Subject: [WSF-Discuss] Humanitarian agencies: passing relics of an imperial model of charity?
The humanitarian
future
Can humanitarian agencies still fly
the flag of high principle, or are they just relics of an imperial
model of charity?
by Paul Currion | Aeon | September
2014
I became an aid worker in the 1990s, just
as the break-up of Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda cast a long
shadow over the humanitarian sector. Those highly visible political
failures were a major influence on my decision. I was possessed of a
distressingly youthful belief that we could do better in the core
humanitarian mission of saving lives, feeding the starving, healing
the sick, and sheltering the displaced from natural disasters and
armed conflicts.
I worked on co-ordination with the United Nations and non-governmental
organisations (NGOs): identifying gaps and overlaps in the delivery of
aid, then persuading humanitarian organisations to avoid those
overlaps and fill those gaps, a slow and frustrating process of
herding cats. Co-ordination had become increasingly important as the
humanitarian sector expanded dramatically following the end of the
Cold War. In Kosovo, after the NATO bombing campaign of 1999, we
registered one NGO for every day of the year. A decade later, after
the 2010 earthquake near Port-au-Prince, an estimated 3,000 NGOs
descended on Haiti.
It wasn't just the size of the humanitarian sector that was
increasing - the scope of humanitarian work was widening as well. In
the post-Cold War world, humanitarian organisations were increasingly
enlisted as government sub-contractors in a larger political project:
the post-conflict reconstruction of entire countries. After Kosovo I
found myself in Afghanistan, where Secretary of State Colin Powell
referred to NGOs as a 'force multiplier' for the US military; then
Iraq, where Andrew Natsios, then head of US overseas aid, asserted
without apparent irony, that NGOs were 'an arm of the US
government'.
Some took this assertion literally. On 19
August 2003, the UN headquarters at the Canal Hotel in Baghdad was
bombed by enemies of the US government. The bomb - placed outside
the information office that I had helped to set up - killed 22 and
injured more than 100 people. I had left Baghdad a few weeks earlier,
precisely because I was worried by deteriorating security. My youthful
belief that we could do better was still intact (even if my youth was
not), but it now seemed clear that humanitarianism had taken a wrong
turn somewhere.
As we mark the 150th anniversary of the
first Geneva Convention, it's worth stating that humanitarian aid is
not a waste of money - it can mean the difference between life and
death - and for the most part that money is well-spent. While some
criticism is warranted, the humanitarian community is not blind to its
shortcomings, and has sought to improve its work since the
mid-1990s.
One of the most important initiatives in
this regard was the publication in 1994 of the Code of Conduct for the
International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster
Relief. The Code was welcomed by NGOs as a largely successful attempt
to articulate core humanitarian principles, but it also doubled as a
field guide to the tensions inherent to the sector. After the more
obvious principles - humanity, neutrality, impartiality and
independence - the last of the Code's 10 points goes in a
surprising direction: 'In our information, publicity and advertising
activities, we shall recognise disaster victims as dignified human
beings, not hopeless objects.'
It's now widely acknowledged that affected communities don't wait
around for outside help, but actively develop their own strategies for
coping with disaster. Yet the humanitarian community has struggled to
embody this realisation. To their public donors, charities continue to
present a Black Box of Suffering. On the front of the box is the
single image of a suffering child that serves as a proxy for all the
suffering that can be imagined. 'What's happening inside this box
is terrible,' it says, 'and you don't want to see inside.'
Then, the pitch: 'Give us your money, and we'll put it into the
box, and that will end the suffering.'
The Black Box is effective in terms of
raising funds, but its platonic ideal of suffering obscures the wider
context in which that suffering takes place. The lack of context
leaves the public with little understanding of how the aid industry
works - when questioned, most people offer some variation on the
theme of 'Whites in Shining Armour' - which in turn prevents
NGOs from being fully open about the problems of delivering aid in the
most challenging environments on Earth. Because all NGOs rely on
public support, they face a dilemma: more nuanced messages will not
reach their public, but less nuanced messages leave them open to
criticism.
