Humanitarian Business E-Book

Thomas G. Weiss

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 345

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

With some 50 million people living under duress and threatened by wars and disasters in 2012, the demand for relief worldwide has reached unprecedented levels. Humanitarianism is now a multi-billion dollar enterprise, and aid agencies are obliged to respond to a range of economic forces in order to 'stay in business'.

In his customarily hard-hitting analysis, Thomas G. Weiss offers penetrating insights into the complexities and challenges of the contemporary humanitarian marketplace. In addition to changing political and military conditions that generate demand for aid, private suppliers have changed too. Today’s political economy places aid agencies side-by-side with for-profit businesses, including private military and security companies, in a marketplace that also is linked to global trade networks in illicit arms, natural resources, and drugs. This witch’s brew is simmering in the cauldron of wars that are often protracted and always costly to civilians who are the very targets of violence. While belligerents put a price-tag on access to victims, aid agencies pursue branding in a competition for 'scarce' resources relative to the staggering needs. As marketization encroaches on traditional humanitarianism, it seems everything may have a priceÑfrom access and principles, to moral authority and lives.

Leseprobe

Humanitarian Business

Humanitarian Business

THOMAS G. WEISS

polity

Copyright © Thomas Weiss 2013

The right of Thomas Weiss to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 9780745665221

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Contents

Figures

Abbreviations

About the Author

Foreword by Hugo Slim

Acknowledgments

Introduction

  1  Responding to Humanitarian Demands

  2  The Contemporary Landscape: Need and Greed

  3  Coordination vs. Competition in an Unregulated Market

  4  Market Distortions from Above and Below

  5  The Push and Pull of Coming to the Rescue

  6  What Next?

Notes

Suggested Reading

Index

Figures

  1.1   External and internal actors on the ground

  3.1   Flow of international resources to a war zone

Abbreviations

CAP

Consolidated Appeals Process

CERF

Central Emergency Response Fund

DAC

Development Assistance Committee

DHA

Department of Humanitarian Affairs

DPKO

Department of Peacekeeping Operations

DRC

Democratic Republic of the Congo

ECHO

European Community Humanitarian Office

FAO

Food and Agriculture Organization

FTS

Financial Tracking System

ICISS

International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty

ICJ

International Court of Justice

ICRC

International Committee of the Red Cross

ICVA

International Council for Voluntary Action

IDP

internally displaced person

IGO

intergovernmental organization

IMF

International Monetary Fund

MSF

Médecins sans Frontières

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NGO

nongovernmental organization

NSA

nonstate actor

OCHA

Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

ODA

official development assistance

OECD

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

PMSCs

private military and security companies

R2P

responsibility to protect

TNC

transnational corporation

UNDP

UN Development Programme

UNDRO

UN Disaster Relief Organization

UNHCR

UN High Commissioner for Refugees

UNICEF

UN Children’s Fund

UNRRA

UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration

UNWRA

UN Relief and Works Agency

USAID

US Agency for International Development

VOICE

Voluntary Organizations Cooperating in Emergencies

WFP

World Food Programme

About the Author

Thomas G. Weiss is Presidential Professor of Political Science at The City University of New York Graduate Center and Director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. He directed the United Nations Intellectual History Project (1999–2010) and was President of the International Studies Association (2009–10), Chair of the Academic Council on the UN System (2006–9), editor of Global Governance, Research Director of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, Research Professor at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, Executive Director of the Academic Council on the UN System and of the International Peace Academy, a member of the UN secretariat, and a consultant to several public and private agencies. He has authored or edited some 45 books and 200 articles and book chapters about multilateral approaches to international peace and security, humanitarian action, and sustainable development. His recent authored volumes include: Global Governance: Why? What? Whither? (Polity, 2013); What’s Wrong with the United Nations and How to Fix It, 2nd edn (Polity Press, 2012); Humanitarian Intervention: Ideas in Action, 2nd edn (Polity Press, 2012); Thinking about Global Governance: Why People and Ideas Matter (Routledge, 2011); Humanitarianism Contested: Where Angels Fear to Tread (Routledge, 2011, with Michael Barnett); Global Governance and the UN: An Unfinished Journey (Indiana University Press, 2010, with Ramesh Thakur); and UN Ideas That Changed the World (Indiana University Press, 2009, with Richard Jolly and Louis Emmerij).

