World on the move: research on refugees, migration & conflict

It is just over a year since the self-styled Islamic State, or ISIS, declared its ‘Caliphate’ in the Middle East, after capturing vast tracts of Iraq and Syria. Today, ISIS retains its bloody grip on the region and, with no end in sight for the civil wars in Syria and Yemen, volatility in the Middle East is giving the group a dangerous territorial advantage.

But while governments thrash out strategies to rein in ISIS territorially, there is another sphere where its influence is largely unchecked — the internet. The group’s flood of propaganda videos and social media posts demonstrate a level of media production and internet savvy that have stunned its opponents.

In this audio interview, we speak to Nico Prucha and Ali Fisher, two researchers of jihadist digital tactics. They explain how ISIS’s ‘media mujahideen’ use mobile phones and HD cameras to create films that take viewers “right into the middle of the heat”.

The group’s media mujahideen are also masters of digital distribution. Fisher says this is based on a strategy centred around speed, agility and resilience. By tapping into global networks of supporters across different social media platforms, ISIS safeguards itself against the loss of individual accounts, making its online dominance hard to break, he says.

Fisher calls for a more strategic approach to reduce ISIS’s online influence by inhibiting the group’s networks as a whole, rather than stepping in to close sites after they have posted ISIS videos. This will demand global partnerships across governments, technology platforms, academic disciplines and civil society. For example, Prucha explains how a project that brings together academics, anti-extremism activists and a Sunni Muslim organisation in Indonesia aims to both compete directly with ISIS’s attempts to tarnish the name of Sunni Islam and to present an alternative, positive picture of Islam.


Radical strategies to counter ISIS’s online onslaught

Leonardo da Vinci, the original ‘Renaissance man’, tends to be better known for his drawings of human anatomy and the animal kingdom than buildings. But his architectural designs were no less pioneering in their fusing of imagination and practical ingenuity. Now, almost 500 years after da Vinci’s death, a ‘reciprocal’ floor design — a self-supporting arrangement involving three or more poles overlapping in turn — could transform shelters for people affected by disasters.

In this audio interview, we speak to Shaun Halbert, director of charity ReciproBoo about the use of da Vinci’s reciprocal frames in humanitarian response. “Essentially what we’re doing is taking what Leonardo da Vinci did … and asking the question: ‘Well, if it’s strong enough for a floor, why not use it for a roof?’” Halbert says. The result is a strong roof that can support the tarpaulins that people displaced by emergencies are given in the days immediately following disasters — replacing the weak structures people have tended to fashion in the past from whatever materials are to hand. 
 
The frames are made from either steel or, where possible, locally sourced bamboo, a sustainable wood that grows in the tropical belt where many natural disasters strike. When lashed together, the tensile strength of the bamboo and the engineering ingenuity of the design create a structure that is far more durable and weather resilient than those erected by refugees themselves. And, as well as shelters, the structures can be easily extended to create schools and clinics — resources in high demand but short supply during emergencies. The ReciproBoo shelter won an award at the 2015 Aid Innovation Challenge. 



Leonardo da Vinci inspires emergency shelter design

What are the language barriers facing refugees and what tools can help bridge these linguistic gaps? Rebecca Petras of Translators Without Borders talks to Imogen Mathers. 

Bridging the language gap in the European refugee crisis

In the face of an earthquake or cyclone, what would you do first? Most people, I imagine, would rush to a place of safety, find out what was going on, and make contact with their families. But what if you didn’t know the language of those around you or understand emergency bulletins broadcast or appearing on billboards, television or mobile screens?   

This is what happens to many of the world’s 60 million people displaced living in countries prone to environmental disasters or conflict,  as well as for local people who do not speak the language of government and public broadcasts. 
When crises strike, it’s not just the emergency itself that affects people: actually understanding what is going on and where to get help is a challenge. 

The breakdown in communication between aid workers and affected people following the Haiti earthquake of 2010 prompted the global translation NGO Translators Without Borders to form their ‘Words of Relief’ crisis project. The team have spent the past two years analysing the information needs of people in crises, designing tech-based tools to aid communication, and training up internet translation engines to recognise more obscure languages like Nepali, Dari and Pashto. 

