 Fy hwn i'n dda. Felly yna yma yma i'r gainifai hon. Mae'n dda i'n ddod o'r sefyllfa o'r senal pwy'r yr ysgol. Mae'n ddod i'n ddod o'i ganchydigol. Mae'n collSI a'r byddau? A'na amserfodd rhaid ddweud ei fofyrddu erbyn ysgol ashgol. Felly mae hynny yma yw beth sydd ei ffordd, mae'n nghymru at y maean gweithdoedd hynny. Felly ddod i'n ddod i'n ddidolau o ddiweddol. Yn ymgyrch chi'n gweithio, rydyn ni wedi bod yn fawr i'r community. Rydyn ni'n gweithio arall, rydyn ni'n gweithio, susann Jasper's book, Power, Politics and Profit, the History of Food Aid and Conflict in Protective Crisis. Susann Jasper is a research associate. She has over 30 years of experience in research and operational work. She has recently acquired her PhD from Bristol University and works as a senior research fellow at the ODI to Manterian Policy Group. I'm going to hand the floor over to Susann to outline her book, to present the main arguments to you, and then I'm going to invite David Keane and Laura Hammond to make some commentary, contribute to the debate, and then we'll give it over to the floor. I'm going to introduce our two panellists now so that we don't have to break during the proceedings. I think David Keane is known to many people here. He is a professor of complex emergencies at LSE. His study on the political economy of famine was published by Princeton University Press as the benefits of famine in 1994-1944. He's aged very well. That's still a seminal book. We study famine, we read David Keane's book, The Benefits of Famine. He's also the author of economic functions of violence in civil wars, endless war, hidden functions of the war on terror, and useful enemies when waging war. It's more important than winning them. These are not the only books David's written. I was looking down, so he missed out these ones. It's not time to talk about them all. He formerly worked as a researcher, consultant and journalist. After David, we'll be inviting Laura Hammond to make a commentary. I think Laura Hammond didn't know to absolutely everyone here. She's a professor in our development studies department, and she's the GCRF Challenge Leader for Security Protected Conflict Refugees Enforced Displacement Project. She also leads the London International Development Centre's Migration Leadership Team and the EU Trust Fund's Research and Evidence Facility for the Horn of Africa. This is why she has to eat her lunch at five o'clock in the evening. I should say also that Suzanne's book will be on sale. It is at the discounted price of £40. It is a hard-backed book, so you can use it for all sorts of things, not just reading. There's only 10, so obviously we'll have some audition if you'd like to buy one of those. If not, you can get a flyer, and you can buy the book online at a 30% discount when you get there. If you're tweeting, the hashtag is soasdevstudies or hashtag ESRC. No idea what that means, if I ask you to say it. So please give a very warm welcome to Suzanne Justbeths. Thank you very much. Nice to see a big crowd here. Anyway, I wanted to start by just saying a few words on why I wrote this book, or after, you know, basically I did a PhD after 25 years of doing operational work and working as an applied researcher. So, I mean, basically, well, the book is based on my PhD, and the PhD itself builds on my own experience of working in food aid for pretty much kind of 25 years, and much of that was in Sudan. So over this period, I was kind of continuously confronted with, you know, the politics of food aid at global and at local level. For example, I would often see that in food distributions, you know, the most vulnerable people would be excluded. I also noticed that over the years, you would approach it seem to be continuously reinvented, so we kind of moved from livelihoods to protection to resilience, but often when you're talking about food aid or food assistance, many of the interventions remain the same, and the political challenges just persisted. But maybe most importantly, I realized that by the 2000s, many countries had received food aid for a very long time, and yet no study had been done to look at, you know, the impact or the effects of food aid within one country over time. So that's what I set out to do. Now, this is the contents of the book. So I start by looking at kind of food aid and power, and as many of you probably will know, you know, food aid is played around in geopolitics, you know, supporting friendly states that are friendly to the West. Locally, you probably know about studies that you know, food aid supports the powerful government, soldiers, militia, and as I said earlier, exclude often exclude the most vulnerable, or, you know, studies have highlighted the manipulation of food aid in conflict for third diversion taxation and how it can strengthen those in power. So in this book, I take a slightly different perspective. I mean, I look at food aid practices themselves as a way of governing. So I use kind of Foucault's concept of governmentality and regimes of practices to look at ways of governing beyond the state and to look at a kind of a set or set of linked practices, techniques, tactics, organisations which in themselves or combined rather can influence behaviour, power relations, or become a way of managing populations. And as I go through, you will see how that happened. So what I do is basically I first look at international regimes of food aid practices and how they changed over time. Then I look at their impact or the effect in Sudan, then in Darfur, and then I look more closely at the kind of, you know, basically the last 10 to 15 years and look at it from kind of different perspectives from the perspective of government, aid agency, traders, transporters and beneficiaries. So in my, in the book, I take as a starting point the second decade of the 2000s, when you still have high levels of acute malnutrition, but international organisations are reducing food aid and have very little access to crisis-affected populations. And this is still the case today. So what you have is a situation in 2004, 2005, where you have, you know, massive humanitarian crisis, but also WFP's largest food aid operation, but by 2010, very little humanitarian access and existing food aid essentially controlled by the Sudan government. So what I do is I then kind of go back 50 years and look at, you know, how the history of food aid in Sudan can explain this strange situation. Now very briefly also, the main argument of my book is that in 50 years of food aid, actually this food aid rarely had its intended effect of improving production, saving lives, supporting livelihoods. Therefore in 2005 was in fact an exception. But instead you see a kind of semblance or type of development that actually has supported the Sudan government and it's closely linked kind of private sector. But crisis-affected populations themselves have been abandoned to become resilient in the context of a permanent emergency. So what I'm going to do now is just talk briefly about these changing regimes of practices, international regimes of practices, and then look more at the effects in Sudan and Darfur and in particularly why I say crisis-affected populations have been abandoned. So I identify kind of three regimes of practices. And I've called them state support, livelihood support, resilience regime. And these quotes illustrate really the ideology in these different regimes. So the first fairly straightforward three day was largely used to strengthen states and to benefit donors. Then, you know, in the livelihood support regime, you basically have kind of UN and NGOs taking responsibility for lives and livelihoods of crisis-affected populations. And this includes during conflict, for example, some of you may have heard of Operation Lifeline Sudan. And as you can also see from the quote, you see a proliferation of objectives during this period. Then there's a resilience regime where we kind of move away from food aid and food assistance to much more kind of medicalised nutrition and kind of focus on individual behaviour to promote resilience. And as you can see here, I mean, it's really malnutrition and food security are seen as key to resilience. So very quickly on the shifts in these regimes of practices. I mean, why the shift from state support to livelihood support? I mean, in part because, I mean, in part because, you know, increasing critiques of the state support regime of the kind of political and trade objectives of food aid, changing domestic policies, development policies, later the end of the Cold War, as well as, you know, a perception now that African states were weak and corrupt. So the, so UN, I mean, donors basically tried to bypass the state at this stage. Then also in responses to famine and refugee crises, people like Alex De Waill in famine.kills found that, you know, food or relief rarely reached vulnerable populations and instead they had to develop their own coping strategies. So you see a shift there from kind of, you know, focus on the state to focus on the individual. Also a range of new practices that I'm sure many of you will have heard of, you know, famine, early