The ‘radical humanism’ of ‘Cap Anamur’ / ‘German Emergency Doctors’ in the 1980s: a turning point for the idea,practice and policy of humanitarian aid

Abstract

Historiographies of humanitarian aid and aid agencies alike had suggested an ever-growing politicization and militarization following the end of the ‘cold war’. But already in the 1980s, the field of humanitarian aid underwent extensive changes; new aid agencies no longer relied on Christian ideas of charity or leftist internationalism, short-term aid gained new importance and an ever-growing disaster awareness can be observed. The relief organization ‘Cap Anamur ’/’ German Emergency Doctors’ (GED) was founded in 1979 with the purpose of saving the so-called ‘boat people’. Typical for its time, it ascribed to a pure and innate humanitarian impulse summarized under the term ‘radical humanism’. Using the example of GED the article sets out to scrutinise the policies of this new humanitarianism that can be summarized as ‘controlled demerging’. The article brings into focus humanitarian aid as such, its own logic deriving from a particular idea of humanitarianism, considering both site-specific practices and also specific policies that are not necessarily congruent with political or economic interests. It becomes clear that the basis for the new political meaning humanitarian aid gained from the 1990s onwards was already laid by the humanitarian-aid agencies themselves.     

‘Aceh thanks the world’: The possibilities of the gift in a post‐disaster society (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

While it has often been argued that post‐disaster aid is humiliating for its beneficiaries, based on my ethnographic research in post‐tsunami Aceh, Indonesia, I argue that such aid may also come to mean the opposite. Rather than feeling humiliated by foreign aid, people in Aceh actively glossed post‐tsunami foreign assistance as ‘gifts’ for which they often expressed their gratitude. Building on Marcel Mauss's classic argument, as well as on more recent works on the nature of the gift, I argue that they did so because they felt that the gift of post‐disaster aid brought with it both a long wished‐for recognition of Aceh and the possibility of establishing long‐term relationships between Aceh and ‘the world’. Therefore, rather than something humiliating, the post‐disaster aid became a medium for imagining what James Ferguson has called a ‘place‐in‐the‐world’ for Aceh.     

Institutions in context: Reconstructing Aristotle's defence of cultural studies

Within political science, there are two alternative approaches to understanding political institutions: traditional ‘institutional studies’ and the newer ‘cultural studies’. Each approach tends to go its own way, with little debate between the two. The former explains institutions by reference to their independent behaviour which has a formative influence on political culture. The latter explains institutions by reference to their dependent behaviour which reflects the formative influence of political culture. This paper proposes a synthesis between the two approaches, offering a third alternative based on a reconstructured application of Aristotle's ‘regime analysis’, along lines experimented with by J.S. Mill. My primary aim is analytical rather that historical: to reconstruct an approach to institutional analysis which better relates institution and culture.     

Is ‘child placement’ trafficking?: Questioning the validity of an accepted discourse (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Within the discursive‐institutional space occupied by organisations working on child protection, child trafficking is often assumed to represent a direct outgrowth of the socio‐cultural custom of ‘child placement’, whereby parents send their children to live (and work) within other households. In Benin, where research for this paper was conducted, the narrative of ‘placement corrupted’ has become so well established that the country's anti‐trafficking law is in fact a law regulating the movement (including placement) of minors, and has in practice resulted in a de facto criminalisation of the intra‐familial mobility that has long formed a normal component of child‐rearing and socialisation within the region. In this paper, I offer a brief overview of this situation, and attempt to question the validity of the discourse on which the anti‐placement law and its attendant policies are based. I will employ the Foucauldian techniques of discursive archaeology and genealogy to unravel the origins of the discourse, and will draw on my own and related empirical research to problematize its conclusions.     

Governing Mobility through Humanitarianism in Somalia: Compromising Protection for the Sake of Return

This article aims to contribute to an increased understanding of the importance of migration in humanitarian and ‘post‐humanitarian’ contexts, by exploring the interlinkages between protection and displacement. It argues that the strategies by which conflict‐displaced populations protect themselves are largely based on mobility. Yet, humanitarian approaches to displaced populations do not take sufficient account of the mobility needs of those they assist. Furthermore, the actual location at which aid is provided is affected by funding realities and donor priorities. This article discusses the case of protracted displacement realities of Somali refugees and internally displaced people in Kenya, Somaliland and south‐central Somalia. Based on in‐depth semi‐structured interviews and focus group discussions with humanitarian aid workers and displaced people, the article offers an analysis of the recent ‘stabilization discourse’ that fuels programming directed at the return of displaced Somalis. The authors argue that humanitarian protection is compromised by immobile aid practices and by humanitarian programmes that are guided by states’ interest in refugee return.     

