Unpacking the Emergency Health Kit of international humanitarian medical aid 1978–90: How humanitarian standards and supply chains became global

Journal article

This article considers the history of Emergency Health Kits established by United Nations agencies and the larger medical non-governmental organisations of the 1980s to analyse the significance of standardised responses in humanitarian emergencies. We argue that far from being a rigid and immutable response the emergency medical kits reflected a (not universally realised) desire to standardise and control both supplies and medical care from international organisations. As such humanitarian medical practice remained a disputed field in which each object or drug was negotiated at the risk of creating innovation traps. Coming at a time of increasingly global logistics capacities, the Emergency Health Kits became a central feature of a more coordinated global marketplace of humanitarian aid. The promise of the kit to provide rapid transport of emergency supplies to crisis settings across the world was often experienced as a construct, with long delays and logjams in certain regions. Even so, humanitarian organisations were agents of globalisation because they imagined a world of rapid supply lines to isolated and/ or insecure locations. In seeking to bring this about, they largely reproduced a system of centralised production in the Global North to sites of humanitarian need in the Global South

Authors: Cullen, M; Taithe, B; Winters, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Journal of Global History
• Pages: 1-23
• Publication date: 2025-12-22
• DOI: 10.1017/s1740022825100223
• EISSN: 1740-0236
• ISSN: 1740-0228
• Language: English
• Keywords: Object (grammar); Unpacking; Humanitarian aid; Humanitarian Logistics; Globalization; Global health; Supply chain; Health care; Humanitarian crisis