Category Archives: Uncategorized

Uncategorized

Resetting our standards

2 Comments

Here is Friday’s Gaza headline: “Israel’s defense chief says military ‘thoroughly planning’ offensive in crowded Gaza border town”.  One might ask: What the hell does that mean?  I don’t know which is more shocking, the idea that it has not been thoroughly planned (aside from those first few days), or that it has. And that is perhaps the point.  We spend an enormous time reading, thinking and arguing about the What.  Is it a genocide? Is it antisemitic? Is it shielding? Was Hamas attack justified? Is this a humanitarian crisis? Has it been sufficiently planned? And so forth.

Moving beyond what is happening

I am more confounded by the Why than the What.  On the Israeli side, at least, the Why seems less mysterious: Netanyahu saving his political career or keeping himself out of jail, or Israel obliterating a proximate threat, or the belief in religious destiny, fear + history + racism + hatred, etc.  What I struggle to understand is why the US government (or the West more generally) is so staunchly entrenched on one side of this conflict given Israel’s arguably genocidal and inarguably targeted campaign to destroy civilian life in Gaza.  It would have been relatively easy to support Israel militarily behind the cloak of much more nuanced public positioning.  Ditto for the UK or Germany.

The US will pay a steep price for this solidarity. Insight from the ever-incisive Nesrine Malik: “When a less safe world becomes an acceptable price to pay for loyalty to allies, the west’s claim to authority as a political and military custodian of law and order looks increasingly tenuous.  Once that authority is gone, the system is rocked from within.”  Certainly, the US position can be explained in negative terms: that these governments are stuck with the fruits of their tortured allegiances, or wedded to the finances of military spending, or that 2024 is a campaign year for embattled President Biden (and PM Sunak), or that the West maintains a double-standard, or that their hypocrisy reveals the inner rot of Western hegemonic power and narcissism.  Certainly these explanations describe influences, but none seems sufficient; none seems reason enough to undermine the West’s own global power and so efficiently gut the very ideals that are so central to wielding this power. Not to mention running the risk of indictments in the genocide cases to come.   

I want to step out of my depth (read: speculation alert!) and ask, what really is at stake for America? Here, let’s postulate some stakes. And if I get it all wrong, please use the comments to enrich the discussion.

An assault on IHL

Violence such as in Gaza today or Mosul in 2016-17 exposes the inherent destructiveness of a military strategy based upon bombardment of densely populated areas, pulverizing alike the people and the social fabric of a people. The mass erasure of the countless details that make us human is not excusable as collateral damage. Is the concussion being delivered to international humanitarian law (IHL) a deliberate strategy to whittle away the safeguards – the rules of war – through which the West has been exercising power, even if also skillfully ignoring these rules when necessary. This time, though, the curtain of hocus pocus surgical strikes has been pulled back. War is messy. That’s why we created rules.

One major difference here is the absence of that oldest of survival strategies – flight. There is literally nowhere to seek safety, nowhere to shield your children.  Now 134 days too late, even President Biden expresses his concern over the impossibility of evacuating to a place of safety. The strategy of bombardment is thus the airborne equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel; barrel after barrel for months on end, with the additional stipulation that the Israeli military has claimed it is only trying to shoot the sharks, who happen to be shielding in the same barrels. Welcome to urban warfare against an irregular armed enemy. Welcome to the end of IHL’s doctrine of proportionality. Welcome to the wider public watching, reading and talking about it.

The strategy is to normalize this type of warfare, to expand the boundaries of justifiable (i.e., legal) or publicly acceptable combat tactics, because urban warfare is the future of an urbanized world.  It’s not just the shelling of civilians, Gaza marks a rebranding of the tolerable when it comes to civilians, where tactics such as cutting off food and electricity or blocking aid are openly declared.

Shielding – Maintaining the West’s options

Recall the loud condemnation of Hamas’ practice of hiding among civilians – known as “shielding”. And the quieter explanation that while shielding is a forbidden tactic, IHL does not condone using an enemy’s shielding as justification for indiscriminately and indifferently killing lots of civilians.[1] With global access to making and viewing videos, violations of the law become ever more un-deniable and un-explainawayable; hence the need in an age of asymmetric warfare to normalize previously less public and “necessary” transgressions.  

