The rise of the UAE on the humanitarian stage

New NCHS paper released

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is an Arab Gulf state that has received growing attention as one of the 21st century’s most generous humanitarian aid donors in the world.

In this latest NCHS paper, “Recent trends in the international humanitarian regime and the rise of the United Arab Emirates on the world humanitarian stage”, Deniz Gökalp (Associate Professor, American University in Dubai), argues that “the UAE, as a re-emerging humanitarian donor in the 21st century, is committed to instrumentalising the new norms and rationalities of neoliberal humanitarianism for acknowledgment and recognition by the US-led western cooperation and coalitions in humanitarian spaces, and capitalises strategically on the most recent trends in humanitarianism (i.e., development-orientation, commercialisation and innovation through digitalisation).”

You can access and download a copy of the full paper here.

Deniz Gökalp is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of International and Middle Eastern Studies at the American University in Dubai.

This paper is part of the project “Humanitarian Diplomacy: Assessing Policies, Practices and Impact of New Forms of Humanitarian Action and Foreign Policy” funded by the Research Council of Norway and led by Research Professor Antonio De Lauri at the Chr. Michelsen Institute.