Geographical Imaginations of Humanitarian Disasters and Rationalities of Aid Organisations

在德国的慈善捐赠市场上，有3000多个人道主义组织在争夺捐赠者的注意力。这些人道主义组织在很大程度上依赖于个人的捐款。令人吃惊的是，对不同人道主义灾难的捐款差异很大。虽然一些灾难会导致高额捐款，但其他灾难引发的慈善热情要低得多。2004年东南亚海啸发生后，仅德国就捐赠了6.7亿欧元，而对2010年巴基斯坦洪灾和2011年东非旱灾的关注相对较低。以这些捐赠行为的显著差异为出发点，本研究项目试图从后结构主义话语理论的角度来调查灾难后媒体如何创造有需要的其他人的表现，如何产生和复制关于灾区和人道主义援助的地理想象，以及哪些替代观点被这些框架边缘化。此外，它还分析了霸权话语如何影响人道主义组织的合理性，即地理想象在多大程度上影响人道主义组织对其援助地区的选择，以及人道主义从业者如何处理他们对慈善捐赠的依赖与灾难的对比表现之间的冲突。因此，它有助于地理发展研究。该研究项目分析和比较关于人道主义灾难的媒体报道，如新闻广播、报纸报道等，并检查在具体情况下使用了哪些有利于人道主义援助的论点，以及如何由此构成和再现对灾区的地理想象。然后，媒体分析的结果作为对人道主义组织专家进行定性访谈的起点，以检查地理想象和人道主义援助的表现对人道主义工作者的理性的影响。

More than 3.000 humanitarian organisations are competing for the attention of donors on the German market for charitable donations. These humanitarian organisations are to a large extent dependent on donations by individuals. It is striking that especially donations for different humanitarian disasters vary strongly. While some disasters lead to high donation amounts, others trigger much less charitable enthusiasm. Whereas giving after the tsunami in Southeast Asia in 2004 reached 670 million euros from German donors alone, the interest in the flooding in Pakistan in 2010 or the drought in East Africa in 2011 remained relatively low.Taking these striking differences in donation behaviour as a starting point, this research project seeks to investigate from a poststructuralist discourse-theoretic perspective how representations of the needy other are created after disasters in the media, how geographical imaginations about disaster regions and humanitarian aid are produced and reproduced and which alternative views are marginalised by these framings. Furthermore, it analyses how hegemonic discourses affect the rationalities of humanitarian organisations, i.e. to what extent geographical imaginations influence the choice of regions where humanitarians imply their aid and how humanitarian practitioners handle the conflict between their dependency on charitable giving and the contrasting representations of disasters. It thereby contributes to geographical development research. The research project analyses and compares media reports, such as news broadcasts, newspaper reports etc. about humanitarian disasters and examines which arguments are used in favour of humanitarian aid in the specific cases and how thereby geographical imaginations of disaster regions are discursively constituted and re-produced. The results of the media analysis then serve as a starting point for qualitative interviews with experts of humanitarian organisations in order to examine the influence of geographical imaginations and representations of humanitarian aid on the rationalities of humanitarian practitioners.