Tag Archives: Identity

Critique of Aid

The Prosthetic Breast of Humanitarian Action

Leave a comment

SPARKED BY OUTSIDERS 1. Sometimes I am struck by artists and other creators who seemingly grasp humanitarian action better than I. This realization comes with a modicum of envy. They seem to breathe the human condition rather than analyze it. Humanitarian action is a silo, a sectoral silo that shapes and also stunts our perspectives as we engage with the external world.  It thus resembles other fields of action with the critical difference that humanitarianism relates to just about everything because its purpose is humanity, the whole enchilada. This blog is the first in a series where I hope to pass on some of that envy.

The Prosthetic Breast of Humanitarian Action

In 1999 I entered MSF as part of the “bearing witness” industrial complex, translating my civil rights and rural development experience into support of témoignage by MSF project teams. Twenty-five years later, tired of work-related reading, I picked Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals from the teetering pile on my wife’s desk.  Lorde’s experience with breast cancer in 1970s America, woven into her experience as a black lesbian feminist, accentuated the gap between bearing witness to the struggles of others and bearing witness to one’s own struggles; and how with a patient’s insight and a poet’s words she was able to produce a piece transcendent enough to offer this humanitarian a lesson or two or ten. Proof, if we needed more of it, of the value of lived experience.

                                           *                                         *                                         *

Choices and options

I’m going to have the mastectomy, knowing there are alternatives, some of which sound very possible in the sense of right thinking, but none of which that satisfy me enough. … Since it is my life that I am gambling with…[1]

There are choices, even if humanitarians feel that so much of their work is driven by a singularity of options, an imperative to move with urgence and exceptionalism’s license to do so. Erasing the choices open to Other societies and Other individuals – a reductionist view of crisis – from our internal narratives helps us to justify these decisions to ourselves. And as our explanations move upwards and outwards towards home society – misinformation in the form of fundraising campaigns[2] – we push responsibility away by foregrounding the necessity of our action, the unique effectiveness of our capacities, and the Other’sdependence upon us.

Lorde’s daring exemplifies how selecting among choices may often be calculated, but a quantitative reckoning replies to an institutional logic while defeating a human one. You can neither remove a breast nor identify the most urgent cases of distress via a process of counting, even if the sector dreams of a joint intersectoral global tool. Worse still, these quantitative reckonings come rooted in the biased mathematics of our capacities and their deficiencies. This is the culture of “needs assessment”, our scrutiny of the stuff that people do not have while remaining unaware of or undervaluing what they do have (their assets, capacities, and well-honed powers of survival). Even there, INGOs often assess the stuff that people don’t have based on the stuff which they possess – so the shelter agency with a warehouse full of tarpaulin, employing staff with heavy financial and emotional stakes in delivering tarpaulin to people in crisis, making an assessment of people’s need for shelter, which it and the institutional funders then redefine as people’s need for this shelter agency to deliver tarps, and completely ignoring the fact that people themselves might see their need differently, not for a tarp but for a job so that they could buy a tarp or rent a home, or for security so that they could return to the home that they own.  Lorde is clear: the mastectomy responds to her need.

                                           *                                         *                                         *

The articulation of the alibi

For as we open ourselves more and more to the genuine conditions of our lives, women become less and less willing to tolerate those conditions unaltered, or to passively accept external and destructive controls over our lives and our identities.  Any short-circuiting of this quest for self-definition and power, however well-meaning and under whatever guise, must been seen as damaging, for it keeps the post-mastectomy woman in a position of perpetual and secret insufficiency, infantilized and dependent for her identity upon an external definition by appearance. (Lorde, p. 50).

Lorde lowers the Boom!  That paragraph should hang as a reminder in the room of every strategic plan workshop, every project team weekly meeting, every community outreach worker morning briefing, and every government and UN office. As Global Truth Solutions summarizes this travesty: it “is indisputable that people should be ‘at the centre’ of humanitarian assistance. It is equally indisputable that they are not.”

Frequently critical in her thinking, Lorde seemingly saves a particular disdain for the ‘saviors’. Not the authors and friends in whom she found wisdom and solace, but in the energetic champion of a prosthetic breast that was so realistic Lorde would “never know the difference”.  Lorde’s rebuke thus fell upon a well-meaning woman from Reach for Recovery, who dispensed useful advice and the idea that through prosthesis, Lorde could be “just as good as [she] was before because [she could] look exactly the same.” (Lorde, p. 34).  This injurious comparison to the accepted standard, the unattainable perfection, pokes a particular spear in the ribs of international aid.  

Today, Lorde’s declaration of empowerment – Every woman has a militant responsibility to involve herself actively with her own health (Lorde, p. 65) – seems ever more distant in humanitarian contexts (and more globally?). Despite increased awareness of the sector’s inequitable power dynamics vis-à-vis people in crisis, the distance to a humanitarian emancipation grows because the root of this humanitarian power lies in its capacity to transform.