Shielding – Protecting soldiers at the expense of civilians

The heavy reliance on bombardment can also be seen as a strategy of deliberate shielding by the Israelis, as with the US in Iraq. The domestic political imperative in Western democracies now demands sacrificing civilians over there in order to protect military expenditure, popular support, and election votes at home. Israel’s approach in Gaza, like the US’s (and allies) actions in Mosul, shows how this practice forms a more surreptitious form of shielding: one military places “enemy” civilians in the path of violence to protect itself from the enemy military. Bloody and destructive as it might be, invading on foot maintains a much higher level of control over the use of lethal weaponry, reducing civilian casualties/costs but adding steeply to those among the invading soldiers. For Western democracies, this means casualties at the ballot box.

Looking forward

Why such unwavering (and carefully worded criticism) US support to Israel? Is it that the US (or the West) needs and wants Israel to be the dirty cop in the region? Is that enough? Or does it reflect a shift in realpolitik thinking, a belief that law and norms like IHL will prove ever more inadequate in a fast-charging future where inequity, brutality and naked self-interest will be both necessary for the securitization of the West’s idealized societies and widely broadcast (when the West is involved, as with Gaza).  The new world political calculation is that widespread demolition from afar thus becomes “necessary” for the defense of democracy and the rule of law. Perhaps this was always the case, but that was never the ideal presented to the public.

I feel as if I am being prepared to accept tomorrow what constitutes a futurist dystopia of today.  In fact, I think we are being initiated into tolerating it. Seems we as a society are halfway through Niemoller’s poem, and that doesn’t even count our acceptance if not collective ignorance of the war in Sudan, ethnic cleansing in Nagorno Karabakh, mass civilian deaths in Tigray, Rohingya persecution, or the re-education camps in China’s Uighur region (not an exhaustive list). 

I worked for years on the protection (witnessing and advocacy) side of humanitarian action. I preached the idea that if only we could communicate more powerfully what was happening, it would stop (or, at least, slow), or bring justice. Either times have changed, or I have long been too much of an idealist. A less safe world, as Malik says above.  This is the gambit on which we have now more decisively embarked.  Creating a less safe world, and at the same time one where the costs will be inequitably distributed, imposed upon the have nots in order to create and maintain the safety of the haves.

[1] In the US or the UK, nobody would support a SWAT team decision to shoot dozens of pedestrians in order to stop the escape of one murderer. Or claim that in a hostage situation it was OK to lob grenades from afar (killing all) rather than take the risk of losing police in storming the location. We expect and police expect to place civilian safety above their own (within limits). IHL is the same. But the home country politics of US soldiers dying on foreign soil increasingly gives rise to a different weighting of lives, where one American non-civilian trumps [fill in the foreign blank of men, women and children].

Uncategorized

Not in Our Name

3 Comments

[I have been drafting and delaying the posting of a number of blogs related to Gaza. In the small points they make they simply don’t seem appropriate given the latest news.  Now over nine weeks in, I’ve lost faith in the idea of waiting for the right time.]

Last Thursday, world humanitarian #1 Martin Griffiths conceded defeat in Gaza: the message that we have been giving – we here being the humanitarian community […] – is that we do not have a humanitarian operation in southern Gaza that can be called by that name anymore.

A praiseworthy defense of the idea and the word behind the idea. We need more.  “Humanitarian” has become a misnomer when used to describe a type of crisis,[1] or mistaken for an “it’s okay, you can focus elsewhere” counterbalance in a hyper-localized Armageddon like Gaza, or applied as an adjective to describe violence (the oxymoronic “humanitarian wars” in the Balkans or Libya), or even a pop culture armada of ships (at 1:34) carrying enough proton torpedoes to detonate a galaxy.  Truth is, our label – humanitarian – carries with it far more capacity to mask, mislead, and divert than we defend against. Maybe that’s because it also bestows such pride and prize.

To pause or not to pause? That is the wrong question

Gaza’s supercharged media environment seems particularly capable of freighting the word with ever greater political liabilities. By way of an example, last month the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2712, calling for “urgent and extended humanitarian pauses” throughout the Gaza Strip to enable humanitarian access in the Gaza Strip. Though immensely more desirable than unrestrained violence, humanitarians should reject the idea of a pause in their name, or any suggestion of a compassionate act by the pausing parties.  Let’s look at the math:

  • A pause in the music = a musical pause. 
  • A pause in the speech = a speech pause.
  • A pause in warfare and atrocities ≠ a humanitarian pause.

