With reference to Sudan

Western humanitarianism has, to be sure, a long history. Used here, however, the term is a container for a new and distinct set of contingent social, political and technical practices that emerged between the 1970s and 1990s for regulating the level of excess death in the neocolonial world. 

The world-historic transformation in the global economy during the decades in question provided the material basis for the changes in humanitarianism described here. The US, UK and other Western economies de-industrialised and financialised, bringing to a willed end the West’s long manufacturing dominance. Put simply, a new defining division of the world occurred between interconnected Western consumer economies and Asian producer economies. Together with the rise of neoliberalism, this new, if partial, international division of labour was celebrated as the ‘no alternative’ era of ‘globalisation’.

Disturbing this teleological ‘triumph of the market’ narrative, however, a different but necessary Africa-West Asia axis took form during the same phase of finance-led imperialism. This development forcefully denotes capitalism’s continued reliance on primitive accumulation: rather than unequal exchange per se, the physical resources, social capital and labour of this spatial axis were slated for external plunder and ecological extractivism through war, legalised theft, and violent dispossession. Compared to what existed before, the measurable effects of the ensuing decades of violence and displacement have been aptly summed up by Ali Kadri as ‘de-development’. 

It is no accident that the Africa-West Asia axis of dispossession was Western humanitarianism’s main site for trial runs of its new ‘life saving’ regulatory practices. On every measure – careers, expenditure, growth and influence – NGOs benefitted from the wages of imperialism. Breaking with liberal humanitarianism’s earlier traditions of autonomy from (if not antipathy to) Western foreign policy, Western humanitarianism, by-and-large, became pro-US and anti-communist. Deeply implicated in the neocolonial recapture of independent former colonies, by the 1980s Western humanitarianism was advocating a post-modern complexity-based worldview

Though they were eclipsed in the aftermath of the launch of the devastating US-led War on Terror in the early 2000s, excavating Western humanitarianism’s regulatory practices in the preceding decades are prime examples of the need for autocritique in the cause of liberation and a sustainable world. 

The NGO invasion 

International NGOs expanded rapidly along the Africa-West Asia axis during the 1980s. Given the relative speed of this event, the term ‘invasion’ is apt. It was a time of de-industrialisation in the West, and of the left’s drift to the right as the Soviet Union collapsed. Indeed, many disillusioned comrades sought solace by joining the NGO expeditionary force. Reflecting the neoliberal zeitgeist, especially the privatization of public services, the invasion was paid for by the transfer of Western aid funding away from states to an expanding private NGO sector. 

The NGO invasion can also be seen to resonate with aspects of the ‘new’ imperialism that emerged a century earlier. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the landmass of the colonised world grew rapidly, its administration reaching new heights of barbarity, as reflected in a series of what Mike Davis termed ‘late-Victorian holocausts’. Paradoxically, a central moral justification that spurred new imperialism was ‘anti-slavery’. During the ‘scramble for Africa’, imperialists would equate unfettered black sovereignty with the tyranny of slavery, despotism and, by implication, humanitarian disaster. When Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, given the prevalence of domestic slavery, this racial equation between slavery and despotism was used to define Egyptians as unfit to govern. As explored by Adom Getachew, during the 1920s, the same fears were at play as Liberia and Abyssinia – both slave owning societies – were incorporated and managed within the League of Nations as ‘unequal sovereigns’. Several decades later, a similar sense of impending disaster also informed the rearguard action of Sudan’s colonial Political Service to forestall that country’s independence in 1956. Western Humanitarianism has not lost this fear of black sovereignty, it has simply reworked its parameters. 

The rapid appearance of NGOs along the Africa-West Asia axis during the 1980s announced Western humanitarianism’s neocolonial phase. NGOs were the practical means of community-level recapture within the proxy structure of US-led imperialism. Rather than anti-slavery, the driving force of Western humanitarianism was now, as the irreverent outbursts of Band Aid’s Bob Geldof epitomised, an ‘anti-authoritarianism’ directed, in particular, at the bureaucracy of African states. To paraphrase one aspect of Hannah Arendt’s somewhat controversial appreciation of Britain’s contribution to the new imperialism: the NGO invasion, with its anti-authoritarian critique, attracted the idealistic best among Western youth. 

The invasion was also symptomatic of the political rupture among the metropolitan left regarding its earlier anti-imperial agitation. The spirit of the era was captured in Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 declaration that the time for grand narratives was over. The following year, the Iron Lady herself, Margaret Thatcher, complemented the French theorist with her notorious pronouncement that ‘there is no alternative’ to neoliberalism.    

