Category Archives: Our Western Identity

Our Western Identity

When deaths count

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Here is the headline we did not see these past two days: “Seven aid workers died in the humanitarian crisis in Gaza”.  Instead, headlines and politicians alike condemned Israel’s deadly military strike on the World Central Kitchen team. 

The difference is telling. We find that human beings with names and faces have been killed. We find that Israel’s intentions and tactics have magically reappeared after six months of so often being passive-languaged out of the narrative by Western governments, the press and most concerningly by humanitarian agencies.  People have thus been re-awakened to the idea that Israel is killing aid workers and civilians in Gaza. Over 197 of the former and 32,000 of the latter (if we limit our numbers to the past six months).

Such is the power of six Western aid workers deaths. (My apologies for omitting from that death toll Saifeddin Issam Ayad Abutaha, a Palestinian member of the team. The headlines were not for him, even if he and his family should weigh equally in our sympathies.). We have U.S. President Joe Biden exclaiming outrage and even highlighting that this attack on humanitarians was not a “stand-alone incident”. That politicians now find the voice to employ such unequivocal language reeks of concern for the cost of their unflinching political and material support to Israel. It also seems like an attempt to create distance from their woeful abandonment of the rules of war over the past six months.

I wonder. Will Israel’s “mistake” provoke more than a shift in tone? I wonder for humanitarians as well. Can we express our outrage over the killing of WCK’s staff without overplaying the narrative of aid workers as “heroes”? Our outrage requires deft communication. Can we make this about the 32,000+ and those to come (because even a ceasefire today will not avoid many of the deaths of tomorrow)? Or even better, can we play on the “heroes” language, perhaps using it to describe not ourselves but the Gazan fathers feeding scraps of scavenged food to their children, or Gazan mothers rinsing from their stinging eyes the dust of their former home?

The issue is that the language and imagery of heroic aid workers too easily invokes a differential; a holier status for people like me and an idea that routine civilian killing is less horrific than special civilian killing, despite the 4571-fold differential in numbers.  As grotesque as the attack on WCK’s vehicles is, instrumentalizing it to open up the space for greater humanitarian action brings risks.  Aid agencies should ensure that our stand on these deaths does not echo the longstanding prejudice and hypocrisy in which the deaths of seven will exert more influence over policy and practice than the deaths of 32,000.  We must thus avoid reinforcing the industrial dehumanization of Palestinians through actions and words that suggest their lives are worth exponentially less than those of Western people.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Maintaining Standards

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While the views expressed below may appear critical of localization, this blogsite is an ally: as local as possible; as international as necessary (see here or here).[1]

One particular and necessary strength of the established global humanitarian order has been the production of guidance and standards that govern practice, boost coherence, and safeguard its legendary accountability.  These standards and guidance uphold hard-fought gains in managerialism which ensure humanitarian work contributes vital assistance and protects the safety of people and communities affected by crisis.  Vigilance is necessary.

On a 10-day visit to Ukraine in November 2022 to collect data for an evaluation, I was shocked to find that critical requirements were being ignored in the interest of preserving local ‘culture’, or due to simple ignorance of the standards and risks. Though examples abound, let me draw your attention to what Ukrainians refer to as a hot dog.  It looks like this:

In contrast, and exemplary of the existing global standard, actual hot dogs look like these:

My research into the matter yielded three essential conclusions.

First, categories and standards matter.  Here, there is clear damage at the conceptual level – a significant blurring of the lines. As has a U.S. Supreme Court Justice has declared, a hot dog is a sandwich (see verdict at 2:37). Conclusively, Miram-Webster defines a sandwich as “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between” (emphasis added).  With neither two slices of bread nor a split roll, the Ukrainian “hot dog” is not a sandwich. This means it is not a hot dog. It belongs more appropriately in the category of miscellaneous meal products such as the burrito, eggroll, or gyro.

These distinctions have enormous consequences for stakeholders such as beneficiaries and delivery agencies. For example, under U.S. law and reflecting a turf war between agencies, a ham and cheese sandwich on one slice of bread is the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which inspects manufacturers daily. But a ham and cheese sandwich on two slices of bread is the responsibility of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which inspects manufacturers about once every five years. And that is just the difference between two sandwiches!  In the aid industry, incentives push in the direction of similar bureaucratic regulation and increased managerial burdens. Obviously, this situation constitutes a threat to the stability and coherence of nutritional guidance. Should UNICEF or FAO have intervened in Ukraine?  Nutritionists or health experts?  We need to avoid this sort of uncertainty.

Second, the Ukrainian “hot dog” presents major health and safety concerns.  Research has shown that choking injury is the fourth leading cause of unintentional death in children under five, hence a risk to the primary target of humanitarian funding. Research produced by the esteemed American Academy of Pediatrics explains that the hot dog is the number one choking hazard due to the size, shape, and consistency of a hot dog chunk, which easily becomes wedged in a child’s windpipe; and is responsible for over 10,000 annual emergency room visits.  This peril is precisely the risk posed by the way the meat protrudes from the breading in a Ukrainian “hot dog”, to be bitten off in choke-friendly chunks by unsuspecting children.  An additional concern, still to be researched, is the risk of germ or bacterial contamination due to the lack of full bun protection for the meat.

Third, this is not good value for money. Claims by advocates of the Ukrainian “hot dog” point to the value and efficiency of the lesser amount of breading, arguing that it will free up financial resources for critically underfunded emergencies such as Yemen, the Horn of Africa, or Haiti. This misdirection ignores the significant reduction in caloric value compared to the standard (American) hot dog bun’s sugar, salt, and ultra-processed carbohydrates. Such a tactical narrowing of the focus also manifests a common evidentiary sleight of hand in the sector: humanitarians cherry-picking one subset of data and ignoring others, such as the disastrous inefficiency of condiment distribution in the Ukrainian “hot dog”.  As the photos reveal, it is a false comparison to substitute a barren cylinder of meat for the more nutritious meat and vegetable (relish, tomato ketchup) sandwiches of a real hot dog.

The target of this post is not the Ukrainian “hot dog” but the importance of safeguarding those components of the international aid system that remain necessary to ensure conceptual clarity of responsibilities and effective programming standards. The author intentionally selected Ukraine to demonstrate that this criticism applies to all local organizations and associations, even ones in a “chosen” crisis because it is local to the West.

