A hypothetical scenario: a child is drowning in a pond and a person unrelated to them is walking by. The pond is shallow, and the person is certainly able to prevent the child from drowning. Their clothes will get wet and muddy, but they will save a life.

This was the scenario used by philosopher Peter Singer to illustrate the moral obligation to act on behalf of others, when such action comes without a comparable moral cost. The obligation existed, Singer argued, whether others were near or far: the child drowning in front of us is morally no different from the distant person whose life is at risk, once we are aware of the situation and of our own means to intervene. Singer first developed this argument in 1971 as a response to events in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, as its people endured the combined effects of poverty, a devastating cyclone, civil war, and genocidal violence. The emergency drew global attention, with benefit concerts organised by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar at Madison Square Garden in New York. Yet despite this attention, international funding fell far short of what was needed. Singer saw this as the neglect of the needy by the affluent. ‘Unfortunately for those who like to keep their moral responsibilities limited, instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation’, he argued. ‘From the moral point of view, the development of the world into a “global village” has made an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation’.¹ Peter Singer, ‘Famine, affluence and morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1:3 (1972), 234.

Singer was writing at a time of generalised ‘crisis’ among the key institutions that positioned themselves as the emergency responders of that supposed global village. As one account noted, by the cusp of the 1970s ‘just about the full cast of what today we would term the international humanitarian system had gathered on stage – donor states, UN bodies, the Red Cross and Red Crescent, and major international NGOs’.² Peter Walker and Daniel Maxwell, Shaping the Humanitarian World (London: Routledge, 2009), 45. Many of them were much older, but they were increasingly assuming the forms and configurations that would dominate the international aid system in the following decades (note the telling absence of local and national actors – those beyond the West – from the list). Normatively speaking, too, there were international conventions covering protections during wartime, human rights, and the treatment of refugees. The players and their chosen rules of engagement were thus at the ready.

Or were they? A series of conflagrations in this period exposed sharp failings in international emergency response – slowness; disorganisation; duplication in some places and gaps in others, exacerbated by institutional rivalries; and susceptibility to manipulation. A report by the United Nations Secretary-General acknowledged major shortcomings: ‘A sense of frustration grew throughout a world community anxious to help, a sense too that international efforts at times of such catastrophe did not measure up to the technical capacity and resources of modern society or satisfy the conscience of the world’.³Assistance in cases of natural disaster: Comprehensive report of the Secretary-General, 13 May 1971, 4. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/787654?ln=en&v=pdf  At the same time, the destruction unleashed during anti-colonial, post-colonial, and Cold War conflicts laid bare the limits of existing norms in preventing and mitigating large-scale suffering. War crimes and crimes against humanity were accepted, even carried out, by states who had helped to achieve their codification. Practitioners of asymmetrical and racialised violence of various kinds and scales subverted, defined out, or simply ignored the laws that might have been invoked to restrain their conduct.

Destabilising moments like that one – when the humanitarian system found its practical contributions, normative strength, and underlying values all open to question – have reoccurred at intervals ever since. We are witnessing one now. Challenges to the legitimacy of Western humanitarian organisations draw strength from widespread evidence of their political and practical failings – from Palestine to Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, and the camps where Rohingya refugees survive on UN food rations of a few dozen cents-worth a day. The costs of over-reliance on, and over-identification with, a small number of core institutional donors – notably the US and Europe, both as a bloc and as individual states – are laid bare. 

Increasingly, moments like this have been understood to display not the importance, or moral power, of the system’s role, but its potential to offer misdirection. The formal humanitarian system functions as the main tool for the international community to react to emergencies. It claims a central position not only in responding to humanitarian crises but also by promoting particular interpretations as to what defines those contexts and what response is required. Concurrently and conversely, authorities of different stripes can project their power, avoid responsibility, succour or deny their populations and those deemed to be strangers, by variously enabling, activating, or blocking would-be responders (whether ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the system). These perpetual tensions between idealised goals and instrumentalised realities periodically become almost overwhelming. Yet, historically, moments of destabilisation in this system have done little to displace its dominant modes and players, which have managed to weather recurring criticisms from both insiders and outsiders. The changing international emergency aid architecture has coexisted with a widely recognised isomorphic trend in the history of the humanitarian system, as different entities associated with it have evolved to more closely resemble each other, ultimately reproducing the system’s core codes and functions. With this perspective in mind, this dossier explores the politics of humanitarian reform, its relationship with other political agendas, and how moves towards reform reflect the humanitarian system’s place within liberal international order.