Western humanitarianism

Among NGOs, the rejection of grand narratives was largely aimed at Marxism, especially the Marx-inspired structural accounts of the development of underdevelopment that were popular at the time. In 1985, the French chapter of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) publicly declared its break with the Third Worldism that had hitherto defined left internationalism. Adopting an openly pro-US, pro-Israel and anti-communist position, it dissociated capitalism from the violent dispossession then strengthening its grip along the Africa-West Asia axis.  Attempts to draw such connections were derided as ‘ideology’. Having declared the world politically fit for purpose, MSF would henceforth devote itself to humanitarianism 101 – that is, ‘saving lives.’     

But why, if capitalism was benign, did lives need saving? It is here that the racial connection between the anti-slavery of new imperialism and the anti-authoritarianism of modern NGOs emerges. In an update of the liberal worldview that equated      emancipated black sovereignty with humanitarian disaster, for MSF the culprit wasn’t imperialism, it was the emergence of disaster-producing, independent totalitarian African states. Henceforth, moreover, MSF would have no hesitation in calling them out. Especially, if they claimed a left-wing or independent agenda.  

If MSF secured the neocolonial bridgehead, it was British academics, such as Randolph Kent and David Booth, and NGOs, like Oxfam and Save the Children, that explained how to understand a world where ‘capitalism’ and ‘imperialism’ had been magicked away. Causal narratives were deemed invalid because of the chaotic ‘complexity’ of the interactions between people, things, and nature. General laws or determining relations were impossible. What was, essentially, a celebratory rationalisation of ignorance, served to render the outside world unknowable beyond immediate experience. Problems were tied to specific times and places, allowing no historic generality between them.¹Tellingly, however, the same social actors that railed against capitalism and ideology seamlessly welcomed the teleological inevitability of ‘globalisation’. The grandest of grand narratives that, as Gabriel Rockhill argues, reproduces, in a quintessential act of historical farce, the specter of the vulgar Marxism they claimed to dismiss! If French political revanchism reached out to neoliberalism, British empiricism linked Western humanitarianism to quantification, cybernetics and machine-learning. 

Forged in the imperial struggle against Marxism and mid-twentieth century attempts at independent world-making, during the 1980s, in the form of generalised forcefield of multiple anticipatory practices, a cybernetic worldview took shape within Western Humanitarianism decades before the seamless spread and lock-in of corporate machine-thinking or AI.²See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006). To use AI in the struggle for liberation and a sustainable world would require its freeing, as China has done, from the enmeshing ecology of Western politico-corporate forces and interests.

Naturalising conflict 

The mid-1980s Sudan famine was a site of competing national and international agendas. Waving the humanitarian flag, the NGO encampment that was rapidly set up marked the end of Sudan’s brief 25-year experiment in self-directed development. NGOs had been few before 1984; within a couple of years, over a hundred were registered in Khartoum. At the time there was no shortage of Marx-inspired structural accounts of famine.³See Claude Meillassoux, “Development or Exploitation: Is the Sahel Famine Good for Business?” Review of African Political Economy 1, no. 1 (1974): 27-33, https://doi.org/10.1080/03056247408703235; Jay O’Brien, “Sowing the Seeds of Famine: The Political Economy of Food Deficits in Sudan.” Review of African Political Economy 12, no. 33 (1985): 23-32; Taisier Mohamed Ahmed Ali, The Cultivation of Hunger: State and Agriculture in Sudan (Khartoum University Press, 1989). Such insights, however, were quickly swept away in the disorientating moment of neocolonial recapture. 

Aside from the liberal fear of black sovereignty, as I argued in Global Governance and the New Wars, the drivers of inter-communal conflict were argued to be multiple and place-specific, taking in the social, economic and environmental factors. For Western humanitarianism, inter-communal warfare had no generalisable or overriding cause beyond the scarcity and ignorance that afflicted those involved. The West’s publicly funded ‘aid industry’ would interpret the coming decades of violence and instability through the ahistoric but quantifiable lens of cybernetic complexity.

On the ground, however, since the 1950s, the expansion of commercial agriculture had progressively undermined subsistence agriculture. From the end of the 1970s, US-authored structural adjustment accelerated this dissolution by reorientating Sudan’s agricultural production towards exports. Already under strain, the possibilities for profit this afforded transformed the former reciprocity between herders and farmers into an exploitable relation of permanent war.⁴Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton, “How Capitalism Is Destroying the Horn of Africa: Sheep and the Crises in Somalia and Sudan.” Review of African Political Economy 51, no. 179 (2024): 105-16. The resulting periodic bouts of paramilitary  resource-extractivism, ecological destruction, polarising racial violence, and forced migration eventually spiraled into Sudan’s long-anticipated state fracture of 2023. 

