Aldo Benini
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2008 - Relief workers sometimes have to match two or more lists of persons (food aid recipients, camp populations, missing persons, patients, etc.) or localities (villages of origin; populated places in two administrative gazetteers). This technical note demonstrates a procedure making record linkage more efficient in the presence of frequent spelling differences. Two methods are described, one in a statistical program, the other in a popular spreadsheet application that most humanitarian data managers use. The data is from Tanzania.
2007 - Poverty-alleviation policies and humanitarian mine-action strategies should be seen as mutually dependent. This dependency, however, is nuanced and cannot be thought of as a simple linear association between contamination and poverty or poverty alleviation and explosives mitigation. While both aim to inform national strategies, the suitability of particular project types for local community development has to be assessed by looking at several information bodies and by actively involving the affected populations. In Armenia, the UNDP implemented a Landmine Impact Survey as well as a Human Development Survey, although separately from each other. By linking the two data bodies, Charles Conley and I demonstrate new findings about mine-affected communities from a poverty-alleviation perspective. The paper appeared in the Journal of Mine Action, vol. 11(1).
2006 - "Survivor Needs or Logistical Convenience? – Factors shaping decisions to deliver relief to earthquake-affected communities, Pakistan 2005-06" merges a United Nations logistics database with external data sources in order to test Waters' “Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan” thesis. Heckman selection models are used to examine whether the extreme logistical challenges of "Operation Winter Race" distracted humanitarian agencies from the needs of the people they were supposed to assist, in favor of other values that their institutional frameworks dictated. In addition, Bayesian semi-parametric models document how the influence of different needs indicators changed over time. - This study was done for the Veterans For America / Information Management and Mine Action Programs. - A shorter version is due to appear in the journal "Disasters" in 2008. - "Runs of Relief" (2007) adds a technical note for humanitarian logistics analysts wanting to use similar data to estimate effects on operational, rather than short-term tactical, decisions in allocating relief.
2006 - Local communities in post-war countries recover unevenly. Do those in more favorable socio-economic conditions offer their residents better security? Do threats to life and the integrity of persons diminish apace with the recovery, or do they linger at elevated levels until growth and development have crossed certain thresholds? Should policy assume that economic opportunity and public service provision will take care of the risk of violent conflict, or does it call for direct intervention? - In "A Semi-Parametric Spatial Regression Approach to Post-War Human Security: Cambodia, 2002-2004" we investigate those questions tapping into a monitoring system on domestic violence, land conflicts and serious crime that the government of Cambodia operated in over 15,000 villages and urban neighborhoods. - This study was conducted, together with Taylor Owen and Håvard Rue, for the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). - A shorter version has been accepted by the Asian Journal of Criminology and should appear in late 2008. A statement on replication is being offered at its Web site; this statement refers to data, command batch and select output files held in a zip file here.
s2005 - "Rapid Humanitarian Assessments – How Rational? A Value-of-Information Study of Two Assessments in Iraq" addresses the question of how rationally humanitarian agencies use one of their standard tools - rapid assessments. This extensive study was motivated by the geographical overlap of two large-scale assessments that took place under UN auspices in northern Iraq after the U.S. invasion in 2003. We build a predictive model of whether the second assessment teams would visit a local community, or not, in terms of covariates some of which had been collected under the first exercise. We operationalize three concepts thought to guide assessment personnel: "mental maps", "policy guidance" and "local experts and key informants". For the 2,425 observed communities, the prediction is correct in 79 percent. In a second step, we construct an importance measure for the information from each of the 1,139 communities that the second assessment visited. We use this measure and the dates of the visits in order to calculate the average information cost as it evolved over the 317 days of survey lifetime. We discuss the need for stopping rules in humanitarian data collections and propose a sequence of smaller community assessments as an alternative. - This study, too was done for the Veterans For America / Information Management and Mine Action Programs. A shorter version appeared in the journal "Disasters", vol. 21, no. 1.
2005 - "Emergency Surveys in Humanitarian Mine Action - Elements of a Protocol", co-authored with Kim Spurway, is the result of a mission in eastern Congo. Emergency surveys need a methodology that integrates them tightly with the technical requirements of Humanitarian Mine Action, notably clearance and disposal. One of the objectives is to accelerate the response to the needs of surveyed communities. This note addresses some of the recurrent challenges in emergency surveys and delineates possible solutions. Rather than being a practical handbook, it discusses a number of conceptual and organizational issues. These are interwoven with elements of practical action, including a catalogue of minimum information fields and a sample questionnaire.
2004 - Like other wars, recent Western military interventions have entailed large losses of civilians in the affected countries. In the spirit of the ‘Revolution in Military Affairs’, some have claimed that those losses were much smaller than the loss of life as a result of previous misrule and oppression, and that during these interventions civilians suffered only accidental ‘small massacres’. In "Civilian Victims in an Asymmetrical Conflict: Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghanistan", Lawrence Moulton, of Johns Hopkins University, and I use victim figures from a survey of 600 local communities exposed to hostilities during Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan to test these claims. We model community victim counts as a function of potential explanatory factors via zero-inflated Poisson regression. - The paper appeared in the "Journal of Peace Research", vol. 41, no. 4.
