Women and Indigenous Religions, , edited by Sylvia Marcos, Santa Barbara, CA, Praeger, 2010, ISBN: 978 0 275 99157 9, 256 pp.

Every profession generates its own technical jargon to facilitate communication among fellow experts. The ability of air-traffic controllers, engineers, and medical practitioners to communicate with each other unambiguously is a life-and-death matter! Other forms of jargon, however, serve to exclude those who are considered by the insider-club to lack the necessary entry qualifications. Paradoxically, the development industry largely belongs to this latter category, with its predilection for forms of expression that are complete gobbledegook to articulate laypersons, let alone the often non-literate ‘end-users’ of its ministrations. Worse still, many intelligent, sensitive, and wellintentioned inhabitants of AidWorld eventually become oblivious to the fact that the Developmentspeak dialect does not translate into plain English, let alone into any other language. Quite simply, they end up talking to themselves about intervening in the lives of distant peoples, with whom they cannot communicate. Communication practitioners Wendy Quarry and Ricardo Ramı́rez are refreshingly honest about this. ‘We recognize the irony: we have been advocates for this field through the type of publications that only converted communicators would read. Our writing has become inaccessible, only academics can endure it, and yet the message was intended for a wider audience. This book is an attempt to break from that habit’ (p.1). Reading this book is like breathing clear mountain air. The style is deceptively simple, yet the issues as serious as they are profound. It is rather like listening in on a conversation between two old friends, candidly sharing ideas, reflections, and wisdom drawn from a lifetime of experience – not wallowing in the past, not congratulating themselves and pointing fingers at others, but rather suggesting future directions based on ‘anchoring our work with organizations where participatory communication can thrive . . . away from development bureaucracies working in the planning mode, to organizations and champions embracing a searching mode’ (p. 140). The book is divided into three roughly equal parts: ‘What We Know’, ‘What We Learned’, and ‘What We Can Do Differently’. The first chapter presents ‘communication’ as it is generally treated by the development industry: ‘a “guest discipline” that functions in organizations pursuing other goals (health, agriculture etc.) and as such . . .seen as only offering tactical support . . . [commanding] as much respect as cocktail piano music among jazz cognoscenti’ (Silvio Waisbord, cited on p. 11). The authors set out five common myths: that communication can be improvised, bolted on as an afterthought; that communication and the medium are the same thing, when actually the medium (whether a modern pod-cast or an old-fashioned glossy report) is often ‘public relations camouflaged as a product’, usually intended for donors’ consumption rather than for any inherent purpose; that organisational communications units have a clear mandate, when the reality is of ‘increasing confusion between public relations, information, knowledge management, social marketing and the participatory forms of communication’ (p.13); that communication is simply ‘reaching out to tell people about who you are and what you do, and why you matter so much’ (p.14), at root a confusion between information and communication; and that

London and New York: Zed Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-84277891-3 (pb), 257 pp. No-one who has attended a United Nations conference on health, population, or women can have failed to notice the swarms of...

London & New York: Zed Books, 2007, ISBN: 978 1 84277 8197 (pb.), 253 pp. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, ISBN: 798 1 4051 6937 0 (pb.), 173 pp. These two edited volumes originated in a workshop in 2003 e...

This article focuses on the role that development NGOs play in capacity building, arguing that many conventional NGO practices are ultimately about retaining power, rather than empowering their partners. This leads to tunnel vision and to upward rather than downward or horizontal accountability, based on the assumption that the transfer of resources is a one-way process. At worst, this undermines rather than strengthens the capacities of the organisations that NGOs are attempting to assist. Sharing responsibilities and risks, mutual accountability, and committing to the long term rather than to short-term projects are more likely to create partnerships that can withstand vicissitudes and contribute to lasting change.

