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.

Critique of Aid

Reversing the paradigm

1 Comment

Just as they do every late December, the interviews and opinion pieces will come.  Atypically, though, the end of the mere year of 2020 seems to have displaced the usual attention to the end of a decade (no, the decade did not end last December 31st). 

Well, it has been a comparatively eventful year.  So some form of this question will be asked over and again: What’s the biggest thing that happened in 2020?  For humanitarians, given the unique qualities of 2020, perhaps the more interesting question is this:  What will prove to be the fourth most impactful event of 2020, after all-too-obvious triumvirate of (1) COVID-19, (2) Trump loses the election, and (3) Black Lives Matter forces scrutiny on the humanitarian action’s neo-colonial hangover.

My answer comes in the form of news from late last week. Unicef will be supporting a feeding operation that aims to reach between 10,000 and 15,000 children.  That will include for example delivering breakfast meals to 13,000 students over the next two weeks (in-school feeding programs will be closed for the holiday).  This food aid marks as typical and maybe even as innocuous of a Unicef program as you might imagine.  Happens every day.  Literally.  But in Unicef’s 70-year history it has not happened that the agency delivered food to children in the United Kingdom.

Returning to our eulogy for 2020, this small event may be one that eventually sneaks up on the humanitarian sector the way all good disruptions do, because it impacts on the level of ideology and perception. With delivery of this small program comes fruit, rice, bread and the power of South to North humanitarian action (even if the example is not specifically South to North).  Not yet. Not yet an event like a Tanzanian medical mission to combat the pharmacalization of American childhood.[1]  Those examples will come. They should come.  And we should not wait for them to come. We should plan and execute their coming because that is one of keys to saving humanitarian action from itself, from its paternalistic, Othering, saviourism.

Unicef delivering emergency aid in the UK offers disruption via “a well-publicised humanitarianization (problematization) of the many crises in the global North.”[2]  Aside from feeding destitute children, the (ulterior) purpose is to “shift the prevailing charity model to one of an exchange among equals, where the North and South partner in ‘saving’ one another.” In other words, to break the mindset which binds together so much of what is right with humanitarian action with so much that is wrong.  This targets the narrative in which the rich, developed, scientific, virtuous and flat-out most excellent people of the world help those who are poor, primitive, irrational, corrupt and flat-out screwed.  Further, this spoils the incentive structure by targeting the construct or dynamic in which we who live in humanitarian-giving nations are enabled to feel superior about ourselves, while those in humanitarian-receiving nations are helped to feel inferior.

The response of Jacob Rees Mogg, a living caricature of British superiorityness, highlights the received meaning of Unicef’s work here in the UK (which should, after all, have come as no surprise given Philip Alston’s blistering report). In Mogg’s vigorous rejection, he railed against Unicef’s action as a “political stunt”, arguing that Unicef aid should be given to what Donald Trump has less eloquently termed “shithole countries”.[3] The reaction of politicians on the UK left was identical in its assumptions, using the fact of Unicef’s local humanitarian action to shame the Prime Minister and his party, calling it “a disgrace” that Unicef had to help feed children in “one of the richest countries in the world.” As if Congo or Iraq weren’t nations brimming with riches and millionaires.  As if the accumulation of the UK’s riches weren’t intimately connected to the production of either the crises being targeted by the humanitarians or the 14M people in the UK who live in poverty (pre-COVID stat!).

In ten (twenty?) years we will hopefully see that this small disruption forms part of a larger transformation, one in which millions of people will assume the wealth and social capital of a country like Yemen or South Sudan and feel the disgrace when children there need to be fed by international donations, and those people will be the Yemenis and South Sudanese themselves.  And where we in the West will feel and see an identical disgrace in the opioid/drug deaths across the working class America, or the loneliness of the elderly in Japan.  And where we can share this disgrace across the entire human family rather than excepting ourselves from it.

The appeal of that critique lies in certain égalité; in the realization that we are just like them.  It certainly fits with my intermittently critical tone and mounting calls for a humanitarianism riddled with humility. But seeing ourselves just like them is also problematic. After yet another decade, perhaps greater humility will produce the parallel recognition as well.  They are just like us.

[Edited for clarity on 27 Dec 2020].

[1] See e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-pharma-s-manufactured-epidemic-the-misdiagnosis-of-adhd/

[2] DuBois The New Humanitarian Basics pp. 26-27.  Or see this script of a rather unscripted Chatham House conversation on humanitarian disruption between me, Urvashi Aneja, Markus Geisser, and Champa Patel.

[3] Putting aside Trump’s language, I fail to differentiate his opinion from either mainstream humanitarian thinking or its public narrative.  These places we work are exceptional in [insert here rephrasing of ‘shitholiness’ in terms of levels of violence, lawlessness, destitution and helplessness].

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.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

A Nexus critique of Humanitarian Protection

Leave a comment

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

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.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Time for a Punch in the Face?

4 Comments

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

2 Comments

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

2 Comments

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

7 Comments

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’.

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.

This blog is supposed to spark critical discussion around current issues affecting humanitarian action. And have some fun. (For more, click on the ABOUT button).