[Text updated 14 August 2023]

[1] Disclosure of interest: I benefit from the apparent reimagination of this mantra/policy.  As practice reveals, localization work now includes HQ-level international efforts that are necessary to ensure localization is realized as soon possible (e.g., capacity building, webinars, articles, or even this blog). I note how growth in the formal and ‘water cooler talk’ about localization has blossomed.  This reflects, we must assume, the continued necessity of the international sector, even as the direct funding of assistance to local and national actors reached 1.2 percent of total humanitarian funding for 2022.

Our Western Identity

The Proportionality of Our Attention

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Depending on how you look at it, it was Day 4 or Year 8 of the war in Ukraine when I began drafting this blog.  It is now Day 145. I recall those early days, the emotions stirred as I saw my younger self in the wire-rimmed glasses and quilted winter coat of a young Kyiv professional, or my family in the hand of a child clutching his mother’s luggage strap as the throng surged for the door of a train. There was little in my head that could be labelled dispassionate. In other words, my head held little professional interest in the Ukraine news, even as my unease grew at the white-out erasing all line of sight to any other crisis.

It is OK to identify with people because we find something of ourselves in them.  These paths of affinity trace paths of identity such as race and gender as well as less obvious similarities.  In March 2002, in the back of an MSF Landcruiser, I sat opposite an Angolan man who had already lost four children, cradling a last, limp daughter on his lap. My next several nights brought terrible imagery, and in the mornings came panic attacks at the thought of going to work.  Weeks later, debriefing with a psycho-social care counsellor in Amsterdam, I came to understand why I’d experienced such a reaction on this occasion, and not on others.  I’d become a father in 1999 and was struggling with a new kind of performance anxiety. This man and his little girl were no longer ‘simply’ a pair of humans in extreme distress.  I saw a dad, unable to protect his child, and to this day it seems like the most terrifying feeling in the world. 

It is even OK for the countries of Europe to devote far more attention and aid to the crisis in their back yard, just as we would expect the African Union to be far more involved in a crisis in the Sahel than the OAS or ASEAN nations.  But…

It is not OK to ignore the structure of the aid system to the point that our affinities undermine our common humanity; to ignore the significantly skewed concentration of ‘certain’ affinities in the decision-making clubhouses across major donors, UN agencies, and the large INGOs. Voting on the Christmas dinner menu is not a problem until we in the clubhouses ‘discover’ that turkeys own the bulk of the votes. Neither human affinities nor the AU nor the OAS create a global distortion in aid resources.  The formal humanitarian sector does. Notably, in 2022 this distortion has been noted. Witness the mainstream critique being raised re the proportionality of aid going to the Ukraine versus other crises, such as Somalia, Yemen, or Ethiopia. (see here or here).  And yet our fixation on Ukraine has endured these past months, only beginning to wane in June and only fleetingly interrupted by an earthquake in Afghanistan.

Bias in the ignoring of bias.  Following the previous point, perhaps more revealing and yet less revealed is the double-standard; the non-response to partiality’s contamination of the principled ‘purity’ of aid.  For years now, ‘local’ actors have been forced to swallow the bitter pill that they cannot be neutral because of their local identity, and hence were disqualified from ascending to the penthouse suites in the global humanitarian club. Their ‘natural’ bias of being in their home context, full of affinities, has been judged as threat to principled aid. The system assigns consequences to such bias. So where was the call in the Ukraine crisis for humanitarian decision-makers to step aside given their bias; given their conflicted interest and powerful affinities?  Where was the challenge to the neutrality of their agencies and the appropriateness of having authority over their work given the undivided support for Ukraine among their home country governments and citizens?

Humanitarians need to be particularly mindful of impartiality in this regard, because this is the substantive ethical principle that operationalizes our affinity-laced humanity.  Impartiality instructs humanitarian aid be delivered on a non-discriminatory basis and therefore in proportion to the urgency of need.  We may forgive media corporations for following the cash and clicks even as we might hope for a more equitable distribution of news content.  If it bleeds, it leads – that is their credo?[1] But it is a problem for humanitarians when not all bleeding is of equal media value because humanitarians have a different obligation. Where is the assessment of the sector’s principled performance? As the Ukraine crisis produced and engulfed resources, how did impartiality fare at the global level of distribution?  Where is the concern over agencies pulling staff/resources away from other crises to manage the well-funded expansion of operations in the Ukraine war context? Tellingly, the Ukraine response suggests a pathogen in the system at the level of impartiality, which as an ethical rather than operational principle should raise far greater discussion than the neutrality of local organizations. 

Is institutional attention a critical resource, like healthcare, food, or cash? What does it mean when GD (General Director) after GD heads to Ukraine for a photo op and website home pages greet the visitor with the faces of Ukrainian children in March, April, May, and often still in June? Given the causal linkage of attention to the provision of assistance, asylum, refuge, and compassion, shouldn’t impartiality guide the institutional use of humanitarian media resources, such as an agency’s home pages or its Twitter feed? Perhaps this would have been the perfect time to counter the prominent bias in media attention by devoting prime website real estate to other crises, or sending GDs to other contexts, to interrupt the frozen gaze on Ukraine. To some extent this discussion is taking place. Good. But is the issue being framed as a matter of obligation and principle? Is this discussion alive in board rooms as an issue of accountability? Or are some humanitarians simply feeling uncomfortable with their in-house disproportions?

Privilege is the power of an agency to assume it can determine right from wrong for itself, especially in a system so weak in accountability. The entitlement of the formal Western sector is well illustrated in deciding for itself when it must play by its own rules, when compromising them is ok for itself or not OK for others.

Power is the privilege of not even being conscious of this assumption.

[1] Actually, when you think figuratively about it, If it bleeds, it leads wouldn’t be such a bad standard to guide impartiality.  Certain better than If they’re white, the aid shall take flight.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

A Nexus critique of Humanitarian Protection

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If the Triple or Humanitarian-Development-Peace (HDP) Nexus were not confounding enough for humanitarian operations, think about our sector’s most misunderstood cluster, humanitarian protection, which has long remained shrouded in conceptual fog.  Even after a decade of the UN’s mainstreaming of humanitarian protection, its 2014 Independent Whole of System Review of Protection in the Context of Humanitarian Action concluded that ‘the widespread perspective among humanitarians [is] that they do not have a role to play in countering abusive or violent behaviour even when political and military strategies and tactics pose the biggest threat to life’ (Niland et al., p. 27).

