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	The international news media is often slow to respond to emerging humanitarian stories by OCHA, Save the Children   The international news media is often slow to respond to emerging humanitarian stories, by Ian Woolverton. (Save the Children)   In West Africa the first wave of journalists, have arrived in places with unfamiliar names like Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali to alert the world to an impending humanitarian catastrophe caused by a savage cocktail of rising food prices and drought that threatens millions of lives.   With luck these journalists and the newspapers and TV networks they work for will help motivate the international donor community to respond to the crisis with millions of dollars of aid to help save lives before a humanitarian crisis becomes a full blown disaster, like last year"s food crisis in East Africa.   If it gets to that point then the humanitarian community will breathe a collective sigh and ask the inevitable question: "How did this happen again?"   In January this year leading aid agencies published a report that showed that thousands more lives and millions of dollars could have been saved if the international community had taken decisive action on early warnings of a hunger crisis in East Africa.   We were, it is fair to say, partly pointing the finger of blame at ourselves. But that only tells part of the humanitarian crisis story. The news media – a key ally for agencies like Save the Children – have an important role to play as well.   The international news media is often slow to respond to emerging humanitarian stories of global consequence such as in 2011 when the UN declared famine in Somalia and the food crisis in East Africa.   Humanitarian stories are only a small part of the "news mix" which also includes politics, sport, business, lifestyle etc. In the news media there is often limited space for humanitarian stories and only the "mega emergencies" like the Japan quake and tsunami, Haiti earthquake and Indian Ocean tsunami grab the headlines with their images of death and destruction.   Even though we have been responding to the crisis in West Africa since January and have been sounding the alarm for just as long, it is always a challenge to raise the profile of a humanitarian crisis in the media before it becomes a full-blown disaster.   Today the window of opportunity to avert a major humanitarian disaster in West Africa is closing fast, meaning that with each passing day it is more and more likely that nightly news bulletins will beam awful images of starving children into our living rooms.   Apart from shrinking and consolidating news media and lack of funds for overseas assignments, as well as fewer foreign correspondents with whom to work in places like Africa, another factor that impedes our ability to attention is what in my opinion can be described as "media fatigue".   As a general rule, what tends to happen is the news media don"t report a story on the fringes of what it considers the "news agenda", like last year"s food crisis in East Africa, unless it is reported elsewhere first.   Last year"s press attention in the East Africa food crisis is a point in case. While I was in the UK, every time I picked up a newspaper or turned on the TV or radio, there seemed to be reports of children at risk of starvation in places like Dadaab in north-east Kenya.   I knew this would become a story of global consequence, especially since significant stories reported by The Guardian and The Times or broadcast on the BBC often get profiled on other international media agencies. Quickly the crisis was on the world media"s radar.   Let"s hope that those journalists filing stories from West Africa today will help alter the trend on disaster reporting and help us save thousands of lives rather than report needless deaths.   *Ian Woolverton is head of media at Save the Children Australia.   24 May, 2012   UN relief coordinator warns over humanitarian crisis in Africa’s drought-hit Sahel.   The United Nations top relief official has called for strong leadership and a comprehensive response plan, as well as donor support, for the food crisis in West Africa’s drought-prone Sahel region, warning that hunger could lead to a humanitarian catastrophe.   “To avoid the food crisis in the Sahel region becoming a catastrophe we need strong leadership, comprehensive response plan; coordinated and speedy action and continued generosity from the regional and international community,” the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Valerie Amos, said at the end of a four-day visit to Burkina Faso and Senegal.   The two countries form part of Africa’s Sahel region, in which there are currently 15 million people facing food insecurity. The region stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, and also includes Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and the northern regions of Cameroon and Nigeria.   In Senegal, Ms. Amos, who is also the Emergency Relief Coordinator and head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), visited a food and seed distribution centre, as well as a community centre where mothers are learning how to recognize early signs of malnutrition and prepare enriched food for their children.   She also toured a health centre where severely malnourished children are being treated. The three locations are situated in the Diourbel region, one of the Senegalese areas most affected by the drought.   According to OCHA, of the millions facing food shortages and a nutrition crisis in the Sahel, it is estimated that 2.8 million people in Burkina Faso are affected – a fifth of the country’s population. In Senegal, more than 800,000 people do not have enough to eat this year.   “Many families have had to sell their livestock to cover their household food needs or they are eating the seeds that they should plant for the next season,” said Ms. Amos, who also emphasized the need to strengthen people’s ability to cope with future droughts and other shocks to reduce dependence on emergency relief.   OCHA said the humanitarian situation is expected to remain critical at least until the main harvest towards the end of this year in Senegal and elsewhere in the region. Other priorities for those in need of assistance include health care and water and sanitation services.   * Visit the link below for more details. Visit the related web page
