In the face of the world's disorders, moral concerns have provided a powerful ground for developing international as well as local policies. Didier Fassin draws on case materials from France, South Africa, Venezuela, and Palestine to explore the meaning of humanitarianism in the contexts of immigration and asylum, disease and poverty, disaster and war. He traces and analyzes recent shifts in moral and political discourse and practices - what he terms "humanitarian reason" - and shows in vivid examples how humanitarianism is confronted by inequality and violence. Deftly illuminating the tensions and contradictions in humanitarian government, he reveals the ambiguities confronting states and organizations as they struggle to deal with the intolerable. His critique of humanitarian reason, respectful of the participants involved but lucid about the stakes they disregard, offers theoretical and empirical foundations for a political and moral anthropology.

Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present

We study the effect of US food aid on conflict in recipient countries. Our analysis exploits time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in US wheat production and cross-sectional variation in a country’s tendency to receive any US food aid. According to our estimates, an increase in US food aid increases the incidence and duration of civil conflicts, but has no robust effect on interstate conflicts or the onset of civil conflicts. We also provide suggestive evidence that the effects are most pronounced in countries with a recent history of civil conflict. (JEL D74, F35, O17, O19, Q11, Q18) We are unable to determine whether our aid helps or hinders one or more parties to the conflict … it is clear that the losses—particularly looted assets—constitutes a serious barrier to the efficient and effective provision of assistance, and can contribute to the war economy. This raises a serious challenge for the humanitarian community: can humanitarians be accused of fueling or prolonging the conflict in these two countries? — Medecins Sans Frontieres, Amsterdam 1

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US Food Aid and Civil Conflict

How do a few Third World political movements become global causes celebres, while most remain isolated? This book rejects dominant views that needy groups readily gain help from selfless nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Instead, they face a Darwinian struggle for scarce resources where support goes to the savviest, not the neediest. Examining Mexico's Zapatista rebels and Nigeria's Ogoni ethnic group, the book draws critical conclusions about social movements, NGOs, and 'global civil society'.

The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism

This book suggests a new explanation for why international peace interventions often fail to reach their full potential. Based on several years of ethnographic research in conflict zones around the world, it demonstrates that everyday elements - such as the expatriates' social habits and usual approaches to understanding their areas of operation - strongly influence peacebuilding effectiveness. Individuals from all over the world and all walks of life share numerous practices, habits, and narratives when they serve as interveners in conflict zones. These common attitudes and actions enable foreign peacebuilders to function in the field, but they also result in unintended consequences that thwart international efforts. Certain expatriates follow alternative modes of thinking and acting, often with notable results, but they remain in the minority. Through an in-depth analysis of the interveners' everyday life and work, this book proposes innovative ways to better help host populations build a sustainable peace.

Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention

The politics of life and death is explored from the perspective of Doctors Without Borders (Medecins sans frontieres [MSF]), an activist nongovernmental organization explicitly founded to respond to health crises on a global scale. Following the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I underline key intersections between MSF's operations that express concern for human life in the midst of humanitarian disaster and the group's self-proclaimed ethic of engaged refusal. Adopting the analytic frame of biopolitics, I suggest that the actual practice of medical humanitarian organizations in crisis settings presents a fragmentary and uncertain form of such power, extended beyond stable sovereignty and deployed within a restricted temporal horizon.

Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis

Humanitarian groups have failed, Fiona Terry believes, to face up to the core paradox of their activity: humanitarian action aims to alleviate suffering, but by inadvertently sustaining conflict it potentially prolongs suffering. In Condemned to Repeat?, Terry examines the side-effects of intervention by aid organizations and points out the need to acknowledge the political consequences of the choice to give aid. The author makes the controversial claim that aid agencies act as though the initial decision to supply aid satisfies any need for ethical discussion and are often blind to the moral quandaries of aid. Terry focuses on four historically relevant cases: Rwandan camps in Zaire, Afghan camps in Pakistan, Salvadoran and Nicaraguan camps in Honduras, and Cambodian camps in Thailand.Terry was the head of the French section of Medecins sans frontieres (Doctors without Borders) when it withdrew from the Rwandan refugee camps in Zaire because aid intended for refugees actually strengthened those responsible for perpetrating genocide. This book contains documents from the former Rwandan army and government that were found in the refugee camps after they were attacked in late 1996. This material illustrates how combatants manipulate humanitarian action to their benefit. Condemned to Repeat? makes clear that the paradox of aid demands immediate attention by organizations and governments around the world. The author stresses that, if international agencies are to meet the needs of populations in crisis, their organizational behavior must adjust to the wider political and socioeconomic contexts in which aid occurs.

Condemned to Repeat?: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action

Neutrality as a guiding principle of humanitarian action was roundly rejected by most actors in Afghanistan's latest conflict. One party to the conflict commandeered assistance and aid organizations into a counter-insurgency campaign, and the other rejected Western aid organizations as agents of an imperialist West. The murder in 2003 of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) water engineer Ricardo Munguia, because of what he symbolized, cast doubt on whether the ICRC could be perceived as neutral in this highly polarized context. Rather than abandon a neutral stance, however, as so many aid organizations did, the ICRC persevered and, through some innovative and sometimes risky initiatives, managed to show both sides the benefits of having a neutral intermediary in conflict. Today, the ICRC continues to expand its reach to Afghans in dire need of humanitarian assistance.

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The International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan: reasserting the neutrality of humanitarian action

Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action

This article explores the methodology and main findings of field studies conducted for the ICRC's Health Care in Danger project in Afghanistan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 2010 and 2013. It discusses some of the actions that the ICRC takes in its health programmes to facilitate access to health care, and its approach to promoting better respect for the laws protecting it. It then suggests what more needs to be done to curb the violence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/38B46E51EC61613D6C13911ED48D3076/S1816383113000581a.pdf/div-class-title-violence-against-health-care-insights-from-afghanistan-somalia-and-the-democratic-republic-of-the-congo-div.pdf

Violence against health care: insights from Afghanistan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Far from rejecting the classicist approach, as Thomas Weiss claims, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) follows the fundamental principle of providing aid in proportion to need and without discrimination. Actions that on Weiss's political continuum would be termed solidarist are less an expression of political preference than a determination to claim and operate within humanitarian space as well as to maintain accountability to international civil society through testimony (temoignage) regarding mass violations of human rights. Although providing aid in conflict is implicitly political, involving humanitarian actors and aid in conflict resolution initiatives, as Weiss advocates, risks diluting the primary responsibility of humanitarian aid to alleviate suffering. It also further shifts the responsibility for conflict resolution and the respect of international legal conventions from accountable political institutions to the private sphere. Is this where we want to lead humanitarianism?

Fiona Terry

Papers

Condemned to Repeat?: The Paradox of Humanitarian Action

The International Committee of the Red Cross in Afghanistan: reasserting the neutrality of humanitarian action

Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action

Violence against health care: insights from Afghanistan, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Humanitarian Responsibility and Committed Action: response to“principles, politics, and humanitarian action”