warning, targeted new norms and standards. Then the shift from livelihood support to resilience. Again, a combination of kind of failure of past practices and global, and global, and as I will talk about later, local politics. So many of the practices of the livelihood regime failed. Famine, early warning rarely led to a response. Targeting rarely reached the most vulnerable. By the end of the 1990s, you have more people in protracted crisis. And crisis itself became normalized. So you would need much, much higher levels of acute malnutrition to lead to a response. Then with the war on terror and the 2008 food crisis, you have a greater focus by donors on stability and on resilience. And as I said earlier, food security and nutrition became key in this. The other things that became more important here is the kind of more quantitative measures, a focus on treatment and behavior, and increased private sector involvement. All of these I can talk about a lot longer, but I don't have time now. So why do I say this is an abandonment? First of all, there's an implicit acceptance of permanent crisis that basically we're talking about survival amongst constant danger, rather than real increases in well-being. Then there's a medicalization of nutrition, which focuses on treatment and specialized products. And really talking about nutrition as an object in itself, rather than looking at its causes. Again, a focus on behavior and individual responsibility makes it easier to withdraw food aid. And this, in turn, is also facilitated by an increase in remote management, which increases a physical and emotional distance between aid worker and crisis victim. And this remote management became much more important because of the Niles of Access, which I will go on to talk about now. So within Sudan, I mean, now I'm looking at what would the actual effects in Sudan end up for. So within Sudan, really these last two periods, the livelihoods and the resilience regime, can also be seen as a kind of a struggle for control of a food aid and the agencies that provide it. So, I mean, to start with, the state support regime was not very contentious. I mean, it basically was intended to support the Sudan government, so it's not contentious on their part. In the case of WFP projects, they largely kind of failed to, you know, there are mostly kind of intended to improve production, but they still kind of supplemented government salaries. So still some form of government support. Now, in the livelihoods regime, you'll see at the bottom, at the graph, you see a sudden increase in food aid in 1985. And the other thing I should say is you see a shift from the state support regime was mainly kind of focused on the center of Sudan, where the kind of wealthier, yeah, best sort of population lives. I mean, and most of the people from the government come from central Sudan. So now, you see a shift from the center to the peripheries. That's one sense. I've already said, suddenly, organisations are delivering directly to communities. So this was actually seen by the government officers that are interviewed as a way of kind of bypassing the state. And the response to that was really to, you know, try and exert kind of greater control over what, to try and deny the need for food aid and to exert greater control over humanitarian agencies. I mean, basically, from this stage, the Sudan government's thought of food aid and international agencies as kind of undermining their own governance and in the case of kind of operation like Sudan in the south as supporting rebel movements. So basically, they were a threat to Sudan's sovereignty. Now, the 1991 famine was particularly controversial because following the Islamist coup in 1991, self-sufficiency was one of the aims of the new government. And this led, again, to ways of inserting more control over international agencies. And this took several forms. First of all, kind of the denial of famine, but later also kind of learning the language. So for, you know, very keen on kind of food economy, local purchase, relief to development, all of which could be taken to serve political objectives of reducing food aid as well. In addition, restrictions of access for international agencies were a key feature. Now, at the same time, it's kind of denying food aid or trying to restrict food aid. At the same time, traders and transporters closely actually benefited from delaying food aid responses which could maximise profits. And because, yeah, I mean, through various means, I mean, as agencies became more desperate to provide food, you know, they would pay more to transporters or that food airlifted in. And many of these transporters and traders were closely linked to the Sudan government. So in fact, some of the things that David Keane showed in the Benefits of Famine in terms of the economic benefits of limiting food aid to certain groups, those continued to evolve throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. Now, when we talk about the resilience regime, I mean, really, you see the Sudan government taking control of food aid and you really see the pseudonisation of food aid. And you can see this in the development of Sudan's own food aid apparatus and the distribution of government food aid. Now, for example, strategic grain reserve, in theory, could be seen as a positive development. But in fact, it was very closely linked to kind of the larger traders who were partners with the government. The same for government food aid was mainly went to, of course, it goes to government-held areas and to government supporters. So let's look at Darfur. Oh my god, OK. I thought I timed myself. OK, so within Darfur, we have three, look at the three regimes of practices again. During the state sport regime, very little food aid. During the 1990s, during the livelihood regime, almost continuous famine, food insecurity, and also food aid. And almost every single evaluation at that time shows that food aid had very little or no impact. Now, the WFP 2004 operation in response to the kind of huge humanitarian crisis in conflict is actually one of the few, or maybe even the only, example where food aid effectively contributed to reduced malnutrition and mortality and actually also supported livelihoods. Now, the political and economic effects also continue to evolve. And many transporters now have massive contracts. Many of them have international companies. But also they made a lot of money from kind of buying up the food sold by beneficiaries in Darfur and taking it back to cartoon to sell. Moving quickly forward, I might need two minutes extra. So let's move more closely at the resilience regime in Darfur. So from 2008, you see a decrease in food aid, partly because of funding, partly because of the clients and access, but also an assumption that people can meet some of their own food needs. And remember, this is when we see this shift to new practices, nutrition, cash transfers, and the private sector are all seen as means of promoting resilience. Nutrition deteriorated and kind of food security information is contradictory, but WFPs indicate to show it to be decreasing. So you're delinking nutrition from food security, which again kind of facilitates assumptions that malnutrition is due to problems of behavior rather than food insecurity. Now, at the same time, a reduction in food aid will facilitate, facilitates counterinsurgency operations and policies to empty the camps. So really from, I guess from 2010 onwards, most food aid goes to government health areas, international food aid largely reducing, and even inside the camps, you have some government food aid largely to kind of attract IDP leaders over to the government side. And this has largely been successful by now. At the same time, very little information about livelihood strategies. So what we know, I mean from 2008 onwards, very little known. So what you have then now is you have this kind of three different realities that people are, that different groups of people are operating in. I mean on the part of international agencies, you have this kind of perception that malnutrition is due to cultural and behavioral factors. Remaining food insecurity is a problem of people's own actions. And basically it's a regime where conflict becomes invisible. Now this kind of converges with the government's kind of reality, where it says Western food aid undermines government, and therefore needs to be reduced or controlled, agencies are spies. But at the same time, by making this invisible, I mean it's possible for the government to continue to manipulate food aid for its own ends. And finally, I mean what it means is that the realities of long-term Sudanese aid workers and beneficiaries who basically talking, they feel that this food aid is reduced to kind of make them work or to make them return home. But at the same time, many of the issues like inadequate access to land, threats to livelihoods are ongoing. And this reality is really suppressed with these kind of two dominant realities of the government and the international aid agencies. I can say more about that, but not now. So really, a few implications. I