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The extent of access to energy of displaced persons in settlements and camps on the African continent is largely unknown. A multitude of contextual factors, such as the location, the characteristics of housing, legal status, socio-cultural background, and the availability of humanitarian and public services, impact the living conditions and needed energy services. Limitations in accessing energy services have direct, multilayered, and far-reaching implications, including impacts on health, nutrition, education, protection, and livelihood. The objective of this article is to contribute to a more comprehensive overview of the current state of energy access in displacement contexts on the African continent by identifying and utilizing existing data. After screening the vast and various available information, setting up a database, consolidating the gathered data as well as assessing quality through a quality assessment method, the currently available information was visualized and discussed. Considerable differences in the access to energy for displaced persons across the countries were found. Access to both electricity and clean cooking ranged from nearly no access at all up to an access rate of 100%, though the averages are 94% of displaced persons without access to electricity and 81% of displaced persons without clean cooking. Overall, the results showed that besides South Africa and countries in the Maghreb region, the access to both clean cooking and electricity for displaced persons is very low. At the same time, the fragmented data availability, the poor data quality, and the inadequate expediency of available data allowed neither solid theoretical conclusions nor the planning of effective practical implementation measures. Novel interdisciplinary research, conceptual frameworks, and indicators are needed for the purpose of comparability and consistency. Future research has the potential to more comprehensively capture the current state of access to energy in displacement contexts and, subsequently, examine how energy is interwoven in the lives of displaced persons to derive a set of more detailed context-sensitive energy indicators. It is essential that displaced persons themselves are included in the research in a meaningful way. Full article

Why were Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid (1608) and The Seven Works of Mercy (1607) requested for display at a number of humanitarian public events? And why did Caravaggio’s work inspire a series of photographic and journalistic reportages on contemporary migratory phenomena? This article surveys the main circumstances linking Caravaggio’s pictorial corpus to the so-called European migrant crisis. After critical reflection on the social construction of the “humanitarian Caravaggio,” the focus shifts onto a book that is at the same time a journalistic investigation of migratory phenomena, a literary work, and a theoretical reflection on the ways of looking: La frontiera (2015) by Alessandro Leogrande, which concludes with a reflection on the representation of suffering in Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St. Matthew (1600). By following a path that connects Caravaggio’s painting, Susan Sontag’s thought, and Leogrande’s writing, what emerges is the critical and self-critical potentiality of a comparative approach to the arts and images. Full article