Tag Archives: Perceptions

Our Western Identity

When deaths count

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

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

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

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

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

Critique of Aid

From good money to bad

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Ethics post #4

Money, scandal and the Royal Family …  we all love a headline with some spectacle, don’t we? No hint of sex but plenty of blood and potential for voyeurism as we watch the Sackler name hemorrhage its wealth-bought nobility. Plenty of outrage and righteousness as well, as we feed on charges that Sackler fortunes were considerably enriched by unleashing an opioid addiction epidemic.  

Spectacle, though, seems almost definitionally concerned with the tip of the iceberg. As museums say no to the Sacklers, humanitarians should pay attention, particularly to what lies beneath the surface.

The Sacklers were no small donors, charitably contributing piles of wampum to acquisitions and exhibitions across the major museums of the West. Their philanthropy helped establish a great deal of beauty in the world.  One common view is that the ends justify the means – ignore where the money came from as long as it is not illegal or scandalous (and hence reduce future donations).  After all, museums are purposed to house artistic endeavor, not advance one or another of thousands of social causes. In this view, the refusal of Sackler funding does not mean morally cleaner art; it means less art and less public accessibility to art.

And then there is the other view. Renowned photographer Nan Goldin fingered the Sackler family due to her own addiction to opioids, threatening to pull her work out of museums and staging protests. The story flared across the media. Donations from the Sacklers thus moved from philanthropic monuments to scandalous gestures (reputational risks).  Even so, for many museums the money proves too substantial to walk the path of refusal.

Humanitarian agencies are similarly thought of as public goods and moral actors.  They often act pragmatically or in institutional self-interest and they often act on the general moral principle of not taking dirty money.  Further, humanitarian power to act depends heavily upon moral legitimacy, and this prompts a more specific moral principle that often guides agency donor policy: whether or not there is a direct connection of the wealth being donated to the suffering of people affected by crisis. It is easy to understand why a health NGO might have more concern with accepting a grant from the pre-spectacle Sacklers than would, say, an environmental agency. 

Here is a first chunk of submerged iceberg. As I’ve blogged recently, our heightened awareness of the causes of crisis requires a new equation in humanitarian donor policy. “Given its increasingly clear role in the conflict and suffering to which we respond … is an enormous chunk of our support produced in the factories of inequality?” Otherwise said, what of the responsibility to interrogate the consequences on inequality of the business behind hedge fund philanthropy?  And if not inequality, perhaps the destruction of the environment or contribution to climate change?  Or maybe the uber-profitable generation of democracy-killing echo chambers and election fraud? 

This is where the spectacle above comes in.  Because what we have in that headline is not a museum, but the British Royal Family (the Prince’s Trust) cutting ties with the Sacklers. Now, I don’t want to pick on the Monarchy just to make a point (or maybe I do), but their wealth has a particular history, one fused with England’s colonial legacy of violence and destruction. The latter would seem to dwarf even the horrors of opioid addiction.  So what does it tell us when the human embodiment of Empire decides that Sackler money is too dirty?

It tells us that the vilification of the Sacklers does not threaten but actually safeguards the commonplace acceptance of funding from tainted sources. It installs a process whereby demonization of the most pathological masks the pathology of the norm.  At best, this marks the triumph of what Hannah Arendt might label ‘lesser evils.’  It seems more likely, however, that the spectacle of this headline marks a textbook example of how power works to preserve the status quo.  The Sacklers now define and embody the rule; they become not just the devil we know, but the way we picture the devil, the standard of what we relegate to devildom.  It may mean a little less art, but it does not herald a new ethical scrutiny of the way questionable money pays for seemingly unquestionable good works.

Stay tuned. Time to question the unquestionable? The second chunk of the submerged iceberg may be even more concerning.

Our Western Identity

The New Humanitarian Basics (blog 2)

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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

Four Ideas that

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… I have been thinking about but have not had time to blog.

  1. A confederacy of shitholes.

It has been some months since Donald Trump (apparently) plastered that label across a large chunk of the global South not named Australia.  One has to be surprised by the depth of irony in the humanitarian reaction, which seemed predictably incensed that Trump could be so racist and stupid but which also seemed, just as predictably, rather delusional on their own role in this affair. How far from the truth would it be to suggest that the humanitarian system is no stranger to loudly promoting a fair amount of shitholiness when it comes to these same contexts plastered by Trump?  For the President, at least, ignorance seems a likely excuse.