The conduct of war needs no pause to deliver humanitarian aid because the rules of war (International Humanitarian Law) take specific care to protect civilians and their access to lifesaving aid. In this case, a “humanitarian pause in combat” (as used recently by an IDF spokesperson on the BBC) in fact describes a pause in the unlawful blockage of humanitarian aid and a pause in the nine weeks of neglect for IHL’s principles of distinction and proportionality.

Exploitation of the humanitarian luster

Speaking of the conflict, Nesrine Malik called it “a constant”, for “years it can be forgotten.” Humanitarian aid has spent decades expensively ensuring the biological sustenance of Gazans while they stewed in an embittering boil of immiseration and humiliation. A flow of aid that openly assuaged the urgency of Gazan grievances, allowed major powers to withdraw their pressure for change (a two-state solution, now moribund?), and encouraged the world to go about its business while the humanitarians engaged in theirs. Nothing to see here.

This humanitarian alibi has long operated in Gaza, a sleight of hand whereby humanitarian action and objectives mask political inaction.   It is one thing to deliver humanitarian aid to people who need it. It is another to do so a little too silently, a little too deferential to the hands that feed us humanitarians while we feed others. And it is still another matter to accept the terms and conditions of Israel’s effective control over Gaza (if not legal occupation of it), and specifically the Israeli faucet’s drip feed of lifeblood into Gaza. The UN understands, even if it has failed to operationalize this understanding: “There is outrage that humanitarian action is still often used as a substitute for political solutions.” (One Humanity, Shared Responsibility, p. 3).

The situation illustrates an old and difficult ethical tension, where silence is often justified in the name of access to or greater funding for the people most affected by that silence.  Soon we will have to choose. As Dr Sultan Barakat lamented last week (see HPG’s excellent panel discussion on the backlash against human rights – beginning at 58:00), humanitarians will again line up to share in the aid funding to come, suggesting that we have some difficult reckoning ahead over the enduring crises in many places, including Palestine.[2]

The need for humility and honesty about the humanitarian endeavor

Humanitarians have long indulged a deep psychological and professional interest in the public overestimation of our moral and operational greatness: in the public’s confidence in our virtue and overconfidence in our impact in crisis situations like Gaza, or Syria, or Sudan.  The aid is critical. It does save lives and alleviate suffering.  We should neither underestimate nor overestimate it. That’s us – the insiders. 

The bigger issue is the public’s belief in the reach and effectiveness of our work as a solution, and how that contributes to the problem of political disengagement.  Beyond us insiders, the battle behind closed doors and in the media for aid to be delivered in Gaza carries far too many assumptions of the capacity of aid to address (and redress) these wounds.  Large flows of aid will help. But even large flows of aid will be more grossly insufficient than sufficient.  I worry that people need to believe in us, because how else to deal with a world on fire?

What can we do? First, may I suggest consistent use of the term “relief”, which seems a little more accurate by signalling to the public its limited nature.  The sector needs to help the public to understand our insufficiency, let alone that old truth that there are “no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems”.  Second, we need to highlight the capacity of people to aid themselves, and to ensure that aid efforts deliberately flow to humanitarian agencies and the society at large. Aid flows – in substance and in name – need to much more deliberately support mutual aid, moving beyond convoys of stuff that humanitarians deliver to resources that leverage Gazans capacity to help themselves.

[1] See Tom Scott-Smith here for a related discussion; or §3.1 of my paper The New Humanitarian Basics. Further critique: at what point does calling violent or even criminal destruction a “humanitarian crisis” become a blend, part euphemism and part neutralizer, akin to Josef Stalin’s famous observation that a million deaths become a statistic?

[2] And within that reckoning, we may want to devote some time to (a) the silence of affected populations in our decision-making processes, which remains stuck in the weeds; and (b) the ethics of accepting funding from governments such as the US, UK, or many others, given their role in the pursuit of this war.

Uncategorized

The human need to act

9 Comments

Preface. My friend and colleague Sean Healy died last night and it hurts. Too soon, too unfair, and too painful to so many people.  A great MSFer, humanitarian and person. 

You might think that people working in the humanitarian business would be familiar enough with life and death to be more prepared for when the latter invades the private and organizational space. Perhaps the doctors, nurses and ambulance drivers are. Perhaps not. I’m not medical. So this morning’s sharp sense of Sean’s death catches me off guard. Two thoughts come to mind.

