Blog Posts
As a humanitarian crisis, Ukraine may be a game changer for pets and animal protection rules – and for how we understand pets as a humanitarian protection problem. A striking imagery coming out of Ukraine is that of a mass flow of displaced pets, accompanied by continuous updates about abandoned ... Read more »
Posted by Rodrigo Mena & Kristin B. Sandvik on Thursday, 28 April 2022
The war in Ukraine – which can be described as an info-kinetic conflict – is the first war in a society with a relatively mature digital economy, a substantial tech sector (including a diaspora tech sector) and a high adoption rate of technology and digital platforms. From a peace and conflict studies perspective, ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Adèle Garnier on Saturday, 5 March 2022
The Russian invasion of Ukraine February 24 2022 marks the start of a new displacement crisis. In a statement on February 24, Filippo Grandi, the High Commissioner for Refugees, emphasized that ‘The humanitarian consequences on civilian populations will be devastating. There are no winners in war, but countless lives will ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik, Anette Bringedal Houge & Solveig Laugerud on Sunday, 16 January 2022
During January 18-21, the Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik will have his request for parole adjudicated by the Telemark District Court over a four-day trial. In 2012, he was sentenced to preventive detention for a term of twenty-one years and a minimum period of ten years for the July 22, ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Monday, 13 September 2021
As of July 2021 the memorials commemorating the 22 July attack include the Government Quarter, with the temporary memorial plaque and the 22 July Centre; Hegnhuset on Utøya; the 1000 iron roses next to Oslo Cathedral; 52 identical commemorative stone sculptures in affected municipalities across Norway; and as well as ... Read more »
Posted by Sissel Haugdal Jore, Bjørn Ivar Kruke, Odd Einar Olsen & Kristin B. Sandvik on Thursday, 8 July 2021
July 22, 2011, at 15.25, a bomb placed inside a white van exploded next to the H-bloc (‘Høyblokka’) where the prime minister’s office was located. Eight people were killed in the blast: most were government employees, and some were passing by. More than 200 people were injured. Additionally, the explosion ... Read more »
On 6 May 2021, something extraordinary happened in Norwegian academia: in an op-ed in the newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad, Ole Gjems-Onstad, a law professor at BI Norwegian Business School (BI), criticized the Labour Party and 22 July survivors for a lack of self-criticism. The op-ed was met with disbelief, horror and ... Read more »
Posted by Michael Bretthauer, Hans Petter Graver, Mette Kalager, Magnus Løberg, Kristin B. Sandvik & Einar Øverenget on Tuesday, 20 April 2021
On 7 April, prime minister Erna Solberg presented the government’s plan for reopening society. The plan provides predictability and clarity about prioritization, including the prioritization of children and young people. This is welcome, but the plan also reveals the problematic aspects of Norway’s handling of the coronavirus crisis. The government’s ... Read more »
Posted by Michael Bretthauer, Hans Petter Graver, Lise Helsingen, Mette Kalager, Hedvig Montgomery, Anna Nylund, Magnus Løberg & Kristin B. Sandvik on Wednesday, 31 March 2021
Quarantine hotels and Easter trips According to the Norwegian government, quarantine hotels are an infection-control measure. In this blog post we contest this view, and argue that the rules are penal in character. “We” are all Norwegian: four medical doctors, one psychologist, and three jurists. The rules distinguish between “necessary” ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik, Michael Bretthauer, Anna Nylund, Einar Øverenget, Magnus Løberg & Ørjan Olsvik on Friday, 26 March 2021
Expanding the use of Covid-19 digital vaccine passports to domestic purposes would in practice represent a return to the checkpoint permit (in Norwegian ‘passerseddel’, in German “Passierschein”), a form of internal passport. This type of document is associated with authoritarian regimes and with war and conflict, last used in Norway ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik, Hans Petter Graver & Peter Scharff Smith on Tuesday, 9 March 2021
The democratic struggle over the Norwegian Covid-19 curfew proposal. Up until a year ago, no one could have anticipated the scope, intensity, and character of the current Norwegian debate on some of the most central civil rights in a democratic society. With the advent of the COVID-19 lockdown and the ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Ingunn Ikdahl on Monday, 25 January 2021
COVID-19 lockdowns have had momentous impact on children’s lives worldwide and in particular on the right to education. Save the Children reports that more than 1.6 billion learners globally have faced school closures due to the pandemic, resulting in at least 10 million children not returning to school.[1] Among key international stakeholders, there ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Tuesday, 5 January 2021
Today, public health is ‘delivered by women and led by men’, with a glaring absence of women and nurses at the decision making table.[1] Globally, though women only make up 25% of those in healthcare leadership they make up the majority of healthcare workers (70%) and nurses (90%).[2] This exclusion skews the ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik, Gyöngyi Kovács & Tina Comes on Monday, 30 November 2020