2. The Wrong Red-Line.

The problem with lines in the sand is that they tend to generate a binary: on one side you’re ok, but on the other side you’re screwed. Saints and sinners.  The use of chemical weapons, we are told, marks not just any line, but a red line. Recent history in Syria, Macron’s or Obama’s own words, validate this. The problem, of course, is that the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons is not so much a red line as a special line. The red lines of warfare prohibit the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals and playgrounds. I guess that means they prohibit the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals and playgrounds over and over and over again.  Red lines also prohibit the blockades on humanitarian assistance, starvation of civilian populations, torture and mass murder.

The next question is painfully obvious. Does a bright red line being drawn on the use of chemical weapons relegate the rest of international humanitarian or human rights law to a set of yellowish lines? Obvious, but what is our answer and where is it in public discourse? A less obvious question: What red lines do we as humanitarians draw, and why? Are we unwilling to defend the legal and moral red line against violence targeting civilians because it is a defense that fails to generate sufficient political traction or media attention? Do we effectively decide to sell out less sexy red lines in the name of needing to be heard?

3. The Zuckerberg Defleption (a manoeuvre that merges deflection with deception).

The red line Mark Zuckerberg has artfully drawn in the sand, complete with a mea culpa and genuine-sounding remorse, is the wrong one. It’s also a brilliant sleight of hand.  We now have the crime: releasing or selling our personal data to unscrupulous outside parties. We can now ignore the original crime: Facebook harvesting and selling our data to everyone else (so long as they do not interfere with the democratic process but merely seek to stufficate our lives and kill the planet by targeting us with psycho-personalized dreams directly attainable through the consumption of their products and services)

It seems past time the humanitarian sector establishes its distance from the likes of Facebook, Google, or Microsoft. I have no doubt they will find their way into the most remote corners of our humanitarian world, but do we have to serve as the vector for their spread? Of course, there are incredibly effective uses for their apps/services. But that should not blind us to data (identity) harvesting, echo chambers (just what we need in the midst of ethnic or religious strife), internet porn and what George Monbiot calls the ‘infrastructure of comparison’.

4. Downward accountability? Or asking them to do our job?

There is an entire industry of humanitarian policy wonks calling for downward accountability to beneficiaries. And regardless the ineffectiveness of power bequeathing accountability to the less powerful, it seems more realistic than waiting for our beneficiaries to seize it. Is that good enough? I do believe I’ve declared downward accountability an ethical requirement on a number of occasions. What if I have this wrong? What if this disguises an unethical outsourcing of our own work? An offloading of our own baggage?  I mean, why should people in crisis be forced to ensure the accountability of our projects because we can’t seem to manage them in a way that accountability overrides self-interest? Aren’t they struggling to survive crisis, overcome with grief, adapting to social upheaval, or find tomorrow’s meal? The last thing they should be asked to do is help us to achieve our oft-repeated good intentions and help us to satisfy donor requirements. Finally, I note that we don’t ask this of crisis-affected people in our own societies – it would be shouted down. In the West we have watchdog groups, journalists, and governments that watch over the do-gooders.

Critique of Aid, Our Western Identity

If you’re happy and you know it…

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I am not the first humanitarian to owe an apology to the people of Somalia.  Somalia is one of my go-to catastrophes.  Have an audience and need an example? The all-purpose Somalia does the trick: starvation, war, GWOT, counter-terrorism legislation, diversion of aid, refugees, ethnic conflict, climate change, cholera, co-opted aid agencies, murder/kidnapping of  aid workers, displacement etc etc.

Somalia is no longer a nation but an archetype of a certain kind of nation, joining (depending on the day) South Sudan, DRC or CAR in a string cite of intractable, unfathomable brutality, drought, destitution and conflict.  These are the contexts that substantiate the humanitarian case for why delivering compassionate aid to others is a necessary part of our world.  They nourish our system just as we feed theirs. (And by way of confession, I talk about Somalia though I’ve never been there.  Again, I’m not the first humanitarian to take that license.)

I recently did work that involved taking a closer – though geographically removed (Nairobi) – look at the situation in Somalia, now mired in the yet another staggering drought, only five years removed from the 2011/12 crisis (drought, conflict…) that killed upwards of 250,000 Somalis. At first, nothing I saw or heard challenged my narrative of Somalia the profoundly a tragic context. In blunt terms: one of the worst places on Earth.  Think about that: me declaring it one of the worst places on Earth.

In the course of those interviews, though, I began to notice another story – Western aid workers recounting how the ‘mood’ of the people – seems quite different.  Experienced humanitarian hands used the term ‘optimistic’ to describe how many Somalis felt.  Not what I was expecting, and sufficiently weighty to pierce my own confirmation bias.

Further reinforcement?  A recently published set of surveys from (the excellent) Ground Truth shows a full  35 percent of Somali respondents felt that life is improving ‘very much’ for people in Somalia, while another 41 percent said it was ‘mostly’ improving. In fact, only 6 percent answered that it wasn’t.

Not convinced? Back home, I stumbled across the recent National Geographic issue (November 2017) on happiness, including findings from the World Happiness Report.  This scientific study ranks Somalia in 5th place in Africa, quite distant from the other members of my string cite of misery. South Sudan placed 37th, and CAR was 44th – dead last. Here’s a stunner of a finding: Somalia yielded a higher ‘daily happiness’ rating than either the UK or USA. Most of Eastern Europe wasn’t even close.

We need to let that sink in.  We really need to think hard about the looping narratives by which we define Somalia, yet another narrative divide between a the perceptions of an international aid community looking down and a people looking up. For me, our unchallenged authority to problematize Somalia needs to be at the center of the localization agenda (displacing the turf war over funding?).  Note: it is a power that fits well with our proverbial humanitarian hammer’s bias in seeing a world of nails.

Conclusion?  The redistribution of power within the humanitarian system should be judged by percentages of funding flows and by the inability of the external system to reduce a country such as Somalia to conflict, corruption, drought, crisis and death. Absent that shift, we will continue to miss the opportunity to tap into the optimism felt by so many of Somalis, to explore with them more inspired options for international action in times of crisis. And in this, Somalia is not alone.

[This post was updated (a number of small edits) on December 23rd]

Addendum December 27th.   I came across this as I rushed to the supermarket on Christmas Eve, a few recipe-saving purchases for the next day’s big dinner.

Some messages are universal, meaning they resonate at the level of the nation or society and for each and every individual. As the localization agenda evolves, I look forward to the ‘local’ finding different ways to say Here we are!

 

Our Western Identity

Headlines of Harvey

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Have you heard about the Cajun Navy?  Google it.  644,000 hits. The Cajun Navy is not a one-off story, it is one of the top Hurricane Harvey storylines. If I had to sum it up: ordinary people coming together in the face of extraordinary adversity to save the lives of other people.  Mother with small children stuck in waist deep water? Some bass fisherman on a boat will haul them out.  Elderly man drowning in a car?  A human chain forms and performs the rescue.  The Lt. Governor of Texas likened the civilian effort to the rescue of Dunkirk. If nothing else, this makes for great TV.  But there is more than nothing else.

The accompanying story is that Hurricane Harvey has met its match.  Unprecedented destruction? Sure, but this is Texas, and even a storm like this will not defeat the spirit of the Texans. Is there anyone who has not seen that story?

Exit Harvey and back to the world. When was the last time coverage of a disaster / crisis somewhere in Africa sounded like that?  Or Asia?  These are not occasional human interest stories sunk within the reporting on a major catastrophe, these are top, persistent headlines. The hero is not a brave individual but a brave population. Here’s a sample headline: Spirit of Texas: People pull together to help Storm Harvey victims. I’ve blogged before about the narrative divide, about the power of the narratives that shape our world view. It’s not a new story.

Media and even aid agencies are doing better, but neither the Western public nor aid agency fundraising targets are ready for the courage, resourcefulness and agency of ordinary Sudanese or Bangladeshis as a predominant image of crisis response. We may be able to feel admiration for the fortitude of an IDP mother and rape survivor who has lost a husband plus two children and has now walked 100 miles to find medical care, but that story is of a heroic individual, the victim of a pervasive venality and brutality.

The core humanitarian principle of humanity manifests itself in the compassion to respond to the suffering not of family, neighbours, clan or countrymen, but to anyone, anywhere in the world, simply because they are human beings just like us.  Our hardwiring sometimes works differently, though, and we see and feel attachments or bonds to family, neighbors and fellow citizens that get in the way of us seeing the entire human race through the lens of a dispassionate equality.  Ethnocentrism may even prove biological in origins, which makes humanitarian ideals all the more important, even if ‘unnatural’.

I choke up and find tears on my cheeks when I watch the videos of the Cajun Navy.  I feel pride at the American can-do spirit. There is a special sense of connection because I lived in New Orleans for several years.  I know quite a few actual Cajuns.  Beyond the near-hegemony of a Western worldview, that helps explain why the Western media run with these headlines. Because I will read them and be touched by them.  Of course I am interested and often moved by stories – in the media or the ones I’ve heard in person – of the extraordinary resourcefulness of disaster-affected communities in the so-called global south. But that is different in both degree and quality.

Two conclusions come to mind.  The first is that the depiction of Hurricane Harvey lines up so much better with the reality of humanitarian crisis.  The people of Houston and Beaumont and Port Arthur will rise to the occasion and overcome this catastrophic event. At the same time, they require support from outside to overcome the immediate needs, to support reconstruction, etc.  They do not need to be saved or rescued as they sit there, helpless.  And they do not need the international community to arrive with the intention of solving painful structural issues such as gender/racial inequality, illiteracy, violent crime, drug addiction, undemocratic institutions, environmental degradation…  (Or, at the least, they might very well need that, but it is not how we as humanitarians understand our role.). So why do we humanitarians think so differently about Sudan or Haiti or Bangladesh?

The second is to consider what the people in places like Texas (or Bihar) need most at a time like this.  Water, shelter, food etc come to mind.  Hope and reassurance come to mind.  But perhaps more than these is that spirit, the one Texans reportedly have in spades, the one that sits not in a briefcase or in a convoy full of water bottles but in a bar, shelter or church full of people. It also sits in and is inspired by headlines and stories and Tweets across the media machine. It is a manufactured swell and it is vital to crisis response. Which raises the question, what happens when there is no such inspirational headline, where 99% of the story reinforces a swell of helpless incompetence or the hope that rescue will come in the form of a foreign intervention?

Critique of Aid

What’s in a name?

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Change can happen in the humanitarian sphere. I kid you not. Take TPFKAB. The People Formerly Known As Beneficiaries (also TPFKAAR – The People Formerly Known As Aid Recipients).  Long perceived as problematic – as passive, reductive and patronizing – over the past 18 months or so that nomenclature has been banished, the sector now self-imposing the more (politically) correct “crisis-affected populations” or “people affected by crisis.”

The new(ish) label is more correct in terms of the respect it confers upon TPFKAB. Reducing human beings to a status founded in their relationship to us – “beneficiary” or “aid recipient” or (worse still) “victim” (read: victim in need of saving by us) – placed a rather profound act of dehumanization at the centre of the humanitarian lexicon.  Kudos for recognizing the issue and making the change.  But the new label is sweeping; it too easily counts millions of people who lack a direct relationship to us at all, and whose well-being is heavily defined by that lack.  Why? Moving from TPFKAB to “people affected by crisis” involves swapping out those who actually receive aid with the larger, aspirational category of all those who probably should be receiving aid but often who do not. The new nomenclature obliterates this distinction.

The new terminology risks producing a sectoral sleight of hand, as becomes obvious in usage, for example in relation to our humanitarian Waterloo, accountability to those self-same crisis-affected people.  Here is how the Core Humanitarian Standard, the latest elixir for our accountability-challenged sector, proclaims itself: It also facilitates greater accountability to communities and people affected by crisis: knowing what humanitarian organisations have committed to will enable them to hold those organisations to account.  I hate to sound picky (actually, I am rather picky), but the word “some” seems missing: “some (and often small percentage of) people affected by crisis.”  That is who gets our aid.

As Austen Davis wrote 10 years ago, “There are no accountability initiatives that would hold agencies to account for not being somewhere.” That remains true today.  In a smart paper on accountability, James Darcy further elaborated on this blind spot, highlighting the degree to which initiatives to establish humanitarian accountability really mean accountability “for what they do, and how they do it; not for what they fail to do”. Agencies remain unaccountable for their “strategic choices.” These form no small gap: “decisions about whether or not to intervene, the timing of intervention and withdrawal, which areas and communities to prioritise, the choice of programme approach and the ‘mode’ of delivery (how to work, with what types of partner, funding etc.).” (at note 10).

The result? Accountability frameworks that offer no accountability to many of those most profoundly affected by the humanitarian response to crisis – those not receiving aid.  Accountability, of course, is just one problematic area for the use of the new terminology.  What of the very image that comes to mind in a casual expression like “The international humanitarian sector has mobilized in large numbers, with dozens of organizations busy delivering aid to crisis-affected populations in [country].”? If only it were more true.

What of the TPFKABWSBDGA? The People Formerly Known As Beneficiaries Who Should But Don’t Get Aid.  The new nomenclature may not conceal the agency or dignity of TPFKAB, may not wrap TPFAAR within their own victimhood, but it nonetheless manages to exemplify the same old trait of placing our lens onto their world, with something going invisible in the process.  In this case, millions of people affected by crisis yet unaffected by our crisis response.

Uncategorized

Thomas Jefferson and the 22nd Century

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A New Year and a new baby have sparked my inner Carl Sagan, pondering the next century, musing on the meaning of life. That sort of thinking delivered me rather quickly to Thomas Jefferson.

Speculation about the future remains a dark art. When I was a kid, people imagined life in 2016 would be like The Jetsons (which, btw, takes place in 2062) not Downton Abbey with an internet connection. Extrapolating trends, the pundits prophesied both horrors and nirvanas. We watched 2001, A Space Odyssey and were convinced by its promise. We lamented never seeing a tight-suited Mick Jagger singing about Satisfaction again. Oh, how we were wrong.

Humanitarian crystal balls fare no better than others. When it comes to such predictions, I produced this piece in 2010, looking forward to 2020. Much more serious analysis can be found, for instance, in Randolph Kent’s work with the Humanitarian Futures project (e.g., see here). What about the far future? Not 2020 or 2050. What about a century or two from now? That’s where Jefferson comes in.

It would be difficult to identify a more brilliant politician, philosopher or steadfast champion of democracy, liberty and equality. Enter, stage left, the inconvenient truth that the man who found it “self-evident” that “all men are created equal” also bought and sold men as slaves. Let’s avoid a discussion of the historical and moral context circa 1775. The more pertinent question: When they study the current humanitarian age, what will prove our Jeffersonian blemish? What will leave people in 2116 shaking their heads, outraged at our deep moral and logical flaws? What constitutes our unrecognized racism? One answer: speciesism.

In scores of presentations during my MSF days, I used the slide below (stolen, with thanks, from JAB) to highlight the critical specificity of humanitarian action, distinguishing it from the much broader remit of do-gooderism issuing from a ‘humanitarian’ spirit (development, rights literacy, democracy promotion, gender equality, etc.). As the colored lines appeared, I asked participants whether they thought it a suitable definition of ‘humanitarian.’ Moving left from “doing good for people”, after a few iterations I would then jump out to ‘animal humanitarianism’ for comic relief, perhaps making fun of the (surprisingly successful) organization Donkey Sanctuary. “Has somebody lost the plot?” I would ask. “Is there some confusion over the first five letters of the word ‘humanitarian’?” Hell no doubt reserves a special pitchfork for the sanctimonious.

What is humanitarian action? JAB chart

 

The paramount principle of humanity places the fundamental human dignity of all people at the heart of the humanitarian ethos. This amounts to and is part of a larger exceptionalism – granting to humans a set of protections that are denied to other species. It yields a classification, as did race, onto which we graft great significance, including a conviction in our own superiority. There is too much similarity with racism not to wonder whether a future enlightenment will unfold, one holding that all life merits an equal degree of reverence, or at least conceiving of all life as possessing a magic, a magic so singular and astonishing that it renders irrelevant the differences between all of life’s diverse forms.

Right now, there are six boneless chicken thigh filets marinating in my fridge. In other words, I have not yet gone off the animal rights deep end, nor have I adopted dubious New Age philosophies such as Why I Identify as a Mammal. It seems almost inevitable that the proud leaders of humanitarian action today will have their names sandblasted off memorials in the future, with 22nd Century students protesting our virulent speciesism and moral decrepitude (i.e., when we become history, we are not likely to become the heroes we secretly yearn to be).

The import of speciesism to humanitarians is to consider whether the most powerful way to protect humanity would be to stop pushing human exceptionalism. Why does humanitarian action neither embrace nor deploy a reverence for life itself, and does this deficit undercut respect for its central message that family, clan, tribe, race, gender and nationality must be subordinate to the single family of humanity? Perhaps all exceptionalism warrants condemnation because exceptionalism, be it that of Joseph Kony or the US government, inexorably yields atrocity. The Jeffersonian problem, of course, is that we may have to live another hundred years of tomorrows to recognize the atrocities of today.

Health, Our Western Identity

The Hammers and Nails of Ebola

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“MSF made a big mistake.” Not a small admission from Claudia Evers, MSF’s Emergency Coordinator in Guinea. Think how much more effective international aid might be if more aid organizations publicized rather than buried such opinion. But that is another blog.

The issue is basic. In its early stages and as the Ebola outbreak mounted, MSF placed almost all its apples in the treatment basket. Fueled by the twinning of high transmission levels and the sloth-paced scaling up of treatment (MSF aside), the virus far outpaced the intervention. Evers concludes: “Instead of asking for more beds we should have been asking for more sensitization activities.”

But did MSF make a mistake? Or is this more of a design flaw in the system? Treatment is what MSF does. Treatment is what MSF is designed to do. When it comes to outbreaks like cholera, or diseases like malaria, or even ‘epidemics’ in some places like maternal mortality, MSF is a hammer of treatment. Nobody, and not even MSF, should be surprised that it sees a world of nails – people who first and foremost need treatment.

To simplify: A good buddy of mine is a cardiologist. His brother is a cardiac surgeon. They disagree bitterly on how best to deal with their aging mother’s heart problems. The former wants to manage it through drugs, diet and exercise. The latter wants to cut. The lesson is that identity determines perception.

So the problem was not MSF calling for a massive, rapid increase in beds and treatment capacity. The problem was that MSF the hammer’s voice stood virtually alone. The problem, in other words, was the absence of other tools in the kit. Where were the wrenches, NGOs that specialize in grassroots mobilization, and who would have seen its potential and pressed for it? Where were the screwdrivers who would have championed decentralized models of care? Where was the diversity of discourse?

Even as sensitization activities scaled up, local communities seem to have been viewed more as targets than as actors. One concern is that the authorities (foreign and international) installed centralized structures for the dissemination of information, rather than capitalizing on local capacities. Another claim is that messages were too simplistic: being told what not to do with a sick child does not provide an actionable solution for a mother with no access to a treatment center. What should she do?

It seems there is an emerging consensus that local communities in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea were sidelined in the rush to contain Ebola, treated more as an obstacle due to their distrust and ‘primitive’ behavior (see, e.g., here). Treated then as a vector for the disease, to be contained rather than sought out as a potential partner in defeating it; not understood to be necessary to generating solutions and disseminating the word. In the end, it seems providential that they did not remain contained, and many communities took the fight against transmission into their own hands (see, e.g., here).

To recap: the Ebola outbreak response reduced communities to a combination of victim, vector, and potential security threat. Otherwise, the aid response and media coverage of it rendered these communities invisible. That invisibility comes because the entire international community – the Western governmental and NGO aid response – is deeply, messianically self-referential. That is the hammer of being a savior, and it blinds us to anything but the nail of victimhood; to the reality that many people, given the shortcomings of international aid, need to know how to save themselves. That is the hammer of being largely Western/foreign, and seeing the nail of disarray, primitivity and ignorance.

One step further: consider this piece from Oxfam CEO Mark Goldring on his recent encounters in Liberia and Sierra Leone. In a few simple paragraphs he conveys the “suffering, bravery and stoicism” of the people. Yet such narratives always fall short. Be it Syrian refugees or civilians in Central African republic or the survivors of Ebola, the sheer scale of grief, social/livelihood devastation and grinding anxiety over life itself evade our comprehension.

For all our efforts, this tremendous suffering remains beyond our ability to fathom with clarity. And it lies beyond our ability to mend. As humanitarian organizations, we find it much easier to be the hammer of crisis response, seeing the nail as the problem called hunger or shelterlessness or, in this case, outbreak. As important as it is to contain and defeat this outbreak, I wonder if we are preconditioned to see the virus, sick people to be mended, and not the millions of people who need something altogether different than the hammers of Western pity, charity, or aid.

Our Western Identity, Politics

Lessons From Charlie Hebdo

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What do David Cameron, Angela Merkel, Benjamin Netanyahu and Mahmoud Abbas have in common? Well, probably lots of things. Here’s one you weren’t thinking of: All of them attended Sunday’s massive Charlie Hebdo rallies in Paris, and did not make any such powerful protest when the Taliban murdered 132 children in Peshawar. A number of articles (see here or here), comments and tweets have contrasted the West’s reaction to the murder of twelve satirists with the case of those Pakistani children, or Boko Haram’s abduction and enslavement of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls.

There is a sad futility in making such comparisons. First, it is not a comparison of like to like. Would the Charlie Hebdo attack have created such a global outpouring without the video footage of the gunmen making their escape? Are the Taliban not the old story, half as sexy as the Islamic State? Bottom line: lots of factors explain Sunday’s extraordinary political and emotional outpouring as 3.6 million people pinned Je Suis Charlie to their hearts.

Beyond that, though, is the misplaced anger of these accusations. It is OK to feel a greater kinship to those closer to us than to those far away. This form of tribalism may even be hardwired into us as human beings. We can still exercise the core humanitarian principle that we share an equal kinship with all humanity. So I can admit to feeling closer to editor Stephane Charbonnier or cartoonist Jean Cabut than to teacher Sofia Amjad or pupil Asad Aziz (even while imagining the school children to be ‘more innocent’ – apologies for that, but you get what I mean). The mistake is not in experiencing the bias of our own very human emotions. The mistake is to allow that bias to go unrecognized, so that it fails to be overruled.

The even larger mistake is in failing to see that the source of those biased feelings is not solely kinship. These biases – our different reactions to Charlie Hebdo versus Peshawar’s massacre – are produced by the same relations of power and privilege that nourish the Western NGO and produce biased approaches, strategies and activities. These prejudicial factors range widely, from the North-South bias in media coverage to the effective valuation of some human lives over others to the difference between the West’s position towards the right to free speech versus the right to an education. Sadly, recognition of these biases will remain spotty without genuinely more global decision makers at the top of our nominally-global aid agencies.

Lesson 2: The sense of senseless

Do not succumb to the reactive view that these killings are senseless, outbursts of psychotic madness, the work of a purely bloodthirsty fanaticism. On display are undoubtedly a purpose and a logic and the capacity of this attack to advance the personal and strategic interests of the murderers. There is a cruel win-win at play – do nothing and the Kouachi brothers’ actions will look heroic, having cowed the West into a fearful submission. Have a mass rally and, well, their actions will look heroic. After all, we were not the message audience. We are more likely its vector in the quest to “sharpen contradictions.”

I wish I were in France myself. I would have marched. But I would have known that the rally plays into the hands of the militants – adding glory to the deeds in the same way an arsonist purrs as his blaze nets a five-alarm response. And my concerns would have been with my colleagues around the world, because international NGOs continue to be seen by many as symbols of Western blasphemy. Targets.

Lesson 3: Who are we kidding?

Been asked to throw away a pot of yogurt by airport security lately? Plenty of brave talk. Lots of people tweeting Voltaire. But who are we trying to fool? Much of the West is particularly and increasingly risk-averse (see e.g. this blog or this one), and we have seen the degree to which even remote threats of harm have elicited ineffective or expensive overreactions. The Ebola panic comes to mind. So let us not be surprised if standing up for free speech quickly gives way to risk management, threat aversion, and a substantial chilling of the exercise of the right to say whatever the fuck one wants.

Lesson 4: The humanitarian culture of offense

The right to offend. The right to talk back to a parent, denounce a President, or criticize a government. The right to “speak truth to power” as so many have suggested. Freedom of speech is one of the core universal human rights. And it is one of the rights that runs most contrary to the common sense, laws, limits of accepted behavior or culture of many societies.

We know that many challenge this absolutist approach to freedom of speech. We need to look no further than our universities, where academics have found themselves policed for advancing unpopular ideas, or the growth of political correctness as muzzle. And that is in the West, the supposed champion of free speech. How does it play in the corners of the world that do not believe in such public airing of opinions or insults? Where maintaining ‘face’ holds enormous cultural currency? Where the values and needs of society trump those of the individual?

Nothing justifies murder. But what of the many places in the world where nothing justifies offensive speech? We fall easily into the rationale that it is a universal right. That is elsewhere a legal technicality, not a shared ideal. More specifically to humanitarian work, what of the many places where we regularly assert this right to offend through our public reports, our exposure of the violence and abuse of civilians in a place like Darfur or Congo?

I remember a Japanese MSF doctor, thoroughly opposed to our advocacy campaign. He had no disagreement with the facts of it, yet he felt ashamed by the public airing. Neither our insistence on universality, nor our conviction that public advocacy forms a necessary component of humanitarian action, obviate the offense of our speech. And causing offense will strike many as un-humanitarian, an act of aggression and an exercise of power no different from inking a blasphemous cartoon.