First, humanitarian action resembles a response to people’s problems yet more accurately constitutes an alleviation of symptoms (of deeper crisis), a shallowness that manages to elicit both hand-wringing and acceptance for decades on end, along with considerable financial backing. In Lorde’s cancer experience, this humanitarian power is mirrored in the sleight of hand effected by mastectomy as a cosmetic experience: “…the concentration upon breast cancer as a cosmetic problem, one which can be solved by a prosthetic pretense.” (Lorde, p. 47).  I have often talked about this in terms of the humanitarian alibi.  Like a prosthetic breast, humanitarian action forges a humanitarian pause, healing enough global anxiety and stopping enough bleeding for the world to look elsewhere. No breast cancer to see here.

Second, and far less visible in our self-criticism, much can be learned by a community sharing the experience of struggling to overcome the destruction and pain of crisis.  The alternative, to which we’ve born witness over the past five decades of humanitarian action, has helped instill reliance and dependency as a degradation that, once internalized, too often becomes self-perpetuating.  Speaking at the individual level, to these geo-political effects (e.g., the causes and politics of breast cancer) Lorde adds personal politics.

The emphasis upon wearing a prosthesis is a way of avoiding having women come to terms with their own pain and loss, and thereby, with their own strength. (Lorde, p. 41). 

                             *                                         *                                         *

Little or no choice

I think now what was most important was not what I chose to do so much as that I was conscious of being able to choose, and having chosen, was empowered from having made a decision, done a strike for myself, moved. (Lorde, p. 25).

Even in a state of crisis and facing complexity beyond her training, Lorde insisted upon and exercised her agency. Of course, aid is often critical to the survival of people. In practice, we decision-makers, we in the agencies, we often decide for and gamble with the lives of others. We inherited such power, but who gives it to us today? And how is such a hierarchy maintained for years and then decades? We know the answers and yet we resist the solutions. The real task is to think hard about that resistance. How can we resist our institutional and personal resistance?  Can ethics help?

Medical ethical principles, for example, accord a remarkable value to autonomy, creating stringent safeguards that require consent except in very limited circumstances. Even if acting in the best interest of their patients, doctors cannot act without the various options being explained to the patient, who owns and takes the decision. The exception is when the patient is incapacitated (e.g., unconscious), and even there, ethical guidance requires scrutiny to be placed upon the necessity of immediate action and the potential for alternative courses of action. Stripped bare, the logic of charity pales in comparison: the choice – mastectomy or chemotherapy – is taken to be ours (and our donors).

In spite of high-level perennial commitments and policies for accountability to affected people (AAP), the sector remains “stuck in the weeds.” The way out of the weeds is not to create and impose more policies or launch new guidance and conferences. Our path out of the weeds is to recognize and operationalize our existing lodestar principle of humanity. We are stuck not in weeds but in a modern age transgression of that principle. That benefits are delivered does not elude this conclusion.  When necessary, accountable compromises to humanity – properly deliberated and reviewed – may be required in some situations. But pasting the excuse of “emergency” onto years of protracted crisis flunks the humanity test.

There is a progressive cost to ignoring this basic ethic of respect, our own principles, and the consequences of treating communities as societal equivalent to unconscious. A cost to ourselves, as we increasingly become accustomed to unnecessarily harmful ways of working, and they solidify in our processes and our norms. A cost to people, as stunting takes place when this disregard carries on for decades, sequentially divesting people of the opportunity to do “strikes” for themselves. Perhaps one answer to “how much divestment?” lies in the near absence of resistance. The lack of significant resistance from communities themselves suggests prolonged disempowerment; and the lack of resistance from local governments seems self-interested (a discharging or responsibilities).

The alternative is to operationalize faith in people having alternatives. We have alternatives.  This returns us to Lorde, who in the period after the surgery worried about the possibility of a recurrence and how she might deal with her life being shorter than she had expected.  “Would I be able to maintain the control over my life that I had always taken for granted.” (Lorde, p. 48). This control is part of the human experience, and should be part of the humanitarian principle of humanity.

[1] Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (1980) London: Sheba Feminist Publishers; p. 27.

[2] Or is it an acceptable form of disinformation, given the good intentions?  I worry that future societies will view it as a form of organized fraud — telling a false story in return for cash!

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Community Engagement — Problems Less Discussed

6 Comments

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.

2 Comments

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.

Our Western Identity

The New Humanitarian Basics (blog 2)

7 Comments

At the core of the humanitarian enterprise lie the twinned tendencies of being highly self-centred and poorly self-aware.  Add to that mix the power of the core aid sector to shape the humanitarian narrative and what you have is the systemic equivalent of nationalism – the difficulty to see the world in any other way.