	Global Civil Society Yearbook 2012 by Mary Kaldor Open Democracy / London School of Economics   The question we ask is whether today"s generation of protestors represent the harbingers of a new emancipatory agenda, or whether the opposite is the case, that social fragmentation and polarisation from above as well as from below could usher in an even more dangerous and divided world. Or both?   The first Global Civil Society yearbook was due to launch in New York at the United Nations on September 17, 2001. The events of 9/11 did not only mean the cancellation of our event - they blew off course the whole project of "civilising" globalisation. Just before 9/11 we felt that our ideas were entering the mainstream; both Newsweek and the New York Times expressed interest in attending the launch. Instead, the newly proclaimed "War on Terror" betokened a return to sovereignty and geopolitics and to the marginalisation and sidelining of values, perspectives, movements, groups and tendencies that comprise what we call global civil society.   For us, the tenth anniversary offers an opportunity to look back over a decade of trying to explain, interpret, conceptualise, describe and measure the phenomenon that we framed as global civil society, and to reflect critically on what we have learned as a result of the research that was undertaken to produce the yearbooks.   The anniversary edition, was written during 2011 in the midst of a new wave of global civil society mobilisation - the Arab Spring, the occupation of squares all over the world, and, at the same time, the rise of the xenophobic right, accompanied by numerous riots and uprisings.   The question we ask is whether our project is back on course: whether today"s generation of protestors represent the harbingers of a new emancipatory agenda, or whether the opposite is the case, that social fragmentation and polarisation from above as well as from below could usher in an even more dangerous and divided world. Or both?   From the beginning we conceived global civil society as a journey into unknown territory where we would discover unconventional ideas and sources of information and different ways of seeing the world.   For operational purposes, we adopted an empirical definition of global civil society as "the sphere of ideas, values, institutions, organisations, networks, and individuals located between the family, the state, and the market and operating beyond the confines of national societies, polities, and economies."   In the pages of the yearbook, we began to experiment with alternative versions of the concept: communicative power, for example, or the space where justice is deliberated, or a realm of civility and non-violence.   One way in which we chose to interpret civil society is as the medium through which individuals participate in public affairs, and through which they endorse or challenge the dominant discourse. It is a constantly shifting medium, sometimes characterised by consensus and sometimes by sharp polarisation and struggle, sometimes changing slowly and sometimes, in revolutionary moments, dramatically.   Its concrete manifestations, as coffee houses or market places in the eighteenth century, town hall meetings and party conferences in the twentieth century, or Facebook and tent cities most recently, vary according to time and place.   1990s consolidation   In our yearbooks, we demonstrated that the 1990s were a period of consolidation for the post- 1968 movements. This was a time when a new post-1968 generation came to power and when the end of the Cold War fatally weakened the dominant ideologies of socialism and post-colonialism. It can be argued that the 1989 revolutions opened the space for the new narratives of the post-1968 movements and, indeed the very idea of global civil society - a kind of radical democratisation - could be said to be the big idea of the 1989 revolutions.   In the aftermath of 1989, many of the actors in the new social movements transformed themselves into NGOs.   If workers movements had turned into national institutions, then the new movements consolidated themselves within a more global environment. Our yearbooks showed a dramatic increase in the number of international NGOs during this period. Furthermore, much of the agenda of the post-1968 movements was formally adopted.   Our yearbooks described how global civil society had contributed to a new global consensus on human rights, leading to the new norm of humanitarian intervention, the establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC), or to new treaties like the Land Mines Treaty. Likewise the emerging importance of climate change, or of addressing AIDS/HIV can be treated as global civil society achievements.   Of course, this was also a time of triumph for the neo-liberal ideas of the right. Both the global market and global NGOs were agents in the intensifying process of interconnectedness.   It was only towards the end of the 1990s that a new anti-capitalist movement emerged. The protests at the G20 meeting in Seattle in 1999 represented the first dents in the so-called Washington consensus. The events of 9/11 and the proclamation of the War on Terror constituted a profound setback to the humanitarian agenda and a resumption of notions of sovereignty and unilateralism.   Subsequently, in contrast to the 1990s, the period of the 2000s was one of political and social polarisation in which movements, especially the Social Forums, mobilised both against the War on Terror and against the dominance of the global market.   The "globalisation generation"   The mobilisation of 2011, while building on the experience of the 1990s, signifies a very new phenomenon that is too early to interpret. Not only in the west, but also in growing parts of Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, many of today"s generation are the children of the Internet, the mobile phone and cheap air travel - the globalisation generation.   As writers Moore and Selchow argue, for them, the Internet is not just a tool of communication and participation or a space for debate and exchange that is separated from the real world but it is a set of resources, engagements and structures through which the world is constantly renewed; it is part of the everyday, with profound implications for political culture and how to understand it.   The new generation can look sideways as well as backwards and forwards. They know that the world is one fragile eco-system - and that while the nation state has a role to play, it is part of a broader global community.   Above all, as has become so movingly obvious in Tahrir Square, in the streets of Syrian towns or even in the Yemen, most believe in non-violence as a fundamental guiding principle and in a new understanding of democracy.   I hope that these very different perspectives and topics, along with the yearbooks themselves, will help to stimulate thinking about how to re-imagine politics and social transformation in contemporary times and, importantly, about the role and impact of individual responsibility in finding ways to navigate and indeed surmount the current democratic crisis.   (Mary Kaldor is Professor of Global Governance and Director of the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit at the London School of Economics). See Open Democracy http://www.opendemocracy.net for articles from the 2012 Yearbook.   * All the previous editions of the Global Civil Society Yearbook except for 2011 are available in full online at http://www.gcsknowledgebase.org/ Visit the related web page
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