- Convenor:
-
Claire Mcloughlin
(University of Birmingham)
Send message to Convenor
- Format:
- Paper panel
- Stream:
- Conflict, crisis and humanitarianism
Short Abstract
This panel explores how basic services are delivered, denied, or disrupted in crisis-affected contexts, and how this shapes power, agency, and imagined futures. We welcome contributions, especially from those working in or from conflict- and crisis-affected settings.
Description
In conflict- and crisis-affected contexts, the delivery of basic services — such as health, education, water, and infrastructure — is often profoundly disrupted, politicised, or instrumentalised. Rather than stabilising governance, service delivery may reflect or deepen violence, fragmentation, and exclusion. Yet these same services remain deeply desired by crisis-affected communities, and continue to offer spaces for agency, negotiation, and hope.
This panel invites critical reflection on service delivery in crisis settings — whether shaped by armed conflict, displacement, political instability, or institutional collapse. We ask: How is power exercised through the delivery or denial of services? Who acts, adapts, or resists in fractured systems? What kinds of futures are imagined, enabled, or foreclosed through service provision in crisis?
We welcome papers that explore themes such as:
– The co-production or obstruction of services by state, non-state, and customary actors
– The moral and practical dilemmas of frontline provision in violent settings
– The weaponisation of essential services
– How services are used to claim legitimacy, build resilience, or resist authority
We are particularly keen to include contributions from researchers and practitioners working in or from crisis-affected contexts, and encourage diverse methodological and disciplinary approaches. The panel aims to foster dialogue between scholars and practitioners to reimagine what service delivery means — and does — in contexts of enduring uncertainty and crisis.
Accepted papers
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how localisation is understood in the CBE transition from international to local NGOs in Afghanistan. It shows a redefined localisation under authoritarian rule – enabling limited local agency, while reproducing hierarchies and exclusions that affect education delivery.
Paper long abstract
Amid political instability in Afghanistan, the localisation of education delivery has become paramount. Following a June 2023 directive from the Taliban’s Ministry of Education (MoE), international NGOs (INGO) supporting Community-Based Education (CBE) were required to transition implementation to local NGOs (LNGOs). While localisation has been central to humanitarian and development debates since the 2016-World Humanitarian Summit, debates on how it occurs and whether it reproduces power-imbalances and new forms of inequality remain rarely-explored.
This paper draws on a qualitative-longitudinal approach, combining 28 KII interviews with UN, INGO and LNGO staff, alongside CBE teachers and document analysis of Afghanistan Education-Cluster meeting minutes (June 2023-December 2024). Analytically, it uses a resource-agency-ways of being framing, interpreted through Lukes’ (2005) three dimensions of power, to examine how localisation is conceptualised and contested in the CBE transition and how this shapes education service delivery.
Findings show unique contextual understanding of localisation, which is widely redefined as a rapid, politically-driven transfer of implementation responsibility from INGOs to LNGOs, rather than a structural transformation of the humanitarian-aid education system and sharing power. The paper also reflects on intersecting dynamics among stakeholders, where MoE seeks control, INGOs retain oversight through compliance and LNGOs hope for gradual empowerment. In practice, the rushed transition has resulted in service disruptions while also reinforcing unequal intra-local hierarchies.
This paper contributes to debates on power and agency in humanitarian-education governance, highlighting how “localisation” can be redefined under restrictive rule – enabling limited local agency while reproducing hierarchies and exclusions that affect education-delivery system.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how public education services in Thailand’s conflict-affected Deep South are expanded, contested, and sometimes weaponised. Using new district-level data, it explores how school investments and their disruption shape violence, authority, and imagined futures.
Paper long abstract
This paper uses the lens of basic service delivery to understand conflict and authority in Thailand’s Deep South. In Pattani, Yala, Narathiwat and parts of Songkhla, public schooling is one of the most visible and contested faces of the Thai state. I assemble a new district-fiscal-year dataset that links Ministry of Education budget data to geocoded conflict events, allowing me to track how the expansion, disruption, and targeting of schools relate to patterns of violence over time. I distinguish between different forms of education spending (e.g., staffing, operations, and school construction and renovation) and use panel models with district and year effects to explore their evolving association with conflict incidence and lethality.
Rather than treating education as a straightforward peace dividend, this paper approaches schools as a site where power is exercised, negotiated, and resisted. Education services can be deployed to claim legitimacy and demonstrate responsiveness, to channel resources and patronage, or to project administrative control into contested areas. At the same time, schools can become focal points for grievance, obstruction, or attack. Preliminary results point to a complex, evolving relationship between schooling investments and violent contestation - one that varies by spending type and timing, suggesting that the same service-delivery expansion may have different implications in the short versus longer run.