Humanitarianism has been intimately linked
to the media from the beginning. The Swiss businessman and social
activist Henry Dunant, who inspired the early Red Cross movement, had
his book A Memory of Solferino (1862) printed at his own
expense as an advocacy tool to spread the humanitarian message across
Europe, arguing that 'in an age when we hear so much of progress and
civilisation, is it not a matter of urgency, since unhappily we cannot
always avoid wars, to press forward in a human and truly civilised
spirit the attempt to prevent, or at least to alleviate, the horrors
of war?' Pressure on governments to adopt the Geneva Conventions
came from popular sentiment, as the public gained greater access to
information about the reality of modern war through the popular press.
The growth of mass media in the 20th century enabled spectacles such
as the Live Aid concerts in 1985 for famine relief in Ethiopia. NGOs
realised that they could shape the humanitarian narrative using their
access to disaster-affected areas.
Today, writers from the Sunday supplements
of UK newspapers accompany NGO staff to health clinics in inaccessible
places, returning with stories of stoic suffering and sterling effort.
This worked well into the 1990s, when communication was still
controlled by corporations and information sources were scarce. With
the information revolution, however, individuals and groups affected
by disasters have increasing access to digital communications that
provide alternative perspectives not mediated by humanitarian
organisations. The Black Box is breaking open, exposing the
humanitarian community to more public scrutiny than ever
before.
Humanitarianism was shaped by specific historical circumstances that
no longer exist. Global economic and political developments -
including the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China - put a
question mark over the assumptions on which the system was built. The
same technologies that have given disaster-affected communities a
voice also enable them to organise themselves more effectively, which
in certain places means less need for external organisations to become
involved. While there will always be those caught in the wake of
natural disasters and human conflicts who need some form of outside
assistance, the 'rich West giving to the poor rest' no longer
makes so much sense.
It might simply be that humanitarian NGOs are no longer the right type
of organisation to meet the needs of the future. It's not merely
that they are no longer fit for purpose: it's increasingly uncertain
what that purpose is. What are humanitarian organisations for?
Are they delivery vehicles for humanitarian assistance -
logistics companies with a side order of social concern? Or are they
delivery vehicles for humanitarian principles, with any
tangible assistance they provide is just a manifestation of those
principles?
Focused on the next emergency rather than the last, unable to draw
easily on past experience, plagued by a high turnover of staff, it
seems as if each new generation of aid workers suffers from a kind of
'Year Zero' thinking. This continues despite efforts to
professionalise aid work. If we fail to pay attention to how history
has shaped the humanitarian sector in the past century, we cannot
begin to understand what is needed to shape it to meet the needs of
the coming century.
The modern humanitarian movement began on 24 June 1859, at the Battle
of Solferino in Italy. For the last time in European history, monarchs
were in direct command of both sides of the battle. After Solferino,
the European states began their trek towards the horrors of total war
in the 20th century. Yet a parallel history also began that evening:
businessman Henry Dunant, horrified by the carnage he'd witnessed in
the battle's aftermath, organised a relief effort to care for the
injured and the dying - regardless of which side they had fought
on.
From this gesture the modern humanitarian
movement was born, in the form of the International Committee of the
Red Cross (ICRC). The First Geneva Convention (1864) was the first
international agreement to cover the treatment of the sick and wounded
on the battlefield. It covered only military personnel, but laid the
foundations for an entire body of international humanitarian law. It
wasn't until the First World War that the ICRC began to
systematically address the needs of civilian populations affected by
war, and the word 'humanitarian' itself appeared in law for the
first time only in the 1929 Convention.
Between the two world wars, elements that we would recognise today
began to appear, such as the League of Red Cross Societies (forerunner
of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent
Societies) and early NGOs such as the Save the Children Fund. It was
only after 1945, however, that a new political order emerged, and the
desire to avoid another ruinous world war led to the creation of the
United Nations. As the exhausted old empires began to unravel,
international affairs were re-shaped in the bipolar image of the Cold
War.
