Public Humanitarian Advocacy : Challenges, Opportunities and its Channelling through Celebrities

The work explores public humanitarian advocacy aimed at championing humanitarian issues stemming from conflict-related crises. It develops around two arguments. First, in current humanitarian environment advocacy has lost its original positive connotations and has assumed negative implications, thus transforming it into a 'good word gone bad'. Second, agency-media relationship engendered drawbacks for the humanitarians that pushed them to explore the use of vectors alternative to the media. The work analyses the evolution of humanitarian advocacy, identifies the main reasons for its deviation and provides conceptual and theoretical frameworks for its understanding. It investigates two initiatives in line with advocacy's original meaning. It examines the grounds for the agencies to reshape their relationships with the media, and to explore alternative vectors to convey their messages. It concludes with a study of the reasons, effectiveness, advantages and challenges behind the use of celebrity advocacy. The work sheds some light on a poorly analysed and researched topic, and is of interest to humanitarians and researchers in conflict humanitarianism and war/crisis communication.