The politics of having no politics

The apolitical nature of humanitarianism is one of the most popular ideas of the formal humanitarian system, encompassing both ethical principle and operational practice. The system’s agents are told that they must remain free from political interferences and motivations. Their refusal to engage explicitly with politics or to acknowledge (sometimes, even to consider) their political identity is ‘triple-locked’ – by humanitarian principles and standards, the professionalisation of humanitarian staff and structures, and the focus on measurable results.⁴ I am grateful to Fernando Espada for articulating these points. 

Of course, this claimed apoliticism is a construct. While its enduring appeal suggests a certain utility, its value has frequently been challenged for its impacts on practice – such as its potential to weaken or marginalise the political analysis necessary to operating in emergencies – as well as for its lack of ambition, in that it requires its practitioners to restrict themselves to a specific part of the spectrum of solidarity.

While much discussion of the system’s relationship with politics has focused on its role in operational settings, these questions also permeate the space of humanitarian reform. Some of the very tools that seek to uphold the notion of apolitical humanitarianism – standards, codes of conduct, measurement frameworks – are the results of reform initiatives, which developed alongside structural reforms such as changes to mechanisms for coordination or funding, and the creation of new institutions to promote accountability, effectiveness, or programme quality, to name two of the most perennial goals. 

Activities grouped under the banner of ‘humanitarian reform’ have been extensive and wide-ranging; they have also increased dramatically in the last thirty years. Since the 1990s especially, there has been a vast production of ideas, initiatives, and in some cases accomplishments in humanitarian reform. This period corresponds with the expansion and professionalisation of the formal humanitarian sector, a phenomenon in turn tied to the end of the Cold War though also reflecting the earlier decline of other, more revolutionary utopias. The literature around reform practices has also burgeoned. Though most of this literature is probably better understood as being of reform rather than about it, a growing body of research has demonstrated the importance of putting reform under the microscope – to scrutinise its processes, to understand how it shapes relief work, and to position it among the various forms of ‘governing the world’ (following Mark Mazower). 

Politics is part of humanitarian reform, in all its manifestations – but, as in humanitarian action more widely, it is always contained. This containment manoeuvre may be implicit or explicit, as the apolitical identity claimed by many conventional humanitarian actors structures how they see their roles – and therefore how they envisage future states and ways to get there. Hence in the early 1970s where Singer, for one, saw the insufficiency of relief and offered a moral account, the aid world tended to diagnose inefficiency and sought to devise better systems. Forms of redistributive politics, such as those linked to what Adom Getachew called the ‘worldmaking’ projects of anti-colonialists, have sometimes found their way onto the horizons of humanitarian organisations, but these engagements have tended to be short-lived. The appeal to apoliticism can be used, with profound conviction as well as more tactically, to open some spaces and close down others. It can also produce elaborate forms of open closure, or closed-down openness, as calls to reform are renewed under conditions that deny all prospect of completion. We must also recognise an overwhelming absence in humanitarian reform: the voices of those whom the system, as is it often put, ‘aims to serve’. Those voices, too, have tended to be contained.

Today, claims that ‘the system needs transformation, not tinkering at the edges’ have become commonplace, almost a requirement.⁵Tanya Wood, Mary Ana McGlasson, Meg Sattler, Kim Scriven, Christina Bennett, and Balwant Singh, “If the humanitarian system is to meet the growing needs of people affected by crises, we need transformation not tinkering: A response to the 2022 State of the Humanitarian System Report.” Medium, September 8, 2022. https://medium.com/start-network/if-the-humanitarian-system-is-to-meet-the-growing-needs-of-people-affected-by-crises-we-need-314233ad540e Yet policy-level commitments that reflect such ideas almost never come with accountability mechanisms. Signatories to the Grand Bargain, perhaps the system’s flagship collective reform, merely self-report; there are no consequences if submissions are incomplete, if numbers are incorrect, or if they haven’t made any progress. One aid worker, participating in a diary study about reform in practice, reflected that ‘we have not felt pressure on our commitment … [my INGO is] comfortable disregarding it’.⁶Veronique Barbelet, John Bryant and Alexandra Spencer, Local humanitarian action during Covid-19: Findings from a diary study, HPG Working Paper (ODI, 2021), 19. At the same time, there is always an additional request for more evidence about what works, an updated catalogue of good practices, another appeal for ‘actionable’ recommendations that everyone can endorse. Activity continues, if not action.

