New Approaches to Humanitarianism

Talk given at ISS As part of a course on Securitisation

and Development

Order today

• 1. History from Chandler – old to new humanitarianism

• 2. Katy Long on refugee containment • 3. The Palestine Context of Occupation and

‘Do no Harm’ humanitarian crisis - Mary B. Anderson

• 4. Duffield, S-D-C nexus; containment as war on uninsured life

Humanitarian principles

• ICRC – 4 underlying principles of humanitarian action: – humanity,– impartiality, – neutrality, – universality Could perhaps add today: - Virtuality ? - Personnel Security ?

Humanitarian principles

• 1. Humanity – help all those in need, as all are human

• 2. Impartiality help without discrimination, most urgent the priority

• 3. Neutrality meant Red Cross workers would not take sides in a violent confrontation, remain ‘outside’ political controversies.

• 4. Universality – same everwhere in the world, same values.

Key goal was to keep humanitarian work separate from all political contamination, and thus to ensure access of humanitarians to victims most in need.

Humanitarian principles

• https://www.icrc.org/eng/who-we-are/humanitarium/index.jsp

• To continue our interest in the course in the case of Yemen and healthcare webinar archived here: https://www.icrc.org/eng/who-we-are/humanitarium/index.jsp involves a lot of questions that illustrate the 4 principles in practice e.g. question for Geneva – is it legal for an armed group to take control of a hospital or health care facility?

Humanitarianism’s origins • Battle of Solferino in 1859 • In one day, 40,000 dead and in 19th century Europe, to be wounded

was to die, since warring parties saw doctors and nurses as enemies.• Those who cared for wounded were themselves targets (a familiar

story today). • Dunant said ‘tutti fratelli’, we are all brothers, and motivated by a

strong evangelistic faith, he inspired locals to care for wounded on both sides of the Solferino battle.

• Avoided deaths through bleeding, through thirst and through infections.

• Started the humanitarian movement, along with Florence Nightingale…and Prince Buddha of course!

Humanitarianisms Origins

• 1863, 31 delegates from 16 countries, discussed neutrality, so injured could be treated, and medical personnel could be seen as neutral helpers by both sides (aim: to save lives)

• https://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/vwTreatiesByDate.xsp

• Texts of many historic Hague and Geneva Conventions (1864 below)

• https://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/Treaty.xsp?documentId=477CEA122D7B7B3DC12563CD002D6603&action=openDocument - original 1864

“New” humanitarianism • Chandler, p. 698• “It is now commonplace to read of humanitarian

aid prolonging wars, feeding killers, legitimizing corrupt regimes, creating war economies, and perpetuating genocidal policies. Humanitarians …from being angels of mercy who can do no wrong [are now]…seen as part of the problem”

• WHY ARE so many in humanitarian field so critical of ICRC’s neutrality-based approach today? What has changed?

Humanitarian principles extended

• Chandler, p. 680 • “By the end of the 1940s, the major relief

charities established themselves in a more permanent role, not merely addressing wartime distress but international suffering in the developing world”.

• During 1946-1989, p. 681 • “While the major powers pursued the realpolitik

of the Cold War, humanitarian NGOs closed the gaps in humanitarian needs”.

• Has that changed (see table on next slide!)

“ New” Humanitarianism • Even before 1989, following 1970s and early 1980s mass

starvation in Sahelian region, “new humanitarian” approaches started to emerge.

• 1. Seen as not good enough to give immediate help to victims, but also seen as important to campaign and advocate on their behalf, strategically within the ‘metropolis’ as it were, for a change in policy

• 2. With a similar logic, preventative work seen as just as important as curative distribution of relief – development long-term to prevent famine and displacement (from 1970s integrated development approaches and development with a human face).

“ New” Humanitarianism

• Chandler dates newness to earlier than this: to Biafra and mediatized starvation

• “Several international NGOs (OXFAM) [argued] that breaking from the ICRC position of noncriticism was the only ethical way of assisting the population…if …Biafran people lost the struggle for secession, they would face systematic massacre by Federal forces”, p. 684.