The Review’s finding suggested a pervasive sectoral malaise with the practice of protection. Humanitarian protection thus struggles against a profound if not foundational weakness, one exacerbated by more ‘mundane’ trends such as the decline of multilateralism, the progressive (non-Western) pluralism of the sector, and the consistent weakening of the sector’s rights-based approach.  The proposition here is that the HDP Nexus offers a rare means for humanitarians to think differently about their work in general, and about protection in particular. 

Thus far, however, humanitarian protection’s (scant) Nexus engagement marks a missed opportunity, seemingly bogged down in a discussion of how to adjust the status quo. For example, a year ago PHAP held a webinar to unpack this vital subject, with the promising (if not somewhat clunky) title of The future of protection in the nexus: The role of the Global Protection Cluster and humanitarian protection in the humanitarian-development-peace-security nexus.[1]  Aside from the ICRC’s contributions, I detected zero evidence of humanitarian protection leadership looking differently at the concept of humanitarian protection.  Rather, the conversation remained embedded in the substantial barriers to nexus praxis, such as coordination. 

The literature remains even thinner than the conversation.  Damian Lilly has produced (for ODI’s Humanitarian Practice Network) a relatively comprehensive and discerning overview of how the HDP Nexus affects humanitarian protection. The discussion focusses on the nexus as a policy initiative, and hence generates more of an updating exercise than a rethink.  His paper usefully examines the challenge to humanitarian protection of an overt or institutional linkage with development and peace actors; and then proposes ways forward in dealing with issues such as collective outcomes, program funding, joined up planning, and so forth. The essential yet less ‘useful’ question remains:  What can the HDP Nexus show us about the nature of humanitarian protection?

My own discussion paper on the Triple Nexus, published earlier this year by CHA Berlin, mostly traffics in the less useful.  It fleshes out the discussion obviated by our preoccupation with the pragmatic challenges of linking together three antagonistic, siloed sectors.  Moving beyond the issue of a tri-sectoral organigram, I believe the Nexus should be used to undermine the humanitarian sector’s inadequate, sequestered thinking. It can do this by helping us to better understand both the needs of people and the (inadvertent) consequences of humanitarian programming.  And then the real goal – to change how we see ourselves. The need for such a new gaze?  I would place humanitarian protection near the front of the queue.  Yet – mea culpa — my paper largely avoids the topic.  So now, a first correction of that mistake.

The HDP Nexus presents humanitarians with two can-openers for their tin-walled silo – looking at it (critically) through the lens of development and through the lens of peace (D & P). In their October conference Triple Nexus in Practice – What about Peace? CHA Berlin allowed space for making a few first cuts in the protection can (see the 30-minute conversation between Florian Westphal and me at #4 on the playlist).  What did that conversation yield?

Protection activities form a humanitarian response to those exercising power in such a way as to harm human dignity (see also the full discussion paper). Yet even the best of humanitarian work simultaneously brings negative consequences for peace, development and human dignity.  Why is it so easy to criticise powerful dictators and yet pay no attention to the exercise of power by the sector? Humanitarians may be excused if these are outbalanced or rendered invisible in the heat of emergency response, and yet we same humanitarians should be held accountable when this outbalancing or invisibility stretches on for decades of protracted crisis.  Hopefully, balance and visibility will be enhanced by ‘nexus-thinking’ that drags the sector (kicking and screaming) to the mirror.  What might this look like for protection?

  • The humanitarian sector has a problem with context. As some of the earlier panels from CHA’s conference described, the level of context blindness displayed by international humanitarian interventions can be staggering.  This cannot surprise us so much as our complacency given the apparent complexity of conflict and context, and yet along that dark road of uncertainty, so full of known and unknown unknowns, we feel it imperative (if not virtuous) to publish highly contentious reports on indiscriminate and discriminatory slaughter by a government, deliberate neglect of populations, rape as a weapon of war, and so forth. Don’t our blind spots matter? Are they really just spots? Where is the accountability (the protection) from the predictably unforeseen consequences?  What power dynamics lay beneath the ethics of, say, a foreign organization publishing a report in the absence of a multi-layered, structured inquiry into the local system of social and political relationships?  
  • Does denunciatory advocacy and finger-pointing produce division and divisiveness? Can it reinforce hatred between groups (as the noted human rights lawyer Philippe Sands has concluded)?  Does this form of protection work – so lucrative to the INGO in terms of its public image — essentially constitute an act of Othering, a heightening of group identity that collides with community peace efforts (‘peace’ with a small P) attempting to bring sides together?
  • How does our reductionist, oversimplified and yet dominant narrative transform complex contexts into stereotypes of poverty and endless conflict that therein call for protection work and international humanitarian intervention? Who is it that protects people in crisis from the humanitarian narrative that trumpets the people’s and government’s incompetence, corruption, primitivism and helplessness?

Finally, if Nexus-thinking from a development perspective spotlights and challenges the inequitable distribution of power underlying so much of humanitarian action, it will necessarily confront the disempowering tactics and processes of humanitarian protection. Nexus-thinking should push the sector towards a protection analysis of what it means to claim the narrative of others, and then to propagate this narrative through the power of well-resourced communications departments and well-placed networks of influence.  What does it mean to sit at the table on behalf of others – what a big fat humanitarian anachronism! – when surely today all peoples can and already do organize to tell their own stories and lobby for their own justice, yet often remain functionally invisible because of the space taken and defended by the major Western agencies? 

Nexus-thinking should bring these and many other conversation-starters to the sector’s table. D and P therefore hold the capacity to end much confusion about humanitarian protection and, at the very least, promise to shake the power of H action and its exercise of H protection.

[Edited 30 November 2020 to correct some unclear phrasing]

[1] I note that PHAP is hosting an interesting humanitarian protection debate on Monday, 30 November: The State of Protection in the COVID-19 Era

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Time for a Punch in the Face?

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Can the leopard change its spots?

Across the humanitarian sector, a surfacing of anger, denial, repent, frustration, recognition, shame, rationalization and hope. The sector moves into action: webinars, all-staff meetings, executive suite statement, and ‘This time!’ promises of a new zero tolerance.  This is not 2020, but 2018.  Did culture or power shift?  Hard to say.  How did our sector perform such a deep dive into abuse of power and not seize upon the issue of race? That remains a riddle to be unpacked.