think this research really highlights the need to take a more critical approach to current contemporary practices. And also that if the evolution of regimes of practices is partly due to kind of global and local politics, but it's, you are not necessarily seeing a linear projection of kind of scientific progress. We can also go back and look at, you know, in the past, you know, where there things were particularly useful. So maybe we need to go think again about livelihoods approach. Maybe we need to think again about something called social nutrition or qualitative methods. The other thing is that no one, no one in Sudan perceives tree dates to be neutral or impartial. So, I mean, aid agencies can talk until they're blue in the face, but I mean, their own knowledge and experience is that this is not the case. And of course, this, you need to take this into account in your programming to be transparent about this and to ensure that the kind of the knowledge and experience, especially of Sudanese aid workers, is part of this kind of deliberation about programming. And then finally, the importance of proximity and solidarity. I mean, it's with the kind of increase in remote programming. I think it's important to realise that, you know, humanitarianism is more than a kind of technical exercise to putting people in categories or estimating need, the best way of estimating needs or treating malnutrition. It's also about, you know, making talking to people and making kind of human connections. So I'm going to end it there. Thank you. Thank you very much, Susan. I'd like to invite David now to make some comments. Great. Well, thank you very much. And I'm very happy to be able to say a few words about Suzanne's book. I think it's a very important book. I've been sort of rereading it, reading it and rereading it. And it really gets better and better every time. So not that it was bad the first time I read it. I thought it was really good then. But it's very disturbing. And I think with the, you know, reading about Donald Trump as a lot of us try not to, you have this idea with Trump that, you know, he's done something very new and bizarre and sort of created this world of alternative facts, you know, and he's taken us into a world of fantasy and a world where there are kind of in a way magical solutions for very complex social and economic problems. And I think reading a book like this, you know, it's very educational, even really on a philosophical level, because it reminds us. And, you know, Suzanne is certainly not the only person to do this. And Zoe's own work does this in a different way. And Hannah Arendt, you know, look at her article Lying in Politics. It's a fantastic portrait of this kind of a flight into unreality, collective flight into unreality during the Vietnam War and the kind of scientific gloss that that collective official flight from reality actually had at the time. And it's that kind of scientific gloss on a flight from reality today, you know, that Suzanne, I think, is drawing our attention to. And we have to be aware, really, that very extreme sort of, in a way, looking glass walls can be constructed out of what appear to be very scientific instruments. Of course, there's nothing really wrong with science, or at least in my opinion, you know, we need, in a way, more science. We need more evidence, more testing. But there's a lot of people that get cut out of what counts as scientific. And this is, I think, why Suzanne's analysis is, you know, it's very fucodian, it's very of much wider relevance even than Sudan or emergency aid. And, you know, if you are interested in fucco and you find it a little bit highfalutin or hard to make concrete, I think this is a great education, in a way, in what some of the things that he was trying to get at. And this, you know, the idea that you can sort of have a mass outbreak of dependency that kind of spreads across western Sudan, given the tiny amounts, relatively tiny amounts of emergency food aid actually being distributed. There's a sort of a huge disjuncture there. There's an amazing, at one level, amazing reluctance to talk about the real causes of food insecurity and malnutrition and so on. And this sort of very bizarre world where, in a way, the level of food rations, which is a very basic thing, becomes, in a certain kind of official discourse, explicitly irrelevant to high levels of acute malnutrition which are actually sometimes admitted and acknowledged. And there's a process there, you know, which Cezanne has referred to already, of a kind of a victim blaming that is very extreme, anyway. And I think when we look at a lot of different functional but dysfunctional systems, systems that are, in a way, failing in terms of their express name but yielding a number of benefits along the way, you do get this very peculiar distribution of shame which is out of all proportion to the actual distribution of responsibility. But even as governments and perhaps to a degree international donors sort of get themselves off the hook, they are necessarily either going to point to a sort of, if you like, contingent factors like the chaos or the weather or constraints, which somehow acquire an immutable quality or even a theological quality, which takes them away from human action, or they're going to do victim blaming. And that is a very big phenomenon which I think Cezanne has drawn our attention to. And she mentioned this pattern of exclusion, for the most part, of rebel-held areas from international food aid, especially from about 2010, the running down of food aid to IDPs and IDP camps. These are very much in line with government priorities and it's a case of, I think, old wine in new bottles, which I think is one of Mark Duffield's phrases. And even the bottles are not really that new, because it's extreme manipulation of food aid for political and military purposes. And then an international regime imposed over the top of it, which seems to be very oddly still obsessed in a way with the prevention of dependency, this kind of Victorian ideology that people are going to be morally corrupted as soon as you give them a small amount of assistance. And these two things work together very strongly and very perniciously now, just as they did in the famine that I was investigating in 19... I was going to say 1944, about 1988 in Sudan. This very clear intention, really, of a number of powerful actors to create a famine in Baral-Gazal to withhold relief from that area, to make money out of the price movements, out of the oil and so on. And then an international regime sort of imposed on that, which was oddly self-congratulatory when it came to the more or less total failure to get relief into those areas. So people would talk about... there's a beneficial economic change that's taking place as southern Sudan shifts from pastoralism into agricultural production. And these processes of mass out-migration are speeding that up. Or they would say, well, we didn't get a lot of food aid in to help these people. One of the most severe famines ever recorded. But we did at least succeed in not creating dependency. And Zoe has documented a lot of this in other contexts as well. You see it in Sierra Leone in the 90s. You know, this idea that conflict is always just about to end and therefore you can legitimately cut people's rations. And yet somehow the conflict doesn't end. And these are things that are being in a way wished away, the continuing conflict in therefore. And I think it's... Suzanne has given us a very fascinating account, really, of a kind of appropriation. It's a kind of rebirth of a very old discourse about dependency. But then on top of that, an appropriation of some recent and not so recent critiques of emergency food aid. The idea that food can fuel the political economy of war. The idea that it can undermine government sovereignty. And the idea that it can interfere with local economies and so on. These things have all been taken up in a way misappropriated. I mean, she paints this rather alarming picture of going to the remotest parts of Darfur and you'll find somebody there reading Mark Duffield. You know, somebody who probably understands Mark a lot better than Suzanne or myself. And there's a kind of... This is an interesting world in which every time a system is critiqued, that critique can be taken up for purposes other than the one for which it was intended. So we have to try and keep an eye on that process. And I think there are so many instances around the world, that the crisis in Sri Lanka in 2009, the war ending there, where you had this very strange unwillingness on the part of key international actors to talk about really the key things that were driving the humanitarian crisis. It's a very selective vision anyway, and it led in that instance to a kind of criminal really naivety about the government's alleged intention to create a safe zone in the north in order to protect the Tamals that it said it was trying to protect. And then the mass shelling of that safe zone under the eyes of the international community. You had a kind of a Faustian bargain where people were keeping silent in