My paper is one attempt to provoke a degree of self-awareness. However, as my friend ‘Archie’ argues, this proposal for a future humanitarianism looks ugly in places (see my previous blog). Actually, he suggests, it doesn’t even look like humanitarianism, as it would seem to increase the number of people who are suffering.  To some extent, this might be true, especially if measured through the humanitarian lens.

The answer? The sector must learn to embrace certain types of ugly. Why? Because the humanitarian lens is fine for humanitarians, but not for a society that is so much more than the location of a crisis.

DRC provides an example. The UN has declared/signed/affirmed time and again the primacy of the home state in crisis response (see, e.g., the Sendai Framework or conclusions of the World Humanitarian Summit).  The sector has seemingly signed up to that pledge. Until it hasn’t. What happened when the government of DRC boycotted the UN’s major aid conference, upset with the portrayal of its country as a humanitarian basket case? The UN agencies and the INGOs quickly asserted their collective paternalistic right to know better. (And trust me, I see DRC the way the sector sees it). But ‘time to let go’ means time to embrace (in some places) the ugly.  Localization means localization, not localization but only until you disagree with its outcomes or judge yourself better able to do it. In my vision, listening to the Congolese government is not ideal, but it is a less worse option than international governance. Just like accepting the US government’s refusal to accept aid from Cuba in response to Hurricane Katrina.

What is missing from the humanitarian lens? First and foremost is the ethical component of humanitarian action, and the way the humanitarian sector’s framing fails to place value on people struggling to overcome their own problems (i.e., self-determination).  In this regard, the paper points to “a ‘decolonisation’ – a transfer of power not merely from international to local agencies, but also from a ‘global’ to a home society.” (p. 28). Should last century’s political decolonization have been blocked in anticipation of states whose homegrown leaders proved even more brutal or greedily indifferent than the colonial powers? Of course not.  And neither should the presence of bad or incompetent states impede the decolonization of humanitarian action.

Second, humanitarians must stop hiding behind their self-serving conceptualization of effectiveness; removing their blinders to the fact that their effectiveness is just that, a self-serving construct.  As Jeremy Konyndyk describes in his recent analysis of the humanitarian business model, the humanitarian system “shapes interventions to conform to agencies’ mandates regardless of the priorities of crisis-affected populations”. A hammer sees a world of nails, and hence success equals having driven X number of nails into Y pieces of wood.  In short, the metric of humanitarian intentions and success – the moral crusade by which it usurps the power of the state – isn’t just a foreign metric, it is a skewed metric.

Even worse than the slanted view of its own effectiveness is the failure of humanitarian action to calculate the impact of its occupation of the crisis response space.  The humanitarian system does not simply respond, it aggressively preserves its market and the predominance of an emergency response that cannot alleviate structural problems or satisfy the full range of human aspiration.  So, for example, the power of the sector’s advocacy, amplified by a mass communication capacity often greater than the entirety of local civil society, means that “the urgent displaces the important (the systemic or structural) in perpetuity.” (p. 6).

As the sector clamors for the urgent, is there room for a state or a community to say no, to conclude that it might be better to invest in the long-term, not the immediate? Are we willing to allow a state to let children fall ill today because it wants to prioritize building the school system of the future?  Are we at least willing to admit that this is not our decision, given that we do not have skin in the game, except for the powerful skin of self-interest in preserving the supremacy of humanitarian action and our personal sense of contribution?

Lastly, where in our calculations of effectiveness do we consider the opportunity costs? With regard to occupation, if the sector were to stand back, what might evolve in the same space?  Would states step up and take more direct responsibility? As research into the West Africa Ebola outbreak concluded, the “state’s capacity to deal with needs and crises is partly a function of how socially embedded it is in the first place.” Do states in the global south have the same freedom enjoyed by Western nations – the freedom to struggle without being subjected to foreign intervention?

This cost undermines the development of the social contract, a lengthy process necessarily full of blunders, as was evidenced by the early months of Liberian or Sierra Leonean Ebola response.  But those governments learned and grew enormously over the course of the epidemic, in part because the humanitarian community lacked the power/willingness to take command.  Ebola is not a lone example. As the Economist recently reported, the response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake marked a critical juncture in the development of the trust between the government and civil society with regard to crisis response, a reversal (though as yet incomplete) of the Communist Party’s deep suspicions.

The point is not that humanitarians are wrong to intervene.  It is that humanitarians are wrong to assess their interventions through such narrow framing, one that produces projects which hit targets but ignores too many other benefits and costs.  Of even greater concern is that humanitarians ignore the real challenges, like stopping war or ending severe poverty. “The best thing the aid system can do is step aside and stop confusing the issue with projects that help small groups and divert attention from the central issue.” – Tony Vaux, Trumped-up Aid and the Challenge of Global Poverty.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity, Politics

The New Humanitarian Basics

1 Comment

ODI/HPG’s 2017 Constructive Deconstruction efforts helped produce my think piece The New Humanitarian Basics – an alternative humanitarian action “that is responsive, ethical and attainable” and also “less paternalistic, bureaucratic and expansive in its ambitions.”  I’ll try blogging a few of the paper’s central themes, because it works better as a discussion piece than as a blueprint. In this blog I pick up the gauntlet thrown by one humanitarian who (managed to) read it. Here is what ‘Archie’ writes:

How does that work when the government is a belligerent with a legitimate interest in winning a war yet a less-than-moral (or worse) approach to the means necessary to attain that end which is an invariable / depressing reality of violent conflict.