After various stretches of lockdowns and the related dire political, social, and economic consequences, the world has welcomed the news that several companies – including Moderna, AstraZeneca and Pfizer – are approaching an effective vaccine for Covid-19. Approximately 200 more are in the pipeline, of which 48 in clinical and 164 in pre-clinical stages of development. While there is ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Tuesday, 13 October 2020
April 16, 2020, the Norwegian COVID-19 tracking app Smittestopp was launched to great fanfare. The app was presented as crucial to the effort of saving lives and curbing infection rates. September 28 it was finally over, although the post-mortem dissection of the app has been unusually acrimonious for the Norwegian context. ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik, Larissa Fast, Adèle Garnier, Katja Lindskov Jacobsen & Maria Gabrielsen Jumbert on Sunday, 11 October 2020
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to the World Food Program for its “efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and ... Read more »
Posted by Katja Lindskov Jacobsen & Kristin B. Sandvik on Tuesday, 6 October 2020
In 1971, the US declared a War on Drugs. In 2001, it began a still ongoing War on Terror. In 2020, the country has initiated a global War on Data to ‘combat’ the malicious collection of US citizens’ personal data. It is the first time that America is going to ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Wednesday, 15 July 2020
In March and April 2020, an ecosystem of tracing apps suddenly emerged, presenting digital solutions as indispensable for winning the battle against Covid-19. A few months later, the techno-optimism has subsided drastically, ranging from a perception that apps are problematic surveillance tools (Russia, Bahrain and Kuwait) or ineffective (Singapore, France ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Julia Köhler-Olsen on Tuesday, 7 July 2020
“The lost generation of the Covid-19 pandemic is not those at risk over 65, but our children and youth, particularly at present here in Larvik municipality. We communicate with children subjected to violence by siblings, threats, mothers who cry all day, children with mentally ill parents, parents with drug and ... Read more »
At the time of writing in early May 2020, Norwegians have in many ways escaped lightly from the first phase of the pandemic. The outbreak was contained at an early stage, the number of cases is low and there have been few deaths. In addition, Norway has money in the ... Read more »
This blog critically assesses the potential of legal tech for improving access to civil justice as measured by the new Sustainable Development Goals indicator 16.3.3. Unresolved legal issues engender marginalisation. The need for better legal aid services is significant not only in Least Developed Countries, but remains a challenge in emerging and ... Read more »
Posted by Adèle Garnier, Kristin B. Sandvik & Amanda Cellini on Monday, 20 April 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered the suspension of international resettlement for refugees. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), resettlement-related travel will resume as soon as prudence and logistics permit. Meanwhile, individuals and families that were set to go are in limbo for ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Thursday, 16 April 2020
Kristin Bergtora Sandvik examines the politics of humanitarian wearables to understand more about how digitization is reshaping the nature and relations of aid. Utopian visions for change The rise of a global data economy has engendered intense engagements with new patterns of digital extraction and surveillance, giving rise to terms such as ‘data ... Read more »
Posted by Anne Hellum, Kristin B. Sandvik, Tatanya Ducran Valland & Marta Bivand Erdal on Tuesday, 14 April 2020
On 1 April, the Norwegian News Agency (NTB) reported that rates of coronavirus (COVID-19) infection among Norwegian-Somalis were significantly higher than among other foreign-born inhabitants of Norway. Hospitals are reporting that 30–40 percent of patients who test positive for the virus are from immigrant backgrounds. The government has now granted NOK ... Read more »
This piece is part of our blog series Beyond the COVID Curve. COVID-19 has quickly changed everything from our daily routines, to the policies of governments, to the fortunes of the global economy. How will it continue to shape society and the conditions for peace and conflict globally in the ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Adèle Garnier on Friday, 27 March 2020
This blog post identifies marginalization, legal distancing and the ambiguity of care as the key characteristics of the COVID-19 pandemic response currently reshaping refugee and migration governance. This piece is part of our blog series Beyond the COVID Curve. COVID-19 has quickly changed everything from our daily routines, to the ... Read more »
Tirsdag 24. mars ble den nye koronaloven vedtatt av Stortinget. Dagen før arrangerte Juridisk fakultet og PRIO webinaret “Korona og rettsstaten: hva skal vi med fullmaktsloven”. Arrangementet gikk via Zoom og hadde 600 deltagere. En redigert versjon kan også sees på youtube. Webinaret – som i utgangspunktet skulle spisse kritikken ... Read more »