order to maximise their access to the most needs affected and conflict affected areas, but then actually unable to get that access on the whole in the end. So a kind of a trade-off, if you like, between silence and access, but then the access doesn't materialise in the end. I mean, I think there is perhaps a danger with the book that Suzanne has produced, certainly a danger with the kind of thing that I do and Mark Duffield, that you turn around and say, as I think WFP at one point said to Suzanne, well, what exactly should we be doing differently? Of course Suzanne has really a fantastic set of answers to that, but at the same time, more or less, it is a good question because these are constraints. You can't just wander around Sudan talking about how the government is trying to foment the emergency and use food aid as a weapon of war. So people are actually keeping quiet about certain things in a way quite strategically and at a certain level, understandably. And there's this thing that Suzanne draws attention to where aid workers are more interested in talking about the kinds of things that they feel they can do something about than the kinds of things that they feel they can't do anything about. And again, in a way, that's quite understandable. But what seems to happen is that then that builds up into a huge kind of regime of truth, as Suzanne put it, or regime of untruth, where collectively and over a period of time, this incredible fantasy world is created where the conflict is essentially wished away. The government is put off the hook in terms of how it's constantly stoking that conflict. The international community is put off the hook. And of course a key part of the context for this now is that the international community and the European Union in particular, and Suzanne has written very powerfully about this as well with Margie Buchanan-Smith in particular, the European community is very concerned to outsource migration control and to put forward Sudan as a kind of island of stability in an unstable region, a partner in a kind of international war against crime and people smuggling. And in that context, it becomes very, very convenient to actually wish away the Darfur conflict to collude with processes where actually the perpetrators of genocide in Darfur have been incorporated into border guard units, government border guard units, which are then preventing out migration by the victims of genocide in Darfur and then turning around to the EU and saying, well, we're doing this in your name and you should reward us for it. So, I mean, some of these context change compared to say I've got roughly no minutes left compared to say 1988, you know, you haven't got the Cold War, you've got a much more technologically sophisticated system, there's critiques of aid and so on, but a lot of things are remaining the same and I think there's a lot of international games or endeavours in terms of perhaps the war on terror and now the so-called war on illegal migration that are actually playing into the hands of governments that want to manipulate food aid in the ways that Suzanne has outlined and some of these kind of silences that she's talking about understandable as they may be on a sort of micro day-to-day level for a relatively powerless aid worker. You know, you put it all together and find that, you know, even the people at the top of say WFP are not really talking frankly about what's going on. This then becomes, you know, a very big shield to hide behind and it opens the door for this kind of outsourcing of migration control and some of these very terrible, really, processes that are underway at the moment. Thank you, David. I'm going to pass straight on to Laura and then we'll start with some questions which I think we'll be generating as we speak. Thanks. So I don't work on Sudan, I'm not going to talk about Sudan, but I re-appreciated what Suzanne has said tonight and the book itself and as well, David's remarks and I'm coming at this from a perspective I work in other, in Ethiopia and Somalia and Somalia areas but also I've just been writing an essay for the Global Hunger Index which is every year it puts out a report and it kind of ranks countries according to where they stand with regard to food security. So I wrote an essay for this year's report on forced migration in hunger so I've kind of been thinking about some of these issues and I think that Sudan's book really nicely illustrates several elements that I was trying to get across which is hard to get across in a broad essay like that. So it's really helpful to have this concrete, empirically driven analysis, rich analysis that can bring some of these points to life but I thought I would maybe having looked now at these examples sort of back up and pull out what may be some useful key points which are also echoed in this essay and I kind of was thinking about there's been years and years since at least 1944 but there's been a long history of people writing about food security trying to explain a political economy of famine, David's work, Alex Duval's work, Mark Duffield's work and lots of people have been writing about the fact that famine and hunger are political, forced migration is political and yet still we have these response mechanisms that do not adequately respond to the needs of those who face food insecurity, who are displaced, who are affected by conflict and I was sort of thinking why is that the case and kind of came up with these ideas of four different kind of myths in a sense which I've just retitled this essay now, components of a fantasy based on David's remarks sort of four kind of basic points and they all come out in Suzanne's work the first is the idea that displacement and famine are both political processes we know that the literature has shown us that year time and time again when you look at response actions, whether it's policy or what aid workers actually do in the field or what kinds of food security policies are being implemented they're absolutely silent on most elements of the political nature of food insecurity they don't take into account particularly in long standing crises like of which Sudan is a prime example, the history of food aid, how food aid has become intricately intertwined into not only the conflict dynamics and David's written a lot about that as well, but just into daily life you have people who have been receiving food aid for basically their entire lives and for them food aid is not an emergency intervention it is something that you can plan on, you can expect you've never known anything else than and yet it continues to be sort of that historical nature of how food aid becomes part of that political economy of life and of conflict and of displacement it really is not well reflected in policy it also means that when we come to think about things like peace building we don't understand peace building as a process that really involves if not disentangling the political economy of food aid and of humanitarian assistance more broadly then at least of trying to understand how to create alternative incentive structures which again have been written about by those gathered here to try to find ways of providing incentives to work towards peace rather than to work towards war the very designation of famine itself is a political tool and when you hear last year when South Sudan was declared to be affected by famine in 2011 when Somalia was affected by famine you saw a huge kind of international operation switch into gear to respond to that problem not so much to respond to it in political terms but to respond to it with a massive stuff dumped on top of the country basically one might ask the question of why in the current climate the situation in Yemen hasn't excited the same kind of response as we've seen in those other cases but we could come back to that in the discussion I thought it was really useful that Suzanne mentioned that food aid is not seen as being impartial or neutral in any context that's certainly the case with regard to most forms of humanitarian assistance and yet it's also again part of this sort of silence about the political nature of food aid and conflict and displacement the second point, that's the first point, that displacement in famine and food aid are highly political processes the second is that humanitarian tools, there's an assumption that humanitarian tools are sufficient to respond to these kind of crises you have a situation like Sudan with decade upon decade of a so called emergency situation you can of course it makes sense to us in this room to question why we would just respond to that in humanitarian terms yet on the ground that is the primary tool which is used to respond and the proposal is of course that it needs to be much more of a developmentally focused approach but also a politically focused approach that tries to get at the question of why is hunger replicating itself why is food insecurity replicating itself that can't be just a climatic factor or a technical problem but it has to be at its root a political problem it has to be related to as such the third point is about the third component of this