In this context, the Marshall Plan for the
recovery of Europe during 1948-51 was both a means of rebuilding
shattered nations and of demonstrating the superiority of democracy.
It set a precedent for overseas development assistance. At this point
'humanitarian' aid (the lifesaving work) was not emphasised, and
the focus was on development (longer-term social and economic growth),
although new international organisations were created, such as the UN
High Commissioner for Refugees (1950) and the UN World Food Programme
(1961).
Legal rights were extended to protecting
'Civilian Persons in Time of War' by the Fourth Geneva Convention in
1949, and further by Additional Protocols in 1977. This legal
framework relied on the responsibilities of nation-states, but
governments could not always be relied upon to abide by the law. Newly
decolonised countries inherited the trappings of government, but not
the capacity required to administer their responsibilities,
particularly in the face of disasters; and unresolved problems caused
or exacerbated by colonial policies led to civil wars in which
civilians tended to suffer disproportionately, whether through design
or neglect.
The UN agencies were bound by mandate to work only with governments,
leaving space that was filled by NGOs who positioned themselves as
giving voice to the voiceless, 'speaking truth' to the power of
the Western bloc. NGOs were tolerated, even encouraged, by Western
governments as living proof of the superiority of democracy with its
freedom of expression and association, in contrast to their absence in
the Soviet bloc. They were also a channel for defusing potentially
revolutionary sentiment in emerging nations. Released into the
marketplace, NGOs competed for the public's attention - and their
cash - during large-scale disasters such as the Biafran war of
1967-70 and the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85.
In both Biafra and Ethiopia, NGOs were in fact being manipulated by
national governments to achieve wider political ends. The evidence
suggests that humanitarian aid enabled the secessionist Biafran
government to continue fighting Nigerian forces even after it had lost
militarily, prolonging the suffering of local communities who were
caught up in the conflict. In Ethiopia, humanitarian aid was also
politicised during a famine that was in part caused by government
policy, although the full extent of aid agency complicity remains an
open question. Aid workers who were aware of these problems could
never explicitly acknowledge them without jeopardising public (and
therefore) financial support; many NGOs were simply naīve about the
political dynamics of the Four Horsemen.
Humanitarianism had come of age during the Cold War, but the end of
the Cold War meant that NGOs continued to be useful footsoldiers for
the democratic project. After the diplomatic catastrophe that was
Bosnia, politicians appropriated the language of humanitarianism,
leading to the oxymoron of NATO's 'humanitarian intervention' in
Kosovo. Some argued that this use of 'humanitarian' showed that
the word had lost its meaning, but what it really showed was that the
word still had power, albeit not in a straightforward sense. We found
ourselves in Afghanistan and Iraq precisely because humanitarian
action was being shoe-horned into a security agenda.
Since the 1960s, there had been tension
between what have been called Dunantist and Wilsonian NGOs. Perhaps
more usefully described as 'principled' and 'pragmatic'
respectively, Dunantists (named after Henry Dunant, and usually
European) claim an apolitical stance aloof from state interests, while
Wilsonians (named after the US President Woodrow Wilson, and usually
American) accept some level of compromise and involvement with those
interests. The Canal Hotel bombing in Baghdad made clear that this
internecine debate was no longer theoretical but very, very
practical.
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, many governments exploited
the Wilsonian approach to humanitarianism, using NGOs as Lego bricks -
interchangeable not just with each other, but also with government,
military or private-sector actors. The NGO response has been an
implicit acceptance that humanitarian assistance is a market, and they
need to maintain their market position, primarily though
professionalising, in order to fit the technocratic logic of donor
governments. So far, so good: according to the 2014 Global
Humanitarian Assistance report, funding for humanitarian crises
remained high throughout the global financial crisis, and in 2013
reached a record high of $22 billion.