With its unwillingness to generalise,  Western humanitarianism normalised the evolution of Sudan’s violent neocolonial economy. Four decades of funding-friendly back-to-back humanitarian emergencies followed, masking a brutal assault by mercantile capital on society and nature. While creating little real knowledge of Sudan – that is, knowledge of practical use to those struggling against impoverishment while fighting for their rights, land and resources – these were profitable decades of institutional growth for the aid industry.

Predicting famine

Structural accounts had scandalised famine as a weapon in the ongoing social civil war and called for political reform and economic protection. Complexity-thinking, on the other hand, normalised famine, transforming it into a predicable outcome of a probabilistic dataset of behavioural signals and alerts. Famine was, after all, to be expected in an ‘underdeveloped’ country. 

While its cause may be ‘complex’, fortuitously, NGOs developed a ‘technology’ to predict the occurrence of famine – a dual-use technology that would also prove useful in the competition for media attention and funding. Since the 1970s, it had been known that variations in local market prices for food, livestock or labour often prefigured atypical behavioural patterns among farmers and herders. Such changes became a proxy for the imminence of famine.      

During the 1980s, Sudan was a laboratory for Famine Early Warning (FEW). The rationale was that a timely alert allows early intervention, which saves more lives. Initially, FEW relied on the labour-intensive collection of price and population-movement data from geographically dispersed markets and collection points. Centralisation, hand-held calculation, and dissemination routinely took weeks. The significance of the manual nature of this early predictive technology should not be missed. As I argued in Post-Humanitarianism, FEW was an ecology of grounded activities amounting to an established socio-technical problem-solving practice a decade or more before the facilitation afforded by generalised computing, and three decades before its codification with the breathless arrival of remotely sensed ‘digital humanitarianism’. 

Rather than technology being a determining external force, FEW is suggestive of a counter-history where technology is a socially determined tool at the centre of capitalism’s ceaseless civil war.⁵See Gabriel Rockhill, Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy (Duke University Press, 2017). As a ‘pure’ technology of prediction, FEW has never worked. Even it death is foretold, in an unequal world, some lives are more valued than others. As a socially determined technology, FEW is inseparable from the historical ecology of practices, institutional agendas, and political struggles that define Western humanitarianism’s neocolonial phase of recapture and politico-cultural pacification. 

Regulating death

Famine Early Warning was especially important to the development of Western humanitarianism’s regulatory role. For a given population, prediction requires the existence of a quantifiable mortality benchmark that, once breached, allows a humanitarian emergency to be officially declared. However, any benchmark, other than one pegged to European norms, necessarily involves a      process of racialised socio-cultural bargaining pursuant to a measure of excess death appropriate to ‘underdevelopment’ while also morally acceptable to Western consumers. 

Rather than saving lives, the counter-history of Western humanitarianism is the technology-driven attempt to regulate excess death along the Africa-West Asia axis of neocolonial predation and violence. 

Since the 1970s, there has been a secular rise in the level of malnutrition deemed to constitute a humanitarian emergency. Levels that justified the mid-1980s NGO invasion of Sudan had, by the 1990s, become ‘normal’ for Africa. This trend was brought to summation in 2004 with the creation of the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). As a set of benchmarks, the IPC scale has been widely celebrated as the ‘gold standard’ of humanitarian practice. Until recently, at least, it was credited with helping the aid industry control the scourge of famine.

However, in an indication of the experiential chasm now dividing Western consumer societies from the majority world, few have posed the obvious question – what would an IPC-declared emergency look like if transposed to Europe? As Nicholas Stockton is currently exploring,⁶Personal communication. a shocking truth lurks in this question. In the case of the UK, during the peak of the Covid-19 crisis, the excess death rate, from all causes, was around 60,000 per year. This barely registers on the IPC disaster scale. On a per capita basis, for a full-blown UN humanitarian emergency to be declared in the UK there would have to be well over four million excess deaths per year!  These figures give some impression of the appalling levels of excess death that neocolonialism has normalised in the majority world.