fantasy is the idea that we have to build on resilience resilience is a huge buzzword within the humanitarian and development community now and yet time and time again we see that food aid typically tramps upon resilience disempower people and prevents them from being able to exercise their own resilience whether that's by limiting their own mobility, by undermining their own livelihood systems Susanne's presentation really shows those who are engaged in trying to provide the most basic support to people not really coming to terms with understanding how the livelihood systems work where are the opportunities to build upon people's resilience a basic kind of truth is that people do get on with trying to help themselves they don't sit waiting for food aid or any other kind of aid to be given to them so there are two dangers with regard to that one is that one can assume that people are over resilient in a sense that they can help themselves out of their own crisis and that there isn't really a need to do very much and that mistake is made time and time again and the other is not understanding the nature of that resilience and so in fact trying kind of counteracting it through an unintentional kind of misappropriated, mistargeted forms of food aid the final kind of component of this fantasy is the idea that displacement and conflict generates movement across the large distances it feeds the European hysteria around the idea of people flooding into European, across European borders when in fact we know that 95% of displacement takes place within regions of origin particularly in countries that are extremely poor Sudan is 112 out of 119 countries on this global hunger index South Sudan doesn't even merit a mention because there is no data to figure out where it would lie but it's certainly at the bottom of the index as well if it had data so these are places that are affected by conflict and displacement and it's not an entirely closed system but really the political dynamics that are driving them and the responses that can address them are to be found within those regions and so there's a real lack of understanding of that and a real kind of directing of resource in disproportionate ways so externalizing EU borders when in fact it should be spent more thinking about that these political natures of food aid so when you get to that question of what can be done I guess in the most simple terms one might say you could take these four components together and say well it's not about knowing new things it's about trying to make actions match those things that we know and really engaging with them in very meaningful ways it doesn't take here we supervise masters and PhD students and we say go out and learn about these new things in fact it's important to learn things but it's also important to build actions based on what is already known and there's a real deficit I think when it comes to those aspects I think actually that's all I wanted to say so I'm going to end there I think one of the things that we come across when we study humanitarianism is this kind of clash of staff contradictions all the time and listening to the three speakers tonight I've identified the normal one between the political and the technical and how to fix those two together but then the idea of science and maybe even just pragmatism on one side and fantasy on the other I'm struck also by the contradiction between the intimacy of biopolitics the use of controlling people's food like where they can live, what they can eat and at the same time a remoteness that is now characterising the assistance that people are receiving dependency versus resilience urgency and visibility against the idea of a permanent emergency and I think ultimately what David is saying enjoying them all out is kind of their security versus our security and seeing a kind of other thing going on through the process of humanitarian assistance so that was my reflection I would like to hear questions from the floor do we have men and microphones and women and microphones so I'll take a few and then identify yourself so you are a friendly wave and also if you want to direct it at a particular panel member please feel free hi, so I was just wondering are there any efforts made to link the fact that Sudan's agriculture is largely mechanised which obviously has its impact on desertification and actually building some sort of resilience through different practices which might be less prone to desertifying arable lands maybe I can make that Of course you can, thank you yeah, please we'll take a few in the next hi, my name is Stephen Costello about two weeks ago I left the UN mission in South Sudan so I was there for the past year I was black UN, not blue UN so to speak I worked for a section called the joint mission analysis centre and I was one of the analysts conflict analyst, intelligence analyst for Unity State but I did sit in all the meetings with the not all but many of the meetings with the Humanitarians when we would have coordination meetings and I recall from May to June there was this absolutely horrific offensive that went on in Unity State and as a result, Cauch, Lear, Maya did these areas huge massacres, huge displacement certain famine is coming the same is true in Southern Central Equatoria with another ongoing offensive there you know, I can't remember anybody in any of these meetings maybe it's just because at my level the sort of mid level bureaucrat level but I mean, people were well aware that the conflict was driving this there was nobody burying their head in the sand and I kind of read every article I could I used to check the news every day as to what was going out in the press and there was not nearly enough that came out in the press about this I tried to leak it myself to be honest but when it was addressed by the mission when the SRSG, David Shearer addressed it they did lay the blame at the foot of the government I mean it has been said many times and we can talk about this all day and I'll just leave it with in terms of addressing the political problems that have made South Sudan what it is I've worked there three times in the last ten years you know, IGAD might as well just rent out the Hilton in Addis because every six months to a year they're back in there talking again and there's a deal they have now but everybody who knows the country knows that it hasn't addressed the underlying problems Anyway, I just thought, yeah, I'd throw it out there Is that your question? I guess I don't really have a question I guess I would just make those observations and see what the panel would say Is your question of the type that the government is being blamed so what can be done? It was of the type that I didn't get the sense while I was there that there was a dismissing of the political causes of the government That's a nice point, thanks and we'll take this one over here, thank you Speaking from someone who also recently came from South Sudan and worked on a development project there for two and a half years I think that it's interesting that what you have seen in Bashar and his ability to manipulate the international community governments over the past 20 years has sort of come down and been passed on to South Sudan and that was wondering if you could speak to that and if that's something that is in the discussions right now when it comes to Darfur and the crisis in Sudan and also I would echo his sentiments that I don't think that this is something that the humanitarian community is bearing their heads in the sand about I think it's just something that especially when it comes to the Troika that whatever progress can be made won't be made without significant pushes from the top that any progress that is made can be ruined in any second based on a government insurgency and wow or anywhere in the United States and I'm sure that the same can be said for Darfur Okay, thanks so I guess you are alluding to what the sphere project said that humanitarian action can substitute for political action like there is an acknowledgement of political factors Suzanne can you answer? I mean that particular issue if you couldn't even forward because are we still being recorded? I think on that particular issue there's a difference between when you talk about an acute phase of a crisis and more in the protracted crisis and I think now in South Sudan or Darfur in 2004-2005 I think at that time the problem was visible and the politics was very evident but I can't say too much about South Sudan actually because I mean I guess I included it in Sudan up until independence but I haven't followed the current conflict too closely but I think in Darfur that kind of making the conflict invisible has gradually developed over time because access has been restricted because there's a kind of an urge amongst most organisations to kind of move away from the kind of acute phase of the humanitarian operation to start building recovery and then you had kind of new scientific developments in nutrition so it was the kind of the combination of all of these things together that kind of resulted in kind of a move away from well, I mean that just