Foreword

Thomas G. Weiss has made an outstanding contribution to the understanding and policymaking of humanitarian action for more than twenty-five years. In this new book, he continues to do so by challenging international humanitarians and their government donors to think about their profession as a business.

To approach humanitarian action as a commercial proposition is – as Weiss notes early on – deeply scandalous to the majority of people who see it as a healing profession based on values, rights, and needs. Most people become humanitarians or give to humanitarian agencies because they care about the suffering of other human beings, and not because they want to make a profit.

But Weiss is evidently right to draw our attention to the strong market dynamic that functions as part of the multibillion-dollar humanitarian sector. It does indeed make sense to talk of supply and demand, competition, market distortions, monopolies, cost, price, efficiencies, and investor bias. These are hard facts in the way the money flows in emergencies, and aid operators rise to meet them. The market is not the whole truth about the global humanitarian project, but it is an important element of the truth.

Weiss also asks us to think metaphorically about the humanitarian profession as a business. In doing so, some of the humanitarian market’s irrationality and imperfections, which we tend to indulge as part of our tradition, fast appear as glaring folly. I will just mention two of Weiss’s many examples because they are the ones he is most passionate about. The first centers on the efficiency of delivery, and the second on the extraordinary market distortions created by political interests.

Weiss has been a long-time prophet calling for greater organizational efficiency and effectiveness in the UN system. Here, he extends his call to the sector of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as well. True to form, Weiss is not cowed by any requirements of diplomatic niceties in his description of most international institutions engaged in humanitarian action. UN agencies are rife with “inertia” and “ineptitude.” The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has made “very little difference” and the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative is “rhetoric only.” There is a “glut” of NGOs with no real assurance of quality and a dominant self-interested concern for “turf.” When money is in play, all agencies compete amongst each other, and their main concern is organizational survival.

That this critique is hardly new makes it the more frustrating, as Weiss points out. His solution to the problem of the aid operators is very business-like: the sector should be rationalized by a spate of mergers that enhance specialization and efficiency; UN agencies should be consolidated, as recommended back in 1997 by Maurice Strong; and NGOs should focus on achieving the real impact of collective action that some of the big transnational NGOs are beginning to achieve in their own organizational families.

Political bias is perhaps the main feature of the humanitarian market that Weiss puts under the spotlight in this book. If Western government donors are regarded as the major shareholders in the humanitarian business, then they drive extraordinary distortions in a market rhetorically based on need. Weiss is extremely critical of this obvious “market failure,” which shows all too clearly that the current market does not work for the majority of victims of war and disaster. The huge distortions in favor of Afghanistan in recent years show that this is a market skewed toward political profit not humanitarian demand.

Weiss has once again written a frank and well-informed book about how to improve international institutions. His emphasis on rationalizing humanitarian institutions, improving evidence-based planning, and increasing donor and agency accountability is right on the nail. As new powers take up more space at the UN in the years ahead, it will become clear where their interests lie in the world’s nascent system of global humanitarian aid. Members like China, India, Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, and Indonesia may seek greater institutional efficiencies, but they may also seek a repoliticization rather than a de-politicization in the spread of humanitarian funds.

In the meantime, every humanitarian who has a purchase on the system would be wise to raise the value, integrity, and reputation of the humanitarian product by following Weiss’s three recommendations to rationalize, prove, and account for what they are doing to help people suffering from war and disaster. In doing this, humanitarian principles will still be the best guide to the quality of the humanitarian business. On this point, Weiss and I probably disagree because he is more pessimistic about the possibilities for impartiality and independence than I am. But, for me, these principles and a determination to reach them remains the real mark of profit in any humanitarian business.

Humanitarian aid is not yet an especially big business. At current annual volumes nearing $18 billion, it is about the same size as the Chinese domestic market for soy sauce and other specialty condiments. As China’s economy grows and disasters rise around the world, it will indeed be interesting to see which market – soy sauce or humanitarian aid – expands faster and more efficiently to meet demand.

