This chapter is based on an interview between one of the Handbook’s editors and an expert on humanitarian monitoring and evaluation. It explores a variety of historical and contemporary issues around the inequalities of monitoring and evaluating humanitarian action with a focus on organisational learning, capacity building, and accountability. From the Rwanda crisis of the humanitarian sector in the 1990s to real-time evaluations in Ukraine today, the power of Terms of References to shape evaluation outcomes and the importance of listening to local partners the chapter covers a range of issues. Based on Sokpoh’s long-standing expertise as local and global manager of evaluations for a range of international organisations this practice-informed chapter concludes with reflections on the use of technology, gendered dimensions of evaluation teams, and decolonising yet another important area of the humanitarian sector that tends to replicate existing inequalities.

This prescient Handbook examines how legacies of colonialism, gender, class, and other markers of inequality intersect with contemporary humanitarianism at multiple levels. 

European humanitarianism includes a wide variety of actors, including governmental and non-governmental, secular, and faith-based organisations, as well as diaspora networks and self-organised aid ‘from below’. The chapter focuses primarily on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and discuss humanitarian action in Switzerland, Western European countries, Nordic countries, Southern European Countries, Central and Eastern Europe, Türkiye, and the European Union (EU). In each sub-section, we discuss selected historical developments, countries, and humanitarian organisations. We also consider how European responses to various refugee crises reflect global and racial inequalities and note that right-wing political parties, movements, and governments seek to restrict migration and support for refugees across Europe. Furthermore, it is important to keep in mind that European refugees and other victims of crises and wars have received humanitarian assistance both from European and non-European humanitarian actors.

The article employs anthropological ritual theory and the concepts of symbolism and liminality to provide a theoretical framework for analyzing ethnographic insights into the academic peace research community in Germany. Using secondary sources for a broader historical outline, I analyze the evolution of peace research discourses in Germany from the beginnings as a new social movement to a contemporary professionalized policy space in which knowledge discourses are (re)produced. Academic conferences and the routines around presenting theoretical papers have become institutionalized by the ritual dynamics of a small group of organizers and venues, fostering “indoor rituals” that represent transformations of the activities of the “outdoor” peace movement that was active in postwar Germany for many decades.

Peacebuilding presents a formidable challenge to anthropology, because it 'enframes' our contemporary world in particular ways. In our introduction to the special section on peacebuilding and anthropology we highlight the changing relationship between peace, conflict, culture and academic writing and how the three articles on Northern Ireland, Afghanistan and India-Pakistan address the changing relationships. The articles do not have the intention to present a coherent statement where anthropology 'is' in relation to peace and conflict studies. Each of them engages with a different aspect of the discipline and broader question beyond ethnographic fieldwork.

We review the ontological and pedagogical origins of International Development graduate education in the context of increasing pressures to ‘professionalise’ graduate curricula. We apply Giroux’s concept of ‘vocationalisation’ to argue that professionalisation risks undermining the field’s intellectual foundations in an elusive quest to equip students with functional rather than intellectual skills. Acknowledging ever-growing competition among graduates for gainful employment in this sector, we argue that instructors of International Development should recommit to the field’s reflective tradition by creating spaces for transformative education and develop a repoliticised ethos that critically engages global capitalism