As it now stands, the aid sector is again being frogmarched into a confrontation with what it has always exercised the privilege to ignore. And we should ask: This time, will the sector’s anti-racist protests  or the mea culpa declarations prove the spark to escape its inequitable relationship with people?

It is difficult to bet on success. The humanitarian sector has established a relatively unblemished track record of escaping from the challenge of transformation, leaving change agendas chopped down to technocratic reform.  The practice of reform – a seeming good – hence becomes a practiced evasion, an avoidance of addressing deeply embedded inequalities that coalesce in a cluster of ugly isms – paternalism, sexism, colonialism, elitism, and racism.  That incomplete list constitutes a straightforward humanitarian defect, namely that the sector is not humanitarian.  We may provide vital relief (as might a NATO or even a McDonald’s food distribution) but we trample at existential peril our distinct purpose as enshrined in the principle of humanity.

The difficulty of achieving transformation from within should not surprise us as much as our faith that we will succeed.  It is not simply that the sector relegates big fat disturbing truths to the bottom of the to-do list (too busy saving lives).  It is also the very humanitarian way in which we address symptoms without unearthing the causes.  Example: As the discussion on racism unfolds, Paul Currion explains that terminology like ‘localisation’ looks “suspiciously like language used to avoid talking about the lingering effects of racism.” In effect, localization, the sector’s ‘solution’ to the problem of its resources and power already being localized (i.e., in the West), employs terminology that functions as a terminus, as a building block of the selfsame problem.

So, will COVID-19 and the climate emergency combine to make this moment a critical juncture? Perhaps. Milton Friedman’s shock doctrine claims that “only a crisis-actual or perceived-produces real change.”  Or perhaps it is clearer in the less academic analysis of Mike Tyson: “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”  Will the public outing of the humanitarian system’s institutional racism or its blind fragility amount to a punch in the mouth?  Will somebody “take a sledgehammer” to the entire system, as was suggested in a last month’s must-watch panel discussion hosted by The New Humanitarian? 

A call for disruption

To answer this question, let’s turn it around: what does this sledgehammer look like?  What does humanitarian disruption look like? And can a system disrupt itself from the inside? Can it punch itself in the mouth? In the TNH discussion, the panel explored how the perception of the US as a fragile state might be just such a driver or change. Kenyan cartoonist and political commentator Patrick Gathara asked, for example, if we can imagine African peacekeepers deployed to the United States. 

That question holds the potential to disrupt the dominant narrative, because it asks us to confront the underlying paradigm. To answer, humanitarians must imagine South-to-North humanitarian programming (see my examples, p. 26ff).  This leads to struggle, because we must reconcile our assumed legitimacy of North-to-South humanitarian action with South-to-North humanitarian work, which strikes us intuitively as wrong, or even nonsensical.  Should we not build, for example, a training scenario exercise where Cuban medical teams respond the opioid addiction crisis that killed almost 47,000 Americans in 2018 (compare to last year’s death toll of 11,215 fighters and civilians in the Syrian war)?

In previous analysis of how the humanitarian sector responded to the crisis of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, I concluded that the intervention exemplified a more equitable and limited model of humanitarian action. The difference in how humanitarians conceived of their role in New Orleans versus in ‘humanitarian contexts’ surfaced the bias in the sectoral lens, and we can now recognize this bias as heavily embedded in racialized verdicts on the neediness, competence and agency of some people.

Humanitarian and disaster relief teams descended on the stricken city of New Orleans and delivered stuff – water, food, blankets, shelter. In other words, a decidedly punctual, modest response aiming to meet basic needs via the delivery of emergency relief. Contrary to the way it intervenes in the ‘global South’, the humanitarian intervention did not conceptualise the crisis in larger terms, and did not see the need (or feel the paternalistic urge?) to engage in rights-based political and social engineering with the goal of ‘fixing’ New Orleans. As a result, it did not seek to address long-standing structural vulnerabilities and problems of violence, corrupt governance, substance abuse, racial segregation and discrimination, gender oppression and violence, shockingly poor education and health services and the myriad of other needs the humanitarian system has captured within the scope of the ‘humanitarian crisis’. (DuBois 2018; 6, citations omitted).

The Katrina response hence demonstrated crisis intervention without further ‘humanitarianisation’. In contrast, crisis in the ‘global south’ produces short-term and assistentialist approaches that “are normalized to compensate for the persistence of structural problems related to rule of law, democratic accountability, public services and deep-seated social division.”[1]  Sounds like a key brick in the wall of humanitarian expansion.

The point is that challenges to the assumptions of North-to-South humanitarian action can be illuminating. However, the risk is that we do not probe deep enough.  One surprising moment in the aforementioned TNH webinar came as a number of panellists agreed on the worrying signs of instability in the US – threats of violent military repression of democratic protest, an uncontrolled virus that devastates ethnic minorities and the poor, divisive and corrupt politics, economic ruin of millions of Americans while a stock market sets records, etc.  That discussion included a proposition: “Should we consider the situation in the US a humanitarian crisis?” The audience answered in the affirmative, 45% saying yes versus 20% for no.

Is American really Yemen (or CAR, Sudan…) in disguise? This question, provocative and as emotionally satisfying as it may be, seems like the wrong question. The issue is not that the sector needs to treat the US more like the ‘dark continent’, it’s that it needs to treat the ‘dark continent’ more like it treats the US.  We should reject the idea that the US today is a ‘shithole’ in the way that resembles the ‘shithole’ countries that we have self-referentially defined as humanitarian contexts. We should learn to see that these so-called humanitarian contexts actually resemble countries in the West, full of contradictions and corruption, achievement and incompetence, massive advantages and terrible needs; and full of people whose dignity (a) rejects the assumption of needing to be saved and (b) demands the right to own their struggles.

The TNH poll thus invites the ‘white gaze’, where the deviation from a presumed White/Western norm of wealth and stability generates an exceptionalist break from history and politics, and yields the virtuous hierarchy of giver/savior above the helpless, incompetent victim.  Arianne Shahvisi captures this racially biased gaze in her concept of ‘tropicality’, and David Chandler has described this as a perception of non-Western countries as “incapable of rational policy-development and prone to corruption and nepotism,” peopled with victims in need of Western intervention against their “corrupt and inefficient elites.” 

