Managing Difference: Gender and culture in humanitarian emergencies

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has a mandate to respond to crises of human displacement on a global scale. The wa2s in which the organilation conceiues of gender and culture in this humanitarian czntext are problematic because thelt tend either to essentialize 'wlman' and 'culture' in the planning process or to minimize the meaning and implications of these dffirences vis-i-vis gender policies which focus on integration. In this article, the discourse of 'UN humanism' is ana[tpd, noting a long-standing tension between culture as shared humanitlt and culture as a piuotal basis of dffirence, Drawing on current research relating t0 UNHCR's gender policies and on initiatiues against uiolence towards refugee wlmen in camps, the implications of ouerarching frameworks which attend to gender and cultural dffirences are discussed. Strategies to aaoid authenticating or fxing categories of dffirence, on the one hand, and to aaoid treating gender and culture as simplt aariables, on the other, are proposed in the clntext of emerging transnational feminist practices.