One. We humanitarians spend too much time occupied with relief in terms of the provision of assistance and services. An attention to biological sustenance that we critique on occasion and then slide away from addressing.  Over the past 24 hours, scores of Sean’s friends have been coming together on a WhatsApp group, to offer testament and support and to do something more basic, to be with others as much as such virtual assembly will allow. Similar WhatsApp groups now form spontaneously among many crisis-affected families and communities, yet one has to wonder if the sector could not have set up and scaled up decades ago in order to provide similar services in situations of crisis.  There were certainly some related efforts, such as message services, bulletin boards, and the like, but they remained minimal in their reach.

The point is not about the lack of the services but our inability to grasp or give appropriate weight to the need in the first place.  Its absence does not threaten life. What about suffering? As well, the sharing of pain and seeking community relates to the enduring sectoral blindness to or avoidance of the spiritual, of people’s need to connect with a higher power at a time of natural calamity or armed destruction, and to share this ancient social experience.

Two. With tragedy and pain comes the need to act, to do something, to respond to the external and internal needs. This is com-passion: the need to address the suffering of others as well as our own discomfort at their suffering.  We feel for them. We feel for ourselves. So: do something. Take action.  Even writing a blog. It helps.

Imagine, though, that somebody else wrote this blog for me.  Maybe it just needed to be written, and maybe it would have been of much higher quality, with a description of the aforementioned message services or links to insightful articles on spirituality and aid. What if my need and my agency were ignored? Or consistently ignored, gripped in the iron hand of a dominant foreign doctrine?

This brings us to enormously complex issues such as aid and dependency, localization, disempowerment, and dignity.  Principles and values crisscross our ideology and work – my preferred lens on the aid world – to such an extent that it is easy to lose sight of the basic need of people to do something. A need no weaker than food, shelter, water, or medical care. A need perhaps less urgent, perhaps even less possible in the earliest stages of a crisis; and at the same time a need that could be more deliberately recognized and reflected in our programming as a both a way to conceptualize and deliver vital relief to the recipients of aid, and to the givers.

[Updated: I made some minor changes to this post on 27 November.]

Uncategorized

IHL in the Crosshairs

6 Comments

In the wake of my imbalanced reaction to the Ukraine war, I worry that too much of my attention, like this blogpost, is generated by news/social media’s distorted ranking of things in the world. The media also produces a new ordering of anxieties and questions.

How can we better articulate the differences and samenesses between the archetypal deaths of children in the rubble of a bombed house and by the alleged slitting of their throats?

In what ways does our temporal frame of reference also frame our judgment? How far back from October 7th do we need to go in order to see October 7th for what it is, or prepare for what is still to come?

The distinction in the first question seems tangible, and yet such distinctions are becoming warped by ever greater politicization.  I struggle to unpack why throat slitting brings headlines of “sheer evil” and “murder” yet hundreds of deaths in the rubble can be palmed off as collateral damage, or are criticized but in less full-throated terms. Throat-slitting is more of an atrocity. This suggests that harm and damage, such as the accumulation over decades of “non-atrocities”, calls for a more fine-grained vocabulary.

How many people on each side of these divisions hold a deep and lasting conviction in the necessity of violence?  What feeds and maintains this perception?

Is there anything that can be judged wrong (or right) through all eyes? Or is everything, from the blockage of aid to the killing of children, to be contextualized, considered relative or justifiable from a particular point of view?

Some days it seems awfully difficult to be optimistic about us humans. What would it take to reverse the relative invisibility of peace as a form of security? That inquiry seems related to humanitarian protection, and yet there’s a sectoral wall blocking such thinking, a conviction that talking about peace violates neutrality and independence in a way that might jeopardize access.  I tend to agree if we are thinking about peace and neutrality in old terms (read: “rigidly sectorialized”). But we shouldn’t be.

The triple nexus suggests that we humanitarians need to pay attention to peace, specifically to our responsiveness (or not) to peace, to (a) our direct contribution to grievance and conflict or (b) the indirect workings of the humanitarian alibi, where relief assistance becomes the primary vehicle for the international political management of conflicts and crises not named Ukraine-Russia or Israel-Gaza. Perhaps the distinction between ‘Big P’ and ‘little p’ (see here for an explanation) offers a way of engaging at the project level with peace, placing it within the rubric of humanitarian protection and conflict sensitivity. For example, in some contexts, little p – not doing little p but thinking little p while doing humanitarian work – suggests responding to people’s need for protection from conflict simply by bringing different communities together in the implementation of assistance.