At the same time, the paternalism of Western humanitarianism is being questioned with striking vigour and visibility, even among (certain) circles associated with it. In the history of humanitarian reform, moves to challenge core assumptions about the relevance of Western humanitarianism and the role of institutional humanitarian actors have had less salience than initiatives to address systems and techniques (even where these initiatives were values-based). Recently, however, there have been accumulating calls to ‘shift power’ to local communities, to confront racism in humanitarian assistance, to ‘decolonise’, or to denounce humanitarianism as an expression of ‘white supremacy’. Established institutions have been enjoined to give way to ‘resistance humanitarianism’ and – not for the first time, as essays in this dossier highlight – the principle of neutrality has been criticised as a gateway to disengagement. Yet elements of these discourses remain contested within humanitarian agencies and almost entirely absent from some; multiple registers commingle in ways that favour the rhetorical and make actions unclear. As described by Tammam Aloudat, positions at the extremes – one essentially dismissive of alternatives to the status quo, the other advocating its total dismantling – come to dominate a discussion that is ‘not directed at a solution but at an appearance of an organisation open to debate’.⁷Tammam Aloudat, “Who gets to decolonise humanitarianism?” Centre for Humanitarian Action, June 21, 2021. https://www.chaberlin.org/en/blog/who-gets-to-decolonise-humanitarianism-2/ As a result, there is a brittleness to some of these calls despite the rich traditions of anti-colonial and de-colonial thought on which they could rest, and notwithstanding the real desire, among some, for something different.⁸Eleanor Davey, A Critical Reflection on Humanitarian Reform – Past, Present, Future (Alameda Institute, 2024). https://alameda.institute/report/a-critical-reflection-on-humanitarian-reform-past-present-future/

What is produced, then, frequently appears as a theatre of change. A rhetorical staging of ambition, novelty and urgency, prepared by decades of claims that ‘humanitarianism’ – or the formal system through which it is assumed to work – is ‘in crisis’, ‘broken’, or otherwise facing an existential moment. While much of this critique has come from insiders, the sector has also been buffeted by external criticisms from the right and the left, of international aid as a ‘waste of taxpayer money’ or part of a regime of oppression of the poor. Faced with these challenges, many of which go far beyond what emergency responders can influence, the ‘new’ may appear to offer an escape from the system’s contradictions and compromises. To examine the working of humanitarian reform is thus to consider the limits of the Western aid industry’s relationship with the political sphere.

Revisiting the history of humanitarian reform

This Alameda dossier offers a window onto the politics and political contexts of humanitarian reform from the 1970s to the 1990s. It aims to contribute to dialogue about the role of humanitarian actors facing compounding crises and injustice, by showing how the politics of past reformist moments unfolded, or failed to unfold – whether those moments were seized by certain actors, lost within the general dynamics of the system, or fell fundamentally outside of its ways of conceiving crisis. From the vast panoply of such prior moments of reform, this dossier could only ever offer a small selection – one that has been made with an eye on the present.

The collection shows how frames of interpretation both inform, and are informed by, the development of tools for the diagnosis and management of crisis. This is an understanding at the heart of Mark Duffield’s critique of the changing frameworks applied to famine in Sudan from the 1970s onwards. Duffield shows how famine and civil conflict became normalised as efforts to explain their causes gave way to attempts to predict their reoccurrence. Western humanitarians are regulators of death, Duffield argues, not savers of life; what they tolerate has become embedded in the technologies they have developed. Thus, even when actors in the sector have confronted their own shortcomings, the tendency to place themselves at the centre of the story has limited the conclusions they’ve been able to draw. As Rahmane Idrissa shows, outside interventions failed to grasp the catastrophe growing in the Sahel from the late 1960s and even exacerbated it. Peasant movements followed, both literally, as people migrated towards cities and towns, and politically, in mobilisations that rejected outside developmentalist solutions and humanitarian interventions. The Sahel in which humanitarian actors imagined they would intervene with new efficiency following their reforms was not the same place where they had faced failure before.

Two treatments of the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement demonstrate that debates within forums of organisational governance are inseparable from their wider social, political and geopolitical contexts. A group of writers led by Čarna Brković documents the contributions of the Yugoslav Red Cross to reformist initiatives, showing how their engagement drew on Yugoslavia’s position in the Non-Aligned Movement. Rejecting the idea that neutrality was achievable in the fight against racism and for peace, they proposed an alternative form of non-political politics that could lead their fellow humanitarians to take action in those causes. Their efforts throughout the 1970s produced few results – a marked contrast with the rapid conflagration over apartheid that occurred in the mid-1980s, when the South African government delegation was ousted from one of the most important reformist forums of the Red Cross/Red Crescent. As Mandisa Mbali recounts, this episode sparked great controversy within the halls of their humanitarian movement that also echoed through South African domestic and indeed global politics. The episode also tested the claimed operational neutrality of the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose delegates had undertaken extensive prison visits in the country, including to Nelson Mandela himself.