He’s referring to two intertwined pillars of the vision: (1) an immediate shift to the primacy of the state (national authorities) in delivering/coordinating response to crisis (a rather simple and long-agreed concept); and (2) actual ‘localization’ (i.e., not the corrupted version that Christina Bennett concludes “reinforce[s] the very dynamics they are meant to be changing.”).

I see Archie’s question as two-fold: (a) an emerging world order’s challenge to hegemonic international humanitarian intervention, and (b) the challenge to the well-protected image of the organization (i.e., its projection of moral purity that is such a key to fundraising, public support and esprit de corps). This blog deals with the former.

A New World Order

Trending up: the primacy of the state, the longstanding call for national authorities to take up their responsibility, the imperative of localization.  This fast-evolving relationship of aid agencies to the national and local challenges power dynamics and challenges the effectiveness of current humanitarian praxis, especially in a conflict setting.  Partly this is a challenge to action – is the agency able to ensure that aid reaches those most in need (impartiality)?  Partly a challenge to perceptions, and hence to agency trust, access and local reputation.  And, as Archie writes, it is partly the challenge posed by a twisted world: by rooting the response in the national authorities the result (e.g., in South Sudan) might be “to put money into the hands of the 5th brigade in Western Upper Nile whose intent [is] to massacre and chase away the Dok Nuer”. Not pretty.

My instinct is to be evasive.  The problem is a thorny one, even if too narrowly framed.  But let’s not debate the framing of the question. In fact, let’s not debate.

Archie is right. I have spelled out a humanitarian action that is far less within the control of the international humanitarian system. That does not create a new problem. Humanitarian agencies work within the boundaries imposed by governments all the time.  This is where they most loudly decry the lack of ‘humanitarian space’ (even though they work in somebody else’s house). Still, humanitarian programs often deliver. By way of extreme example, look at the national Red Cross Societies, who comprise actual auxiliaries of the state.  So not new, but this ‘vision’ certainly exacerbates existing challenges.

Negotiated access will become more necessary and more difficult in a response governed by the host state, especially where that host acts with what humanitarians perceive as bad intent. Impartiality, independence and neutrality provide guidance, but actual control by national authorities will in some contexts alter the nature of assistance and protection. As the paper anticipates, perhaps there will be contexts where agencies provide relief tout court (much-valued relief!) because they are too compromised to be considered humanitarian in their actions (in that context). In other words, there will be places where aid agencies transparently choose not to act under the humanitarian label, in order to avoid further undermining the meaning of that specific designation (see here for more on this). (Hopefully, they will also be strategizing on how to better implement the principles and hence become humanitarian with time).  And perhaps there are places where agencies will have to say no, taking a principled stand in the face of unacceptable compromises. That is a freedom and a responsibility they possess (one not available to the RC Societies).

Unlike impartiality, I note that the principles of independence and neutrality are not absolutes but guideposts that are regularly (always?) forcibly compromised by the context of humanitarian action. They are also a means to the ends of access and impartiality, hence wrongly viewed in puritanical terms, where the perfection of the principle acts as a barrier to access and delivery. Don’t get me wrong, adherence to the principles “helps build the trust and acceptance that is critical to (though no guarantee of) access to people in crisis” (p. 12); but changing power dynamics necessitate rethinking how they are or are not operationalized.

Moreover, any apparent agreement with Archie is oversimplified. A call for more robust negotiated access leaves too much systemic baggage in place. Humanitarians must not simply and grudgingly accept that the ‘golden age’ of unfettered access to people in crisis is trending towards extinction, they must understand that this is a good thing, even though it will have negative consequences in certain contexts.  To begin with, the obvious: nowhere in the West can you find foreign powers with unfettered access, implementing locally unaccountable programming.

Hence, as the paper argues, humanitarians must interrogate and move beyond “the facile conclusion that the humanitarian principles are best preserved by state-avoiding methodologies.” (p. 27). Underpinning the sector’s state-avoidance lies a host of powerful assumptions, including a false binary between visions of a monolithic bad/evil/corrupt state and a saviorist/moral humanitarianism.  It would help to recognize that many elements within any state have an interest in responding to the needs of people in crisis.  Further, as Andrew Cunningham astutely concludes, INGOs should recognize the degree to which they need states.  In other words, humanitarians need to change the way they think.

More importantly, though, is the degree to which Archie’s challenge masks a sector that is full of itself, deeply presumptive of its moral authority and of the effectiveness of its actions. There is a fundamental flaw in this practice of a highly self-interested, Western, unaccountable sector passing judgment on a state’s right to govern.  This is not about principles. This is about power. That is for my next blog post.

Our Western Identity, Politics

A dog’s life

Leave a comment

Consider this an addendum to my previous post.  There, I waded into the aid system’s #MeToo / #AidToo deliberations.  Across the aid system we see agencies dealing with ‘bad apples’, holding difficult conversations and exploring initiatives that promise improvement.  This recent IRIN panel discussion and accompanying articles explore a number of ‘solutions’.

A caution: we should heed the lessons of past experience and avoid false binaries.  Great that the system invests in pruning the bad apples and building better safeguarding or whistleblowing programs and procedures.  But it must equally maintain a healthy dissatisfaction with such an approach, understanding that such reforms mollify calls for deeper changes, and hold steep opportunity costs in a overstretched system.

Deep changes? Easier said than done, as illustrated by my previous blog’s three suggestions.  Nobody disagrees that the system also needs to address more fundamental causes.  The problem is the rarity of plausible suggestions. Can I defend my offering of ‘food for thought’ if the system cannot and could never swallow it?   Do we already know that my call for deep changes is a call for pigs to have wings? NRC’s Joel Charny responded to my blog with a tweet that’s hard to disagree with:

https://twitter.com/CharnyJ/status/971738294110294016

The problem is that messiah complex coupled with the marketing imperative to maintain or grow leads us down path of delusions of grandeur.

I have raised some of these concerns myself. What if we can’t dump the savior routine, because it runs through the heart of our authority to act, our model of recruitment, and our financial support from the public and donor agencies? In other words, what if we are addicted to being messiahs?

Until February 4th, I had no answer.  Now I have two, adapted from the WORLD CHAMPION PHILADELPHIA EAGLES.  That’s right, I’m from Philadelphia and the Eagles won the Super Bowl.

The first is the story of being an underdog. Jason Kelce’s profanity laced speech captures it perfectly. Nobody believed the Eagles were any good because, because, because. So even though they had the best record, earned the top seed in the playoffs and held home field advantage, few of the pundits or even the money guys (the Vegas betting houses) picked the Eagles to win its first playoff game, its second playoff game or the Super Bowl itself.  After their first playoff win against Atlanta, star players Chris Long and Lane Johnson wore dog masks. It built miraculously from there, solidifying and motivating a team, capturing a public. Underdogs. That was the story and that was the team’s fire.

For us humanitarians, the point is that as an underdog, as opposed to as a savior, we would be free to engage honestly with the public about aid’s complexities (read: snafus, failures, missed targets, bad behaviour, unintended consequences, etc.). We would be free to play the role of sidekick. We would be free to take risks and fail.  And the public would love us (read: fund us) because we are underdogs, trying our best against insurmountable odds.  As this Forbes article notes:  There’s something intrinsically human about the tale of an underdog, and it taps into our capacity to hope for the future and dream big.

The second is one of Eagles head coach Doug Pederson’s mantras: “An individual can make a difference, but a team can make a miracle.”  If I think about my own performance, I wonder if I was too often trying to make a difference rather than aiming for outcomes of more collective, outsized dimensions. An old story: Aid strategy, be it programmatic design or systemic transformation, needs to be steeped in (rather than selectively blind to) an analysis of aid’s political economy. I now think that we also need a parallel analysis, one that comes to understand aid through a political – psychological analysis of the humanitarian. Making a difference may sound good, but it doesn’t seem to be adding up.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

Bad apples vs good eggs

1 Comment

The Oxfam scandal leaves me closer to paralysis than clarity. (Not a good start for the next 1000 words.).

The aid industry desperately needs to overreact, for the pendulum to swing pitilessly against the fortifications of its unaccountable power and faith in its mission.  At the same time, the aid industry desperately needs to avoid scapegoating Caligula-esque abusers such as Roland van Hauwermeiren if it is to change.

The obvious has been said – the scandal is a function of the system, not of bad apples. Bad apples exist everywhere. They are but a symptom of an aid system that struggles to recognize (let alone correct) the manner in which such extremes of abuse are rooted in the everyday inequitable power relationships and weak accountability that permeate so much of the humanitarian enterprise. Getting rid of bad apples is a good thing, but we still need to deal with the tree. To rephrase: the problem is power, not abuse of power.

Where to start? Check out Jennifer Lentfer’s #AidToo mourning of issues that need to change – the ‘interpersonal, gendered, historical, economic, and geopolitical power imbalances’ or ‘our misogyny, our racism, our exploitation and extraction, our history, our willful ignorance, our current reality’.  I couldn’t agree more.  How to say anything fresh?

Trying not to repeat what has been written elsewhere, here are three thoughts on how to grasp the problem.

