Why has the humanitarian world already forgotten the people of Rwanda? And why do the survivors of the Rwandan genocide continue to be sidelined, particularly those women who were raped and deliberately infected with HIV/AIDS in a campaign of systematic sexual violence? The focus of humanitarian organisations shifted from Rwanda after 1994, and these women – most of whom have to maintain their households alone – are needlessly dying because they have no access to treatment. Humanitarian and development efforts will not achieve lasting benefits without better coordination and the ability to act on lessons learned.

This article focuses on the development of African Studies, principally in post-1945 Europe and North America, and its counterpart in post-independence Africa. African Studies enjoys an increasingly close connection with bilateral and multilateral development co-operation, providing research and researchers (along with their own conceptual frameworks and concerns) to assist in defining and providing direction for aid and related policies. This is leading to unhealthy practices, whereby African research is ignored in the formulation of international policies towards the continent; while external Africanists assume the function of interpreting the world to Africa, and vice versa. This dynamic reinforces existing asymmetries in capacity and influence, especially given the crisis of higher education in most African countries. It also undermines Africa's research community, in particular the scope for cross-national and international exchange and the engagement in broader development debates, with the result that those social scientists who have not succumbed to the consultancy market or sought career opportunities elsewhere are encouraged to focus on narrow empirical studies. This political division of intellectual labour needs to be replaced with one that allows for the free expression and exchange of ideas not only by Africans on Africa, but with the wider international community who share the same broad thematic and/or theoretical preoccupations as the African scholars with whom they are in contact.

We suggest that PhD and post-doctoral researchers are a strong, untapped resource with the potential to make a real contribution to global health research (GHR). However, we raise some ethical, institutional, and funding issues that either discourage new researchers from entering the field or diminish their capacity to contribute. We offer a number of recommendations to Canadian academic and non-academic institutions and funders, aiming to generate discussion among them about how to overcome these constraints. We need changes in the way graduate research is organised and funded, to create opportunities to work collaboratively within established low- and middle-income countries (LMIC)/Canadian research partnerships. We urge changes in the way that institutions fund, recognise, value, and support GHR, so that established researchers are encouraged to develop long-term LMIC relationships and mentor new Canadian/LMIC researchers. We ask funders to reconsider additional GHR activities for support, including strategic training initiatives and dissemination of research results. We also encourage the development of alternative institutions that can provide training and mentoring opportunities. GHR faces many challenges. If we address those that reduce our potential to contribute, we can become real partners in GHR, working towards equitable global health and solutions to priority health issues.

Humanitarianism and politics are more often than not considered to be separate from each other, despite the increasing complexity of contemporary conflict. This article highlights the specifics of the flight of one renegade soldier and some 300 of his men from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to Rwanda, at a time when the international community was plotting the roadmap for an ideal solution that everybody could have approved. The article explores what caused the relevant parties to forfeit such a solution and recommends ways to improve operational coordination and complementarity among international actors.

The authors examine whether the concept of social capital can facilitate our understanding of online networks in development. Much of the knowledge generation and social learning in development takes place in networks, which increasingly operate online. Although these networks are assumed to be a positive force in development, there are many unknown factors, partly because they are in their infancy. The concept of social capital has traditionally been applied to examine the functioning of groups and societies. More recently, it has also been applied to development and to online networks outside development. Three non-development approaches to examining social capital in online networks and communities are reviewed in the article. Elements of these approaches, combined with development-related aspects, are used to produce a framework to facilitate the analysis of social capital in online networks in a development context.

This article discusses humanitarian advocacy in the contemporary world within the wider crisis of political vision. Humanitarian advocacy over the past 15 years, drawing attention to how crises have been precipitated by state policies, has sought international intervention to protect people. It has consequently become associated with challenging the national sovereignty of the developing state. The author contends that the weak state is the problem, and suggests that the existing paradigm of humanitarian advocacy helps to legitimise the erosion of equality among sovereign states and the reassertion of international inequalities.

Fair Trade has become a dynamic and successful dimension of an emerging counter-tendency to the neo-liberal globalisation regime. This study explores some of the dilemmas facing the Fair Trade movement as it seeks to broaden and deepen its impact among the rural poor of Latin America's coffee sector. We argue that the efforts to broaden Fair Trade's economic impact among poor, small-scale producers are creating challenges for deepening the political impact of a movement that is based on social justice and environmental sustainability. The study is based on two years' research and seven case studies of Mexican and Central American small-scale farmer cooperatives producing coffee for the Fair Trade market.

Following the Renamo/Frelimo conflict and the 1992 Rome Accord ending hostilities, the Christian Council of Mozambique undertook to remove arms from the civilian population by trading them for development tools. The weapons were given to artists associated with a collective in the capital, Maputo. The weapons were cut into pieces and converted to sculptures that subsequently focused international attention on the Tools for Arms project, or TAE (Transformação de Armas em Enxadas). While succeeding in drawing attention to the proliferation of arms among civilians, and collecting a considerable number of arms and munitions, the project encountered difficulties in relating the production of art to the overall initiative. This paper examines the aspect of the project that produced art from weapons, with insights and observations based on fieldwork conducted for CUSO and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

This article examines the capacity-building experiences of two research teams in Yunnan and Guizhou provinces in south-west China who used participatory monitoring and evaluation (PM&E) to strengthen their development research, particularly in the area of natural-resource management (NRM). The authors describe their efforts to incorporate PM&E practices in their work. The process proved challenging, despite political and economic changes in China that aim to allow more space for local voice and decision-making power in the management of natural resources and other village affairs. Institutionalising PM&E has still a long way to go and will require more field practice, greater integration in the processes of organisational development, and stronger connections with agendas of political change.

Using autobiographical experience with reference to wood-fuel research in two locations in West Africa, this article illustrates how knowledge processes influence what can be produced as knowledge; how such knowledge is actually produced; and what is eventually produced as knowledge. However, although it explores the various roles that knowledge plays in the social relations at particular historical moments in the personal and professional development of a single individual, the questions that this subjective experience raises are of wider import: whose knowledge matters? How do certain knowledges get suppressed or denied, while others are privileged? In turn, this raises additional questions concerning the ways in which research and practice are mediated through local research, policy, and development prisms. In a general sense, the article is about the way in which wood-fuel philosophies, methodologies, and practices are constructed, modified, and maintained in existence as knowledge; and a reminder that such knowledge processes cannot truly be understood in isolation, but need to be situated within complex, diversified contexts of individual agendas, and group strategies, as well as in multiple sites of production.