The humanitarian future

Can humanitarian agencies still fly the flag of high principle, or are they just relics of an imperial
model of charity?
by Paul Currion 3,000 words


Paul Currion is a consultant to humanitarian organisations, having previously worked on responses in
Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Indian Ocean Tsunami. He lives in Belgrade.

I became an aid worker in the 1990s, just as the break-up of Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda
cast a long shadow over the humanitarian sector. Those highly visible political failures were a major
influence on my decision. I was possessed of a distressingly youthful belief that we could do better in
the core humanitarian mission of saving lives, feeding the starving, healing the sick, and sheltering
the displaced from natural disasters and armed conflicts.

I worked on co-ordination with the United Nations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs):
identifying gaps and overlaps in the delivery of aid, then persuading humanitarian organisations to
avoid those overlaps and fill those gaps, a slow and frustrating process of herding cats. Co-ordination
had become increasingly important as the humanitarian sector expanded dramatically following the
end of the Cold War. In Kosovo, after the NATO bombing campaign of 1999, we registered one NGO
for every day of the year. A decade later, after the 2010 earthquake near Port-au-Prince, an
estimated 3,000 NGOs descended on Haiti.
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It wasnt just the size of the humanitarian sector that was increasing the scope of humanitarian
work was widening as well. In the post-Cold War world, humanitarian organisations were increasingly
enlisted as government sub-contractors in a larger political project: the post-conflict reconstruction
of entire countries. After Kosovo I found myself in Afghanistan, where Secretary of State Colin Powell
referred to NGOs as a force multiplier for the US military; then Iraq, where Andrew Natsios, then
head of US overseas aid, asserted without apparent irony, that NGOs were an arm of the US
government.

Some took this assertion literally. On 19 August 2003, the UN headquarters at the Canal Hotel in
Baghdad was bombed by enemies of the US government. The bomb placed outside the information
office that I had helped to set up killed 22 and injured more than 100 people. I had left Baghdad a
few weeks earlier, precisely because I was worried by deteriorating security. My youthful belief that
we could do better was still intact (even if my youth was not), but it now seemed clear that
humanitarianism had taken a wrong turn somewhere.
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As we mark the 150th anniversary of the first Geneva Convention, its worth stating that
humanitarian aid is not a waste of money it can mean the difference between life and death and
for the most part that money is well-spent. While some criticism is warranted, the humanitarian
community is not blind to its shortcomings, and has sought to improve its work since the mid-1990s.

One of the most important initiatives in this regard was the publication in 1994 of the Code of
Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief.
The Code was welcomed by NGOs as a largely successful attempt to articulate core humanitarian
principles, but it also doubled as a field guide to the tensions inherent to the sector. After the more
obvious principles humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence the last of the Codes 10
points goes in a surprising direction: In our information, publicity and advertising activities, we shall
recognise disaster victims as dignified human beings, not hopeless objects.

Its now widely acknowledged that affected communities dont wait around for outside help, but
actively develop their own strategies for coping with disaster. Yet the humanitarian community has
struggled to embody this realisation. To their public donors, charities continue to present a Black Box
of Suffering. On the front of the box is the single image of a suffering child that serves as a proxy for
all the suffering that can be imagined. Whats happening inside this box is terrible, it says, and you
dont want to see inside. Then, the pitch: Give us your money, and well put it into the box, and that
will end the suffering.

The Black Box is effective in terms of raising funds, but its platonic ideal of suffering obscures the
wider context in which that suffering takes place. The lack of context leaves the public with little
understanding of how the aid industry works when questioned, most people offer some variation
on the theme of Whites in Shining Armour which in turn prevents NGOs from being fully open
about the problems of delivering aid in the most challenging environments on Earth. Because all
NGOs rely on public support, they face a dilemma: more nuanced messages will not reach their
public, but less nuanced messages leave them open to criticism.

Humanitarianism has been intimately linked to the media from the beginning. The Swiss
businessman and social activist Henry Dunant, who inspired the early Red Cross movement, had his
book A Memory of Solferino (1862) printed at his own expense as an advocacy tool to spread the
humanitarian message across Europe, arguing that in an age when we hear so much of progress and
civilisation, is it not a matter of urgency, since unhappily we cannot always avoid wars, to press
forward in a human and truly civilised spirit the attempt to prevent, or at least to alleviate, the
horrors of war? Pressure on governments to adopt the Geneva Conventions came from popular
sentiment, as the public gained greater access to information about the reality of modern war
through the popular press. The growth of mass media in the 20th century enabled spectacles such as
the Live Aid concerts in 1985 for famine relief in Ethiopia. NGOs realised that they could shape the
humanitarian narrative using their access to disaster-affected areas.

the rich West giving to the poor rest no longer makes so much sense

Today, writers from the Sunday supplements of UK newspapers accompany NGO staff to health
clinics in inaccessible places, returning with stories of stoic suffering and sterling effort. This worked
well into the 1990s, when communication was still controlled by corporations and information
sources were scarce. With the information revolution, however, individuals and groups affected by
disasters have increasing access to digital communications that provide alternative perspectives not
mediated by humanitarian organisations. The Black Box is breaking open, exposing the humanitarian
community to more public scrutiny than ever before.

