About

What is The Humanitarian Commons?

The Humanitarian Commons is an independent critical knowledge curation project. It assembles journalism, analysis, opinion, data, academic research, and primary sources to help people understand humanitarian situations, the systems that respond to them, and the structural forces that shape both.

The project is built on the conviction that understanding humanitarian action requires more than following the news cycle or the choices of donors and humanitarian actors. It requires engaging with the history, political economy, legal frameworks, and power dynamics that produce humanitarian crises and shape the responses to them. This site aims to make that deeper engagement accessible.

How it works

Each topic or context page on the site brings together curated resources selected for their quality, credibility, and relevance. Resources include reporting from independent journalism outlets, analysis from think tanks and policy organisations, academic research, official documents and data, and expert commentary.

All content is verified and contextualised. The site does not generate or fabricate information (see Disclaimer). It curates existing knowledge and presents it in a way that helps readers see connections, understand context, and engage critically with humanitarian issues.

The knowledge graph structure allows readers to navigate between topics, people, and organisations, discovering connections that might not be apparent from any single source.

Who is this for?

The Humanitarian Commons is designed for anyone who wants to critically understand humanitarian affairs at a level deeper than daily news coverage: humanitarian practitioners seeking context for their work, academics researching humanitarian issues, students learning about the field, journalists covering crises, policy makers, and engaged members of the public.

While it includes both practical and theoretical resources, the project is neither a practical guide for humanitarian decisions nor a theoretical or academic research resource. It is meant to ensure the possibility of addressing humanitarianism through a decolonial praxis, defined by Anila Zainub in 2019 as:

Decolonization and Anti-colonial Praxis presents research on contemporary forms of decolonization and anti-colonialism in practice. It pertains to the ways in which individuals, groups, and communities engage with the logic of epistemic colonial power within areas of citizenship, migration, education, Indigeneity, language, land struggle, and social work. The contributions in this edited volume empirically document the conceptual and bodily engagement of racialized and violated individuals and communities as they use anti-colonial principles to disrupt criminalizing institutional discourses and policies within various global imperial contexts.

Editorial standards

Every factual claim on this site is sourced. Resources are selected based on their credibility, analytical quality, and relevance to the topic. The site distinguishes clearly between reporting, analysis, and opinion. Content is regularly reviewed for accuracy and currency.

An independent project

The Humanitarian Commons is an independent project. It is not affiliated with any government, UN agency, or humanitarian organisation. This independence is essential to its ability to present a critical, honest account of humanitarian action and the systems that govern it.

Funding

The Humanitarian Commons is currently not funded and done on voluntary basis and with own time and effort with no support from any external party. The privilege of having time and resources is thus shared with the wider community.

Contact

For questions, suggestions, or corrections, please get in touch at hello@humanitariancommons.org.