Drawing on years of fieldwork by an interdisciplinary team of scholars from both Tanzania and the Global North, this groundbreaking collection analyzes the impacts and potential of citizen-led responses to pandemics, localized conflicts, refugee crises, and other mass emergencies in the Global South.

Across five sections and twelve chapters exploring methodologies, motivations, legal frameworks, social factors, and individual case studies, this collaborative effort issues an important challenge to persistent tropes of Western saviors and Global-South "victims." In so doing, it broadens our understanding of humanitarianism beyond the work of formal aid organizations such as the American Red Cross and the International Refugee Committee, and it develops new models of local-led assistance and resilience in the face of disaster.

A must-read for researchers, practitioners, and students interested in disaster response, humanitarianism, and decolonizing approaches to development in the Global South.


The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Nordic Africa Institute.

Peter Kragelund is Director of the Danish Institute for International Studies, Denmark.

Hamudi Ismail Majamba is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Daudi Rivelo Mukangara is Professor of Political Science at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Lisa Ann Richey is Professor of Globalization at the Copenhagen Business School, Denmark.

Consolata Raphael Sulley is Lecturer of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.