To disrupt humanitarian power is to remove the legacy of racism from the justification and extensiveness of our interventions in places like South Sudan, Bangladesh, Haiti, or CAR.  It is to subvert the privilege of believing that our good intentions magically overcome our causal relationship to the profound injustices of those places.  For that sort of disruption, though, we should perhaps look outside the sector, because it will not come from within.

[Edits for clarity were made to the original post, on 28 August, about five hours after posting.]

[1] Fiori, J. et al. (2016) The Echo Chamber: Results, Management, and the Humanitarian Effectiveness Agenda. London: Save the Children, p. 54.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The Privilege of Control

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Anti-racism protests have prompted unprecedented conversations across many parts of the humanitarian sector.  Institutions and their leaders have raised their hands as witnesses and responders to the destructive practices of racism, and to being spreaders and perpetrators of it.  There is a flow of apology and commitment.  We see strong vows to change, to listen, to understand, to do better, to open up uncomfortable spaces, to rectify, and to eradicate.  An odd gap in this litany of promises?  Reckoning.  Justice.

Let us begin with the simple fact that various forms of racial discrimination – both individualized acts of racial discrimination and institutional racism – are not examples of bad behavior.  They are examples of wrong behavior.  They are deemed in much of the world to be an offense, usually a civil offense but in some states a criminal offense.  Legal codes attach this gravity to racism because racial discrimination and racism (just as sexism, etc.) constitutes an act of direct harm upon an individual, and it is a particularly insidious category of harm because it targets and violates that which is immutable about a human being.

In a textbook display of privilege, agencies within the sector have assumed the capacity to act as both defendant and judge or jury. Defining the boundaries of how they will talk about addressing their racism marks an appropriation, so for instance deciding to look forward but deflecting accountability for the present or the past.  Angela Bruce-Raeburn asks the question that is erased by these declarations:  “Can a chief executive ‘apologise’ for racism and stay?”

This is a particular exercise of privilege, because it both masks and is a product of our virtue. As I’ve written before, the legitimacy of the sector is challenged by its susceptibility to moral licensing, allowing its good works to facilitate or counterbalance bad stuff. We downplay the offense and then rationalize our actions.  Why such persistent difficulties with community engagement, localisation or ‘downward’ accountability? Because we justify our inaction and allow our racism to hide in the plain sight of “power over” policies or practices of knowing what is best for them.  Move fast fast fast and you do not notice.  Beware the strong resemblance to the original humanitarian sin of its colonial legacy, the enterprise of subjugation and resource extraction being justified by the civilizing mission.

Self-accountability

In the almost 25 years since the JEFAR first recommended that humanitarians needed to be held accountable by an independent body, the sector has devoted consistent, massive effort to producing codes of self-accountability, an ever-expanding lists of best practices, standards, targets and other technocratic non-fixes to the problem of the sector’s social injustice.[1] Complaint mechanisms, suggestion boxes, agency hotlines and help desks are emblematic of the twinned mindsets of privilege and of charity, a uniquely inebriating potion that mixes good intentions with an (un)conscious “it’s better than nothing” (“happy to get something”?) rationalisation of sectoral shortcomings.  In the end, the underlying distinction of humanitarian accountability is that it does not produce the state in which an agency must give and then be held to account for its decisions and actions. Aid requires a reckoning.  And when an offense is committed, it demands justice as well.

The starting point of the internal discussions to come should be letters of resignation. It is not for me to say if they should be accepted, but they should be sincere and on the table. Truth and reconciliation? Independent adjudicators? National inquiries in the countries where aid takes place? Grace? This is easier for me to write than to now predict if I would have had the integrity to submit my own back when I was director.  I made the choice to remain, a choice rationalized by the good being done and by my occasional and completely ineffective protestations. My decision marked the mistaken weighing of moral obligations against programmatic output.

Critical to change is recognition that weak sectoral and negligible external accountability do not give rise to or permit racism in humanitarian action.  The problem to be addressed is the reverse. Racism gives rise to the sector’s insufficient accountability. The solution is simple in theory.  As Themrise Khan astutely argues, “it is the aid ‘recipients’ who must push back against the white aid system”. Accountability is not an internal treasure for the dominant agencies of the Global North to bequeath, but rather a power, authority and even a vocabulary that will need to be taken and will need to be constructed. 

To do that, society must counter the sector having approached accountability as an internal or isolated exercise.  MEAL programs and internal reporting can and do contribute to accountability, but accountability requires a multiplicity of external prongs.  This is what you would find in the West, where accountability for the work in an NGO (or business) arises from the independent work of journalists, review-based websites (coming soon?), official ombudsmen, law enforcement, lawsuits, citizen watch-dog groups, government regulatory bodies, consumer groups, etc. The blindspot should now be apparent. Efforts to improve governance and strengthen civil society should be pushing for the requisite frameworks and skills to hold foreign aid agencies to account and protect people from harm.  The neo-colonial gaze means never seeing ourselves as the problem to fix, and yet we exert enormous power over the lives of people in crisis.

The external equivalent of Bruce-Raeburn’s taking issue with non-resignation resides in the governments and civil societies of the states and communities where humanitarians work.  How can an organisation that understands itself to have racism threading through its work and culture – driving the conceptualization of programs, framing the narrative and imagery of ‘heroic’ aid, suffusing the relationship with its employees – simply assume that it should or is able to remain engaged in said work? In other words, what is the significance of and process by which we construct ourselves as fit for the purpose of delivering assistance and protection to (predominantly) people of color? This is white privilege at work. Accountability for its racism requires resignation of the humanitarian project, to be accepted or rejected by the governments and communities that have suffered the offense. 

[21/July: I made two edits to this post — minor cosmetic changes in the first para and the insertion of a missing “not” in the fifth para.]

[1] While there is considerable external accountability to HQ or institutional donors, this relates more to responsible financial management and log-framed targets, and not to the character of the aid or to the relationship of the agency to the community.

Our Western Identity, Politics

The Test of the Times

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The Road to Recognition

Who or what has most triggered change in the humanitarian sector over the past five years?  Arguably, the answer to that question is either Harvey Weinstein or the ancient humans who invented cash.  If we ask ourselves that same question in 2025, the answer may prove similarly disturbing. It may be Derek Chauvin and George Floyd.  Of course, such a disturbance is to be applauded even as our dependence on such external triggers should raise searching questions. Phenomena like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter spotlight a moral and operational indolence and an active hypocrisy at the heart of our humanitarian action. A humanitarian sector should not require being pressed into these discussions (this evolution!) by threats to our income and image.