“New” Humanitarianism

• Shift from needs – rights • Accompanied shift from being responsive

to desperate situations to seeking to work strategically to avoid them

• The saying about the man with the fish is responsible!

• But what is rights-based humanitarianism? How can someone destitute assert rights?

“New” Humanitarianism

• Medecins sans Frontieres, small but important • Founder doctor Bernard Kouchner had

resigned from ICRC over Biafra, he said Red Cross workers made “accomplices in the systematic massacre of a population”.

• Suddenly ICRC became the bad guys because they remained ‘silent’ – media the big game changer here. Battles not fought only off-screen, but in images, on TV, virtually. MSF got Nobel Peace Prize

“ New” Humanitarianism

• Mary B. Anderson claims that: • Donors, in ‘hating’ Israelis, and resenting the Occupation,

may even worsen tensions by ‘reinforcing dividers’ • Chandler suggests that neutrality is sacrificed through

solidarity politics: • “NGOs that choose to engage in advocacy and

solidarity are….eroding…principles of needs-based humanitarianism by subordinating needs to…human rights and…struggle against oppressive Third World governments”, p. 686.

“New” humanitarianism

• 1970s-1980s more and more funding through international NGOs in disaster situations, so that by mid-eighties, 70 percent of UK aid to Sudan and 5 percent of British relief to Ethiopia was managed through NGOs (difference is significant).

• This is the world that Duffield sharpened his teeth on.

“New” humanitarianism

• By late 1980s, NGOs partnered with local NGOs in the South, to receive direct funding from Western donors – parallel to already undermined, weak and under-resourced state structures that had been subjected in most cases to cuts and restructuring. Developmental approach trumped humanitarians of classic kind.

• Professionalism and capacity building, not charity!

Some talks from TEDx

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J45cWdDEbm0 – Fiona Terry

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Id3XVK4nKCU – Paul Conneally

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23vKtqo2t4k – Alberto Cairo

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm9-H6NucHk – Digital Humanitarianism

Humanitarian Containment?

• “Empirically, ‘safe zones’ have often failed even to secure safety, most notoriously in the case of Srebenica, where the massacre of 8,000 Bosniak men in July 1995 offers damning evidence of the failure of safe zones to protect civilian populations”, p. 459

• Katy Long (2012) In Search of Sanctuary: Border Closures, ‘Safe’ Zones and Refugee Protection

Humanitarian Containment?

• Katy Long ctd: • “Buffer zones” and IDP zones near closed

borders, have “proven controversial, because the line between preventative protection and coercive containment has frequently been blurred. Insisting someone remains in their country of origin may conflict with an individual’s right to seek asylum elsewhere”,

Humanitarian Containment?

• “Abstention is sometimes necessary so that the humanitarian is not used against a population in crisis”- MSF James Orbinski quoted in Chandler, p. 697.

• BUT

• Oxfam UK’s Philip Bloomer quoted trying to challenge trend of blaming humanitarians for conflict. “[w]e’ve seen a concerted political attack on the fundamental humanitarian principles and assistance for perpetuating wars.”

Humanitarian Containment

• Nicholas Stockton quoted “some 750,000 of those forcibly repatriated or ‘lost in Zaire’ were children under five. Over 1.5 million were under 16 years of age.” HORROR of this episode of humanitarian abandonment is unwatchable (Hubert Sauper’s film KISANGANI)

• “[t]he application of ‘do no harm’ policies is tantamount to playing God—a deadly, perhaps totalitarian business to indulge in without the benefit of 20:20 future vision”.

Humanitarian Containment?

• Katy Long: • “As the US prepared to begin a military

campaign in Afghanistan in September 2001, all six of Afghanistan’s neighbouring states closed their borders at the request of the US and in the interests of preventing Taliban flight (Tait 2001; Ferris 2008). Refugee flows were now associated not only with economic burden, but also with fears of terrorist infiltration”… p. 463.

Humanitarian Containment • Katy Long ctd. • She mentions 5 cases of border closures (walls also) and cites US and one

could add Saudi and Israeli military interests that shape responses to border closure.