  1. Lose the assumption of (belief in) our individual goodness.

We humanitarians seem to have an entrenched need to be viewed as and view ourselves as special, as being good as opposed to just working towards it. This defines us; it separates us from our stereotyped image of bankers or lawyers or corrupt politicians. Even where we acknowledge our shortcomings and failures (even discussing them ad nauseum), we do so on the limited grounds of effectiveness and effort, not ethics. How do we go about chopping down our moral overconfidence? Perhaps we can start with opinions that should be read even if it hurts to read them.

There are smart people out there for whom the problem is not those we call the bad apples, but the ones we think of as ‘good eggs’ – the everyday aid worker who forms part of a system inescapably linked to its ‘colonial hinterlands’.  That’s me. I am part of the problem. And so are many of you.  Where I depart from Hirsch’s polemic is her belief that these flaws wholly define me. I am part of the problem (and so are many of you), but I am not only part of the problem (and neither are you).  We can be part of the solution. How? I think it will take us owning the problem in a different way by owning it as agencies and as individuals.  In the form of a logical equation: the aid system is synonymous with imbalanced power + power corrupts + corruption is a form of abuse = personal ownership of abuse cannot be restricted to the Caligulas.

  1. Change the public narrative.

As I and many others have written before, there is much wrong with the humanitarian narrative. Three persistent problems: its reduction of people in crisis to helpless victims, its double-chocolate fudging of our success topped with the creamy concealment of failure, and its holier-than-thou finger pointing. While some have been rightly concerned with the impact of this narrative upon others, it now seems more important to address our having become a prisoner to its narrative force. For instance, we fear having an open discussion of failure and so do not learn from it. We create enormous reputational risks for ourselves – so a Daily Mail article highlighting a botched project leaves half the public apoplectic with shock and surprise. At what? At what should be a common story of precarious circumstances and wickedly complex choices not working out.  Worse still, as the Oxfam scandal has shown, we set ourselves up as an international Jimmy Swaggart, our narrative of global moral rectitude generating a public that clearly wants to believe in us, invest in us, and yet feels both indignation and vengeance at the fall of the sanctimonious.

  1. Fight the entitlement.

Everybody knows the saying ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Humanitarians know they hold lots of power, but somehow don’t really believe it. That’s because we’re special (see #1). We systematically fail to anticipate our own corruption. Why? Because that’s how power works. Just ask any politician, especially one of the fallen. They never see it coming.

The issue is not just about power, it is about the corruption that takes an individual from power to a sense of entitlement. As this Economist article explains, (brilliant!) research has demonstrated that that ‘people with power . . . think [it] is justified break rules not only because they can get away with it, but also because they feel at some intuitive level that they are entitled to take what they want.’ So the ‘sacrifice’ of our aid work and the power we wield and the powerful self-belief in our goodness produce people who are inclined to believe that it is OK to engage in what we know is wrong for others.  This is the notion of privilege, a word which, as the Economist points out, defines a ‘private law’.

I pray for the pendulum, that these and other reflections on the grey do not dampen the black and white fervor aiming to exorcise the bad apples (sexual cowboys and others) and the culture of acceptance that has empowered them for so long.  I also pray we are not one major earthquake away from the status quo snapping back.

 

 

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Localization

4 Comments

Localization — the agenda formerly intending a shift of humanitarian power?

The Good

The one year anniversary of the World Humanitarian Summit’s ‘Grand Bargain’ offers time to take stock of progress.    At a conceptual level, a key goal of the Grand Bargain is to drive the humanitarian sector towards the irrefutable good of contextualizing its work: re-imagining a humanitarian action that departs from top-down, cookie-cutter approaches and empowers programming that is borne in and is effective in meeting the needs of people within a specific context.  It will do so by shifting greater focus and cash to responders, a departure from a system based on the near monopoly of international aid conglomerates. We call this the localization agenda, even though a more neutral perspective would grasp the humanitarian system as already suffering from an over-localization (in the West).

The Bad

Let us imagine this contextualization in full bloom, a localization that moves beyond its current emphasis on the location of the funding recipient and beyond even the crucial focus on meaningful participation/involvement of local communities. To truly embody the shift in power first envisioned by the localization agenda, it should also comprise a locally-driven rethink of how to address people’s needs. How do we build the freedom for that rethink to occur? How do we avoid the seemingly unstoppable bulk transfer of managerial systems, best-practices and standardized (read: homogenized) methodologies that decontextualize humanitarian assistance in the first place?

This ongoing stampede of North-to-South ‘capacity building’ exercises risks producing globalization instead of localization, a kicking of the humanitarian can down bumpy local roads. [link] We already know the contents of this can — dozens of colourful guidelines on the same topic, neatly venned organizational processes and tick-box exercise after tick-box exercise to ensure quality control.  As the NEAR Network has declared: “Local actors have had more than 30 years of supposed capacity building and ‘partnership principles’ which has not resulted in any significant gains.”

