The Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication is an authoritative and comprehensive guide to research within the academic sub-field of humanitarian communication.

Lilie Chouliaraki is a Professor of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has published extensively on distant suffering as a problem of communication and is the author, co-author or editor of eight volumes, including Discourse in Late Modernity (1999), The Spectatorship of Suffering (2006/2011), The Soft Power of War (ed., 2008), The Ironic Spectator (2013) and The Digital Border (2022).
Anne Vestergaard is an Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School. Her research revolves around mainstream discourses of morality, pursued in two strands of research, one concerning humanitarian communication, the other concerning CSR communication. Vestergaard's work is published in international journals such as Business & Society, Journal of Business Ethics and Critical Discourse Studies. In addition, Vestergaard is co-editor of Civic Engagement and Social Media. Political Participation Beyond Protest (2015).

Introduction: Humanitarian Communication in the 21st Century PART I: DOMAINS 1. Disaster Aid as a Domain of Media and Humanitarian Politics 2. Development and its Narratives 3. Human Rights, Culture and Media 4. Media and Compassion in Digital War PART II: METHODS 5. The Audience of Humanitarian Communication 6. Text-analytical Approaches to Humanitarian Communication 7. Production-centered Approaches to Humanitarian Communication 8. Ethnography in Humanitarian Communication: Descending into the Lifeworlds of Witnessing and Wounded Subjects PART III: ISSUES Politics 9. The Logic of Projects in Humanitarian Relief 10. Micro-mapping: Digital Humanitarianism and the Politics of Material Participation in Disaster Relief 11. Technocolonialism: Digital Innovation and Data Practices in the Humanitarian Response to Refugee Crises 12. The Politics of Humanitarian Journalism 13. Conflicted Witnesses: Journalists and the Humanitarian Imaginary 14. Human Rights Protests and Mediated Violence Economy 15. Celebrity Advocacy 16. Brand Aid: Humanitarianism in Corporate Communication 17. Humanitarianism in the African Luxury Designer Market 18. Corporate Social Responsibility and the Humanitarian Civic Imaginary 19. Volunteer Tourism as Humanitarian Communication 20. Humanitarianism and Microfinance Histories and Futures 21. Humanitarian Imagery: Historical registers in the representation of atrocity 22. Photography and Humanitarian Intervention: The Early Years, 1850s-1914 23. MSF: Silence heals. From the Cold War to the War on Terror 24. How Do We Arm the Other Eleven? Humanitarianism, Commodities and Jobs 25. Post-humanitarianism: Solidarity beyond the Politics of Pity 26. Data Witnessing: Attending to Injustice with Data in Amnesty International's Decoders Project