• When Turkey closed borders against Kurds from Iraq, from Syria now, the international community stays silent. It is a holocaust with another name.

• DO not pressure Turkey into opening its borders to the Kurdish refugees, do not let them in either.

• UN Security Council Resolution 688, authorized a multilateral relief effort (‘Operation Provide Comfort’) yet this characterized the refugee flows as a threat to international peace and security, but not the closed border itself, which is causing the problems….

Film materials on Gaza

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJQgDBKeDFU#t=16 • Propaganda video that suggests that things in Gaza are just

fine (note this is supposed to be footage from 2011). • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oq-enFV5gXw – 2012 • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7keCScSM0g – 2014 • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z4TvDbffI0 – BBC ‘war

on children’ • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsDyxnJxbkc – Young

Turks (4.17 tweet from UNRWA representative) • “We have moved beyond the realm of humanitarian action

alone, we are in the realm of accountability” (war crimes).

Do no harm under Occupation?

• The case of Palestine • Mary Anderson – Do no Harm • Principle of humanitarian law and human rights

law – associated with Quakers, Mennonites, Jains, Buddhists, Sufis and many other mystics.

• Uses an inductive approach which methodologically starts from local actors/structures

Do no harm under Occupation?

• “I came to this region with some genuine doubt as to the relevance of the Do No Harm learning, gathered in civil and interstate wars, to the circumstances of Occupation”, p. 1.

• “Experience shows that the impacts on dividers and connectors between groups in conflict are never neutral”, p.

Do no harm under Occupation?

Do no harm under Occupation?

Do no Harm Under Occupation?

• Extraordinary claim that Palestine had no state or culture of state making prior to 1948

• She also suggest that donors ‘hating’ Israelis, and resenting the Occupation, may worsen tensions by ‘reinforcing dividers’

• “Few donor publications are translated into Arabic; none, so far as I could learn, is translated into Hebrew”…

Link to Duffield

• “Exploiting the public welfare vacuum within the underdeveloped state, some insurgent groups have taken on humanitarian and social support roles. Hamas, for example, provides ‘the most comprehensive social safety net in the West Bank and Gaza’ (Goldenburg 2001)”. Duffield, p. 158.

Link to idea of Empire and Aron’s model of International Relations

• Duffield suggests (recall Professor Murshed’s talk about decline in number of wars)

• “the statistical decline in civil war is actually an inversely expanding zone of international pacification. Occupation is the corollary of containment and the externalization of the West’s sovereign frontier”, p. 159.

Humanitarian Containment as war

• Decolonisation • 1. “Fixed biopolitical division of humanity into

metaphorically insured and non-insured life, setting up the possibility of a global civil war at the level of species-existence”.

• 2. …introduced: “…a ban on the international circulation of underdeveloped life it also established an expansive risk-based security architecture that both separates and reproduces the life-chance divide upon which this civil war is based”, p. 149

Humanitarian Containment as War

• Development-Security nexus has 3rd pole DUFFIELD calls ‘CONTAINMENT”, i.e. “those various interventions and technologies that seek to restrict or manage the circulation of incomplete and hence potentially threatening life, or return it from whence it came…you cannot have development or security without containing the mobility of underdeveloped life”, p. 146 Duffield reading.

Humanitarian containment as war

• “Conveniently for neo-liberalism, a large part of humanity apparently exempts itself from the need for expensive systems of social protection through its own communal resilience”, p. 151 – Duffield is being bitterly ironic here, of course!

• Civil war reinterpreted as irrational….’new wars’ discourse

• Delegitimation of many armed struggles – confirmed by UK 2000 Terrorism Act, which proscribed a list of Middle Eastern and Asian political groups as terrorist organizations; again main aim could be CONTAINMENT i.e. PREVENT ASYLUM FOR SUSPECTED MEMBERS…

Humanitarian Containment as War

• “In seeking to ameliorate the destructive effects of progress, liberal regimes of development typically attempt to re-establish acceptable forms of existence on the foundation of a reconstituted community life”, his critique of Development as a project inherited from colonialism, p. 148.

