There is a major Ebola epidemic affecting parts of West Africa. Ebola is a highly infectious disease that carries a significant risk of death. New therapies and potential vaccines that can be distributed to the affected populations are being developed. Stricken communities have appealed for help. One response from the UK government has been to deploy UK military healthcare personnel to Sierra Leone (operation Gritrock), initially to provide a small facility for affected healthcare workers and to assist with training of local healthcare workers. It is possible that the scope of this involvement will increase, and prudent planning is in place for further deployments. This is the first major, purely humanitarian military deployment since Rwanda (1994). It is known that civilian humanitarian healthcare workers experience complex ethical tensions when deployed as expatriates. Military healthcare workers face both related and different (uniquely military) challenges when deployed in conflict scenarios but it is not known how they will experience the novel ethical challenges and complexities in a purely humanitarian setting, dealing with a highly infectious disease in conditions of near disaster for the affected communities. This project aims to collect interview data on the ethical challenges experienced by the deployed UK military healthcare personnel. It plans to recruit up to 25 nurses, doctors, and allied health professionals. An initial analysis of the resulting data will enable training materials to be developed quickly to benefit those, including civilians, about to deploy to Ebola-affected regions. These materials will be evaluated by a subset of the participants and used to inform, train and support existing and future (military and civilian) deployments during the Ebola outbreak. The data collected will also be used in the longer term to expand and enrich existing understanding of the ethical experiences of expatriate healthcare workers volunteering for humanitarian work in other contexts, for instance working with non-governmental organisations or as part of governmental responses. It is predicted that the UK medical military will increasingly be expected to contribute to similar humanitarian responses in the future. This work will also contribute to military preparation, training, support and policy in other humanitarian contexts.

There is a major Ebola epidemic affecting parts of West Africa. Ebola is a highly infectious disease that carries a significant risk of death. New therapies and potential vaccines that can be distributed to the affected populations are being developed. Stricken communities have appealed for help. One response from the UK government has been to deploy UK military healthcare personnel to Sierra Leone (operation Gritrock), initially to provide a small facility for affected healthcare workers and to assist with training of local healthcare workers. It is possible that the scope of this involvement will increase, and prudent planning is in place for further deployments. This is the first major, purely humanitarian military deployment since Rwanda (1994). It is known that civilian humanitarian healthcare workers experience complex ethical tensions when deployed as expatriates. Military healthcare workers face both related and different (uniquely military) challenges when deployed in conflict scenarios but it is not known how they will experience the novel ethical challenges and complexities in a purely humanitarian setting, dealing with a highly infectious disease in conditions of near disaster for the affected communities. This project aims to collect interview data on the ethical challenges experienced by the deployed UK military healthcare personnel. It plans to recruit up to 25 nurses, doctors, and allied health professionals. An initial analysis of the resulting data will enable training materials to be developed quickly to benefit those, including civilians, about to deploy to Ebola-affected regions. These materials will be evaluated by a subset of the participants and used to inform, train and support existing and future (military and civilian) deployments during the Ebola outbreak. The data collected will also be used in the longer term to expand and enrich existing understanding of the ethical experiences of expatriate healthcare workers volunteering for humanitarian work in other contexts, for instance working with non-governmental organisations or as part of governmental responses. It is predicted that the UK medical military will increasingly be expected to contribute to similar humanitarian responses in the future. This work will also contribute to military preparation, training, support and policy in other humanitarian contexts.

