Dr Abdel Hamid Afana, MA, PhD, is the President of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims, Director of the Training and Research Department at the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, a non-governmental organization established in 1990 which adopts a community-based approach to tackle mental health problems, and President of the Board of Directors of the Jesoor Organization that deals with community rehabilitation for trauma and human rights abuse victims. He is a psychotherapist, a graduate of the University of Oslo in Norway, and has extensive experience in torture rehabilitation. Dr Afana is one of the scholars who believe that mental health and human rights are inseparable and that mental health professionals have a role in community development and building bridges for peace through health. He is the founder and former head of the international board of a postgraduate diploma in Community Mental Health and Human Rights and a member of national, regional and international organizations and professional bodies in fields related to health and human rights. Through transcultural psychiatry at McGill University, Dr Afana is analyzing the social representation, meaning of and means of coping with traumatic experiences in protracted conflicts.

Ambassador Maurits R. Jochems is currently Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Operations in the International Secretariat of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). His functions include responsibility for the Alliance's work in the field of civil emergency planning. As a Dutch Foreign Service career diplomat, he has been seconded to NATO since August 2005. Before taking up his current position he was Director of International Security Policy in the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, dealing with operations, NATO and EU security policy issues, UN disarmament and arms control, OSCE matters and arms export policy. He has also served at Dutch embassies in Kingston, Bonn, Beirut, Brussels (NATO) and Rome.

Fatima Gailani has been serving as the president of the Afghan Red Crescent Society since 2004. She is the daughter of Pir Sayed Ahmed Gailani, the leader of the National Islamic Front of Afghanistan who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. After graduating from Malalai High School in Kabul, Ms Gailani obtained a BA and subsequently an MA in Persian Literature and Sufism in 1978 from the National University of Iran. She also earned an MA in Islamic Studies from the Muslim College in London in 1994. She lived in exile during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and acted as spokesperson in London for the Afghan Mujahideen. She attended the Bonne Conference on Afghanistan in 2001. After her return to Afghanistan she was chosen as a delegate to the Emergency Loya Jirga – Grand Council – of June 2002 and was appointed as a constitution drafting and ratifying commissioner. Ms Gailani is the author of two books (Mosques of London and a biography of Mohammed Mosa Shafi).

His Royal Highness Prince El Hassan bin Talal served as the closest political adviser, confidant and deputy of his brother King Hussein of Jordan until King Hussein's death in 1999. He has founded, and is actively involved in, a number of Jordanian and international institutes, organizations and committees. He is president of the Arab Thought Forum, a former president of the Club of Rome, chairman of the Independent Bureau for Humanitarian Issues and a member of the expert group, appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, to implement the Declaration and Programme of Action of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance that was made in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. A graduate of Oxford University, he holds numerous honorary doctorates in law, letters, theology, and oriental and African studies, and has received many awards, including the Abu Bakr Al-Siddique Medal of the Organization of Arab Red Crescent and Red Cross Societies. His most recently published books are To Be a Muslim (2003), Continuity, Innovation and Change: Selected Essays (2001) and In Memory of Faisal I: The Iraqi Question (2003, in Arabic).

The principle of humane treatment, as Jean Pictet wrote in 1958, is in truth the leitmotiv of the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. Article 3 common to these Conventions and other provisions of International Humanitarian Law embody this absolute and minimum rule by prohibiting torture, cruel or inhuman treatment and outrages upon personal dignity. These notions can be interpreted in meaningful and practical ways through the existing instruments and jurisprudence on the prohibition of ill-treatment. Their assessment must take into account the need to respect the human being in all his or her physical, mental and moral integrity, mindful of all the circumstances of the case.

A Shiite resurgence in Iraq has generated a region-wide Sunni backlash, raising fears of an emerging sectarian rift that is colouring and aggravating local conflicts. After discussing the schism's origins, manifestations and implications, the author concludes that the primary battle in the region is not between Sunnis and Shiites but between the United States and Iran. A US–Iranian rapprochement would do much to reduce sectarian tensions, while the most effective long-term response to sectarianism itself will likely come from systemic restraints that exist in the form of countervailing loyalties that prevent any single allegiance, such as religious adherence, from becoming paramount.