Like sexism, the racism and abusive power dynamics in the sector constitute in large part a category even Donald Rumsfeld failed to see – the “unknown known”.  This is a set of assumptions, beliefs and ideologies that remain invisible or inert within the central cultural power block of the sector, and yet perfectly obvious to those who suffer it every day. It takes powerful lenses to filter out such tragic disempowerment.  We see it and even denounce it elsewhere, but somehow not when we look at our organizations.  I see it, but somehow not when I look in the mirror.  Or even more accurately: somehow I do not see it enough to act.

[Digression warning] I am reminded of plastic-coated coffee cups.  For decades now I certainly understood the environmental cost of throwing out hundreds of cups each year.  Shazam!  One day I suddenly saw it in a way that mattered. I bought a reusable cup, along with tens of millions of other people.  A miraculously swift change. No campaign, no acronymed initiative, no tax incentive.  Can we bottle that? Deploy it elsewhere?  How do we understand that change of perspective; that noticing? And how do we avoid the infinitesimal sacrifice (the self-satisfaction?) of buying a reusable cup not later rationalizing, say, the decision to fly off on a weekend break? [Digression over]

Given the ‘revelations’ of the past months, humanitarians no longer have the option of avoiding the mirror, for historical and institutional racism is now visibly central to the humanitarian project and elemental to outing our deeply internalized paternalism (read: colonialism).  And shazam!, there now seems to be an internal momentum. The issues at stake – staying with them over time and not launching ourselves into the next crisis or exciting initiative – will test the sector and test humanitarians.  In a sector with a pronounced short-term gaze, endurance must be questioned.  Prolonged discomfort does not fit well with a sector designed in part to help its inhabitants feel good. White privilege is bad enough. White savior privilege might be its most toxic strain.

As many have said, the sector needs to listen (and here).  Further, we within the sector need to recognize.  Listening will help us recognize the pain as well as the opportunities.  But we also need to recognize the thing itself.  What do white privilege, discriminatory decisions, rasicst structures and interwoven coloniality actually look like in policy and practice (and let’s not forget the power dynamics of inequality or sexism)? Some instances are shockingly easy to spot.  Some not. We need to build awareness of the telltale signs, an Audubon catalogue of ‘invisible’ visibility and subterranean workings.  How has racism so successfully ‘hidden’ in plain sight, overlooked in our echo-chamberous institutions or casually justified by appeal to our ‘exceptional’ objectives?  Should we test sectoral decision-makers for this ability/sensitivity, just as we already test to ensure key qualities or certify expertise in other areas?  And should we as individuals test ourselves, to see if our awareness of (e.g.,) racism is improving?

A Simple Test

Talking on a news program about the COVID pandemic, a French doctor opined, “If I can be provocative, shouldn’t we be doing this study in Africa, where there are no masks, no treatments, no resuscitation?”  What do you think? Did this off-handed idea sound reasonable, a way of testing a potential vaccine in real-world conditions, and self-aware to being ‘provocative’?  Or did you find it revolting?  WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was swift and blunt in his denunciation: “Africa can’t and won’t be a testing ground for any vaccine.”  The story spread. Ivoirian footballer Didier Drogba called it ‘absolutely disgusting’. In today’s world, that’s actually a denunciation a billion or so people might hear about.

Contrast the French doctor’s provocation to the declaration of the “Inclusive Vaccine Alliance”, formed by the governments of France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands.  By working together as an alliance, they hope to reach a successful vaccine quicker, and then allow other EU members an opportunity to use it. In addition the Alliance “is also working to make a portion of vaccines available to low-income countries, including in Africa.”  [Add three clapping hands emojis here].

I now need to apologize for conducting an experiment of sorts.  Did you spot the problem with the statement of the four governments? I am indebted to the Open Society’s A. Kayum Ahmed for this example, and I would encourage all readers to go to his dissection of the Alliance’s statement, which he labels an act of “vaccine sovereignty” that portrays Africa as a “site of redemption.”.

Well, how did you fare? Did you recognize the flaws in the Alliance’s statement? Or did it slide by because it so resembles the dozens of ‘innocuous’ statements we read every day? My score? Maybe a D+.  I thought the word “portion” sounded measly, prompting an image of Oliver Twist begging for more porridge, and I sensed though did not identify the deeper issue raised by Ahmed.

What is the Target?

Which statement exemplifies the bigger problem for the sector, the necessary objective of our calls to address systemic racism?  Is it the doctor’s statement, because of the overt denigration and the hurt it caused millions of viewers? Easier to spot. Easier to reach agreement against.  Easier to address. Easier to make progress. But is it also easier to demonize, and does it thereby help mask the insidious, incremental ‘invisibility’ of the Alliance’s statement?

Like many have said, this is not going to be easy.

            *                                         *                                         *                                        

[Final Note: Even if you disagree with Ahmed or me about the racism in the Alliance’s statement, you still need to spot it as a potential issue.  Think security management.  The only way to identify signs of insecurity is to spot and then investigate potential signs of insecurity. The requirement, hence, is a quantum leap in our sensitivity to racism.]

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Finding air

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I can’t breathe. A novel virus that has choked the breath out of over 400,000 people and a white police officer who choked the life out of man by driving his knee press of historical, pervasive American racism into George Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. 

A stirring, frightening global juncture and a moment for humanitarian ‘thought leaders’ to offer their opinions on whiteness, racism, and colonialism in humanitarian action.  An opportunity to share my thinking and to engage in the efforts to ‘make a difference’.

I have spent the week trying to find the right words. Long draft essays. Perhaps less is more.  Approaches to privilege:

  1. Listen to our colleagues and to the recipients of aid, because we don’t know enough about the consequences of whiteness. 
  2. Listen to and interrogate the excuses we have made, because we have certainly known enough to act.
  3. Listen to critics (or here) who see a dangerous, active institutional racism in the power dynamics and practices of our sector, not just in the people leading it. 
  4. Think about how to relinquish  space.