As Tony Vaux points out in his Guest Editorial in this issue, the concept of humanitarianism applies to both war and general disaster, and is based on the principle that 'in extreme cases of human suffering external agents may offer assistance to people in need, and in doing so should be accorded respect and even "rights" in carrying out their functions'. However, policy makers in humanitarian agencies, and aid workers on the ground, face a bewilderingly complex set of challenges in determining such 'rights'. Gone are any comfortable certainties about what in the commercial sector is known as 'the licence to operate', and claims to the moral high ground of 'neutrality' have an increasingly hollow ring. Perhaps more to the point, such assumptions are of little practical use to frontline workers who may risk ambush, abduction, deportation, or even their lives as the result of their professional activities. Nor do outdated road maps help relief agencies to orient their decisions on whether to withdraw or continue providing material assistance in the knowledge that a proportion of it is fuelling the violence or lining the pockets of conflict profiteers. There are no standard 'off-the-peg' answers, because each situation must be considered on its own merits. And of course no aid agencies share an identical mandate, or have precisely the same expertise or history of involvement with the affected population – all factors that must be weighed up in deciding what is the appropriate course of action. For reasons of space, we have not sought to cover the areas of early warning, prevention, and mitigation associated with 'natural' disasters, although of course the two are always linked, as became very clear in wake of the Asian tsunami in Aceh and Sri Lanka. It has long been recognised that since catastrophic events disproportionately affect the poor and marginalised, they expose and may intensify existing social divides and structural injustice. For instance, in his seminal work on the 1943 Bengal famine, Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (OUP, 1984) Amartya K Sen argued that such food shortages do not occur in functioning democracies. Similarly, Roger Plant's, Guatemala: Unnatural Disaster (Latin America Bureau, 1978) showed how the 1974 earthquake triggered an intensification in state violence that was to result in the death or disappearance of 200,000 Guatemalans and create 'a nation of widows and orphans'. In accordance with the focus of this issue, we have given priority to publications and organisations that reflect on some direct involvement in humanitarian endeavour, rather than giving priority to more policy-oriented or scholarly works or academic institutions. We have included literature on the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, since this was such a defining event for humanitarianism; and some recent publications concerning the US-led invasions of Afghanistan in October 2001 ('Operation Enduring Freedom') and Iraq in March 2003 ('Operation Iraqi Freedom'), since these have significantly redefined the global landscape of policy and practice within which humanitarian agencies operate. Inevitably we can offer only a glimpse of the growing literature in these fields, but we hope in so doing that readers, and particularly those directly involved in humanitarian endeavours, will be encouraged to explore the issues further.

This annotated list highlights some 70 recent publications and organisations that focus primarily on what happens after rather than before or during armed conflict. Issues covered include the political, economic, and social aspects of post-war reconstruction, and questions related to transitional justice and post-conflict reconciliation, and we have sought to offer a sample of the growing theoretical and empirical literature analysing the contemporary challenges involved in peace building and post-war reconstruction.

In the early 1980s, support for trade unions was a significant component of Oxfam GB's programmes in various parts of the world, most notably Central America and South Africa. In Central America, this was motivated both because organised labour played an important role in popular movements that were pressing for equitable political settlements to the wars ravaging the region, and because unions as such, as well as their members and leaders, were the targets of repression and political violence. This article explores the background to the rise in funding for unions in Honduras, reflects on this experience, and discusses some of the factors that might change a potentially awkward donor‐recipient relationship to one of dialogue and solidarity.

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"Building Bridges in Southern Africa: Reconstruction, and Reconciliation inTimes of Change Conflict,." Development in Practice, 7(4), pp. 436–437

(1994). Emergencies and development. Gender & Development: Vol. 2, Women and Emergencies, pp. 17-19.

The human cost of war is something with which all readers of this volume are familiar, albeit vicariously. The international media bring the images of war right into our own homes. The protagonists in these representations are almost exclusively male - soldiers, diplomats, politicians. By contrast, women are assigned one of two supporting roles: either the helpless victim caught in the crossfire, or the pillar of strength in adversity. The men do the talking and strategizing; the women suffer and struggle in the background. The implicit message of this narrative is clear. When conflict breaks out, men prosecute war to defend the homeland, while women bind the social wounds and keep the home fires burning. The statistics are well known, and may no longer have the power to shock: contemporary wars are fought out not on demarcated battlefields, but in the towns, villages, and homes of ordinary people. The fact that 90 per cent of today's war casualties are civilians, and the fact that four out of five refugees and displaced persons are women and children ... are so often quoted that we hardly stop to think about what they mean. (Eade 1996:5) To these, we can add that one-fifth of humanity survives on less than a dollar a day, and that two-thirds of the world's poorest people are women, as are two-thirds of adults who cannot read and write. Women perform most of the unremunerated work in the 'hidden economy', and are disproportionately represented among the world's 'working poor', with lower average earnings than men in every country in the world, significantly so in some. It goes without saying, then, that most of those who become homeless, stateless, and penniless as a result of armed conflict are women (Eade 2001).