Humanitarianism was shaped by specific historical circumstances that no longer exist. Global
economic and political developments including the rise of Brazil, Russia, India and China put a
question mark over the assumptions on which the system was built. The same technologies that have
given disaster-affected communities a voice also enable them to organise themselves more
effectively, which in certain places means less need for external organisations to become involved.
While there will always be those caught in the wake of natural disasters and human conflicts who
need some form of outside assistance, the rich West giving to the poor rest no longer makes so
much sense.

It might simply be that humanitarian NGOs are no longer the right type of organisation to meet the
needs of the future. Its not merely that they are no longer fit for purpose: its increasingly uncertain
what that purpose is. What are humanitarian organisations for? Are they delivery vehicles for
humanitarian assistance logistics companies with a side order of social concern? Or are they
delivery vehicles for humanitarian principles, with any tangible assistance they provide is just a
manifestation of those principles?

Focused on the next emergency rather than the last, unable to draw easily on past experience,
plagued by a high turnover of staff, it seems as if each new generation of aid workers suffers from a
kind of Year Zero thinking. This continues despite efforts to professionalise aid work. If we fail to
pay attention to how history has shaped the humanitarian sector in the past century, we cannot
begin to understand what is needed to shape it to meet the needs of the coming century.

The modern humanitarian movement began on 24 June 1859, at the Battle of Solferino in Italy. For
the last time in European history, monarchs were in direct command of both sides of the battle. After
Solferino, the European states began their trek towards the horrors of total war in the 20th century.
Yet a parallel history also began that evening: businessman Henry Dunant, horrified by the carnage
hed witnessed in the battles aftermath, organised a relief effort to care for the injured and the
dying regardless of which side they had fought on.

From this gesture the modern humanitarian movement was born, in the form of the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The First Geneva Convention (1864) was the first international
agreement to cover the treatment of the sick and wounded on the battlefield. It covered only
military personnel, but laid the foundations for an entire body of international humanitarian law. It
wasnt until the First World War that the ICRC began to systematically address the needs of civilian
populations affected by war, and the word humanitarian itself appeared in law for the first time
only in the 1929 Convention.

Between the two world wars, elements that we would recognise today began to appear, such as the
League of Red Cross Societies (forerunner of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red
Crescent Societies) and early NGOs such as the Save the Children Fund. It was only after 1945,
however, that a new political order emerged, and the desire to avoid another ruinous world war led
to the creation of the United Nations. As the exhausted old empires began to unravel, international
affairs were re-shaped in the bipolar image of the Cold War.

In this context, the Marshall Plan for the recovery of Europe during 1948-51 was both a means of
rebuilding shattered nations and of demonstrating the superiority of democracy. It set a precedent
for overseas development assistance. At this point humanitarian aid (the lifesaving work) was not
emphasised, and the focus was on development (longer-term social and economic growth), although
new international organisations were created, such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
(1950) and the UN World Food Programme (1961).

NGOs were tolerated, even encouraged, by Western governments as living proof of the superiority
of democracy

Legal rights were extended to protecting Civilian Persons in Time of War by the Fourth Geneva
Convention in 1949, and further by Additional Protocols in 1977. This legal framework relied on the
responsibilities of nation-states, but governments could not always be relied upon to abide by the
law. Newly decolonised countries inherited the trappings of government, but not the capacity
required to administer their responsibilities, particularly in the face of disasters; and unresolved
problems caused or exacerbated by colonial policies led to civil wars in which civilians tended to
suffer disproportionately, whether through design or neglect.

The UN agencies were bound by mandate to work only with governments, leaving space that was
filled by NGOs who positioned themselves as giving voice to the voiceless, speaking truth to the
power of the Western bloc. NGOs were tolerated, even encouraged, by Western governments as
living proof of the superiority of democracy with its freedom of expression and association, in
contrast to their absence in the Soviet bloc. They were also a channel for defusing potentially
revolutionary sentiment in emerging nations. Released into the marketplace, NGOs competed for the
publics attention and their cash during large-scale disasters such as the Biafran war of 1967-70
and the Ethiopian famine of 1984-85.

In both Biafra and Ethiopia, NGOs were in fact being manipulated by national governments to
achieve wider political ends. The evidence suggests that humanitarian aid enabled the secessionist
Biafran government to continue fighting Nigerian forces even after it had lost militarily, prolonging
the suffering of local communities who were caught up in the conflict. In Ethiopia, humanitarian aid
was also politicised during a famine that was in part caused by government policy, although the full
extent of aid agency complicity remains an open question. Aid workers who were aware of these
problems could never explicitly acknowledge them without jeopardising public (and therefore)
financial support; many NGOs were simply nave about the political dynamics of the Four Horsemen.

