2015: The State of the Humanitarian Enterprise describes the challenges faced by humanitarian actors striving to maintain fidelity to their ideals in a globalized world. The report highlights persisting tensions in the relationship between "outsiders" and local communities, encroachments of political agendas - particularly as a result of the war on terror - and the deteriorating security climate for humanitarian workers on the ground. Humanitarian action, the authors argue, needs to be more in sync with the aspirations of the people it aims to help and more open to non-western humanitarian coping strategies and traditions. Talking "principally to the like-minded, shunning different or dissenting voices" ultimately undermines humanitarian principles and causes "misunderstanding, false expectations, and delusions of grandeur."
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Agenda humanitaire à l'horizon 2015 -- principes, pouvoir et perceptions
— Ce rapport est une synthèse des résultats de la première phase d'un projet de recherche de grande envergure sur les défis et les difficultés susceptibles d'affecter l'action humanitaire au cours de la prochaine décennie.
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Humanitarian Agenda 2015 -- Principles, Power, and Perceptions
— This report summarizes the findings of the first phase of a major research project on the challenges and compromises that are likely to affect humanitarian action in the next decade.
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Humanitarian Agenda 2015 -- Afghanistan Country Study
— The four themes of the HA 2015 research come together in Afghanistan with clear-cut relevance.
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Mapping the Security Environment
— The data presented and analyzed by the study in three cases-Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Sierra Leone-offers intriguing and provocative look at the wide-ranging security needs of local communities and the uneven extent to which these are understood and responded to by major international institutions. The voices of local communities are not being heard, much less "priviledged", by outside actors. The dominant voices in transition environments instead are those of peace support operations (PSOs) and assistance agencies (AAs). Even the voice of government is often muffled. Such a disconnect has major implications: if the perceptions of local communities were to be the entry point for outside actor engagement or the benchmark for the effectiveness of international assistance and peace support, a major re-thinking of the ways PSOs and AA's operate would be required.
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Ambiguity and Change
— This study provides international NGOs with a rudimentary framework for strategic planning in the light of the likely challenges of ambiguity and change awaiting them during the next decade. It examines a series of hazard domains – environment, urbanization, migration, and HIV/AIDS – within which NGOs can exercise at least a modicum of control. It identifies other variables well beyond the capacity of NGOs to manage, including combinations of crises that cut across these individual domains and, more broadly still, civilization-changing events.
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FIC Briefing Papers
Afghanistan -- Humanitarianism under Threat
— Based on extensive field interviews in Afghanistan, this briefing paper is an update of a 2006 study on perceptions of humanitarian action in Afghanistan, which was part of the Humanitarian Agenda 2015 research program. The paper highlights critical issues affecting the provision of humanitarian action and suggests how they could, partially at least, be redressed.
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Book chapters
Through a Glass Darkly -- Humanitarianism and Empire
— By Antonio Donini. In N. Gunewardana and M. Shuller, Capitalizing on Catastrophe: Neoliberal Strategies in Disaster Reduction, AltaMira Press, Plymouth: UK, 2008.
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Knocking on Heaven's Door -- Meeting Social Expectations in Post-conflict Transitions
— By Antonio Donini. In Karen Guttieri and Jessica Piombo (eds), Interim Governments. Institutional Bridges to Peace and Democracy? US Institute for Peace Press. Washington DC, 2007.
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Negotiating with the Taliban
— By Antonio Donini. In Larry Minear and Hazel Smith (eds), Humanitarian Diplomacy. Practitioners and their Craft, United Nations University Press, Tokyo-New York-Paris, 2007.
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Is Universality under Threat? Humanitarian Aid and Intervention in the 2000s
— By Antonio Donini. In I. Richter et al (eds), Building a Transnational Society. Global Issues and Global Actors, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke (UK), 2006.
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Principles, Politics and Pragmatism in the International Response to the Afghan Crisis
— By Antonio Donini. In A. Donini, N. Niland, K. Wermester (eds),Nation-building Unraveled? Aid, Peace and Justice in Afghanistan, Kumarian Press, Bloomfield, CT, 2004.
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The Geopolitics of Mercy -- Humanitarianism in the Age of Globalization
— By Antonio Donini. In R. Vayrynen and W. Nafziger (eds), The Prevention of Humanitarian Emergencies, UNU-WIDER, Palgrave, New York, 2002.
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Peer-Reviewed Articles
Other Major Publications
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