I never thought I would have to think seriously about homeschooling. To me as an academic, feminist and parent with kids in the public-school system in Norway, that has always seemed very fringe and also enormously demanding. In any event, here we are, universities and schools in Norway are closed, ... Read more »
The point of departure for this blog is the apparent frequency of criminalization strategies in early government responses to the Corona virus. While much attention has been given to the securitization of global health responses – also in the case of Corona – less systematic focus has been given to ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Kjersti Lohne on Friday, 21 February 2020
Kristin Bergtora Sandvik and Kjersti Lohne ask: How can education help to realize the multiple goals and visions of transitional justice, and how can transnational justice be adapted to new educational objectives? This is the first post in an occasional series on the legal, bureaucratic and political aftermaths of the July ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Monday, 17 February 2020
In the context of the rapid adoption and integration of legal technology at a global level, this blog post will problematize the consequences of the bias of current discussions on the ethics of legal tech in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs strongly emphasize the importance ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Friday, 14 February 2020
Introduction This post addresses an emergent field of inquiry for critical geography, namely the transnational dissemination of legal technology for rule of law purposes. Whereas critical attention has been given to digital humanitarianism and the “marketization” of displacement through Big Data (Burns 2019; Taylor and Meissner 2019), little focus has ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Dennis Dijkzeul on Tuesday, 19 November 2019
While localization is high on the agenda for humanitarian actors, at present, humanitarian governance does not support the localization agenda. To understand better why, we explore three issues underpinning humanitarian governance: the problem construction, consolidation and growth of the sector, and the sorting of civilians. We conclude that the localization ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Monday, 18 November 2019
Children are becoming the objects of a multitude of monitoring devices—what are the possible negative ramifications in low resource contexts and fragile settings? The recent incident of a UNHCR official tweeting a photo of an Iraqi refugee girl holding a piece of paper with all her personal data, including family ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Monday, 11 November 2019
On October 23, 2019, 39 bodies were found inside a refrigerator lorry on an industrial estate in Essex. The vehicle was registered in Varna, Bulgaria, had entered the UK four days before and was driven by a man from Northern-Ireland. The victims – 38 adults and a teenager – were identified as ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Dennis Dijkzeul on Tuesday, 5 November 2019
According to an influential conception, humanitarian governance entails ‘the increasingly organized and internationalized attempt to save the lives, enhance the welfare, and reduce the suffering of the world’s most vulnerable populations.’ The actors involved in humanitarian governance include affected populations, civil society, host governments, the military, the private sector, international organisations ... Read more »
Hundreds of Mozambicans were killed and thousands made homeless recently by Cyclones Idai and Kenneth. Almost immediately, there were reports of a sadly familiar story: women being forced to trade sex for food by local community leaders distributing aid. Globally, international organisations appear to be grappling with the issue more seriously than before. Yet reports about ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik, Liliana Lyra Jubilut & Adèle Garnier on Monday, 29 October 2018
This fall, the 73rd General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) was held in New York. The 193 UN member states gather annually to discuss, and sometimes act upon, global issues. Refugees were on the agenda in 2018, not only because numbers are historically high (25.4 million at the end ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Friday, 28 September 2018
In 2017, Latin America was described by the UN as the world’s most violent continent for women. The assassinations of women activists and community leaders have continued across the region in 2018. While the killing of Marielle Franco, a favela community leader, and the unraveling of government-private enterprise collusion in ... Read more »
The scholarship on law, conflict and suffering has for the past two decades been dominated by a moral and analytical concern with “women and children” and sexual violence. However, when we look up and do the body count out in the physical and political world – in the city and ... Read more »
On 4 August 2018, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s speech at a military parade in Caracas was interrupted by the sound of two explosions. Maduro’s camp immediately claimed that the explosions resulted from a failed assassination attempt by drones carrying explosives. Although the nature of the incident remains disputed, and is ... Read more »