The paper contributes to debates on how basic services operate in crisis-affected settings as both instruments of governance and potential targets or tools of resistance, and highlights the conditions under which expanding education may help rework state-citizen relations.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on extensive research into Gaza’s health political economy, this talk explores service delivery under occupation, outlining historical and macroeconomic forces, bargaining dynamics, and ideological underpinnings, while assessing barriers and prospects for systemic reform.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines how health services in Gaza have been systematically disrupted under decades of Israeli occupation, blockade, and internal political fragmentation. Drawing on in-depth interviews with senior policymakers, health professionals, and caregivers, it analyzes how these structural conditions weakened service delivery, dismantled institutional capacity, and entrenched chronic health and humanitarian crises, shaping power, agency, and the sector's future in profound ways.
By centering the pre-October 2023 realities, this research provides critical context for understanding the severity of the damages caused by Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza, which has escalated into unprecedented violence, including the systematic targeting and destruction of health infrastructure. These attacks underscore the urgent need to strengthen community-led health resilience, and use innovative ways of service delivery, under conditions of active warfare, while recognising that reversing decades of de-development will only be possible with a complete end to the war and the conditions that sustain it.
This study has uniquely used creative dissemination strategies, such as animation, photography, theatre, poetry, and podcasts to convey the affective side of the research, democratise knowledge sharing, and foster international solidarity.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how twilight institutions in conflict environments in Kenya broker and instrumentalise service delivery under devolution to gain power and contest competing authority, drawing on micro-level insights on ethnic tensions.
Paper long abstract
Kenya’s 2010 devolution aimed to reduce ethnic tensions by improving service delivery for marginalised communities (Akech, 2010). Yet, in conflict environments such as Chepyuk Ward in Mount Elgon constituency, service delivery remains a challenge. Chepyuk, an ethnically diverse agricultural frontier, suffers persistent underdevelopment in health, education and road infrastructure. Historically marked by violent identity and land conflicts (Médard, 2009, 2010; Lynch, 2011; Lynch and Anderson, 2014), the territory has long been a site of power struggles. Before devolution, elected elites directly exercised control over service delivery along micro-ethnic lines. Since 2013, new twilight institutions—those that are not the government but exercise public authority (Lund, 2006)—have emerged, reshaping local politics. Drawing on nine-month ethnographic research, May 2022 to February 2023, this paper shows how two rival institutions from the same micro-ethnic group—a local NGO and an informal group—broker and instrumentalise service delivery to gain power and contest authority. These struggles deepen micro-ethnic divisions, selectively delivering and disrupting services, particularly in social, education and road infrastructure. The paper argues that service delivery in such contexts is not neutral but political, shaping agency and governance while influencing how communities imagine their futures amid uncertainty.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores the challenges of the provision of safe, affordable and sustainable water for both refugees and host communities in Uganda, a context that promotes the user pays principle and is experimenting with prepayment systems, with little to no active engagement of water service users.
Paper long abstract
While some countries erect fences and prevent refugees from crossing international boundaries, Uganda has been praised for its progressive policies towards refugees. This agenda was strengthened with the 2016 Refugee and Host Comprehensive Empowerment (ReHoPE) strategy which seeks to treat refugees as nationals with the same responsibilities.
In terms of access to water, host rural communities are subject to the Demand Response Approach: communities demand the level of service they want and thereafter will be financially responsible for its maintenance. They are given no meaningful choice over the technology nor its post-construction management.
Similarly, within refugee settlements, water service levels are determined by NGOs who must adhere to UNHCR approved standards. Not only does this means that refugees often receive a higher service level than host communities, with the risk of damaging relations, but in a context of declining humanitarian support and in-line with ReHoPE these piped water systems are not sustainable. A construct and leave mentality is similarly rife in the humanitarian sector where constructed infrastructure is routinely branded by NGOs for upward donor accountability. There is no downwards accountability to refugees who will be asked to contribute to the maintenance of costly systems they were never consulted over.