Since 2011, the Syrian conflict is a constellation of overlapping crises. Each of the related international and regional dimensions necessitate tailored responses within an overarching framework. The recent escalations, conflicts, natural disasters, diseases compound urgent humanitarian needs of the lives of civilians. Together with the start of the conflict, Turkey has taken a proactive approach and now hosting the largest refugee population in the world, which is over 4 million and the vast majority includes women, children and elderly population. In addition to that, Europe hosts the largest number of international migrants (82 million); Hence, Migrant needs are always in centre of European Humanitarian policy.The humanitarian field is complex and a difficult environment to navigate. By stating that undesirable or harmful outcomes may be resulted from the humanitarian response, it is emphasized that the agencies are required to seek for collaboration to diminish or prevent these adverse impacts. Therefore, focusing on innovative humanitarian relief framework emphasizes the development and improvement of the local and national capacity in the response towards the crisis and the requirement to establish stronger ties among National Societies. This project is a global humanitarian initiative led by five international National Red Cross Red Crescent Societies that are Turkish Red Crescent, British Red Cross, Danish Red Cross (Dansk Rode Kors), Bulgarian Red Cross and Red Cross Society of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This country consortium is aimed the development and improvement of the local and national capacity in the response towards the crisis and the requirement to establish stronger ties with the local organizations. By stating that undesirable or harmful outcomes may be resulted from the humanitarian response, it is emphasized that the agencies are required to seek for collaboration to diminish or prevent these adverse impacts. It could be used as a reference tool for developing a country consortium or strengthening an existing collaboration among emergency response agencies and wider stakeholders, including local government and local communities.Project community has been working to improve the speed, quality and effectiveness of emergency preparedness and response in the humanitarian community by building capacity at the field, organizational and global humanitarian sector levels. The key principles of collaboration, partnership and non-duplication provide a framework for participating agencies to work together towards improved response. Together with the sharing response concerns, two pillars are determined as a common objective among the National Societies collaboration. Sharing National Societies’ action plans as a response to the emergencies, resources and approaches will be the starting point for understanding each member’s mandate, priorities and ways of working. Opportunities are aimed to develop joint strategies and initiatives will result from analysis of the challenges, weaknesses and/or gaps within Protection and Cash Programs. Developing a common log frame and work plan together as a consortium will ensure that the members are clear on why they are collaborating and what their priorities are. Project teams are working together to develop a cyclical process of experiential learning, action, reflection, and learning, with an aspiration that this cycle is owned by the participating agencies and communicate with the wider sector to improve our ability to respond to emergencies. The participants of this collaboration will work together via preparation meetings, working groups, exchange groups, workshop and trainings. For that purpose, the following objectives are aimed to be achieved within the project:Objective 1: Identifying, compiling and sharing experience and knowledge of four partners National Red Cross Red Crescent Societies on protection and cash-based interventions from their respective contexts regarding migration (British Red Cross, Danish Red Cross, Turkish Red Crescent, Bosnian Red Cross and Bulgarian Red Cross)Objective 2: Strengthening the competence of staff on protection and cash-based intervention to improve HR capacities through exchanges, trainings and on- the -job exercises.

Asylum seekers who appeal against initially negative decisions are more than twice as likely to be successful if their case is heard in North London than if their case is heard in Newport or Manchester. This is true for all asylum seekers in the UK, but also applies to specific nationalities. Iranians, for example, enjoy a 34% success rate at one hearing centre and only an 18% success rate at another, Afghans' success rates vary from 31% to 17% depending upon the court, and Zimbabweans' from 54% to 22%. These geographic disparities have not been investigated in the UK because the data on appeal success rates is not publicly available. This proposal draws upon two successful freedom of information requests (FIRs) however, in order to piece together the geography of asylum appeal success rates (see Figure One, case for support). An examination of these disparities is important for various reasons. First, asylum seekers who appeal may be facing a lottery in terms of the court that hears their case, which is arbitrary and unjust. Second, immigration law firms and their clients (such as the Legal Services Commission) may be facing an uneven landscape in terms of the degree of success they can expect in different parts of the country. Understanding this 'lawscape' will empower them with the knowledge to direct their resources more effectively. Third, official bodies with responsibility for asylum appeals, such as the Ministry of Justice and UKBA, need information and analysis in order to make a judgement about whether steps should be taken in order to improve the geographic consistency of the asylum appeal system. Fourth, the wider legal community, beyond immigration