kind of made it more difficult to see some of the more the ongoing violence and the ongoing kind of conflict that was happening so I'll, yeah, I think I'll David? Yeah, I mean I think those are valuable points in a way and good to me, good sort of correctives I think, you know, Suzanne talks about this phenomenon that Stanley Cohen wrote about and Zoe wrote about this as well the idea of knowing and not knowing so in a sense it's not that people are not aware of a lot of the political factors, political constraints it's not that they're not interested and often people who work for aid agencies are incredibly knowledgeable about all different kinds of local politics and you get these very informed discussions and you found it in Sri Lanka as well which I mentioned in 2009 these incredibly passionate and knowledgeable people often somewhat lower down the hierarchy I would say and you mentioned your level of these organisations and then at the same time I think what you tend to get depending on the international context and the international diplomatic priorities is a diminishing degree of frankness as you proceed up the hierarchy and up the salary scale in a way of different organisations particularly within the UN and you also get a phenomenon where people will perhaps condemn certain actions but then they'll do it sort of voce and simultaneously there'll be something like the US will be lifting sanctions off from the cartoon regime which sends a very strong signal and in a way negates all kinds of things that might be said at a lower level within these various organisations so I think it isn't ignorance or lack of interest in politics it's knowing and not knowing it's systems that sort of almost feel a need to put politics aside sometimes in order to function and it's different degrees of openness and honesty to some extent depending on where you sit within these different organisations Thanks, I think these points are really well made I think sometimes it's I mean as David says there's a link or there's a disconnect between knowing knowing the political situation in the country where you work but also then how those are turned into action so when you look at the actual tools and policies that are driving food aid how much of them are reflecting the political realities within which the so-called emergency or the protracted situation is taking place sometimes there's literally a split between the political and humanitarian sides of the UN or of different organisations and so the two are deliberately tasked with very different things and it's deliberately kept separate in a sense why I work in Somalia there was several years ago bringing together of the political and humanitarian sides within one UN house which carries with it its own set of risks as well because then the idea that humanitarian assistance can be set apart from can be impartial and neutral absolutely goes down the train and maybe that's okay because maybe it does anyway in a real context and at least you then have it out on there on the table so there's not necessarily a perfect solution but I think even with and then you have also the realities that many organisations feel that they can't take explicit aim at the political realities with which they work because they worry about losing access being expelled from the country not being able to work in the area but even within those constraints there's more that can be done I think that we would all say there's more that can be done to overcome the short term emergency nature of things you're dealing with a tool emergency food aid to try to solve a problem which is food insecurity and chronic food insecurity and as a result of a chronic conflict and other issues as well and the tool is not fit for the problem there's got to be more that can be done even with these constraints that we're talking about more questions this is something about agricultural sorry just quickly about mechanised agriculture this is very much focused in central Sudan and controlled by the wealthier elite so not necessarily something that can develop the country as a whole in fact this is sorry? since mechanised agriculture has such a detrimental effect on the land are there any efforts to counter that by introducing things which can reverse the desertification of the I think 70% already desert and that's being pushed more so with mechanised agriculture which consumes enormous amounts of food are there any efforts to try to take on the two issues as a sort of I don't know that I can really answer that I mean I think maybe the main thing is that up until very recently there has really hardly been elite major development aid to Sudan I mean most of it has been made mainly humanitarian assistance because of the ongoing conflict so from a kind of aid perspective not really much as far as I know can we take another round of questions yes please hi I think this goes out more to Laura but just based on what you were saying just now that there is a certain margin to even within humanitarian aid be integrating a concept of sustainability could you illustrate a bit what that would look like is that something that you've seen possibly manifested in Somalia or anywhere else and just in a tangible sense okay thanks yes please thank you Suzanne and also David and Laura for a fascinating presentation when I think of 2008 I think of the global financial crisis and I think of food riots in the global south and I just wondered if you could say more about those maybe or more about the resilience regime that you were talking about in relation to kind of you know wider sort of global structures I mean David mentioned the war on terror and obviously in 2008 you're seeing a kind of hyper almost a kind of hyper neoliberalism you know that we're sort of experiencing of course the the kind of move towards the kind of digital humanitarianism or post humanitarianism I just wondered whether we could explain I mean you talked about the different perceptions and all of that really fascinating I just wondered whether we can also explain that shift in 2008 to those widers those kind of structural questions I was going to ask for the microphone I've got quite a specific question I'd like to ask because some of the things we study in the security course so we look at Alex Tavall's work in the idea of the criminalisation of famine and Alex Tavall has talked obviously quite a lot about Sudan and the fact that there are some individuals who are prominent and their work is well known in the creation of famine do you see that, is that a way forward is that something that is possible to institute in a concrete way or is it a kind of philosophical approach to it? Should I just ask Laura do you want to answer that question first? Yes so the question was about what would these longer term approaches to dealing with extreme food insecurity look like I mean a whole range of things I think one of the hallmarks of the term food aid is that it is precisely that it's food delivered and the assumption is that people need food so you give them food when over a long period of time what people usually need more is cash and access to cash and being able to get that themselves so there's huge innovations going on in humanitarian work on cash programming of which there's a burgeoning literature as well if you're interested in that and within the refugee field as well there are experiments going on right now with trying to give refugees access in Jordan soon to be in Ethiopia as well those are interesting questions around what else refugees might need besides a job and I think sometimes that discussion gets instrumentalised where the idea is just to give this place people access to employment and then they don't need anything else but that's a sort of separate topic the point being that really they need access to a source of income for themselves Ethiopia did something interesting probably 15 years ago where it was always having the same number 3-5 million people were in need of food assistance and they realised that many of those people at that time about 3 million people were actually chronically affected that means every year they were at this tipping point between being food insecure and not being able to meet their needs and needing support and then there were the acute food food insecure who were affected by a sudden short term effect maybe it was flooding or a sudden drought in a particular place that particularly got worse drought is not a sudden crisis but something that was more limited in time and so they disaggregated the acute and the chronic food insecure and that actually had quite an important impact because it meant that you could deal with chronic food insecurity with a different set of strategic support mechanisms grants, credit, training, education and employment, a whole range of things and it was just that the people who had been whose crops had been washed away by a flood would receive food aid it's a bit of a smarter use of food aid in that sense so there are those kinds of things but as well we find that food aid means to work against people's resilience as I said before so the idea that people need