Are we being herded into a dominant us-them discourse, one where each side believes that it alone holds and is entitled to act upon the absolute truth? 

The general social trend of the past 20 years seems headed in the direction of powerful us-them divides. Having shied away from neutrality for some good reasons, the public humanitarian voice might need to backtrack towards the posture of neutrality even if individual humanitarians take a side.

Beyond self promotion and fundraising, how can the humanitarian sector capitalize on the intensity and likely duration of the focus on Israel-Gaza (without contributing to it); and how can we diminish the negative consequences?

How might this conflict, so emblematic of the positioning of the West generally, effect on a global scale the trust of people in humanitarian action? Specifically, how might it contribute to a perception of (or render more visible) humanitarian agencies delivering on the direct strategic interests of the West, or being funded by Western governments as force multipliers in the clash of civilizations? What of the perception that humanitarians are blind to their being steeped in/carriers of /attached to a predominantly Western set of principles, policies, ways of working, and culture?

When will Biden fly to Burkina Faso, Yemen, Myanmar, DRC or some other “acceptable” crisis?[1] Would actual engagement even prove effective after decades of bare minimums of humanitarian relief as the primary form of foreign intervention (in other words, is the embeddedness of crisis as big a problem as the original crisis)?

It is quite understandable that aid agencies raise loud demands for access, for all parties to respect international humanitarian law, and for the various authorities to grant safe access into Gaza for relief and other supplies vital to life (e.g., fuel to run the water desalination plants).  But note how much of the political conversation is also centred on this human and political minimum. Obviously, there’s an immediate priority for humanitarian relief. Yet humanitarian work in protracted crises bears witness to how the focus on immediate lifesaving measures means that the important conversations to come (resolution of the crisis) will not come, leaving the same unacceptable human despair that we’ve grown to accept these past decades.

It is quite understandable as well that aid agencies are talking about respect for International Humanitarian Law.  The necessity is to be very clear about how IHL is being misused by politicians to reinforce a distinction between “murderers” on one side and a law-abiding military power on the other. That’s the clash of civilizations that we’re being asked to buy into in much of the US/UK media. Let’s be loud and clear: urban warfare such as in Gaza produces a high-visibility challenge to the law of proportionality.

It is not quite understandable that so many people believe civilian deaths are simply legal within the pursuit of war (including the news presenter on BBC 4 yesterday morning). My concern is that for Western publics, thus politicized discussion risks undermining IHL’s (fragile) integrity, this transforming IHL into a tool of power designed not to place limits on war but to demarcate the line between good and evil, and hence to justify transgressions of those limits. This seems like what is happening right on the front pages of the news. IHL thus becomes one more tool of domination in the eyes of people who experience “evil” differently.

[1] The world’s crises seem divided into the haves and have-nots – those that have to be fixed (political engagement) and those that do not have to be fixed so long as they do not disrupt Western publics with horrifying images or threaten key strategic interests. 

Uncategorized

Don’t Just Do It

2 Comments

The leader of the UK’s Labour Party just took action. “I would, of course, do the right thing and step down.”  This is, of course, politics. Kier Starmer’s catchy response to accusations he broke Covid lockdown rules was delivered in order to contrast his integrity with the Prime Minister’s refusal to hold himself to account. 

Forget about the recent plan to send single male migrants to Rwanda, or even Brexit, the British government’s most dangerous manoeuvring comes in the form of a single, innocuous word: “job”.  As in “But I think the best thing I can do now is, having settled the fine, is focus on the job in hand.” Faced with a police fine for having broken Covid rules (see “Partygate” for those lucky enough not to follow British politics), the party line was clear: the Prime Minister wanted to “deliver on the priorities of the British people”, he was “keen to get back to the job”, and the British people wanted to see the Tory party “getting on with the job”. 

This line of argument recalls the well-worn path of politicians, corporations, the Catholic church and, sometimes, just about all of us:  the good I do buys me some space for the bad.  It’s like carbon offsetting for sins.

Let’s skip back five years.  Not long after the World Humanitarian Summit, I was talking to a leader in our sector, a vocal proponent of transferring power to local non-governmental organizations (LNGOs).  “Kevin” was an enthusiastic supporter of the Grand Bargain, especially the commitment to deliver a fat chunk of funding directly to local organizations.  Turns out, Kevin’s commitment involved a commitment to the idea of localization rather than to an actual substantial shift of responsibility and financial resources.  Turns out, his views spoke for much of the sector.  Turns out, there was a caveat.  The sector’s inequitably powerful and overly Western contingent can bask in the noble glow of being champions of localization while effectively blocking it.

