Abstract

The increased interest in the role of religious actors, ideas and practices in the International Relations (IR) discipline is a promising development of contemporary scholarship. Within the study of humanitarianism in particular, attention to the range of ways in which religion infuses action and meaning in the global space has raised important questions about how best to understand these interactions. However, slow movement away from secular framings of humanitarianism means that religious actors remain under-conceptualised and poorly understood.

This talk advances this conceptualisation work by providing a novel theoretical framework to explore the relationship between identity and practice for faith-based humanitarian agencies.

This framework investigates the role of theological commitments in creating organisational orientations and frameworks of action that then interact constitutively with a prism of environmental factors in order to produce humanitarian practices that both reflect and diverge from broader mainstream responses. It then applies this framework to the humanitarian practices of three evangelical Christian NGOs as they engaged with two humanitarian disasters in the Asia-Pacific – the Boxing Day tsunami in Aceh, and Cyclone Nargis in the Ayeyarwady delta region.

About the Speaker

Alana Moore is a PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU.