Vulnerability, Resilience, Territories and Humanitarian Logistics: Social Science Approaches

Dear Colleagues,

Humanitarian logistics has been a popular subject for almost 10 years, and the interest in it has increased after the generalization of recurrent disasters and crises in the last few years. The notion of humanitarian logistics is often linked to those of resilience and vulnerability: The aim of humanitarian logistics is, in essence, to make social systems more resilient and less vulnerable. Moreover, the action range of humanitarian logistics can embrace small or big areas and deal with short- (reaction to disasters and reduction of suffering) or long-term issues (social improvement and vulnerability reduction of social groups).

This Special Issue aims to bring a particular viewpoint of humanitarian logistics: That of the contribution of social science methods, and how they can complement optimization and engineering methods often used in natural (or anthropic) risk prevention and humanitarian logistic organization. In other words, papers submitted to this Special Issue can, of course, address problems of a quantitative nature, and deploy optimization methods, but these need to be linked to interpretation, social systems and/or social science methods and theories.

Potential subjects in the issue include, but are not limited to:

• Economic approaches and visions of humanitarian logistics.
• Geographical analyses of vulnerability facing crises.
• Socio-demographic analyses of populations and territories and their links to resilience.
• Historical approaches of humanitarian and crisis-related logistics.
• Mathematical and computational methods for humanitarian logistics in a context and interpretative perspective.
• Human interactions, multi-stakeholder and group decision support in humanitarian logistics facing crises.
• Links between logistics and social improvement in middle-long term humanitarian projects.
• Resilience, accessibility, transport and logistics: spatial approaches.
• Non-crisis humanitarian logistics systems definition and analysis.
• Use of spatial analyses to support humanitarian logistics.
• Multi-disciplinary approaches for humanitarian logistics planning and forecasting.

Dr. Jesús González-Feliu
Dr. Mario Chong
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• humanitarian logistics
• resilience
• vulnerability
• quantitative analyses
• qualitative analyses
• case study research
• social impacts
• scenario assessment