Although the humanitarian landscape is constantly evolving, one factor which stands out among the players of aid, and particularly non-governmental organizations (NGOs), is the significance of the private, not-for-profit dimension. After tracing the historical origin of those organizations, defining them and stressing how well known and well regarded they are, the article goes on to discuss the main questions they set. It points out that although each one has its own specific characteristics, their operating methods have much in common. In conclusion the role NGOs play on the international stage is also mentioned, as well as their position regarding UN plans to overhaul the international humanitarian system. Faced with a transnational environment and a growing demand for accountability both to beneficiaries and to sponsors, with uncertain times ahead and difficult choices to make, NGOs must be even more humanitarian in the approach they take.

Recent catastrophes, and predictions of an increasing potential for more, have stimulated thinking about the best policy responses to these threats. This article explores how security concepts influence catastrophe governance. The article considers how globalization affects thinking about catastrophes and describes ways in which catastrophes have been conceptualized as governance challenges, such as the human rights approach to the provision of health and humanitarian assistance. The article explains how health and humanitarian assistance experienced “securitization” in the post-cold war period, a development that challenges rights-based strategies and creates complex and controversial implications for the prevention, protection and response functions of catastrophe governance.

The article discusses the “ethnic paradigm” that currently prevails in analyses of Iraqi history and politics. While acknowledging the strong forces associated with ethnic and sectarian loyalties in the country, the article points to three important indicators of the surviving Iraqi nationalist sentiment that cut across these ethno-sectarian categories. It highlights the misfit between Western approaches to Iraqi politics and indigenous Iraqi political thinking on ethnicity and sectarianism, and pays special attention to the implications for the debates about federalism and the partitioning – “soft” or “hard” – of Iraq.

During its war against the armed nationalist movement fighting for Algerian independence (1954–62), France made extensive use of torture, for which the main justification given was the terrorism employed by the National Liberation Front, even though such terrorist violence was neither the nationalists' main form of action nor the French army's true target. Research into the methods used and the aims pursued challenges that justification, shedding light on the way in which torture really operates in a war of this kind, even though the Algerian War has been presented as a model for many subsequent conflict situations.

This article uses the metaphor of a pyramid bounding the humanitarian space as a means of portraying what it is that constitutes humanitarian law and humanitarian action. Whereas humanity as the tip of the pyramid forms the aim and international humanitarian law the base, the sides are the principles of impartiality, neutrality and independence, which enclose the humanitarian space and make the humanitarian endeavour possible.

Comparing the two tsunamis of Lisbon in 1775 and of Asia in 2004, the article analyses the different paradigmatic interpretations of “Western” religious and secular causality. Based on the rational concept of risk making and risk taking, the need to accept failures and their consequences is discussed, as well as the responsibility to develop human strategies for disaster prevention and to foster living conditions which may avoid large-scale suffering.

The article takes an overall look at the initial medical relief activities in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb fell there on 9 August 1945. In Nagasaki, as in Hiroshima, medical facilities were instantaneously destroyed by the explosion, yet the surviving doctors and other medical staff, though themselves sometimes seriously injured, did their best to help the victims. Medical facilities in adjacent areas also tended to the wounded continuously being brought there; some relief workers arrived at the disaster area when the level of radiation was still dangerously high. This article will in particular highlight the work of the doctors.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, associated with four Nobel Peace Prizes, is a unique and widely respected humanitarian actor. There were times in its past, however, when it was not as independent, neutral and impartial as is sometimes pictured. Since about 1970 it has made important changes in its structure and functioning so as to improve on the past. In contemporary times the ICRC has carved out an enduring place for neutral humanitarianism in conflicts, but one that is not free from controversies and challenges.

The use of torture by the US armed forces and the CIA was not limited to “a few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib but encompassed a broader range of practices, including rendition to third countries and secret “black sites”, that the US administration deemed permissible under US and international law. This article explores the various legal avenues pursued by the administration to justify and maintain its coercive interrogation programme, and the response by Congress and the courts. Much of the public debate concerned defining and redefining torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. While US laws defining torture have moved closer to international standards, they have also effectively shut out those seeking redress for mistreatment from bringing their cases before the courts and protect those responsible from prosecution.

After decades of fighting and suffering, the Kurds in Iraq have achieved far-reaching self-rule. Looking at the history of conflicts and alliances between the Kurds and their counterparts inside Iraq and beyond its borders, the authors find that the region faces an uncertain future because major issues like the future status of Kirkuk remain unsolved. A federal and democratic Iraq offers a rare opportunity for a peaceful settlement of the Kurdish question in Iraq – and for national reconciliation. While certain groups and currents in Iraq and the wider Arab world have to overcome the notion that federalism equals partition, the Kurds can only dispel fears about their drive for independence if they fully reintegrate into Iraq and show greater commitment to democratic reforms in the Kurdistan Region.