The INGO Kevin worked for – a major player – was committed to the Grand Bargain. Yet, its uppermost commitment is understood as being to people, not the Bargain.  Fair enough. But this ‘higher’ commitment has been interpreted to mean that Kevin’s INGO should operationalize localization only if it did not diminish the quality or quantity of aid, and that Kevin’s INGO should be the judge of this potential diminishment. 

This was the Grand Bargain’s ideological equivalent of fine print. So much for the slogan says humanitarian work should be “as local as possible and as international as necessary”. There’s a lot of ‘devil’ in the detail of that last bit.” But let’s not enter the “INGO vs LNGO: who can do it better?” debate. The more critical issue is that the arguments of both sides – the pros and cons of local action – share the same underlying logic. This is the logic of effectiveness. Is aid really only about who can do the job better?

Back to the British PM. The danger in Boris Johnson’s declaration recalls the danger we as leaders perpetrate and perpetuate upon our own humanitarian sector.  We remove annoying obstacles to our business by rendering ethical principles invisible.  The Kevins of our sector can talk endlessly about doing things the right way, about one day doing things in a ‘righter’ way (new evidence-based guidelines are being developed by our global task force!), and about doing things in a ‘righter’ way than local organizations (after all, we must build their capacity on the new evidence-based guidelines).

What the Kevins do not want to talk about is doing the right thing.

Johnson’s apology for transgressions effectively shreds the uppermost responsibility of leadership – to champion the ideals, aspirations, and ethical principles which guide actions, and which unite societies even where there are strong disagreements on the ‘how’ level. Neither British politics nor humanitarian action would be well-served by moral purity, yet the power of both are gutted by excluding ethics from deliberation and decision. We need to think about the politics that has girded decades of constant, directive paternalism; and the presumption this status quo can be justified on the basis of effectiveness and actions.  The ethical cost is too high, for instance to the principle of humanity.

People matter because they are not static vessels of need to be filled by our action. Human solidarity is impossible without recognition of the other’s human sovereignty. Being more capable than local NGOs sounds like a logic we tossed out 60 years ago (and it’s an assumption of dubious accuracy as well).  Would it have been OK for Britain to maintain rule over Kenya or Sierra Leone on the basis of Her Majesty’s greater technical and economic capacity?  That sounds offensive. Why?  Because there are principles more important than doing a good job.

Uncategorized

Two new posts (elsewhere)

Leave a comment

Last week ODI/HPG launched a new (and excellent) report on what we can learn from the response to DRC Ebola outbreak #10. Having led HPG’s 2015 review of the Ebola response in West Africa, I was asked to contribute to the discussion. Twice. That led to a joint blog with Kerrie Holloway, one of the authors of the new report. To nobody’s surprise the authors found issues such as community engagement and embedding the international response in the context of the outbreak remain points of weakness.

This led to my solo blog post, where I ask whether or not it is time to shoot the messenger. Meaning, whether or not in addition to our finger-pointing at operational agencies and donors, it is we who deliver evaluations and reviews turn to accept some responsibility for sectoral intransigence and bad practice. Why do evaluation and review miss the forest for the trees, or dive into program performance with politics and systemic dysfunction being placed oh-so-conventiently outside the scope? What is the cost of this misdirection?

It’s past time the sector pays more attention to the messenger. The opening of the blog…

=============================================

As the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG) launches its new research on the 2018–2020 Ebola outbreak in the DRC, global news of new outbreaks in the Republic of Guinea and again in DRC gives pause to reflect. By way of grasping for a silver lining, this frequency offers the opportunity to improve global health and humanitarian operational responses by learning from them. A second opportunity is to improve by learning from how we learn.

Our sector publishes no shortage of evaluations, reviews and reports that traffic in ‘lessons learned’. Yet contrary to the cosy idea of having learned lessons, this new HPG report from Crawford, Holloway, et al highlights a repetition of shortcomings, such as the quintessential agency turf battle that manifests in debates over how the crisis was framed and thus responded to (in this case whether Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) was primarily a vertical health crisis or had fused with and fuelled the longstanding conflict and multi-dimensional political and economic crisis in Nord Kivu); and the failed imperative for such extraordinary expenditure (in this case, an estimated $1 billion) to leave behind permanent infrastructure and capacity. These issues are anything but unfamiliar. They were unambiguously signposted by many reports on the 2014-16 outbreak in West Africa, including a previous HPG study (which I led), and in the evaluation reports of too many crises before that…

[To continue (to get to the fun part), here’s the link.]