The politics of the accord does corporatism explain it?

The period between the holding of the National Economic Summit Conference in April 1983 and the 1984 election has seen the politics of the Accord shift from a primary concern with wage setting through the Arbitration Commission to the management of trade‐offs in non‐wage areas between business, government and the ACTU. The politics of the Accord in this period is not understood by adopting an interest group approach to business, the ACTU and the government or by accepting EPAC's view of its own institutional role. Rather, business and the ACTU obey two different logics of collective action and Epac is a ‘disorganising’ institution. It is a representation system based on closure by exclusion called partial corporatism. Partial corporatism benefits business disproportionately and excludes women, welfare recipients and the unemployed.     

Looking ‘The Gift’ in the mouth: Russia as donor (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

While the Soviet Union was a significant donor of international development aid, since the 1990s, a generation of Russians has experienced the subject position of ‘recipient’ in the global political economy. However, following its G8 presidency in 2006, Russia officially signalled its intention to (re‐)emerge as an aid donor. Should the Russian government's efforts to join the global community of donors be understood as a defence mechanism against what Mauss called the ‘wounding’ experience of being treated as a perpetual recipient? International development aid is seen here as a cultural phenomenon whose underlying assumptions are both challenged and affirmed by the arrival of ‘emerging donors’ such as Russia.     

Can the World Bank Enforce its Own Conditions?

In the 1980s, the World Bank stepped up policy‐based lending, making loans conditional on government policy and institutional reforms in the borrower country. In 2002, policy‐based lending (or adjustment loans) accounted for 64 per cent of total commitments. Some critics have argued that conditionality has failed because borrowers do not comply with conditions, and that borrowers do not comply because donors do not enforce the conditions, due to their own institutional incentives to lend. Accordingly, they argue that conditionality should be abandoned in favour of selectivity, a strategy in which donors would lend to governments that already have good policies and institutions in place. This article reviews the evidence that has been offered for this ‘enforcement critique’ and finds that it is not sufficient to support the argument. Although the critique is often asserted, and although there is ample evidence of lending pressures, no studies have attempted to determine whether borrower non‐compliance is a serious problem, or whether Bank failures to enforce are the principal reason for the failure of borrowers to meet conditions; nor have any studies been carried out to show whether lending pressures are the main reason for the Bank's failure to enforce.     

There's No‐Place Like Home: emotional geographies of researching ‘race’ and refuge provision in Britain

In this article we draw on feminist and psychodynamic theory to discuss processes of researching service provision for minoritised women escaping domestic violence. Our aim is to take seriously the ways particular contexts, in this case as produced by the process of researching this topic, elicit specific responses. In particular we offer some conceptual tools for analysing the emotions generated in these geographies. Taking the ‘space’ of the research team as our focus, we analyse how culturally defined meanings of ‘home’, community and refuge that were the focus of our research topic also functioned as a lens through which tensions and dynamics within the project team could be understood. Just as secrecy, silence and shame figured in our participants' accounts, so they circulated between the team. Drawing on the motifs of the intersection of ‘space’ and ‘place’ (as they occur within discourses and practices around domestic violence and minoritisation) as well as the psychodynamic notions of ‘mirroring’ and ‘parallel process’, we consider the extent to which the combined racialised, gendered and institutional relationships structuring the research team constituted it as a ‘non‐place’. This is because it was a space produced by the research process which, other than this, had no acknowledged tradition of history or memory to anchor it. We discuss how this space functioned paradoxically to foster creativity and innovation in generating discourses and practices working across difference, as well as inevitably at times recapitulating prevailing power (including racialised) relationships. We end by evaluating the usefulness of such concepts for wider analyses of intercultural and antiracist feminist practice.     