Hugo Slim, University of Oxford, April 2012

Acknowledgments

One of the pleasant tasks of writing a book is to thank those who have helped along the way. This volume for Polity Press condenses my own and others’ thinking about the shape of the contemporary humanitarian delivery system in a user-friendly way that nonetheless raises all of the fraught issues. Let me repeat what I wrote in earlier volumes, namely that I am grateful to Louise Knight, who is a wonderful commissioning editor, using a congenial mix of flattery and tough reviews to extract what I trust is a solid scholarly and commercial product.

I have been laboring in the analytical vineyard of humanitarian action for a quarter of a century. Many of my ideas and insights, such as they are, have been catalyzed and developed in a series of collaborations over the years. I have been extremely fortunate in finding intellectual partners.

Let me acknowledge my intellectual debt to those whose work and influence are evident in these pages because much of what I have written here draws on earlier collaborations with several of them. I will begin with Larry Minear, with whom I actively collaborated for ten years on the Humanitarianism & War Project, which we founded and directed. Lessons-learned versus lessons-spurned was the theme song of our efforts from 1990 to 1998, and I draw on our joint efforts from that time.1 During that period, I benefited from work with Cindy Collins, at the time a graduate student at Brown University.2 Also these pages reflect work with another younger comrade-in-arms, Don Hubert, who was an essential part of my team at the Research Directorate for the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) in producing The Responsibility to Protect and an accompanying research volume.3 During ICISS’s deliberations and in the years that followed, I learned particularly from the work of three of the commissioners: Gareth Evans, Michael Ignatieff, and Ramesh Thakur.4 I would also like to acknowledge another younger side-kick, Peter J. Hoffman, who went from my classroom to ICISS to introducing me to the theory of new wars and new humanitarianisms in a co-authored book and several articles, and also has now finished his dissertation on private military and security companies.5 Finally, Michael Barnett and I collaborated over the last several years, first on an edited book and more recently an authored one that seek to re-examine humanitarian shibboleths and rethink standard operating procedures and principles.6 I am also grateful to several publishers for permission to adapt material here.

Two respected colleagues with critical eyes provided comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. I begin by thanking Stephen Hopgood, who brought to bear his own cutting-edge work at the School for Oriental and African Studies on the people, the problems, and the prospects of humanitarian action. Anyone who has not read his Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International7 should do so to understand many of the motivations behind the generations of human rights advocates.

I am grateful to Hugo Slim not only for his comments but also for the fact that in his Foreword he has graced this book with some of his unusual insights. He is one of those rare individuals who has successfully combined applied university teaching and practical humanitarian work for more than a quarter-century. I only recently discovered what I should have suspected, namely that Hugo draws on his original training as a theologian. As such, he was one of an important group of British “scholar practitioners” – including Mark Duffield, Alex de Waal, David Keen, and Peter Walker – who were joined by a few of us on the other side of the Atlantic in trying to infuse humanitarian ethics into mainstream practice. His own classic treatment of the morality of civilian protection, Killing Civilians: Method, Madness and Morality in War, 8 is a text in military academies as well as in departments of international relations and war studies.

In the process of writing this volume and preparing it for publication, I have encountered one particular debt of gratitude. Danielle Zach is completing her dissertation on diasporas and armed conflict at The City University of New York’s Graduate Center, and I expect great things from her in the near future. She also has labored tirelessly as an editor for several publications during her student years at 365 Fifth Avenue. In addition to accomplishing such for this volume, she helped me from the very outset to conceptualize and hone the framework of the marketplace in order to depict the numerous interactions of politics and economics in the contemporary international humanitarian system. It was a pleasure to have had her in my classes and as a collaborator over the last several years. This book is immeasurably better because of her careful attention to details and clarity.

The City University of New York’s Graduate Center has been my congenial institutional home since 1998. Public universities everywhere are under attack, and I am proud to say that I am part of a system that still strives to provide both excellence and access. I am thankful to President William Kelly and Provost Chase Robinson for warmly and generously supporting my adventures over the years.

This book is dedicated to my daughters, Hannah and Rebeccah, and my grandchildren, Amara and Kieran. They are constant reminders that what once seemed unimaginable is quite possible.

As always, I welcome comments from readers. And obviously, any howlers are my responsibility.