I have not posted a blog here since July. To some extent, I was busy.  To some extent, a loss of voice. A birthday reminds me that the time to speak out is not well served by ‘maybe next week-ism’.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Community Engagement — Problems Less Discussed

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Expanding the Rules of Engagement

In sector jargon, the concept of “community engagement” (CE) refers to a process of interaction and exchange between an aid agency and a community.  To my ear, that sounds more like gathering intelligence, or conducting market research. Closer to a modern day ‘getting to know the natives’ [for their own benefit – of course!] than to getting to know the neighbors?  Another way of thinking about CE: Why does human communing need so many conferences, experts and guidelines? 

Well, maybe CE is not so simple as human communing.  A quick look at “engagement” reveals a colourful term, which suggests plenty about CE.  Meanings of “engagement” from the OED (online):

Meanings How meanings might relate to CE
An agreement to marry somebody Engagement as a ‘legal or moral
obligation’
An arrangement to do something For example, a procedure or
contract to meet and find out more about a community?
Actual fighting between two
militaries or armed forces 		This suggests conflict in CE, the
‘violence’ of inequitable power
relationships, armed with the
authority of clipboards
Being involved or in a relationship with somebody or something in an attempt to understand them/it The community as a target of
understanding, a fundamentally
unidirectional process
An arrangement or agreement to
employ somebody 		Such as employing a community to gain information necessary to
access, funding, etc.?

A collision between communities

Reading sector literature one quickly spots the tendency to refer to an agency’s engagement with a community, rather than a community’s engagement with an agency.  Equally telling, the failure to see our CE as engagement by a community, meaning seeing ourselves as a community, and a rather exotic one at that.  The humanitarian/foreign aid and crisis response sector AKA “the international community”.  AKA? Perhaps ASAA is more accurate – Also Self-Aggrandized As.

Therein lies an excess of typically invisible and not so invisible (see DRC Ebola response) collisions.  Of specific relevance here, and largely undiscussed, would be the extent to which this engagement marks a collision between a predominantly Western culture whose fundamental building block is the individual, and non-Western cultures which remain to varying degrees fundamentally grounded in the community or collective.[1]  Is the sector paying attention to the consequences of exporting the West’s historic shift from ‘we’ to the centrality of ‘I’?

Thankfully, some humanitarian organizations have already begun thinking about this problem.  In a recent article published by The New Humanitarian (FKA IRIN) that discusses research by Mercy Corps:  

South Sudan is a collective society, but currently the way much aid is delivered mirrors how Western donors think and is often modelled on their own societies. Organisations tend to work with individuals or households, but in the South Sudan context, everything is communal. Aid actors need to shift our Western notions of individual and household vulnerability to consider our response from a collective perspective.

Mercy Corps’ research concludes “that when humanitarian actors fail to understand these existing local coping strategies, they risk inadvertently undermining them.”[2]  That said, the exportation of the ‘I’ culture of ‘radical’ individualism goes far beyond humanitarian intervention.  It may be as inevitable as globalization or global warming, so let us avoid being overly romantic and focus on mitigation.

Spelling it out: humanitarian action places the individual or household in competition with other crisis-affected individuals and households.  It forces a competition, an individualized misery contest, to qualify for or attract the attentions and deliveries of the aid giver.  The way we deliver aid (not the aid itself) places in harm’s way a community’s social capital, their network of relationships that depends upon trust and reciprocity and which becomes critical at times of crisis. This social capital, rather than being nurtured or developed in the humanitarian response, is displaced by the expectation that the international community can and will solve their problems through individualized sets of technological and material interventions. The community contract (let alone the development of a social contract with the state) is thus eroded. Off the top of my head, I tend to agree with Mercy Corps’ conclusion that the nurturing rather than undermining of these social relationships is vital to peace-building and stability in the future. 

The cultural insensitivity of an aid response based on individuals

The impact of exporting/imposing a particular individuality can be seen in how the paradigm of individual human rights (and individual choice) has governed aid choices even in places where communities and a sense of communal or family duty remain dominant; where they remain necessary to life and to identity.  Think of how an agency might dissuade or even scold the mother of a malnourished child when it becomes obvious that she is sharing the therapeutic food packets among her several hungry children (contrary to instructions to use it to feed only the acutely malnourished child who qualified for treatment).  We can also see it in the lens created by our systemic reverence for the humanitarian principle of impartiality, which essentially declares the individual (or household) to be the fundamental metric for the distribution of assistance.

Communities have to be quite powerful to refuse this power imbalance.  In the response to Typhoon Haiyan, some communities in the Philippines pushed against agency plans to distribute aid to individual families, insisting that this would not be well-perceived in the community and that the community would ensure the welfare of all.  In other words, our ‘impartiality-based’ aid would cause harmful tensions and violate communal norms.  The Filipino example illustrates CE’s inadvertent globalization of a ‘universal’ individual-centered humanity that has the power to erase, devalue or, worse, declare as a pathology, that which constitutes community, tribe, collective, etc.

Ethics as a way forward?

As a process, CE rightfully comes highly proclaimed, helping humanitarians do things right. It is also the right thing to do.  The principle of humanity means all people belong to a common family with a common inalienable dignity, and this dignity requires even-footed engagement rather charity. On this latter ethical principle, communities must be more insistent. Humanitarians have long evaded meaningful CE because they operationalized it as a laudable option, not as a prerequisite to being humanitarian. The result is CE’s being persistently outweighed in the ‘heat of action’ by other pressing needs, such as a rapid deployment.  Even where an agency declares CE as the right thing to do, its de facto translation seems more aspirational than normative. Is poor or absent CE ever deemed an ethical violation? An abuse of power? Was somebody fired? We unnecessarily glorify humanity, impartiality or CE.

The way forward lies in our comprehending the complexity of such principles in practice. For instance, humanity acknowledges the equality of human beings with intelligence, rights and agency; and yet also brings an unthinking globalization of a ‘universal’ humanity that can erase or devalue diversity and reinforce hierarchies.  This paradox then inheres to CE itself: CE might contribute to the success of a very particular sort of humanitarian intervention, one that devalues communities qua communities and imposes a regime of assistance based on individuals or individual households. 

The problem is not CE. The problem is not the principle of humanity. The problem is deploying CE while blind to its potential shortcomings, impositions and negative consequences. CE, so seldom simple human communing and so often unidirectional or hierarchical, is designed to generate empowerment, people-centered and contextually adapted aid, and ‘beneficiary’ buy in.  These luminous goals need to be championed; and research needs to explore how negative consequences might be identified and mitigated.  Addressing CE rather than simply calling for it is the way to address power imbalance between two communities, one a billionaires club of agencies and the other being in crisis; one on a mission and the other at the sharp end of a mission that engages with them as a target.  Sounds too much like meaning #3.