At that meeting, wrote one of the Committee’s leaders, ‘the humanitarian Geneva met the Geneva of great debates and political passions’ (not necessarily, in his mind, for the better). These two Genevas also figure in the collection’s interview with Jan Eliasson, where they share an axis with the seat of the United Nations in New York. This was the main theatre for the negotiation of UN General Assembly resolution 46/182, in December 1991, which contained some of the most enduring humanitarian reform initiatives of that era. Eliasson, the leader of those negotiations, recalls the perspectives and approaches that shaped the process, portrayed as a move to place ‘the people’ closer to the centre of the UN’s role.

The reform train rolled on. Before many years were out, the progeny of 46/182 would be facing their own review and a new round of institutional re-engineering. Then, as often now, observers despaired: ‘war victims require an operational capacity and not a humanitarian shell game played by UN wordsmiths and yet another honeymoon for the conductor of the UN humanitarian orchestra’.⁹Thomas G. Weiss, “Humanitarian Shell Games: Whither UN Reform?” Security Dialogue 29, no. 1 (1998), 16. Fearful for their own ethical standing, humanitarian organisations embarked on a series of reforms designed to ensure technical standards, behavioural rules, and professional codes. Their minimalist approaches encountered the rise of maximalist agendas connected to military interventionism, which also adopted the language of humanitarianism. Advocates of ‘new humanitarianism’ embraced some of the expansive implications of that development for aid agencies themselves.

Environmental questions, often downplayed though never entirely absent, have gradually achieved much greater prominence. Two decades into the twenty-first century, the challenge posed by climate change is among the drivers of calls for change on various levels ranging from the technocratic to the philosophical. Some have proposed the concept of ecocide – developed during the Vietnam War to characterise environmental destruction during war – as a potential frame for other environmental crimes, including the causes of climate change. This speaks to some of the normative changes that have underpinned humanitarian action. Yet, as Pamela McElwee cautions, this new application of the idea raises as many questions as it answers, and the lack of accountability that ecocide has afforded the Vietnamese to date offers little cause for optimism. Other forms of pressure, deploying different coalitions towards more political goals, McElwee proposes, might offer more.

By tracing the trajectories of these cases, where the politics of humanitarian reform encountered questions of legitimacy, efficacy, intent and effect, we hope this dossier can illustrate the value of ‘excavating’, to borrow Duffield’s term, moments of reformism in the humanitarian system. Constraints, both imposed and chosen, may be more clearly grasped; risks may be defined with a different perspective; and strategies formulated to take account of the past in ways that help us grapple with our turbulent present.

NOTAS DE RODAPÉ

• 1
   Peter Singer, ‘Famine, affluence and morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1:3 (1972), 234.
• 2
   Peter Walker and Daniel Maxwell, Shaping the Humanitarian World (London: Routledge, 2009), 45.
• 3
  Assistance in cases of natural disaster: Comprehensive report of the Secretary-General, 13 May 1971, 4. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/787654?ln=en&v=pdf 
• 4
   I am grateful to Fernando Espada for articulating these points. 
  
• 5
  Tanya Wood, Mary Ana McGlasson, Meg Sattler, Kim Scriven, Christina Bennett, and Balwant Singh, “If the humanitarian system is to meet the growing needs of people affected by crises, we need transformation not tinkering: A response to the 2022 State of the Humanitarian System Report.” Medium, September 8, 2022. https://medium.com/start-network/if-the-humanitarian-system-is-to-meet-the-growing-needs-of-people-affected-by-crises-we-need-314233ad540e
• 6
  Veronique Barbelet, John Bryant and Alexandra Spencer, Local humanitarian action during Covid-19: Findings from a diary study, HPG Working Paper (ODI, 2021), 19.
• 7
  Tammam Aloudat, “Who gets to decolonise humanitarianism?” Centre for Humanitarian Action, June 21, 2021. https://www.chaberlin.org/en/blog/who-gets-to-decolonise-humanitarianism-2/
• 8
  Eleanor Davey, A Critical Reflection on Humanitarian Reform – Past, Present, Future (Alameda Institute, 2024). https://alameda.institute/report/a-critical-reflection-on-humanitarian-reform-past-present-future/
• 9
  Thomas G. Weiss, “Humanitarian Shell Games: Whither UN Reform?” Security Dialogue 29, no. 1 (1998), 16.