to report to a central centre in order to pick up their food aid deliveries means that they tend to congregate in towns and cities rather than on their farms so just decentralizing the way that one distributes support trying to distribute support in cash so that people can access markets instead a whole range of different things that can be done but typically it's you know the idea is that there is food and I think that's starting to change in small ways but it's still a predominant model of response Right, yeah I mean 2008 and the food crisis financial crisis yes I mean I think that it was a key factor in kind of the shift towards the resilience regime in particular because it's I mean it kind of well I mean it's there were a kind of a range of kind of initiatives and that's what you're trying to remember kind of with you know convened by FAO and wasn't there a kind of global global kind of strategy but I think maybe more importantly I think because of kind of limited funding for kind of aid agencies or UN agencies you had the kind of emergence of these public private partnerships and kind of much much greater involvement of the kind of the private sector in addressing well first of all a key I mean after the kind of food crisis and the food rides a real kind of emphasis on food security nutrition as a means to resilience as a means to kind of greater stability I think and you know so you see these kind of global initiatives like that scaling up nutrition movement the new airlines for food security nutrition and I mean they all I guess again well because this is the way I looked at it in terms of regimes of practices you have all these different factors coming together an increased emphasis on behalf of the west on kind of food security and nutrition kind of creating greater stability you have I mean there was also a series of studies in the Lancet which kind of you know promoted the kind of standard package for addressing malnutrition then kind of interest private sector in doing that so you you see a kind of convergence of interest in you know promoting food security and nutrition as a way of kind of promoting stability and resilience and you know this also I mean at the same time it's kind of like I said it's it's convenient for countries like Sudan where you know it's it's much better to say okay we can solve nutrition by this kind of you know and that's where you get the kind of hyper neoliberalization of say you can solve malnutrition by you know these specialised products and saying that you know if we improve nutrition by itself that will kind of lead to economic growth so there's an interest there in the part of the Sudan government also in the part of kind of western donors because it seems like a cheap way or cost effective way of promoting growth and stability I certainly there are some papers where they say you know even nutrition is now included in kind of national security strategies I mean from western kind of nations and of course on the part of the private sector I mean it's this is a kind of you know huge opportunity I mean suddenly malnutrition is a business opportunity and you can see a kind of range of kind of products developing that are being solved in countries like Sudan and others as well and then of course it's also quite kind of suitable for remote management because if you have a standardised package you don't actually need to do a more in depth analysis of you know what's really going on in terms of the nature of food insecurity and its causes and yeah so I mean I think globally the food crisis was one thing that kind of kind of revived this interest in nutrition but in a very different way than you know nutrition was seen in the 1980s and 90s and that kind of leads me to the criminalisation of famine I've been thinking about this a lot particularly because Alex Dwell actually talks about social nutrition as maybe one way of providing evidence for you know to promote accountability for masturbation and I'm still thinking about this actually I mean first of all I've just said all the kind of powerful motivations by you know nobody is really looking anymore at the kind of the social and political causes of malnutrition so to now say we're going to revive that to assist in the criminalisation of famine I mean just so many so many things to think about I mean you know what incentive would there be for somebody and I don't know who either to start looking more at the political causes of famine given all the constraints that we've just talked about so big big questions there in terms of individuals also big questions I don't really know, I don't really know but I noticed that Alex he's just written did you see his article in The Guardian just now that he wrote that Mohammed anyway one of the crown prince should be prosecuted for crimes of starvation he's already starting that I hope he's going to get on to Theresa May and austerity soon as I'm David did you have something else to say? Yeah I was just going to say quickly I mean Suzanne just said that you know these 2008 food crisis and the crisis and the price of food this was sort of a key moment for the resilience regime and you know I think it is worth emphasising anyway that sort of that was one of the moments of if you like maximum international responsibility for crises you know that are often portrayed as local you know and you had people moving out of the housing market moving into food speculation you have a lot of food traders who you know I used to work in the city and if you have a if you have kind of volatility price volatility that's regarded on the whole as a good thing because that's an opportunity to make profit as a trader but I think you know this was a moment of if you like maximum international responsibility and it led in a way through sort of a perverse logic to that moment of in a way maximum understanding of the local or identification of responsibility at the extreme sort of in a way within the household I think Mark Duffield I've only just read some of it but he's clearly quite influenced by Suzanne's work in particular when he talks about the medicalisation of aid and this sort of increasing focus on smaller and smaller units you know sort of the national rather than the international the local rather than the national the household as an arena where you can identify responsibility for nutritional and health problems and I think there are you know part of Mark's worry in that book is that a certain kind of political systems analysis associated in a way with the old you know it is going missing it kind of came back a little bit in 2008 I'm not quite sure sort of where it is now but it's worth observing how you know one discourse tends to sort of push out another and the rise of this kind of medical discourse is you know it's not without consequences for other ways of interpreting the world and do we have some more questions from the floor? Yes please Hi I was just wondering when you talk about the acute and the protracted phase of conflict if you look at Yemen now would you describe it in the acute phase or is it already the protracted phase and then who would you want who would you help accountable and how far does accountability go also and in a stage that is so fragmented actually and where obviously my nutrition is highly politicized so you can't really separate it but you also have a probability the problem of access for humanitarian aid workers for delivery of food aid so I was just wondering where you see that and also in general I find it very difficult to differentiate between the acute state of an emergency and when do you call it the protracted phase when you don't necessarily know where it's going Shall we take another couple if there are another couple of questions? So I had more of a general question actually and it was something that David said that people often talk about the victories and what we can do something about much more than what we can I think this is a problem sorry I work in communications so I'm mostly for charities and non-profits and this is definitely a problem because I think internally people are reflecting on all of these issues but obviously the impression they want to present externally is one that we want to see that the approach is working and especially then there's the tension between the funders and the supporters who don't really want to hear about what's not working so I just wondered if you had any advice for practitioners or how this could be applied on a day to day basis for people representing charities, aid organizations, social enterprises and so on and there's tension between oversimplifying some complex situations but also on the other hand over dramatizing some with the whole what bleeds leads in the news and so on and so forth so if you had any advice on that Thank you very much and a third question yes again please no take the floor, seize it and love it I think it was just building on the response that Laura gave but maybe it can be opened up to Suzanne as well but my question was more in terms of what does this look like in a situation of conflict because the productive safety net program that