2003 - "Integration of Different Data Bodies for Humanitarian Decision Support: An Example from Mine Action" illustrates dilemmas of humanitarian data management. In this field, data integration has been fostered not only by the diffusion of GIS technology, but also by institutional changes such as the creation of United Nations-led "Humanitarian Information Centers". But there is a question whether the analytic capacity is in step with aggressive data acquisition. Humanitarian action may yet have to build the kind of strong analytic tradition that public health and poverty alleviation have accomplished. Seizing an opportunity presented by the Lebanon Landmine Impact Survey, we demonstrate that model-driven data integration leads to non-trivial insights for humanitarian policy. In this event, we merge community-level with agricultural census tract data and use ordered logit regression to estimate land use ratios in response to contamination severity and year of exit from hostilities. - The study appeared in "Disasters", vol. 27, no. 4.
2002 - As a sample of how I work on the data collection side, I add a version of the annotated questionnaire that I created for the Landmine Impact Survey. This multi-country survey was being challenged by centrifugal tendencies, given the greatly diverse conditions in the participating countries and the different professional composition of country management teams. Between 1999 and 2002, I created most of the survey protocols and training syllabi (except GIS and database), trying to strike a balance between the need for global comparability (rooted ultimately in advocacy needs) and for flexibility to accommodate country-specific factors. My approach was to couch specifications, wherever possible, in explicit rationales, both for the instrument as a whole and for lower-level technical points that the country teams would explain in staff trainings or modify in response to the pre-test findings. This way, supervisors and trainers could find out identically why things had to be done within certain bands of discretion.
Generally, this was well appreciated among country team members with a social science background. But I had to learn the hard way that some of the managers with an engineering background found detailed reasoned prescriptions useless. The concept of measurement error and our interest to minimize it meant little to them. Their presumption was that data collectors and interviewees understood the landmine and unexploded ordnance reality well enough in order to work with succinct check lists. In fact, as one of them (in Kosovo), explained to me: "When I am done listening to the group [of key informants from a contaminated local community], I go back to my jeep, roll up the window, and fill out the whole thing myself." He sure got done more than any of us social constructivists ever will ..
1999 - "Network Without Centre? A Case Study of an Organizational Network Responding to an Earthquake" grew out of the evaluation that I conducted of the Red Cross Movement response to a disaster in northern Afghanistan. It was published in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, vol. 7/1. Network concepts had been around in the humanitarian world since Randolph Kent's Anatomy of Disaster Relief (1987), but ten years' later this paper was one of the first to look at structural features of a response network. This has since changed, through the application of more formal network analysis concepts in a number of disaster studies. Another ten years later, what the reader may still find stimulating, is my way of tabulating the delay structure of the response and diagramming partner preferences among UN, Red Cross and NGOs.
1998 - My last mission with the International Committee of the Red Cross took place in South Africa, in 1993 - 94. Seeing an odious political regime come to an end was a very satisfactory conclusion, and having contributed, in whatever tiny measure, to the largely peaceful transition, was immensely gratifying, in contrast to several intractable conflict theaters from which I had departed without much hope for the countries and the people with whom ICRC delegates worked together personally. South Africa offered me also a collaboration with two local researchers whose conflict analyses contributed to the new government's decision to postpone local elections in the volatile Kwazulu-Natal province three times during 1995 - 96.
"Persistent Collective Violence and Early Warning Systems: The Case of Kwazulu‑Natal, South Africa" is two things in one: a study of a networked violence monitoring system in an early warning perspective, and an analysis of the violence dynamics using the data that the system collected. Monthly fatalities from political violence, segregated for the two major antagonists, feed into a system of action-reaction equations; we estimate the effects of reciprocity ("it-for-tat") and of inertia (previous violence) for periods before and after the April 1994 national elections. - The study, written together with Anthony Minnaar and Sam Pretorius, appeared in "Armed Forces & Society", vol. 24, no. 4.
1997 - "Uncertainty and Information Flows in Humanitarian Agencies" was inspired by the 1996 review of "Operation Lifeline Sudan", in which I took part as a "relief economist" (that's what the UN contracts manager called me ..). A computer simulation underlines the point that uncertainty grows out of the internal complexity of the agencies themselves, rather than simply emanating from their war-ridden environments. But the focus of this paper, which appeared in "Disasters", vol. 21, no. 4, is on the philosophical treatment of the uncertainty concept (and of certainty substitutes) in this particular institutional complex, borrowing from Smithson's typology of ignorance and from organizational theorists such as Stinchcombe's "Information and Organizations". Although written ten years ago, I believe that the paper still has value for the education of the new generation of relief workers and humanitarian policy students.
1993 - "Simulation of the Effectiveness of Protection and Assistance for Victims of Armed Conflict", my second published computer simulation, translates into a formal model intuition that I built, as an ICRC delegate in Mali in 1991, of the dynamics of ethnic violence and its reduction in response to protection and assistance activities for the civilian population. As a field person (and later deskman at Geneva HQ), I was divorced from academic conflict studies and had to build a simulation sensitive to place, history and humanitarian policy mix with the conceptual tools on hand. Some of them were rather unorthodox, such as interacting social clocks that translate events into levels of tension and hence new violence. The irony of it all was that I was able to present this paper at a computer simulation conference in 1993, filling the slot of a researcher from former Yugoslavia who could no longer travel because of the ethnic violence in his country!
More papers will be added gradually. If you experience difficulty accessing any of these papers, please send a request to
abenini [a t] starpower [ dot ] net [address broken up to thwart spammers]
I took this photo inside the besieged city of Wau, southern Sudan, in 1990 when I was the head of the ICRC sub-delegation there.
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Last updated: 20 October 2008