Drawing on 12 years of research within both humanitarian and development settings, this paper explores the challenges that refugees and host communities in Uganda face for safe, affordable and sustainable water in a context that promotes the user pays principle with no active engagement of water service users.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on Rendille ethnography, the paper examines how in Northern Kenya uncertainty is actively produced, governed, and instrumentalized through emergencies, humanitarianism, and state actors with consequences for power, social cohesion and subaltern agency in marginalised communities
Paper long abstract
In northern Kenya, climate change and conflict are framed as permanent emergencies requiring humanitarian governance, technocratic interventions, and prayer. This paper examines how uncertainty is actively produced, governed, and instrumentalised, shaping power, cooperation, and social cohesion in Rendille. Historically, Rendille society relied on centralised but redistributive elder-led structures to manage scarce resources during droughts. Today, these roles are replaced by state actors, producing patronage, clientelism, and selective interventions during “crises,” which reinforce dependence while eroding traditional mutual aid. NGOs further exacerbate this dynamic, substituting rights-based citizenship with compassion-driven humanitarianism, while the state neglects basic infrastructure. Political narratives frame the Rendille as dependent, rebellious, or backward, obscuring structural inequalities and the dramatic social transformations of the past half-century. Behavioural change interventions by NGOs coexist with state abandonment of infrastructure, electricity, and transport, producing contradictory and racialised interpretations of vulnerability.
The paper draws on 70 in-depth interviews and analysis of Facebook communications to explore consent, political legitimacy, infrapolitics, James C. Scott’s concept of hegemony, and Didier Fassin’s theorisation of emergency. It interrogates the meaning of development: is it alignment with external values or a political vision for the future? In contexts fractured by tribalism, corruption, historical marginalisation, and humanitarian paternalism, repeated interventions—even bottom-up approaches—fail unless structural injustices, political crimes, human rights violations, and systemic inequalities are addressed first. Only then can smaller, targeted interventions succeed—changing the structures before attempting to reshape outcomes. Development is thus not merely a policy question, but a matter of legality in a functioning democracy.
Paper short abstract
Designed to maintain stability and peace, social protection in Timor-Leste represents a trade-off between universal entitlements on paper and politically-selective benefits in practice. This paper examines citizen interpretations of the political bargain and implications for the peace dividend.
Paper long abstract
Following Timor-Leste’s security crisis in 2006, which caused disruption of basic services, several social protection schemes were introduced with the aim of lowering tensions and promoting stability. The right to social security and social assistance, health and education without discrimination is enshrined in the Constitution and National Social Protection Strategy.
While these schemes have contributed to relative peace in the country, they have also exacerbated social divisions through competition over Timorese national identity. By targeting certain groups – particularly veterans and their families – these schemes provide some citizens with access to symbolic and financial capital while excluding others. Women and young people are particularly disadvantaged due to a combination of Catholic values, militarized masculinity, and hierarchical customary laws.
This leads to a trade-off between universal entitlements on paper and politically-selective benefits in practice. While the valorisation of the veterans is still widely accepted among citizens, there are also unintended consequences including fiscal stress, social resentment and intergenerational inequality. Attitudes are changing in younger generations and the role of social protection delivery within state legitimacy and social cohesion remains contested.
This paper examines the ways in which social protection contributes to stability and cohesion, while also creating tensions through its design and implementation. It draws on an innovative mixed methods study, combining a ‘lab-in-the-field’ experiment with focus groups discussions to gain insights into how citizens navigate and interpret the political bargain underpinning the social protection system. It also considers whether social protection is maintaining or threatening Timor-Leste’s post-conflict peace dividend.
Paper short abstract
When aid disappears, communities step in. Drawing on 35 interviews with youth volunteers in Khartoum, this paper examines community kitchens as lifelines that reimagine service delivery and development as dignity, care, and survival under armed conflict.
Paper long abstract
This paper looks at community kitchens in Khartoum during active armed conflict, when the state and international aid were largely absent. It is based on 35 interviews with young volunteers, mostly under 25 years old, from seven provinces of Khartoum. The interviews were conducted in March and April 2025, during a period of severe food shortage and insecurity.
The paper argues that community kitchens became an important form of service delivery in crisis. They were not formal organizations, but small, informal groups of youth who felt responsible for protecting their communities. Volunteers did not describe their work as charity. Instead, they spoke about humanity, duty, and the impossibility of watching people die from hunger. The kitchens relied mainly on popular efforts and donations, including support from Sudanese living abroad. Most of them could only provide one meal per day, often only two days a week, while the number of people in need increased every day.
The paper also discusses the difficulties and tensions faced by volunteers, especially when food finished while people were still waiting. Women often came with their faces covered, and sometimes families sent only children to collect food because of shame or insecurity. These moments show how power, exclusion, and difficult decisions were negotiated at the community level.
The paper suggests that community kitchens should be understood as grassroots service delivery systems that reimagine development as collective survival, care, and dignity in times of deep uncertainty.