The HE corpus contains 39,309 occurrences of the concept authorities.

Types of Authorities

Authorities is modified quite frequently and can be used to delineate hundreds of types of organisations and titles or positions. An analysis of how authorities is used in multiword terms found approximately 23,000 cases, which were grouped in the following categories: geographic, specifying, and non-specifying, described below.

About 4,500 instances of authorities are modified by place names and political divisions, with the most frequent being Israeli, US, Palestinian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Afghan. Apart from these, the majority of cases (around 16,000) can be considered "specifying," in that they clearly label a type of authority, most commonly health, government, detaining, education, water, and judicial. About half of these cases specify a level of operations, such as local, national, state, municipal, and regional. Multiword terms that combine several categories are not uncommon, as in local government authorities.

A considerable number of cases (about 1,600) were also found that, rather than specifying an exact group or individual, maintain some level of ambiguity: relevant, pertinent, competent, other, concerned, delegated, appropriate, and so forth. It seems notable that in these cases the authorities being referred to may be transparent given the context, as when criminal activity is reported to the relevant authorities (i.e., law enforcement), while in others many possible deductions could be made. Given the numerous kinds of authorities, it could be difficult to deduce whether the case below refers to governmental representatives, village elders, or still other authorities.

Finally, given the concept's many combinatorial uses, no manual comparison of types of authorities was conducted by text type. It can at least be noted that while much of the corpus has a more even distribution of hits, 13 International Committee of the Red Cross documents amass over 15,000 hits. AR-2411, the document with the most hits (at over 1,600), for example, itself contains many examples of geographic, specifying, and non-specifying cases of authorities, along with even more unmodified uses.

Sibling Concepts

When sibling concepts and authorities appear together in lists, there are generally two observations to be made. First, when authors enumerate lists, many sibling concepts can in fact be considered types of authorities. For example, police forces are unequivocally considered authorities but may be listed separately to make concrete distinctions between their differing roles: "key decision-makers, such as authorities, armed forces, police forces and other weapon bearers" (Activity Report, Europe, RC, 2011, AR-2409). Second, remaining actors tend to be organised groups that have working relationships with authorities, such as humanitarian organisations, companies, and the media.

Interactions with Humanitarians

How do humanitarian organisations describe their interactions with authorities? A sample of 61 contexts was taken from randomised sentences containing authorities, humanitarians, and verbs of action, with most being from Activity Reports from NGO and RC organisation types.

In the large majority of these cases, interactions with authorities are couched in a positive, collaborative light. Importantly, here authorities generally appears to be limited to government actors. Most verbs that portrayed the relationship between authorities and humanitarians centred on the cooperation between these actors as partners. These include communicate, contact, engage, dialogue, approach, transmit reports and findings, raise concerns, share information, discuss, remind, recommend, and find agreement.

The example below underscores the humanitarian belief that effective communication with authorities is in itself a key objective.

At the same time, many of the contexts focused on the support role that humanitarians take concerning authorities. Selected verbs include work together, assist, advise, support, train, enable, help, raise awareness, and build capacity. In these cases, humanitarians often highlighted the limited resources, knowledge, and skills of authorities, while recognising the direct benefit that helping authorities has for populations in need.

In several cases humanitarian organisations reported negative experiences with authorities, with the latter refusing access, restricting information, suspending projects. While this analysis was limited in scope and it is difficult to generalise such a large array of actors and circumstances, it is clear that the ability to maintain positive interactions even despite disagreements with authorities is considered essential.

This analysis appears to show that humanitarians tend to report positive outcomes with government authorities more than negative ones. This could be representative of their relationships as a whole but also merely an editorial norm, which would hardly convey the full nuance of experiences that actors accumulate over time. Criticism and conflict between these parties may also be expressed in the corpus less directly or with syntax not captured here. A more thorough discussion of humanitarians' relationship with authorities is continued in the Debates and Controversies section.

Frequent words that accompany a term are known as collocates. A given term and its collocates form collocations. These can be extracted automatically based on statistics and curated manually to explore interactions with concepts.

Comparisons over time between organisation types with the greatest number of hits (RC, NGO, IGO, NGO_Fed and State organisations) may prove to be meaningful. Below is an histogram for the top yearly collocation for each of the five organisations with the greatest contribution as well as across all organisation types.

Occurrences of authorities were highest in 2013. However, this concept obtained the highest relative frequency recorded in 2007 (103%).

Europe generated the greatest number of occurrences and MENA generated the the highest relative frequency with 137%.

The top 5 organisation types with the highest relative frequency of authorities are RC, Project, State, NGO and C/B.

Activity reports provided the greatest number of occurrences as well as the highest relative frequency with 93%.

65 cases were found that offered an opinion about what authorities can, cannot, should, or must do regarding humanitarian causes. These cases can be contradictory given the broad range of authorities being referred to, but in general there are a few patterns to note: authorities have limited power and resources and hence require support; their responsibilities can vary by situation; they should be accomplishing more; they should be open and honest; and they can hamper humanitarian work in numerous ways.

The following excerpts provide more specific perspectives about the challenges of working with authorities, including strategies to overcome common limitations or pitfalls. The excerpt from GD-89, however, also shows that humanitarian organisations may face dilemmas between upholding their ideals and navigating relationships with authorities.