Humanitarianism had come of age during the Cold War, but the end of the Cold War meant that
NGOs continued to be useful footsoldiers for the democratic project. After the diplomatic
catastrophe that was Bosnia, politicians appropriated the language of humanitarianism, leading to
the oxymoron of NATOs humanitarian intervention in Kosovo. Some argued that this use of
humanitarian showed that the word had lost its meaning, but what it really showed was that the
word still had power, albeit not in a straightforward sense. We found ourselves in Afghanistan and
Iraq precisely because humanitarian action was being shoe-horned into a security agenda.

Since the 1960s, there had been tension between what have been called Dunantist and Wilsonian
NGOs. Perhaps more usefully described as principled and pragmatic respectively, Dunantists
(named after Henry Dunant, and usually European) claim an apolitical stance aloof from state
interests, while Wilsonians (named after the US President Woodrow Wilson, and usually American)
accept some level of compromise and involvement with those interests. The Canal Hotel bombing in
Baghdad made clear that this internecine debate was no longer theoretical but very, very practical.

After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US, many governments exploited the Wilsonian approach to
humanitarianism, using NGOs as Lego bricks interchangeable not just with each other, but also with
government, military or private-sector actors. The NGO response has been an implicit acceptance
that humanitarian assistance is a market, and they need to maintain their market position, primarily
though professionalising, in order to fit the technocratic logic of donor governments. So far, so good:
according to the 2014 Global Humanitarian Assistance report, funding for humanitarian crises
remained high throughout the global financial crisis, and in 2013 reached a record high of $22 billion.

Still, its worth putting this in context. In 2013, the size of the US pet industry was nearly three times
that value: just under $56 billion. The money available for humanitarian aid is still nowhere near
what is required to meet the needs of disaster-affected communities today, when there are more
ongoing major disasters than any time since the mid-1990s. The humanitarian community is
wrestling with the future: multiple reports over the past decade have tried to identify future
challenges, but failed, instead responding belatedly to existing trends climate change, urbanisation,
demographic shifts.

More worryingly, the solutions proposed by these reports are more of the same: more
professionalisation, more decentralisation, more regulation; the organisational equivalent of re-
arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Modern humanitarianism is one of the most radical ideas in
the history of human thought yet, as the international development entrepreneur Paul Polak has
pointed out, institutions are simply radical ideas cast in concrete, and the institutions that have
been built around humanitarianism now struggle to support it.

This is not a techno-utopian view of the future in which the internet sweeps away all the injustices
of the world

Our network age demands a network model. It demands that we shift away from the old industrial,
imperial model of delivering material relief along a supply chain from rich to poor countries. We need
a post-industrial, post-imperial model that mobilises resources through global networks. Ori Brafman
and Rod Beckstroms The Starfish and the Spider (2006) provides a starting point: the decentralised
structure of what they call starfish organisations makes them more resilient, compared with more
centralised spider organisations. Humanitarian organisations must become hubs, connecting
individuals and communities to enable them to share knowledge and resources more freely, and
using their position to embed humanitarian principles within their networks.

Those networks are not just about providing cash, or medical support, or shelter kits, but about
creating the opportunity for a more inclusive discourse what it means to be humanitarian: how to
create a peoples humanitarianism, rather than the private club that exists now. This is particularly
important since problems at the global level (such as climate change, financial crises and population
movements) affect all of us, albeit unequally; and its urgency has been underlined this year, as
multiple, overlapping emergencies in the Central Africa Republic, Iraq and Syria, and South Sudan
as well as the Ebola outbreak in Africa have stretched the system further than at any time since I
first entered the sector.

New communication technologies create opportunities to engage both disaster-affected
communities and the giving public on a more equal footing indeed, the web begins to break down
the distinction between the two. There are promising developments: the Communicating with
Disaster Affected Communities initiative is looking at outreach efforts; the Humanitarian Innovation
Fund is testing novel approaches; the Digital Humanitarian Network is bringing together newer, tech-
focused organisations; and the Start Network of UK NGOs is experimenting with new ways of
working. In 2016, the UN-organised World Humanitarian Summit offers an opportunity to set a new
course for the community, bringing together many of these threads.

This is not a techno-utopian view of the future in which the internet sweeps away all the injustices of
the world. The web could lead to a dead end of corporate monocultures, but part of our struggle
against that must be the continual renewal of these grassroots connections. We cant predict the
future, but we can shape it by forming alternative narratives. Humanitarianism is not a pile of Lego
blocks to be re-arranged as required, but a set of organising principles that tell a compelling story
about what we want our civilisation to look like; about how we wish to act towards each other.

For decades now, humanitarian organisations have been approaching the public to ask for coins in
the purse or signatures on the page. As the Black Box breaks open, this will no longer be enough, and
NGOs should lead the shift away from institutions, and towards a peoples humanitarianism. It is
quite likely that at least a few of those organisations will not survive the transition but that isnt a
reason for not making the change. Of the Fortune 500 firms first listed in 1955, nearly 90 per cent no
longer exist in 2014, and this type of creative destruction is sorely lacking in the humanitarian sector.

The alternative is a zombie humanitarianism, going through the motions but lacking the spirit, the
same spirit that spurred Dunant to action: the simple belief not just that we could do better, but that
we could be better.

10 September 2014

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