T.G.W., New York, August 2012

Introduction

“Humanitarian” and “business” are juxtaposed in the title of this book for two reasons: provocation and accuracy. Like the expression “humanitarian politics,” this title will be unsettling and perhaps even jarring for those who idealize the humanitarian endeavor. Both are provocative because the adjective has essentially uncontested positive connotations while the nouns usually are associated with wheeling and dealing and thus are at odds with the values and self-image of true- believers. Rooted essentially in morality and principle – the parable of the “Good Samaritan” often comes to mind – humanitarian undertakings are seen as noble. The objective is to help people whose lives are at grave risk, irrespective of who they are, or where they are located, or why they are in need.

If humanitarian action claims the moral high ground, the labels of “politics” and “business” are customarily seen to reside elsewhere, in the nether lands. Politics, as Harold Lasswell so famously put it, is essentially about “who gets what, when, how.”1 In practice, it is the art of the possible and associated not with principles but with the compromise of principles in order to get things done. Politicians operate in an arena where deals are cut, money buys access, the common good is ignored, talk is cheap, and tough decisions deferred. As ideal types, humanitarians are interested in the welfare of those in their care and are ideally unaffected by political factors in the countries that provide or receive relief and within the aid agencies that deliver it. Of course in reality, humanitarians are not divorced from politics but rather are steeped in politics at all levels. The day-to-day functioning of all aid agencies intersects in myriad ways with home and host governments, with armed insurgents as well as peacekeepers and local populations, and with the priorities of funding sources. As agents engaged in resource acquisition and distribution, where they get their resources and how and to whom they deliver aid can have significant political consequences, particularly in such contentious environments as war zones. At the same time, humanitarians regularly confront forces that seek to distort and sometimes obstruct assistance for their own political, economic, and military advantage. For political scientists, it is difficult to believe that anyone anywhere is apolitical – and certainly not humanitarians.

While many analysts have moved beyond simplistic interpretations of humanitarian practice, the ideal type of the Good Samaritan exists in many minds as well as in the aspirations and expectations of many aid workers and donors. As David Rieff reminds us, “in the collective memory of modern humanitarianism, the comforting illusion endures that there was a time when relief NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] were largely free to act as they saw fit, taking into account only the needs of the populations they sought to help, and the limits imposed by their own charters.”2

And while there may be fewer die-hard traditionalists today clinging to a utopian image of humanitarian action than there were yesterday, agencies certainly strategically project a “pure” image to Western publics. As one analyst explained, the marketing logic is crystal clear: NGOs need contributions from donors who wish to have their heartstrings pulled with a story of one suffering child (indeed, two is often too many for the most effective image) who is caught in the crosshairs of war and can only be saved by their donations. Thereafter the donors want to be assured that their contributions are directly helping to improve lives, which then requires the production of brochures depicting relief workers wearing NGO T-shirts posing beside seemingly happy and well-nourished kids. Unsurprisingly a key lesson NGOs teach relief workers is how to pose with children.3

Thus, like entrepreneurs, humanitarian agencies are concerned with image and marketing strategies in an expanding global business that over the past two decades has become increasingly competitive with a glut of suppliers vying for their share of the market. In aggregate terms, there is a tremendous need for relief owing to the global political and economic transformations of the past few decades. And while funding is more abundant than ever, resources are still “scarce” given the magnitude of the requirements confronting those who provide succor. For die-hard humanitarians who claim to be apolitical and are often appalled by the allegation that they are not, the very use of the term “business,” or “market,” will conjure up comparable complexities. These true-believers undoubtedly will be additionally offended by being analyzed as part of a “marketplace.” Marketing involves the four “P’s” of product, price, place, and promotion. While humanitarians focus on delivery of the product, they should also be increasingly aware of the crucial importance of the entire humanitarian business, which, as Hugo Slim reminds us, begins with “selling the idea of restraint and compassion in war.”4

Yet this is the reality of humanitarianism in the twenty-first century in a globalizing world. An apt illustration is captured in a photo on a postcard from Médecins sans Frontières (MSF, translated as Doctors without Borders) advertising a talk titled “At Any Price?” It depicts an MSF worker, clad in a T-shirt with the organization’s logo, intensely negotiating access to vulnerable populations with child soldiers dressed in military uniform and carrying machine guns. As marketization encroaches on the traditional humanitarian sector, everything may have a price – from access, to moral authority, and perhaps even lives.

