Humanitarian Early Warning Systems: myth and reality

The field of humanitarian early warning has emerged as a way to alert governments about countries facing imminent humanitarian crises, based on indicators of potential conflict, food shortages and other related issues. Early warning as a technical field has often failed because intervention in another state is based on national self-interests and the constraints of sovereignty. Governments continue to be unresponsive to areas outside of these considerations. Because this reality is overlooked, all the literature reviewed focuses on the technical fixes required to address the well known failures in early warning. As such, humanitarian early warning is frequently inconsequential at best, and at worst it has become instrumentalised by states to justify their interventions in countries based on their national self-interest, which is increasingly linked to national security in the era of the so-called ‘global war on terror’.