Human Rights

Note: A 2011 report on this topic has been issued that updates the findings below.

The need to “put a face” on a humanitarian crisis and give it individual particularity is premised on a well-established phenomenon: As the numbers of a group experiencing suffering increases, the level of compassion felt for that group typically decreases. However, the mechanism behind this apparently counterintuitive dynamic — declining compassion as the level of suffering increases — has long resisted understanding.

The Republic of South Sudan became the world’s newest nation on July 9, 2011. Although the Second Sudanese Civil War officially ended in 2005, nearly 40 years of conflict have left South Sudan with substantial economic and infrastructure challenges, ranging from protracted border disputes to a high rate of illiteracy and limited access to clean water.

The idea that sexism can have negative consequences within workplaces and specific areas of public life is well-established. But how sexist attitudes on the part of individuals can operate in the aggregate at the societal level — their national economic and social consequences — has not been well documented.

A growing body of academic literature has been assessing how effective foreign aid is in an average country, as well as the conditions that allow such aid to have its intended impact and spur development. Called “conditional aid effectiveness,” this research has in the past focused on factors such as geographic location and the size of a country’s local elite, and examined how such variables are associated with foreign aid’s impact on economic growth.