The Humanitarian Marketplace in the Twenty-first Century

This book is fundamentally about the political economy of humanitarian assistance and protection as well as the incentives that help explain action and inaction, success and failure. The contemporary humanitarian marketplace is shaped by the complexly intertwined disintegrative and integrative forces of globalization – what James Rosenau once dubbed “fragmegration.”5 On the one hand, the world is increasingly interconnected through global markets and technology. Neoliberalization, with its trappings of privatization, liberalization, and deregulation, has fostered economic integration, eroding barriers to trade in formerly protected markets. Technological advances ease economic transactions and make possible the instantaneous flow of information from one side of the globe to another. At the same time, the development of universal human rights as well as an increasingly accepted international responsibility to protect victimized populations regardless of borders has generated a robust normative framework for the world’s affairs.

On the other hand, some integrative trends can have destabilizing effects in fragile states. “Developmentally challenged” countries are especially vulnerable to external pressures, from global markets as well as powerful world actors, including other states and international financial institutions. They are also more prone to internal upheaval, which at the extreme means a violent challenge to the state’s authority.

Today’s civil wars are often intimately linked into global trade networks in illicit arms, natural resources, and drugs; and thus tend to be protracted as “mutually hurting stalemates” fail to materialize with a steady stream of resources. At the same time, they typically produce massive suffering among civilian populations, who frequently are the very targets of violence by belligerents. The immediate drivers of today’s marketplace are countries in which governments fail to provide collective goods for their citizens, especially protection from mass murder, forced displacement, and rape – that is, in places where the state abuses its own population or is contested, weak, or even nonexistent, as Afghanistan and Somalia aptly illustrate. Such environments not only generate an enormous demand for lifesaving aid but are also fertile ground for those who seek to profit from misery; and thus they prolong it by distorting the distribution of relief for their own ends.

Alongside high demand for help from suffering civilians, the development of international human rights norms has added incentives for states and the private sector alike to do something and disincentives for doing nothing, which undoubtedly has also contributed to the expansion of the humanitarian sector in terms of both actors and resources. Acts of “shaming” especially are facilitated by global media, which sometime come close to producing “disaster pornography” for headlines.

In a neoliberal global context, it is unsurprising that the “spirit of capitalism” is reshaping humanitarianism. The picture is far more complicated than in abstract economic models that are divorced from political realities and take the existence of a stable state as a given. Indeed alongside neoliberalization, it is the privatization of violence that has fostered the marketization of humanitarian discourses and practices. For-profit businesses have entered the fray of service delivery and protection; belligerent nonstate actors (NSAs) commodify access to victims; aid agencies concern themselves with marketing and branding in a competition for scarce resources from governments as well as corporations.

The “pay-offs” for “suppliers” and “buyers” in the global humanitarian market are varied – the actual alleviation of human suffering is but one among others. Among the “buyers” of humanitarian services are governments, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), corporations, and individuals (i.e., compositely “donors”). Contributing to saving lives can be a means to another end, a by-product in the pursuit of less lofty goals, including re-election, security, “soft power,” a positive corporate image, and even raw financial profit. To be fair, while for-profit firms may be an alternative supplier for relief, they may also help aid agencies do their jobs better if appropriate solidarity or incentives prevail. “Private sector companies,” observes António Guterres, current head of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “are also increasingly willing to share their resources and know-how with UNHCR and its humanitarian partners.”6 Typical “suppliers” would obviously include aid agencies, but also for-profit actors such as private military and security companies (PMSCs). Governments can also be direct suppliers of goods and services, while aid agencies themselves can be buyers, for example by contracting PMSCs or local NGOs, or even by purchasing access to needy populations from warlords who are responsible for generating the “demand” in the first place.

This book aims to unpack the dynamics of competition and exchange within the supply chain – which itself constitutes a complex supply and demand network – and the consequences for local economies and those who are the ultimate consumers of humanitarian aid: war victims. As the relationship between suppliers and the consumers of humanitarian aid is essentially a redistributive one, there typically is no direct instrumental exchange between them. Of course, there have been egregious cases of exploitation, in which providers have commodified the very war victims whom they are supposed to help: for example, by requiring girls to perform sexual “labor” in exchange for access to goods and services or cash.

