Shattered Lives

Debbie Hillyer

Arms are out of control. Arms kill more than half a million men, women, and children on average every year. Many thousands more are maimed, or tortured, or forced to flee their homes. The uncontrolled proliferation of arms fuels human rights violations, escalates conflicts, and intensifies poverty....

Loin des caméras

Amelia Bookstein

Depuis les atrocités du 11 Septembre 2001, les dirigeants des grandes puissances internationales se sont concentrées sur confronter ce qu'ils perçoivent comme la plus grande menace à la sécurité mondiale: la combinaison des armes de destruction massive et le terrorisme international. Lors du sommet...

Action Against Small Arms

Jim Coe, Henry Smith

The uncontrolled spread and misuse of small arms and light weapons constitute a crisis of global proportions. They destroy both lives and livelihoods; they are a threat to peace and development, to democracy and human rights. Since the mid-1990s, civil-society groups and some progressive governments...

Engineering in Emergencies

Jan Davis, Robert Lambert

Engineering in Emergencies is a hugely successful practical handbook for all relief workers involved in giving humanitarian assistance. It provides the information needed to implement an effective engineering response in the aftermath of an emergency. The second edition of Engineering in Emergencies...

Supporting Communities Affected by Violence

Craig Higson-Smith

More than 15,000 people have been killed, and 500,000 displaced, during years of low-intensity civil war in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. This title describes the work of the KwaZulu-Natal Programme for Survivors of Violence (KZN-PSV), which (with the support of Oxfam) helps communiti...

Gender, Development, and Humanitarian Work

Caroline Sweetman

Conflict, displacement and natural disasters are experienced differently by men and women from the different risks and vulnerabilities they face during disasters to their changing roles, relationships, responsibilities and resources in preparing for and coping with crisis. Despite this differences b...

Construction Manual for Earthquake-Resistant Houses Built of Earth

The solutions proposed in this manual concentrate on low-cost single-story houses, built from earth in rural areas of earthquake-prone zones. They are based on research projects carried out at the Forschungslabor für Experimentelles Bauen (Building Research Laboratory) of the University of Kassel,...

Listening to the Displaced

Kerry Demusz

Oxfam, in partnership with Save the Children, conducted a series of annual surveys of the effectiveness of NGO relief efforts in northern Sri Lanka. Men, women and children were interviewed in depth and their perceptions and criticisms were recorded. The results of these surveys were used to inform...

Risk-Mapping and Local Capacities

Monica Trujillo

This working paper maps the range of natural hazards and other risks to which people in Mexico and Central America are exposed and relates these to the complex social, economic, political and cultural factors that make some social sectors more critically vulnerable than others in emergencies. It als...

Building Sustainable Peace

Ada Linde

Intense fighting in the Northern Region of Ghana in 1994 and 1995 led to the loss of 15,000 lives and the displacement of 200,000 people. A formal peace treaty negotiated by the government ended the fighting but did not address the underlying causes of the conflict, which were a complex mix of econo...