Accountability and Inaction: NGOs and Resource Lodging in Development

From the late 1980s, research on NGOs had a normative focus and was vulnerable to changing donor preoccupations. This article contributes a new conceptual approach, analysing the practices through which relationships and resources are translated into programmes and projects. The theoretical justification for this move combines the new ethnography of development practice with a re‐agency approach to transactions across time and space. The study is based on data including thirty hours of video ethnography involving interviews and field visits with Kenyan NGOs in a variety of sectors. The analysis focuses on the problem of accountability that emerged through the interactions of donors and state corruption. We argue that NGOs operating in capital cities often provide organizational solutions to this problem. Depending on donor preferences, varying amounts of resources become ‘lodged’ or absorbed in ‘capital NGOs’ as they provide accounts of programmes that satisfy donors. However, no matter the donor preferences, capital NGOs provide accountability independently of increased action with communities or increased resources transferred to them. We conclude that the institutionalization of the NGO field as a well‐grounded specialization depends in part on the degree to which researchers can sideline the stories generated in inter‐organizational contexts such as workshops and policy meetings, and substitute understandings based on accounting practices, resource flows and social ties.     

World Bank Influence and Institutional Reform in Argentina

During the 1990s, reforms concerned with ‘good governance’ became popular with multilateral and bilateral lenders. This trend was led by the World Bank, which claimed that in order to achieve economic development, institutions mattered. This article looks at governance reforms in Argentina, specifically in the judicial sector, and contends that World Bank involvement affected the nature, reach and depth of these initiatives. The influence of the Bank can be traced through three dimensions that have characterized its approach to institutional reform: donor‐driven designs for project reform; reliance on technical approaches; and restricted forms of decision making in project initiatives. Such an approach to institutional change conditioned domestic reform in Argentina and contributed to piecemeal and inadequate initiatives. The author also argues that the Bank's approach in Argentina can be traced to wider strategies that derive from embedded institutional practices and ideological foundations within the institution that throw into question the Bank's capacities to promote such reforms.     

Heritage in trust: Sustainable stewardship in transition?

Abstract

Frequently identified with ‘establishment’ values the National Trust has as often been a focus of critique as of celebration. This essay examines the Trust's changing relation to contested values of heritage as manifest in its acquisitions and management policies, in its engagement with environmental and social issues and an emerging politicisation which transcends a narrow, purely property‐based interpretation of its statutory purpose. Recent acquisitions challenge conventional perceptions of ‘natural beauty’ and ‘historic interest’. Organisational greening has precipitated a review of the implications of stewardship ‘in perpetuity’. Recognition of the needs of local communities and awareness of equal opportunities issues have prompted a reinterpretation of its founders’ concerns with access and enjoyment ‘for the nation’. These developments manifest an inchoate shift in the Trust's emphasis from the preservation of the status quo to engagement with change, both within the context of its own properties and in its relations to the wider society and environment. The Trust is unlikely ever to lead changes in public perceptions of heritage but neither is its role necessarily or irredeemably a wholly reactionary one. Inertial and cautious, the Trust reflects and articulates the shifting resolution of contested cultural values.     

Indigenous Research: Whose Priority? Journeys and Possibilities of Cross‐Cultural Research in Geography

Decolonising research in geography is part of a broader ‘reflexive’ process which continues to question the positivist status of ‘researcher as observer’. This paper contributes to this reflexive turn, drawing on the particular experiences of a cross‐cultural Honours thesis. The paper is pursued through a parallel journey involving a non‐Indigenous researcher (and author of the cross‐cultural Honours thesis) engaging Indigenous research 1 with interpretative insight from an Indigenous adviser or ‘on‐looker’. The methodological difficulties revealed by the parallel journey are emphasised to highlight both the complexities and reflexive possibilities of cross‐cultural research but also to consider potential institutional and pedagogic implications that stem from the experience. One of the substantial findings of the paper is that, by linking Indigenous community priorities to research and coursework, conventional (and often unequal) research relations are minimised and colonising tendencies reduced. By challenging the conventional way that cross‐cultural research is conceived, and the way that institutional practices and research frameworks are implemented, geographers can continue their prolonged and complex efforts at decolonisation of the field and their own practices.     

Property and Authority in a Migrant Society: Balinese Irrigators in Sulawesi,Indonesia

Multiple definitions of resources as property lead to competition over legitimate authority between state and non‐state organizational and institutional arrangements. This article focuses on the overlapping and competing domains of the water users’ association, WUA, and the ‘traditional’ Balinese irrigators’ institution, subak. While the former is backed up by the power of state regulation and administration, the latter derives legitimacy from Balinese irrigators. The author presents a case study of the establishment and transformation of property rights in an irrigation‐based Balinese migrant society in Indonesia; he concludes that, in the ongoing process of competition for authority and mutual adjustment, both institutions undergo important transformations.     