[1] It would be inaccurate to frame this generalization as a binary – it is more about positioning along a spectrum.  I do not think it an exaggeration, and it is certainly receiving a great deal of attention these days, to suggest that the escalating individualism of the West is deeply intertwined with many of the political and social problems in the West. As David Brooks opines in a NYT Op-Ed: “I think we all realize that the hatred, fragmentation and disconnection in our society is not just a political problem. It stems from some moral and spiritual crisis. We don’t treat one another well. And the truth is that 60 years of a hyper-individualistic … culture have weakened the bonds between people. They’ve dissolved the shared moral cultures that used to restrain capitalism and the meritocracy. Over the past few decades the individual, the self, has been at the center.” In other words, individualism may prove to be the sort of invasive species you will regret importing to a new environment.

[2] Mercy Corps, The Currency of Connections, p.4. On this point, Mercy Corps is citing to “Famine in Somalia: Competing Imperatives, Collective Failures, 2011-12” Daniel Maxwell and Nisar Majid. Hurst Publications (which I did not consult).

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

A new humanitarian ethics? Blog 3.

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Not completely out of work mode over the holidays, I hunted down this scene from Spectre, where James Bond meets his love-interest-to-be (Léa Seydoux’s Madeleine Swann). The writers introduce her via a cinematic masterclass in cutting the cloth of a character in only a few strokes.  First the visuals. She’s stunning, chic and exudes self-sufficiency to the point of frostiness. To top it off, she’s French.  Thus far: necessary but not sufficient.  How to signal her utter exceptionality?  From the mouth of Bond: “How does one train at Oxford and the Sorbonne, become a consultant, spend two years with Médecins sans Frontières … and end up here.”

A wave of disappointment. In the U.S. alone, Spectre opened in 3500 theatres. My elite club was now registering Kardashian appeal. OK, pride swelled my ego, but I didn’t really want to admit it.

It made sense.  MSFness as a character prop. MSFness as a signifier of a cool, rebellious commitment to ideals.  MSFness as the goop of the beautiful and the anointed. This MSFness that I hold so dear, my own Ferrari of humanitarian cred, increasingly bears resemblance to the sort of acquisition Choire Sicha finds in personal consumption. “Polo shirts, cars, houses, children, purebred dogs, washing machines, golf clubs, boats. These are things we buy as a shortcut to an identity.”  We must add to that the things we do, because in modern society we don’t just hold jobs and take holidays, we consume them, with a meaninfgul life reformulated as an accumulation of purchases and experiences.

Humanitarianess. No less than James Bond was hooked. So was I. So am I. We need to talk about this from an ethical perspective: the role played by humanitarian action as the personal champion of my self-image. This is my exploitation of humanitarianism’s winning formula in the competition for remarkability.  Among other traits, this is my self-curated individuality and selflessness – my ‘sacrificing’ a more common career that would have brought far greater financial reward.  But how can it be selfless if it goes so far to defining my self?

And let’s not be so negative. Work that matters.  Making a difference. Saving the world or just saving somebody. A contribution to the good of humanity. The admiration of those we admire. The praise of family and politicians and donors and beneficiaries. How much is this worth?  What price can be put on personal enrichment and contentedness? Better yet, how much should I be willing to pay for a life of purpose?  Seems a bargain now two generations (in my family) removed from a belief in God that might have conveyed similar spiritual fulfilment. Oh, and it’s lot cheaper than psychotherapy or a swish yoga retreat.

Since Henri Dunant this selfishness was certainly always present. Times, though, are changing, and humanitarianism is arguably ever more co-opted by the modern zeitgeist.  Does the next generation not require a more individualized, tangible participation in the good cause? Do they not possess a thirst to be seen embracing all the right thirsts?  Swipe right for humanitarian action. Can you name a more effective signifier of virtue?  Here is Rob Acker, CEO of Salesforce.org, speaking at a Davos panel hosted by IRIN: “Employees are the new humanitarians.… The number one attribute that millennials look for in their job is to have purpose. And companies need to give them that outlet for purpose.”

This is one example of what the IRIN article labels ‘the new players’, an assortment of newcomers to the humanitarian table who are “unapologetically redefining what it means to be humanitarian.”  A large part of me cringes, wanting to seal myself off in the comfort of humanitarianism’s exceptionality, in my club’s exclusivity.  Corporate humanitarians indeed! Yet I stop with the snobbery: we are not that different when it comes to the quest for purpose. 

Perhaps the more important question is whether this redefinition of humanitarians requires a similar redefinition of humanitarianism.  What happens if this changing of the guard exposes the sector’s ugly secret, the danger that my work has always been (ponderously) about me, then multiplied by the number of humanitarians?  

Even if that pushes cynicism too far, the point is the potential disruption of the charity model upon which the sector rests.  This life of purpose challenges the selflessness of our motivation and its insistence that benefits accrue unilaterally to the recipients of our beneficence.  Aid is not supposed to be self-interested.  Sure, we will admit that aid jobs earn us a decent wage and bring travel to exotic locations, but we treat those benefits more like incidentals.  We do not allow them to undermine the force of the charity model, and we rather easily sink into our faith in compassion as the ‘prime mover’ of our work.

The principle of humanity is compassion and it is definitive. As the sole motivation of humanitarian action it functions to distinguish it from other forms of relief aid. That ethical core needs to be discussed and it needs to change. In Madeleine Swann’s life prop, we can see that the ethics of humanitarian action must include a recognition of the dividends accruing to the humanitarian, and that nowadays act as a tax paid to us (and our organizations and donors) by the denigration of the ‘beneficiary’ to the lowly status of victim in need of being saved.  As I have written elsewhere, these are “the deeply engrained inequities of the Western charity model – plastering hierarchies such as rich/poor or developed/needy and giver/receiver or saviour/beggar upon nations, communities and people.” 

What might a better ethical model look like if not the charity model?  Perhaps it is useful (i.e., perhaps it helps deconstruct humanitarian power) to reconceptualize humanitarian action as an exchange, a transaction.  Not mere embodiments of compassion, but humanitarian action as an expression of mutual self-interest.