Posted by Sean Martin McDonald, Kristin B. Sandvik & Katja Lindskov Jacobsen on Monday, 12 February 2018
Without methods to gauge success and failure, and without appropriate ethical frameworks, humanitarian tech may do more harm than good. Humanitarian organizations have an almost impossible task: They must balance the imperative to save lives with the commitment to do no harm. They perform this balancing act amidst chaos, with ... Read more »
Posted by Katja Lindskov Jacobsen, Kristin B. Sandvik & Sean Martin McDonald on Wednesday, 10 January 2018
Humanitarian actors, faced with ongoing conflict, epidemics, famine and a range of natural disasters, are increasingly being asked to do more with less. The international community’s commitment of resources has not kept pace with their expectations or the growing crises around the world. Some humanitarian organizations are trying to bridge ... Read more »
Posted by Kjersti Lohne & Kristin B. Sandvik on Thursday, 31 August 2017
Legal sociology has paid significant attention to human rights, but in contrast to legal anthropology, little focus has been given to humanitarianism. In this contribution, we ask, what does a legal sociological research agenda for the humanitarian field look like? Humanitarianism is many things to many people. As described by ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Nathaniel A. Raymond on Tuesday, 20 June 2017
Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) are now being employed as a standard part of mass atrocity response, evidence collection, and research by non-governmental organizations, governments, and the private sector. Deployment of these tools and techniques occur for a variety of stated reasons, most notably the ostensible goal of “protecting” vulnerable populations. ... Read more »
The Norwegian Nobel Committee emphasizes that the award of the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize to the Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos is not only a prize given in recognition of his own personal efforts to end the more than 50 year old civil war in the country, but that this ... Read more »
Posted by Adèle Garnier, Kristin B. Sandvik & Liliana Lyra Jubilut on Wednesday, 14 September 2016
This blog post suggests understanding refugee resettlement as an instrument of humanitarian governance from the selection of refugees to their long-term integration. It presents a five-point research agenda aiming to investigate resettlement’s power dynamics in multiscalar perspective, with a focus on: political economy; the UNHCR’s competing goals; and the role ... Read more »
The ongoing drone proliferation throughout Africa has received little critical attention. However, African drone proliferation has become a vehicle for the production and distribution of forms of legitimacy and of resources that have implications for drone proliferation both within and outside Africa. More specifically, the perception of Africa as being ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Katja Lindskov Jacobsen on Monday, 23 May 2016
The European refugee crisis has been a difficult experience for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). On the one hand, UNHCR has been criticized by civil society and the humanitarian community for not being present on Greek islands. On the other hand, the organization has experienced difficulties in ... Read more »
Humanitarian practitioners and scholars are currently struggling with how to analyse the opportunities and challenges of technological innovation. This includes not only what technological innovation can do for humanitarianism but also what it does to humanitarian action. Over the last two decades, innovations have fueled the creation of a humanitarian ... Read more »
Humanitarian actors increasingly look to frame the failure of the War on Drugs as an imperative for renewed engagement in Latin America. When leaders meet at UNGASS 2016 in April, legalization will be central in discussions, but issues of humanitarian encroachment should also be on the table. In Latin America, ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Wednesday, 16 March 2016
Despite the strong growth of the humanitarian sector, there is an increasing operational and financial deficit in the capacity of governments and humanitarian organizations to respond. This has led to calls for changes in the way such crises are understood and managed. As humanitarians grapple with what is increasingly imagined ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Wednesday, 24 February 2016
Debates on global drone proliferation tend to assume that adoption and adaptation of drones follow a universal logic and that the drone industry is a singular thing, geographically concentrated in the Global North. In this blog post I argue that these assumptions make it difficult to critically assess the growth ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Wednesday, 16 December 2015
Over the last decade, Colombia has been host to the world’s largest population of internally displaced people (IDP). In 2016, it is expected that the Colombian government and FARC will reach a peace agreement, marking the formal end of more than 50 years of civil war. It is widely recognized ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Kjersti Lohne on Wednesday, 2 December 2015