Uncategorized

The Politics of Humanitarian Uncertainty

Leave a comment

[What began as a conversation about uncertainty with HERE-Geneva’s Marzia Montemurro ended up finding its way to an article, now published by the good folks at Global Dashboard. The thrust of our argument is that humanitarians have “failed to engage with the bias in its attention and the political content of how uncertainty is interpreted, ignored, unseen, and suppressed.”

Our catchy tiitle? Uncertainty and Humanitarian Action: What Donald Rumsfeld can teach us. The article:

Since its onset, one striking feature of the coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has been the narrative power of its novelty. This global narrative depicts COVID-19 pushing humanity towards a ‘historical divide’ of BC and AC (before and after COVID-19), where unknown, unpredictable futures await.  Within the humanitarian sector, we reveal this same preoccupation with the post-COVID future in a plethora of reports and webinars. While the virus itself may be the antihero of this narrative, we believe uncertainty should be recognised as the second, less visible protagonist.

Keep reading here.

Uncategorized

The Future of Aid

Leave a comment

The editorial team at The New Humanitarian has assembled a series of ideas on the future of aid. Their call was to keep it short and simple (400 words) — not my usual M.O. — just make a clear statement of a problem and then solution.

The series is well worth the thought-provoking effort. For example, Abby Stoddard writes on how humanitarian access to certain populations in crisis is blocked/restricted by heavy insecurity (e.g., NE Nigeria, Syria or Somalia). The idea? Turn it around. Instead of humanitarians transporting tons and tons of aid to people, what about the people (who are not helpless and know their country) setting up supply lines and accessing humanitarians?

And here’s a sample from my argument that less is more: This rethink requires the humanitarian deployment in protracted crises to step back, un-occupying the space in which others – those with the responsibility, the expertise, and the right (i.e. states, development actors, local civil society) – can step forward to build (over time) a peaceful and stable society. Their society.

Uncategorized

Covid-19 futures in humanitarian action

Leave a comment

[Along with my colleague Urvashi Aneja, I have authored this article on ODI’s HPN (Humanitarian Practice Network) website. Thanks to our colleagues Paul Harvey, Sean Healy and Sandrine Tiller for their comments. And thanks to HPN’s Wendy Fenton and Matthew Foley for their suggestions and edits.]

For many, the coronavirus pandemic’s novelty, deadliness and potential persistence mean we are facing a new ‘historical divide’ of BC and AC – before and after Covid-19. Reviewing scores of blogs, articles and reports as part of the MSF Reflection and Analysis Network, we found considerable evidence that the humanitarian sector (if not the world) sees itself as poised at just such a critical juncture – yet little agreement as to the direction of travel (more/less authoritarian, more/less interconnected, more/less green, more/less local). Still more pressure to change comes from the anti-racism movement, bringing powerful calls for a sectoral decolonisation.

Given this attention on Covid-19 and calls for the transformation of power dynamics within the aid arena, we identified several key issues, themes and challenges that we think need to be addressed in the months to come…

The rest of the article can be found here.

Uncategorized

The Other Side of Trust

Leave a comment

The good folks at the ICRC Law & Policy blog have been kind enough to post a new Humanicontarian blog on their site. This time, I’m responding to — really, just adding to — an earlier post by the ICRC’s Hugo Slim. The topic is as important as they come. Trust. The problem is that we humanitarians tend to discuss trust only halfway. We talk about the problem (and it is an important problem) of people not trusting us.

What’s the other half? It sits in our blindspot. The “more fundamentally humanitarian and costly problem may be the degree to which we humanitarians do not trust others.” This isn’t about feel-good platitudes. This is about power.

“At the center of the sector’s persistent resistance to change one finds mistrust, which manifests in a series of perceptions and beliefs: that local authorities, communities, people and NGOs are not democratic enough, not unbiased enough, not reliable enough, not expert enough, not neutral enough, etc. This mistrust functionally places on hold any shift in power and meaningful participation until the main (Western) donors and international agencies feel reassured that the local is ready. Mistrust is thus one pillar upon which the sector’s paternalism stands the test of time.”

Hope you enjoy the read. And thanks to the ICRC for being open to this discussion.