Still, it's worth putting this in context. In 2013, the size of the
US pet industry was nearly three times that value: just under
$56 billion. The money available for humanitarian aid is still
nowhere near what is required to meet the needs of disaster-affected
communities today, when there are more ongoing major disasters than
any time since the mid-1990s. The humanitarian community is wrestling
with the future: multiple reports over the past decade have tried to
identify future challenges, but failed, instead responding belatedly
to existing trends - climate change, urbanisation, demographic
shifts.
More worryingly, the solutions proposed by
these reports are more of the same: more professionalisation, more
decentralisation, more regulation; the organisational equivalent of
re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Modern
humanitarianism is one of the most radical ideas in the history of
human thought yet, as the international development entrepreneur Paul
Polak has pointed out, institutions are simply 'radical ideas cast
in concrete', and the institutions that have been built around
humanitarianism now struggle to support it.
Our network age demands a network model. It
demands that we shift away from the old industrial, imperial model of
delivering material relief along a supply chain from rich to poor
countries. We need a post-industrial, post-imperial model that
mobilises resources through global networks. Ori Brafman and Rod
Beckstrom's The Starfish and the Spider (2006) provides a
starting point: the decentralised structure of what they call
'starfish' organisations makes them more resilient, compared with
more centralised 'spider' organisations. Humanitarian
organisations must become hubs, connecting individuals and communities
to enable them to share knowledge and resources more freely, and using
their position to embed humanitarian principles within their
networks.
Those networks are not just about providing cash, or medical support,
or shelter kits, but about creating the opportunity for a more
inclusive discourse what it means to be humanitarian: how to create a
'people's humanitarianism', rather than the private club that
exists now. This is particularly important since problems at the
global level (such as climate change, financial crises and population
movements) affect all of us, albeit unequally; and its urgency has
been underlined this year, as multiple, overlapping emergencies in the
Central Africa Republic, Iraq and Syria, and South Sudan - as well
as the Ebola outbreak in Africa - have stretched the system further
than at any time since I first entered the sector.
New communication technologies create opportunities to engage both
disaster-affected communities and the giving public on a more equal
footing - indeed, the web begins to break down the distinction
between the two. There are promising developments: the Communicating
with Disaster Affected Communities initiative is looking at outreach
efforts; the Humanitarian Innovation Fund is testing novel approaches;
the Digital Humanitarian Network is bringing together newer,
tech-focused organisations; and the Start Network of UK NGOs is
experimenting with new ways of working. In 2016, the UN-organised
World Humanitarian Summit offers an opportunity to set a new course
for the community, bringing together many of these
threads.
This is not a techno-utopian view of the
future in which the internet sweeps away all the injustices of the
world. The web could lead to a dead end of corporate monocultures, but
part of our struggle against that must be the continual renewal of
these grassroots connections. We can't predict the future, but we
can shape it by forming alternative narratives. Humanitarianism is not
a pile of Lego blocks to be re-arranged as required, but a set of
organising principles that tell a compelling story about what we want
our civilisation to look like; about how we wish to act towards each
other.
For decades now, humanitarian organisations have been approaching the
public to ask for coins in the purse or signatures on the page. As the
Black Box breaks open, this will no longer be enough, and NGOs should
lead the shift away from institutions, and towards a peoples'
humanitarianism. It is quite likely that at least a few of those
organisations will not survive the transition but that isn't a
reason for not making the change. Of the Fortune 500 firms first
listed in 1955, nearly 90 per cent no longer exist in 2014, and this
type of creative destruction is sorely lacking in the humanitarian
sector.
The alternative is a zombie humanitarianism, going through the motions
but lacking the spirit, the same spirit that spurred Dunant to action:
the simple belief not just that we could do better, but that we
could be better.
~ 10 September 2014
Paul Currion is a consultant to
humanitarian organisations, having previously worked on responses in
Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Indian Ocean Tsunami. He lives in
Belgrade.
** WSFDiscuss is an open and unmoderated forum for the exchange of information and views on the experience, practise, and theory of the World Social Forum at any level (local, national, regional, and global) and on related social and political movements and issues. Join in !**