was rolled out in Ethiopia was under a politically stable regime and an absence of conflict but even then it could be co-opted by allegiance to the political party like I know that there are instances where even this combination program which was really great wouldn't be provided or given to individuals unless they pledged allegiance to the PRDF which is the ruling party but what does this look like in a situation of conflict where you already have this criminalization of the assistance and any kind of humanitarian goods that are provided so what kind of framework then could we be employing under the constraints that people are working with Thank you Laura, do you want to start? I suspect we could all answer I'll try to have a stab at all three of those questions but in terms of Yemen I mean in a way Yemen is to my mind is a is a kind of layered acute and protracted situation at the same time I mean typically in displacement circles when you talk about protracted displacement you talk about anything that's more than five years and I think conflict is a similar kind of thing there are elements of conflict in Yemen that even predate the current kind of dynamics with Saudi Arabia that Yemen has already been a site of protracted conflict and protracted food insecurity as well and those two things of course go together hand in hand but then you have these layers of acute extreme food insecurity at the same time I think what that means is then having different approaches that speak to those we're kind of giving humanitarian assistance a really bad time tonight but let's be clear there are lifesaving functions of humanitarian assistance that are well placed and particularly over a short period of time to stabilise a situation I think none of us would argue against we're not necessarily saying that shouldn't be provided it's just that when, at least from my perspective when that is all that's provided over a long period of time that's when the problems start to emerge so you need to have a very nuanced kind of an approach and clearly it's not going to be perfect because humanitarian access is extremely problematic because the dynamics of the conflict are unpredictable and it's one of the most difficult environments to work in unfortunately so I've several times taught a course on food security and at the end of the course we always say, in VCD as well unfortunately these are the jobs that are most available to new graduates because the turnover is very high nobody really wants these kinds of jobs or if they do they don't want them for very long and they're the most challenging you have to have an extremely well informed political sense and you have to have a million other kinds of skills in your pocket and that's something that usually ideally is gained over time and it's not something that is often that you leave so as or the LSE or anywhere else with right off the bat so there's a problem there sorry that's a slight digression the question about how this acute and chronic approaches in times of conflict is incredibly difficult because of the lack of access in many situations but it's often the case as well you can over emphasize the ways in which conflict affects a society so in Somalia for instance we say that it's been without a state and affected by conflict since 1991 it's not actually the case so between 1995 and 2005 things were relatively stable there wasn't a central government but there was quite effective local government in place there was also less humanitarian assistance being provided whether that was a cause or an effect of the peace we're not really sure but there was a coexistence of kind of relatively stable political situation relatively low levels of violence low levels of displacement and low levels of aid so I think there's something that we can learn from that kind of approach as well so just to say that there even in situations of conflict there are areas in which one can have a more a developmental focus or a more kind of one that reaches into the political roots of what's happening in a community rather than just a humanitarian kind of short termist approach and then I guess the question about how to deal on a day to day basis with it's of course you know what we're it's not of course we're not coming up with a totally new ideas that no one's ever thought of in the evenings when people sit around at the end of the day in their NGO houses they talk about these issues all the time yet the problem is they don't get worked into the ways of operating and sometimes one can talk oneself into the idea that it's impossible to do that when in fact it's not impossible to do that and there are really great examples in the history of humanitarianism where people have taken a risk and tried to break down some of those barriers with some success so it's not a great response but I would say look at where those barriers have been broken down to try to figure out how to do it Thanks Laura I mean David are you ready to go? In what sense? You're ready to go? Yeah I I mean I just wanted to people don't normally ask me for practical advice since I can't really organise my own office never mind like sort out anything bigger but in terms of the that sort of climate of any way self promotion and not admitting mistakes and so on I think it is quite a huge problem anyway and I have a sense that because there are particularly in this country where pay is either daily mail or it seems to be in a way ready to seize on any sign that things are going wrong in the humanitarian sector or that taxpayers money is being wasted and so on so I think it's kind of fed into quite a defensive mentality in a way where people don't want to admit mistakes because there's a perception there's a lot of sort of enemies out there but I don't know how to challenge that but sometimes I feel that more intuitively in a way that because NGOs have sort of found themselves in this position of trying to portray themselves as purer than purer that somehow seems to it kind of riles people up in a Trumpian sense and people are looking for ways to sort of find the hypocrisy of the liberals and some of the hypocrisy in a way is real I think and some of it isn't but practically I would say that if you are sort of in the lucky position of being able to give out money like as a donor or maybe an NGO that's giving money to a local partner you can actually choose in a way to reward a report that says oh everything went amazing well and it was all fantastic or you could reward the report that says well we actually there was these failures these successes and we demonstrate in this report our understanding of the local political and cultural context and why things worked or they didn't work and it would be I think if those sort of self accounts were rewarded it would be in a way a different climate in terms of this sort of self promotion but obviously there are elements of that already Thanks Yes I think in terms of the new I mean how to I mean I think the thing is working in protracted crisis is just really really difficult whether it's in Yemen or in Sudan or in south Sudan so in terms of looking at the political aspects or accountability for family I think I mean what I've said in relation is to really I mean as David said earlier I mean international aid workers do know at some level it's just not incorporated in the methodologies Sudanese aid workers know even more I mean they've often been working for 20, 30 years in the same field so it's kind of finding a way of kind of combining that knowledge with the currently more kind of quantitative remote collection of data and even if it's not possible to you know write it in a report I mean that there is I mean even that that information is kind of transferred informally to or at least verbally to you know donors to embassies so that it's yeah which is one way of kind of making the the issues visible again and I mean this will also help with kind of you know this kind of you know it doesn't really matter whether it's kind of agricultural support or food aid I mean you need this in the this kind of constant kind of deliberation of you know if I do this what will the consequences be or you know if you know so it's just thinking through of yeah how you address in in protected crisis and I mean I think you know as all of us there there's no perfect solutions okay thank you very much I'd like to extend an extra special thanks for Suzanne for her work for her publication congratulations publication of your book please do remember to buy it it's 40 pounds also thank you very much to be to David King for coming along today all the way from the LSE for Laura who I haven't seen for about two and a half years so it's great to see her as well you also are not allowed out of the room before you picked up a flyer so it's phasie which we'll tell you all about next term come and join in there's a reception in the SCR with wine and something nibbles you get that when you get there and there's a leaflet yes great the book again to everyone for coming congratulations on surviving up until 8th week of this term have a very good break lots of rest and see you next term