The politics of rape denunciation is fast becoming the politics of lobbyists, vendors and military manufacturers seeking access to new customers and markets. The recognition of wartime rape as a fundamental violation of international law has been a hard-fought victory. Ending rape and other forms of sexual violence in war ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Kjersti Lohne on Thursday, 13 August 2015
Earlier this spring, we debated a law professor who insisted that lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS) could clean up war. The professor posited that a war fought with autonomous weapons would be a war without rape. Taking humans out of the loop would, the argument goes, lead to more humane war. ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Julieta Lemaitre on Wednesday, 1 July 2015
What are the challenges of responding to displacement as a problem of transitional justice? In the Colombian context, pervasive violent conflict coexists with constitutional democracy. In recent years, the legal framework for dealing with internal displacement has been altered by the 2011 Victims’ Law. Based on newly published work on ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Julieta Lemaitre on Monday, 13 April 2015
Based on extensive field research in Colombia, our new article “Beyond Sexual Violence in Transitional Justice: Political Insecurity as a Gendered Harm” examines political insecurity as a specifically gendered harm that must be addressed in the ongoing Colombian transitional justice process. In a previous blogpost we described the tragic plight ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Wednesday, 18 March 2015
While the humanitarian community is still struggling to help end the Ebola epidemic, talk about lessons learned and the need for critical evaluations have been on the way for some time already. Here, I suggest that humanitarians must pay keen attention to the post-Ebola narrative of military victory that is ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Thursday, 19 February 2015
The humanitarian sector faces an unprecedented number of crises globally. The growing operational and financial deficit in the capacity of governments and humanitarian organizations to respond has led to calls for changes in the way such crises are understood and managed. This involves a strong focus on cooperation and partnerships ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Friday, 12 December 2014
A particularly interesting and puzzling corner of the War on Ebola imaginary is inhabited by the triad consisting of Ebola, humanitarian governance, and unmanned technology, drones more precisely. Out of this triad has emerged what will here be called ´the Ebola Drone`. The Ebola Drone has materialized from a confluence ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Wednesday, 12 November 2014
The continued evolution of the humanitarian innovation concept needs a critical engagement with how this agenda interacts with previous and contemporary attempts to improve humanitarian action. Accountability and transparency have been central to discussions of humanitarian action over the past two decades. Yet these issues appear generally to be given ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Saturday, 18 October 2014
Against the background of increasing dependence on technology and on the internet, NATO is advancing its efforts to confront the wide range of cyber threats. Presented at the organization’s 2014 summit in Wales, on 4 September 2014, a new defense policy states that there is no distinction between cyber attack ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik on Wednesday, 15 October 2014
With more than 8,000 confirmed, suspected and probable cases of Ebola and nearly 4,000 deaths, mainly in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the impact of this Ebola outbreak far surpasses all previous outbreaks registered since the disease was identified in 1976. But what type of crisis is this? Is this just another humanitarian crisis in ... Read more »
New technology has become central to relief efforts in humanitarian crises. This may make relief efforts more effective, but we can’t assume that the technology will have only a beneficial impact on the recipients of emergency aid. Today, mobile phones, social media, crisis mapping, online volunteering, and pre-paid cards are ... Read more »
The World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 will feature transformation through innovation as a key theme. Leading up to the summit, OCHA has voiced the need to “identify and implement….positions that address operational challenges and opportunities” (OCHA 2013) relating to the use of information technology, big data and innovations in humanitarian ... Read more »
On May 13-16 a United Nations (UN) expert meeting will discuss ‘questions relating to emerging technologies’ in lethal autonomous weapon systems. Such systems are distinguished by being mobile and selecting targets autonomously without direct human supervision. This type of expert meeting represents the lowest rung of the UN ladder. The Chair of ... Read more »
Posted by Kristin B. Sandvik & Kjersti Lohne on Monday, 2 December 2013
The dire humanitarian consequences of the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) in conflict have become all too familiar. In contrast, there has been much less public discussion about the potential humanitarian uses of drones. So-called ‘disaster drones’ offer humanitarian agencies a range of possibilities in relation to ... Read more »