This Trojan Horse of sectoral bureaucracy accompanies a more insidious globalization as local responders clamber for direct funding from Western donors. As I have written elsewhere, the prospect of local agencies tethering themselves to the soft power and avowedly self-interested geo-political ambitions of Western donor funding has already proven itself a debilitating experience for the Western INGO.  We must also guard against the globalizing effects of reducing localization to a donor-driven search for cheap labor, a rationale of efficiency gains by which localization reduces transaction costs by decreasing layers.

More deeply, localization must pierce the imposition of our (globalized) world view, and the universalist approach to exporting our truths, even where the underlying values may be universal in nature.  In other words, humanitarian ideals may be universal, but the architecture and processes designed to realize and defend those deals must be seen as a rather localized product of history and geography.  Let’s not confuse universal with sacred cow.

The Ugly

It has taken nine months of discussion to settle simple questions because they came burdened by complex institutional consequences: What is a local responder? What does ‘as directly as possible’ mean? To answer simply requires only an understanding of the catalyst for the localization push – the spectacular North-South power imbalance and inequitable distribution of resources within the humanitarian sector.  As it turns out, local responders were effectively shut out of owning the local response, even though often sub-contracted to deliver it. One stat summed up the embarrassing state of affairs: a mere 0.4% of international humanitarian assistance in 2015 went directly to national and local NGOs, a situation that makes global inequality look relatively tame.

The definitional debate, however, has compromised this clear intent. The accommodation of political and bureaucratic interests means that a local outpost of a billion-dollars-per-year INGO could be considered ‘local’, and that funding funnelled to local responders via the same old rent-extracting Western INGO intermediaries may count towards the Grand Bargain’s target of going 25 percent local (an issue still to be settled).

Proponents of localization take note.  Lesson 1: wealth and power are not so easily captured. Lesson 2: a logic of localization based on effectiveness and efficiency favors the status quo.

Lost in these debates over effectiveness and efficiency, lost in the scramble of trying to establish INGO standards of financial accounting in smaller, differently-developed local organizations, is any notion of localization as an ethical undertaking. The modern humanitarian sector is founded upon the principle of humanity, that a fundamental human dignity resides within each one of us.  There, we should house the right to self-determination and the ability to possess at least some degree of power over the forces affecting one’s life.

Enter the humanitarian machine at a time of crisis, wielding its monopoly power over decision-making as to who will live or die. That is an abusive power inhering in its unaccountable decisions as to who will and who will not receive aid.  That is a sovereign power being held by a non-sovereign body. It is time then for a realization that localization may or may not yield either effectiveness or efficiency, but those laudable goals should not be the standards by which it is ultimately judged. The ‘decolonization’ of humanitarian action constitutes an ethical mission, not simply a technocratic one; a transfer of power not merely from international to local agencies but from an alien civilization to a home society. Accepting such a meaningful transformation (read: loss) will not be easy for people like me. But our humanitarian action in their house? Time to admit that we haven’t exactly gotten it right, and the principle of humanity means that they should hold the power to get it wrong.

[7 July 2017.  In response to comments that the original blog misstated certain elements, changes were made to the second paragraph of The Ugly.]

Politics

Segregation is in the Air

Leave a comment

[Warning: In places I find it hard to understand what I am trying to say! Help appreciated.]

My previous blog makes the (simplistic) argument that the label “refugee” does scant justice to the reality of millions of people forced from their homelands by violence and destruction in which Western governments has played a significant role. The term “refugee” builds too weak a case. It underplays their actual history.

A weak case, however, is not the primary harm to the refugee.  The primary harm lies in the attendant displacement, not the displacement of people but the displacement of disciplines, approaches and paradigms that might have more ably defended these people/refugees.  And it is we in the humanitarian community, or the more specialized community that fights for refugee rights, who have elbowed out these other communities. Would ambulance chasing plaintiff attorneys be able to construct a successful claim for residency as compensation for an Iraqi fleeing war and ISIL?  Or maybe not an attorney at all, but a wheeler-dealer businessman, or a military negotiator, professionals unopposed to horse trading, able to traffic in compromise and the crude use power? Or maybe disruption and violence – a refugee exercise of power to replace their submission to a stacked deck of a legal regime?

It is not so much communities that are displaced by our elbowing, but the paradigms in which they operate. The “refugee” label belongs to a particular set of discourses (professional, personal, political) and to a specific world view. It lives within a particular framework. It offers a home to me and people like me in terms of its thinking and values – progressive, do-gooder, legal, humanist, justice-fighter, not-a-banker-thank-goodness, etc. There is hence a lovely power in that label, allowing me to cultivate a self-image full of virtues.  For that reason alone I am, like many others, well-wired to hold onto it with clenched fists, unconsciously perceiving my world through its lens. Put differently, I work within a structural aversion to recognizing what might have been.  By way of illustration, David Kennedy’s analysis of human rights reaches a parallel conclusion, that it “encourages people to seek emancipation in the vocabularies of reason, rather than faith, in public rather than private life, in law rather than politics, in politics rather than economics.” (David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue).