Acting in a particular war zone clearly has dramatic consequences for the profile and financial health of aid agencies. The 2011 global bottom line is some $18 billion and would strike most MBAs, on the face of it, as a substantial commercial opportunity. Some individual agencies (like the International Rescue Committee, IRC) or federations (like Oxfam and Save the Children) are big businesses, while others are far smaller, some even artisanal enterprises. Values purportedly distinguish humanitarians, in big and small enterprises, from their for-profit business counterparts. However, the emerging issue of corporate social responsibility as an issue for corporate boards and stockholders suggests that values also may make for good business. A host of other considerations arise for both humanitarians and businesspeople, ranging from corruption to transparency. Moreover, if providing goods and services and protecting the vulnerable are the ultimate goals, what if for-profit businesses can provide more bang for the buck or euro and save more lives than private voluntary agencies? What exactly is the value-added of not-for-profit humanitarian organizations? The market drives business, but it also drives humanitarians. And neither is a fan of regulation but rather each looks to the famous or infamous invisible hand. Naomi Klein has even gone so far as to describe the business model behind providing emergency relief as “ disaster capitalism.”7

In short, “humanitarian business” is a very useful and appropriate lens through which to analyze the dynamics of supply and demand and thus understand the challenges of coming to the rescue in the twenty-first century. The last two decades have severely tested the tensile strength of the global safety net. Desperate people still require relief and protection from abuse of their fundamental human rights, yet the political and military conditions that generate the demand for humanitarian action have changed, and so it should not surprise us that so too has the nature of the suppliers in the marketplace.

Along with politics, the metaphor of the marketplace and business economics appears throughout the text. While aid agencies are committed to saving lives and not making profits, nonetheless they respond to incentives and the nature of local and international market forces in order to thrive and “stay in business.” Other actors relevant for contemporary humanitarianism actually seek profits. Indeed, PMSCs have become ubiquitous in such war zones as Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Sudan. Meanwhile, governments are looking for a pay-off from policies and decisions – a reasonable return on the time and resources invested – such as furthering geostrategic interest and domestic political capital. In a world without unlimited resources, it is necessary to determine the opportunity costs for humanitarian decisions.

Moreover, aid is not distributed in a vacuum. Countries riddled with violence and weak rule of law are fertile ground to profit from misery, whether by hoarding aid to drive up food prices, black marketing essential goods, or employing “shadow” workers to pad the payroll. They are high-risk environments with high-risk stakes in which various types of market distortions (such as nepotism, fraud, and corruption) play dominant roles.

Glimpses into the chaotic world of humanitarian action in these dangerous environments regularly appear on television and in the press. The images are poignant: forcibly displaced people on the move and shuffling along dusty roads or wandering around in tent villages surrounded by barbed wire; men and boys (and some women and girls) brandishing automatic weapons amidst destroyed urban and rural landscapes; and sacks of food stamped with UN or NGO acronyms or symbols. The casual viewer or reader might recall a handful of dramatic cases – recently in Libya, Syria, Darfur, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and earlier in East Timor, Kosovo, Iraq, Haiti, and Somalia. But only a specialist would be aware of another fifty wars raging at present largely beyond the scrutiny of the media. These “silent” or “forgotten” or “orphan” armed conflicts as well as the louder and more visible ones have taken countless lives over the last two decades. Because of warfare, some 35 million of our global neighbors will be homeless tonight as refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs); they of course join those more numerous homeless who are victims of chronic poverty. In early 2012, an estimated 50 million people were under duress in humanitarian emergencies in 16 countries. Every day aid workers risk their lives to reach the needy, especially in conflict contexts where roads are often impassible and under attack, where food and fuel and medicine are stolen by combatants. This is the so-called real world of humanitarian action in war zones where the risks are high and so is the demand for assistance and protection.

Some Definitions

The terrain that we are about to enter is fraught with ambiguous language and contested concepts. The definitions of key concepts would be helpful as a baseline for readers to interpret what follows. The first is humanitarian action. The meaning is relatively straightforward: the delivery of life-saving succor and the protection of the fundamental human rights of endangered populations. Both of these tasks are meant to catch in the global safety net those who are vulnerable because they are being whipped about in the vortex of human-made disasters. As becomes clearer, the two tasks are mutually reinforcing, although many humanitarians have sought to specialize and insulate one from the other lest by making the provision of life-saving succor subservient to rights, emergency relief be held hostage to human rights advocacy.