• E.g. small is beautiful (for others); small farmers, sustainably cultivating in honorable poverty; freed slaves to be self-reliant too…no moral responsibility for the damage of capitalism and its waste humanity, as Baumann calls them.

Humanitarian Containment as War

• “In a global civil war being fought at the level of existence, containing the circulation of underdeveloped life is strategically vital. While hopelessly breached by history, containment functions as a global perimeter fence both separating and reproducing the generic life-chance divide between the developed and underdeveloped worlds., pp. 145-6

Cartoon by JD of Sierra

Leone

Conclusion Chandler • From neutrality we have gone to partiality in the name

of solidarity with the oppressed.

• Violates sovereignty in the name of human rights

• “A fairy story” with 3 actors – victims (good, protective guys, weak women and children), perpetrators (bad aggressive guys, armed, maybe poor, or rich and corrupt) and ‘Us’ - all the rest of us, those who ‘care’, whose duty becomes to save/support/extract the victims from the clutches of these perpetrators, to hold the perpetrators accountable, to help rehabilitate and redress the victims.

Conclusion Chandler

• From being based on the universal nature of humanity, which inevitably caused conflict with the pro-Western agenda of the Cold War, today’s “new humanitarians” have challenged every principle that demarcated the traditional framework of humanitarian action. No longer do they advocate a principled neutrality, nor defend the most basic level of humanitarian relief as a universal right if this threatens to undermine broader strategic human rights-based aims. Through the human rights discourse, humanitarian action has become transformed from relying on empathy with suffering victims and providing emergency aid to mobilizing misanthropy and legitimizing the politics of international condemnation, sanctions, and bombings.

Chandler conclusion

• “In Serbia, European Union humanitarian aid programs operated on the highly selective basis of providing fuel and provisions to opposition-run municipalities while applying strict sanctions to the rest of the country. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Belgrade and the International Federation of the Red Cross challenged this approach by arguing that aid should be given on the basis of need and irrespective of political party affiliation”, p. 700.

Katy Long Conclusions

• “Border closure and ‘safe’ zones can thus be seen as part of a broader trend that has seen freedom of movement, particularly of the poor, increasingly restricted by Western states”, p. 473

• YET: “A refugee’s access to full and meaningful international protection first depends on being able to cross a border”, p. 473

Katy Long conclusion

• “Shifting understandings of sovereignty have opened up the space for additional protection of the internally displaced, and allow for easier delivery of humanitarian aid within conflict settings. However the new ‘responsibility to protect’ is a nascent doctrine at best, and cannot be considered a substitute for the freedom of movement that provides refugees with the protections of asylum”, p. 474

Duffield Conclusion

• “This essay began with the proposition that to complete the nexus between development and security, the term containment needs to be included; in the sense that you cannot have development or security without containing the circulation of underdeveloped life. Rather than emerging with the end of the Cold War, or even less convincingly with 9/11, the origins of this nexus can be traced to decolonization”, p. 162

Duffield Conclusion

• “The international security architecture that emerged with decolonization interconnects the containment of irregular migration with measures to integrate migrant communities already settled within consumer society and, at the same time, state-led development initiatives to improve the self-reliance and stasis of underdeveloped life in situ. This episodic architecture has deepened with each crisis of global circulation. It marks out a terrain of a global civil war, or rather tableau of wars, which is being fought on and between the modalities of life itself”, p. 162.

Mary B. Anderson Conclusion

• “It may seem difficult to assess political or social impacts of aid deliveries [which are] intangible and immeasurable. In complex settings, how can one trace what actions are responsible for which outcomes?

• ….• Experience in many settings shows that this is not as

difficult as it may at first appear. Identification of context-specific dividers and connectors is intended to focus attention on real, observable factors that, within that context, reinforce socio/political fragmentation or socio/political cohesion”, p. 12.

Mary B. Anderson Conclusion

• “If donors can create new modes of engaging people in giving and receiving assistance, and by doing so get agreement on humanitarian space that expands their effectiveness, they can change the political space to which political actors have to respond. Will this bring peace? Unlikely. Will it contribute positively rather than negatively? Yes. It is that simple”, p. 11.