The mismeasure of the human: Big data and the ‘AI turn’ in global governance

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are already transforming our world socially, economically and politically and are part of our everyday lives, most of the time in invisible ways. In this paper, I offer some reflections on the possible effects that the ‘AI turn’ of global governance has for human rights practices, particularly in the case of the United Nations. This turn, under the banner ‘AI for good’, is expressed in the UN's intervention in major crises and continues with the creation of more mundane policies and law. The paper also shows that, beyond the policy and crisis-intervention orientations of AI, we are witnessing the creation of new foundations for human belonging and being. Algorithmic interpretation and computational calculation contribute to the definition of the reality of intervention and to the institutional production of data identities and data realities that are part of digital humanity. All this is taking place through the automatization of decision making in the context of the increased interdependence between private and public sectors.     

No friend of democratization: Europe's role in the genesis of the ‘Arab Spring’

The argument advanced in this article is that EU policies helped to trigger the so‐called Arab Spring, not by intention but by default. This contention is advanced through an examination of four strands of EU policy towards those countries designated as Mediterranean Partner Countries (MPCs) under the Euro‐Mediterranean Partnership Programme (EMP) and the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), namely: trade and economic development, political reform, the ‘peace process’, and regional security (including migration control). What emerges is that the EU has not just departed from its own normative principles and aspirations for Arab reform in some instances, but that the EU has consistently prioritized European security interests over ‘shared prosperity’ and democracy promotion in the Mediterranean. The net result is a set of structured, institutionalized and securitized relationships which will be difficult to reconfigure and will not help Arab reformers attain their goals.     

From the ‘new localism’ to the ‘new regionalism’? The implications of regional development agencies for city–regional relations

Throughout the last three decades efforts to regenerate British cities have been based around the construction of new institutional alliances and policy networks supported by a series of urban-based initiatives. Successive Conservative governments premised their intervention on the assumption that cities (and particular parts therein) were the most appropriate geographical level around which to organise policy intervention. In pursuing this city-based agenda, the policies were themselves instrumental in constituting the city as an object of policy: a problem in need of a solution. The aim of this paper, however, is not to explore how certain spaces or scales become constructed through, for example, government policy, political practices or state restructuring. Rather the paper augments work conducted on the socially constructed nature of ‘cities’ and ‘regions’. It explores for regeneration policy and politics the implications of the tendential shift away from a model of ‘new localism’ towards an alternative model of ‘new regionalism’. The origins of the central element of New Labour's emergent regional project — the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) — are established before the paper moves on to examine the likely political relationships between the local state, drawing upon the example of Manchester, and the regional state, drawing upon North West England, under the new institutional arrangements.     

Teaching Across the Divide: Physical and Human Geographies of Hurricane Katrina

This article critically reflects on our effort to ‘teach across the divide’, by integrating physical and human geography in a new first-year course. We achieved this integration by structuring our course around a series of key events, in order to draw out the interaction of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ forces. After setting out the intellectual and institutional reasons for integration, we illustrate our approach with reference to one of the key events covered in our course: Hurricane Katrina. Finally, we draw on our own reflections and student evaluations to consider the positive outcomes of our approach, and the challenges it poses.     

Unsettling Experiences: Internal Resettlement and International Aid Agencies in Laos

A number of programmes and policies in Laos are promoting the internal resettlement of mostly indigenous ethnic minorities from remote highlands to lowland areas and along roads. Various justifications are given for this internal resettlement: eradication of opium cultivation, security concerns, access and service delivery, cultural integration and nation building, and the reduction of swidden agriculture. There is compelling evidence that it is having a devastating impact on local livelihoods and cultures, and that international aid agencies are playing important but varied and sometimes conflicting roles with regard to internal resettlement in Laos. While some international aid agencies claim that they are willing to support internal resettlement if it is ‘voluntary’, it is not easy to separate voluntary from involuntary resettlement in the Lao context. Both state and non‐state players often find it convenient to discursively frame non‐villager initiated resettlement as ‘voluntary’.