law, should be alerted to the existence and impact of geographic disparities in legal processes. The obvious research question arising from these disparities concerns why they exist. Accepting that the discrepancies are unlikely to have occurred by chance (less than 0.01% likelihood according to statistical analysis of the FIRs), four explanations present themselves. First, there may be administrative processes that direct strong cases towards certain courts, although preliminary enquiries put to officials from UKBA, immigration judges and practising immigration lawyers do not support this explanation. Second, some asylum seekers have legal representation and others do not, and this geography of legal aid may be driving the discrepancies. In light of the 10% contraction in legal aid funding in the UK as part of recent austerity measures, this explanation seems particularly important to address. Third, different judges may be predisposed towards particular decisions. This was the finding of quantitative US-based research that demonstrated that the gender and age of immigration judges has significant impact over their decisions, underscoring the importance of investigating this set of factors in the UK case (Ramji-Nogales et al, 2009). And fourth, there may be differences in the daily practices of courts - their rhythms, cultures and routines. This set of factors, centring upon courts as distinct and non-homogenous places, remains understudied in legal geography as well as legal studies more broadly. This research will examine the relative salience of these four groups of variables in explaining disparities in asylum appeal success rates. In so doing, the research will bring together qualitative and quantitative forms of analysis in order to generate a rich and innovative set of explanations for the disparities; constitute the first statistically informed UK-based analysis of national disparities in asylum appeals; impact upon the way policy makers, politicians and lawyers in the field of immigration law, as well as appellants, approach their activities; and have wide implications for the theoretical and empirical study of the relation between geography and law in the future.

The 'Small Island Developing States' (SIDS) of the Caribbean are at the frontline of our changing environment and strategies to respond and cope with their consequences are now of paramount importance. The damage from the hurricanes of 2017 demonstrate starkly the challenge such countries face in dealing with recurrent high intensity hazards; on average the Caribbean incurs $835 million of losses from hurricanes per annum. This is in addition to the challenges posed by 'everyday' risks e.g. slope stability, water resources and the rainy season where longer term planning is blighted by the annualised expenditure subsequently incurred. Swift, strong, and inclusive recovery reduces impact on livelihoods and well-being and improves resilience towards future events. Attention to re-building strong physical infrastructure is important, but, long term benefits accumulate faster when strategies are inclusive and clearly tailored to the local cultural, social and physical environment (Hallegatte et al., 2018). This underpins the 'leave no one behind' strategy of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and demands disaster risk reduction strategies that place a strong emphasis on a wide range of knowledges as set out by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030). Our recent research includes three fundamental findings: (1) cultural responses to hazardous events in the Caribbean contain powerful knowledge about impacts, response and recovery and (2) the process of their transmission provides a strong mechanism to include communities in their own preparedness and recovery. (3) the historical as well as the recent past contains important knowledge that deepens understanding of how and why people place themselves in areas of high risk (problems) but reveals important strategies or moments when national and international response acted to counteract the impacts of hazardous events (solutions). The aim of this 'Follow-on-Fund' proposal is to share these findings to highlight the importance of cultural and historical knowledge in disaster risk reduction in the Caribbean. We want to put our research to work to help shape effective strategies, both directly in a country where they are responding to future hydro-meteorological risks while recovering from a geophysical disaster (Montserrat) and indirectly in the United Kingdom via agencies responsible for providing support and advice during and after hazardous events. We will create a new exhibit for communities on Montserrat, working throughout with MVO, involving the Montserrat Red Cross and Montserrat National Trust to access a wide cross-section of local views. However, we want to push this engagement further: our findings do not just map out a means for a more inclusive approach to sharing disaster risk reduction information locally, but contain positive experiences of transformation and coping that could inform policy and disaster response at an international level. Thus we also want to create an exhibit for the UK, demonstrating our findings across Dominica, St. Vincent and Montserrat aimed at those responsible for shaping response and policy in the English-speaking SIDS in the Caribbean. To do this we are working with the Overseas Development Institute, creating new partnerships with the British Red Cross, and responding to advice from the Emergency Response Team from the Department for International Development. Collectively, we will work together to understand how to create effective engagement. Finally, we will draw both elements together using a website as a digital tool to bridge between the different communities, as a means to further enhance conversations between these groups and to document and continue the process of sharing and learning, including our own.