Humanitarian Intelligence: A Practitioner's Guide to Crisis Analysis and Project Design

Security and Professional Intelligence Education Series

by Professor Andrej Zwitter

Humanitarian aid workers are faced with many challenges, from possible terrorist attacks to dealing with difficult stakeholders and securing operational space free from violence. To do their work properly and safely, they need effective intelligence. Humanitarian intelligence refers to the use of investigative and analytical techniques in service of rapid and continuous assessment, project and program development, impact evaluation, and learning. It focuses just as much on how to use early warning indicators to assess risks, evaluate trends, and write early warning analyses as it does provide guidance on the operational design of humanitarian relief efforts. Further, operational security depends on the intelligence analysis. Unlike governments, NGOs’ resources are very limited. Humanitarian intelligence officers hardly have any literature detailing useful current standards and important tools for their analysis needs. Humanitarian Intelligence is the first to provide an overview and a practical guide to the tools and methods of data gathering and assessment, standards of measurement in humanitarian action, interpretation strategies, and operational planning tools. Short hypothetical cases and practical examples illustrate and explain the tools detailed in each chapter.Additional resources including case studies and teaching tools are available online at

249 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 12, 2016

Reviews

[Chris Corpora · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting application of research skills to the field of humanitarian assistance and development. It harkens back to the days when all political science programs had a dedicated track to development studies, which was broken up and dispersed between other programs of study. This book reminded me of how important development and modernization studies are and continue to be. This research program ended largely because it was seen as a Marxist dominated area of study and no longer viable with the end of the Soviet experiment. This narrow political interpretation misses that great value of Socialist thought in the study of human behavior and social theory. This research program deserves a reinvention.