And so, what precisely is humanitarianism, and who exactly qualifies as a humanitarian? For many audiences, “humanitarian” retains great resonance, but one searches in vain for an unequivocal definition, in international law and elsewhere. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) was provided an opportunity in the Nicaragua v United States case, when it was asked to clarify what actions legitimately fall within the category of humanitarian behavior. But in its 1986 decision that ruled in favor of Nicaragua and against the United States (which had laid mines in Nicaraguan territorial waters), the ICJ waffled. Instead, it pointed to the principles held by one humanitarian actor and engaged in begging the legal question by stating that humanitarian action is what the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) does.

The dictionary is not much more helpful. The Oxford English Dictionary – whose 1819 edition had the first citation – relied on derivatives and tautologies when stating that humanitarian is “having regard to the interests of humanity or mankind at large; relating to, or advocating, or practising humanity or human action.”8 In common discourse, humanitarianism (noun) consists of actions to improve human well-being or welfare, a humanitarian (noun) is a person who actively promotes human welfare, and humanitarian (adj.) usually means philanthropic or charitable.

The ICJ’s “definition” requires that we briefly spell out the gold standard espoused by the ICRC, which may make clearer why terms like “politics” and “business” can be so appalling to humanitarians. The standard entails: the independent, neutral, and impartial provision of relief to victims of armed conflicts and natural disasters – in short, to save those at immediate risk of death. The politics of helping when a natural disaster strikes are often relatively simple and thus do not really concern us here. Political authorities who are unable to respond adequately or are temporarily overwhelmed by an unexpected crisis usually welcome with open arms external assistance from whatever the source, be they governments (including their military forces), IGOs, or NGOs. Every country, no matter how sophisticated and developed, can encounter a disaster resembling the 2011 tsunami and Fukushima nuclear meltdown; and in such circumstances, it would be unusual not to seek outside help. In cases of natural disaster, the provision of life-saving resources to populations in need does not usually have an impact on the political status quo in the recipient country. Rather, the political impact of not responding adequately might very well mark the end of the government. The potential cost of not asking for outside assistance thus outweighs the costs of going it alone.

Helping in the midst of violence and especially in civil wars is another matter, however, considerably more fraught and controversial. Governments in the throes of armed conflict, whether domestic or international, often view the acceptance of help as an all-too-visible sign of weakness. Conversely, political officials may look upon aid and protection as fungible resources that are part of the calculations of winning a war. Belligerents are not averse to employing assistance and civilians as weapons. Intrastate armed conflicts (or civil wars) are more freewheeling than international wars waged between professional armies with defined battle lines and rules. The mediation skills of village elders and politicians are outmatched by drugged-up children wielding AK-47s.

The ICRC’s ground rules focus not only on what humanitarianism is supposed to do, but also how it is supposed to do it. In his famous desiderata, Jean Pictet, the organization’s vice president, identified seven defining principles: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity, and universality. The first four arguably constitute the core.9 Humanity commands attention to all people. Impartiality requires that assistance be based on need and not discriminate on the basis of nationality, race, religion, gender, or political affiliation. Neutrality demands that humanitarian organizations refrain from taking part in hostilities or from any action that either benefits or disadvantages the parties to an armed conflict. Independence necessitates that assistance not be connected to any of the belligerents or others (especially states) with a stake in the outcome of a war; accordingly, there is a general rule that agencies should either refuse or limit their reliance on government funding, especially from those with interests in the outcome.

The ICRC derived these principles from decades of experience regarding which principles best helped to do its job. In other words, although many humanitarians treat these principles as a sacred part of their identity, they have also instrumentally served essential functions. Simply put, traditional principles have helped guide humanitarians to reach people in duress. If aid agencies are perceived by combatants as partial, allied with the opposing side, or having a vested interest in the outcome, they have a difficult time getting access; or, even worse, they may become targets. If principles are followed and respected, both aid workers and victims have a sanctuary of sorts. Operating according to these principles and being perceived as apolitical are particularly important during times of armed conflict. In sum, humanitarianism is defined as the desire and ability to provide life-saving assistance while honoring the principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence.