For Western consumer societies, imperialism and colonialism are ‘history’: legacy issues that, at most, require some reparational amends. To suggest that the ongoing, indeed intensifying neocolonial phase of US-proxy wars is just as violent as colonialism, perhaps even more so, is to risk derision. For many countries on the Africa-West Asia axis, however, including Sudan, the UN’s high bar for excess deaths suggests otherwise. When we consider the toll of four decades of permanent war – the dispossession, immiseration and displacement; the destruction of livelihoods, public infrastructure and the biosphere; the austerity, urbicidal decimation, and the scattering to the wind of professional classes – a different picture is waiting to be drawn.      

Western humanitarianism in crisis

Western humanitarianism, as outlined above, entered a period of crisis with the launch of the US-led War on Terror. With its polarising ‘with or against us’ ethos, large areas of West Asia and Africa effectively became a free-fire zones. As international backing for humanitarian access and an associated concern for ‘human rights’ disappeared, the aid industry defensively bunkered itself. The insularity of aid workers has since increased, together with a dependence on machine-driven remote management. Helped by budget cuts and increased managerial oversight, the aid industry’s regulatory role came adrift in the mounting violence and impunity of recent decades.  

What did Western humanitarianism leave to the world, in the stead of the structuralism and political radicalism that it displaced?  Here we are confronted with the ‘humanitarian paradox’. 

At the heart of this paradox is that despite having been in Sudan for fifty years, for example, NGOs have little real knowledge of that country. As an agent of neocolonial recapture and pacification, the aid industry is incapable of creating useful knowledge for those struggling against neocolonialism and the violence, dispossession and impoverishment it has unleashed. While dedicated to ‘saving lives’ and supporting ‘rights’, the aid industry cannot furnish a peoples’ history,⁷For an outline of a people’s history of the western Sahel in disastrous times, see Rahmane Idrissa in this dossier. so to speak. By way of concealing this paradox, we find in Western humanitarian discourse several countervailing reflexes. 

Regarding the Horn of Africa, the last few years have seen recurrent, self-serving predictions of the ‘famine to come’, each seeking to attract the attention of otherwise busily militarising      Western states. Many hope that the banner of ‘climate change’, backed by the objectivity of science and its ability to obfuscate decades of institutional complicity while renewing a security-driven urge to intervene, will keep Western humanitarianism marching on. 

If ‘climate change’ seeks to draw a line under decades of aggravated intervention, when escalating neocolonial violence is actually addressed, we find yet another iteration of liberalism’s longstanding racial fear of unfettered black sovereignty: for example, the threat posed by independent totalitarian African states, their corrupt incumbents and rapacious non-state wannabes. Important here is the fashionable academic embrace of the transactional politics of the neoliberal ‘political marketplace’ where everything has a price. Dedicated research programmes are now busy ‘mappng’ this unregulated space where, devoid of imperial designs, African tyrants and regional hegemons regularly sell each other down the river, so to speak. 

The paradox of Western Humanitarianism lies in its inability to constitute a peoples’ history of resistance and struggle against neocolonial oppression. The only history that Western Humanitarianism is capable of producing are celebratory or egotistical accounts of its own technologies of intervention, surveillance and digitalization.  

NOTAS DE RODAPÉ

• 1
  Tellingly, however, the same social actors that railed against capitalism and ideology seamlessly welcomed the teleological inevitability of ‘globalisation’. The grandest of grand narratives that, as Gabriel Rockhill argues, reproduces, in a quintessential act of historical farce, the specter of the vulgar Marxism they claimed to dismiss!
• 2
  See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006). To use AI in the struggle for liberation and a sustainable world would require its freeing, as China has done, from the enmeshing ecology of Western politico-corporate forces and interests.
• 3
  See Claude Meillassoux, “Development or Exploitation: Is the Sahel Famine Good for Business?” Review of African Political Economy 1, no. 1 (1974): 27-33, https://doi.org/10.1080/03056247408703235; Jay O’Brien, “Sowing the Seeds of Famine: The Political Economy of Food Deficits in Sudan.” Review of African Political Economy 12, no. 33 (1985): 23-32; Taisier Mohamed Ahmed Ali, The Cultivation of Hunger: State and Agriculture in Sudan (Khartoum University Press, 1989).
• 4
  Mark Duffield and Nicholas Stockton, “How Capitalism Is Destroying the Horn of Africa: Sheep and the Crises in Somalia and Sudan.” Review of African Political Economy 51, no. 179 (2024): 105-16.
• 5
  See Gabriel Rockhill, Counter-History of the Present: Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, Democracy (Duke University Press, 2017).
• 6
  Personal communication.
• 7
  For an outline of a people’s history of the western Sahel in disastrous times, see Rahmane Idrissa in this dossier.