Their deputy director, Rebecca Petras, tells us more in this interview. 


Tech tools break down language barriers in emergencies

Global conflicts now often last longer than they did, and they are becoming more complex to understand and address. Some of the worst civil wars, for example in Syria or South Sudan, have now lasted so long that young children born there hardly remember peace. Food shortages can become severe during conflict, and people are much more vulnerable to extreme weather.

But crisis response is getting smarter, and humanitarian workers can now take advantage of planning tools such as satellite imagery. 

Images from space can help aid agencies restore food supplies, decide on how best to distribute funds and predict violence.

But emergency response during war isn’t the only time satellite imagery helps. A truly effective humanitarian response must follow the lives of refugees long after the immediate aftermath of a conflict, says Taner Kodanaz, a director at DigitalGlobe. 
The firm owns and manages an array of satellites that provide accurate imagery of human activities on the ground. It uses these to cooperate with international institutions such as the UN to analyse migration patterns and identify early warning of conflict.

In this interview, Kodanaz explores the many ways satellite technology supports humanitarian response and explains how space imagery is used to achieve aid goals.

http://www.scidev.net/global/aid/multimedia/satellites-humanitarian-work-refugees.html

The power of satellites in humanitarian work

Medics are using underground clinics and surgery guided by satellite link to save lives, says Zaher Sahloul.

Attacks on health workers in Syria have become so frequent that medical relief charities have been forced to build hospitals in bunkers and deep into the side of mountains.  

The Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), which provides medical relief across Syria and to refugees in neighbouring countries, now has 22 underground clinics in Syria. These care for some of the millions of Syrians living in hard-to-reach parts of the country and the 800,000 living in besieged areas, cut off from medical aid and supplies, electricity, telephone lines and food aid. 

Ingenuity and resourcefulness are core to these clinics, says Zaher Sahloul, SAMS senior advisor, in this interview. For example, with many power plants bombed out, Syrian hospitals must often rely on diesel-fed generators. But in areas under siege, diesel is unavailable so medical clinics have been testing ways of running generators on methane from animal waste. 

Meanwhile, satellite internet and video apps link Syrian doctors, nurses and medical students to medical teams in the United States. “This is the only way we know what is happening and what’s needed,” Sahloul says. “I can look at the patients and talk with the physicians and nurses and [they can] tell me what’s happening and seek advice.” 

Doctors, nurses and medical students are also being trained to treat the effects of chlorine gas, a chemical agent used frequently by the Assad regime. Virtual situation rooms, using apps like WhatsApp and Viber, guide health workers through chemical weapon response, from treatment to decontamination. SAMS also provide training in advanced trauma life support and how to use crisis technology like portable ultrasound kits.  

The care of the wounded and sick has been protected since the very first Geneva Convention of 1864, but the Syrian conflict has seen the rule book torn up, with attacks on healthcare reshaping conflict and humanitarian response. The story behind one SAMS hospital highlights the shocking “new normal” in twenty-first-century warfare.

SAMS wanted to build the hospital in a city in one besieged area, Sahloul tells SciDev.Net. “But people in the city told them: ‘No way are you going to build a hospital inside the city because that means we will be targeted.’” So the organisation moved it away from the city and dug it deep into the heart of a mountain, where the emergency rooms and intensive care units are served by a 24-metre ventilation shaft.  

Overall, SAMS had 72 clinics attacked last year by bombs, missiles and shells. The international relief charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has stopped sharing hospital locations because of attacks. A new report from the Safeguarding Health in Conflict coalition documents 122 attacks on health centres in Syria in 2015.

““People no longer react when hospitals are bombed, doctors are killed,” Sahloul said in his keynote speech at the MSF Scientific Days on 20 May. “This should not be allowed. Not only in Syria, but [also] in the rest of the world.”

The interview was recorded during the MSF Scientific Days. 

http://www.scidev.net/global/health/multimedia/cave-hospitals-syria-front-line.html

The cave hospitals of Syria’s front line

SciDev.Net podcasts look at key global development issues and the ways in which science can have a positive impact on equitable and sustainable development and poverty reduction. 