Many observers find that humanitarian space is a useful way to conceptualize the physical arena in which humanitarians act. What is this sanctuary? It is ideally a safe area administered and occupied by international aid agencies in a region in which war is taking place. In short, it is a physically secure environment in which victims can be assisted by humanitarians. The image has the advantage of implying that space can open and close, expand and contract. Like everything in this business, it has been subjected to a variety of interpretations, customarily tailored to fit the needs of particular situations or of humanitarian agencies to emphasize aspects of action. The main understandings include: physical access by agencies; the ability within such space of agencies to adhere to traditional principles; and the ability of affected populations to have assistance and protection. So, it is important to specify whether the person or entity referring to “space” wishes to capture the objectives of aid agencies, their ability to respond, the context in which action takes place, or the ability of vulnerable populations to survive.10

Finally, what is humanitarian intervention? Adam Roberts is clear: “coercive action by one or more states involving the use of armed force in another state without the consent of its authorities, and with the purpose of preventing widespread suffering or death among the inhabitants.”11 Military interventions beginning in the 1990s – against the wishes of a government, or without their genuine consent, and with substantial humanitarian justifications – figure prominently in many of the illustrations throughout this book. The contested nature of the undertaking itself and of the immediate and longer-term results has led two authors recently to ask, “Can intervention work?”12 While their answer and mine is “yes,” we should qualify that by stating that it can do so when it takes place under the proper conditions and with understanding of the local culture and of humanitarian limitations. That, of course, is a tall order.

Here we should spend another moment understanding the notion more broadly. The general meaning of “intervention” can be gleaned from the contexts in which it occurs and the purposes for which it is invoked. Intervention is not involved when an action is based on a genuine and freely given request from, or with the unqualified consent of, a state. Other forms of interference that fall short of coercion in the domestic affairs of a state thus do not amount to intervention. The simplicity of the notion can be muddled somewhat in that foreign policy in general aims to persuade or sometimes cajole other states to change behavior. The absolute absence of consent is required to merit the label of “intervention” because other wise any outside involvement or attempt to influence or interfere with another political authority would qualify. If it covers everything, the term loses salience.

In a world of asymmetrical power, what constitutes “consent” may also be of questionable relevance. Some observers believe that economic leverage and foreign direct investment may be considered as “intervention,” a position that falls on sympathetic ears in an era of contested globalization when smaller countries experience new vulnerabilities about which they can do virtually nothing. A cash-starved developing country can hardly turn down a “request” from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Some “requests” for military assistance (e.g., by the government of Indonesia in East Timor in 1999) may take place after so much arm-twisting that they actually verge on coercion – a term, “coercive inducement,” was coined to reflect this possibility.13 Nonetheless, consent has a distinct international legal character; and its actual expression is a crucial conceptual distinction for military measures against a state as well as for such non-military measures as political and economic sanctions, arms embargoes, and international criminal prosecution.14

About the Book

Chapter 1, “Responding to Humanitarian Demands,” begins with antecedents in the anti-slavery movement, the response to social ills wrought by the expansion of industrial capitalism, and efforts to curb colonial rapaciousness. It then moves to discuss the three historical periods of consequence for this book: the late nineteenth-century founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross to World War II; the Cold War humanitarian system, 1945–89; and the present period beginning after the end of the Cold War. The following section provides an overview of the diverse actors that flock to any human-made disaster from outside a war zone: NGOs; the ICRC; bilateral aid agencies; members of the UN system; the military; for-profit actors (corporations and PMSCs); and the media. There will also be a discussion of local actors, including those responsible for generating demand – that is, armed belligerents who can obstruct as well as facilitate the distribution of aid – as well as NGOs and businesses that can be an essential part of the supply chain.

Chapter 2 focuses on our turbulent times and is titled “The Contemporary Landscape: Need and Greed.” It explores the playing field of contemporary humanitarians: new wars and new humanitarianisms. The main focus is the security threats that transnationalized domestic armed conflicts pose to civilians, communities, and even entire regions. Part of the international response by governments to such destabilization has been to increase overall funding for humanitarian services, including through their own bilateral aid programs. At the same time, the dangerous context in which humanitarian actors typically operate – indeed they are ever more frequently the very targets of kidnapping and violence – has also led to the commodification of protection and access. Paying for such goods and services often fosters uncomfortable decisions and sometimes ethical dilemmas. War-torn countries are high-risk environments with high-risk stakes.