It is no coincidence that this displacement ensures my privileged position within the sphere of the refugee. There is no finer feeling than to stand erect in the fight for the downtrodden! We act as their champions, complete with a loud admiration for their drive, resilience and strength. Within this world (and not that one) displacement leaves people like me as the high priests and anointed speakers. That in itself is not a problem. Not knowing, feeling or seeing it is a problem. Certainty of its Truth is another. A less fundamental example of the power of the paradigm, one that has finally been exposed, is the process by which the aid response to migrants, refugees and IDPs became compartmentalized within humanitarian action, rendering invisible needs and aspirations of a long-term or developmental nature, even as camps morphed over decades into lifelong settlements.

One way to look at it is that we rule by the blessing of segregation, in this instance taking the form of compartmentalization. As we bear witness to the transfer of power in the US it strikes me as a good time to think more about this segregation. More dangerous than ever-sharpening global inequality is the degree to which the haves will maintain this inequality through a web of segregations. Segregation of neighborhoods, healthcare, education, cross-border mobility and perhaps soon human genetics; segregation within communities and across nations. A simple litmus test: Does the status quo work in your favor or not? It does pretty damned well by me.

The world of the haves will protect its interests by building Trumpian walls, and has been doing so for generations if not longer. In part, it will drive further inequality via a sanitized segregation, avoiding the horrors of Jim Crow and Apartheid, replacing such racist ugliness with the institutionalized compassion of aid, peacekeeping and 5-pronged fixes after technocratic fixes.  Is it clear to humanitarians that we form part of the haves? Issue by issue we side with them, perhaps as their less wealthy (but living quite comfortably — thank you for your donations) brethren, perhaps as an agent of their business. As in the fight for refugee rights, we will thump our fists and push for change, but will do so while posing no threat to the paradigm, in fact thumping our fists just as urgently to protect it.

[Note:  Twelve hours after the original posting I made several changes in wording. For better or worse, substance remains the same.]

Critique of Aid, Politics

The trouble with labels

1 Comment

The realization that humanitarian action masks political (in)action is an old story, as is our collective lament that blankets, pills and food will not fix an Afghanistan, even if they may prove quite useful to the cold, sick and hungry.  This is the problem of the humanitarian fig-leaf.  The humanitarian sector at times recognizes this effect, and has long echoed former UNHCR High Commissioner Sadako Ogata’s well-quoted wisdom that “there are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems.” That is certainly true, but tends to be deployed as an alibi for our failures.  We forget to invoke Ogata as a critique of our successes.

In other words, we humanitarians bear responsibility for maintaining the lustre and exclusivity of the humanitarian label, a mode of action that emplaces one set of responses by displacing others. Have we not safeguarded our turf by averting any critique of the its sufficiency; of the effect of humanitarianizing a crisis? Beyond a label that obscures the political and military, it also occupies turf within the aid sector. To label a crisis as “humanitarian” makes us the Big Kahuna, and its calcification into policy and practice – for example, the humanitarian-development divide – has usefully meant that only humanitarian projects could be funded in some contexts.

The price of the label hence falls upon people. To wit, using blankets and pills to fix war, rescue at sea to fix killer migration, or the incongruity of responding to decades of crisis in places like DRC or South Sudan through projects aimed at addressing people’s immediate needs.  As I write in a forthcoming report, the “urgency of [humanitarian] needs eclipses but in no way lessens a greater spectrum of human aspirations – to secure livelihoods, education for their children or to live in peace.”  The degree to which such short-term approaches to long-term problems have been particularly damaging in refugee settings, addressing neither the causes of flight nor the protracted nature of being in flight.

So let us begin. Let us begin by tossing out Ogata, as a necessary but insufficient realization.  As Tom Scott-Smith cleverly concludes, the problem is not with the humanitarian solutions being inadequate, but ‘humanitarian problems’.  In his words: Framing an issue as a distinctly humanitarian one necessarily limits the responses available. Seeing inescapably political issues as humanitarian ones, in other words, can seriously curtail the possibilities for reducing suffering, and nowhere is this more evident than in the recent migration crisis. 

So let us begin in earnest by a moratorium on humanitarian tagging. The situation in DRC is not a humanitarian crisis. The situation in Haiti is not a humanitarian crisis. And the situation in the Mediterranean is not a humanitarian crisis.  The world should not sleep better knowing that humanitarians have responded to a humanitarian crisis.

And if it does not seem to be in our institutional interest to remove our label? Take heed! What goes around comes around. Look no further than the ‘crisis’ of refugees and migrants in Europe or the Ebola response. It will not be long before the security label more completely paints over the humanitarian one, replacing victims with problems, aid with self-protection and compassion with fear; replacing one Big Kahuna with another.