Aid Conditionality as a Tool for Peacebuilding: Opportunities and Constraints

Over the past decade, aid donors have pledged billions of dollars to support peacebuilding efforts in collapsed states and war–torn societies. Peace conditionality — the use of formal performance criteria and informal policy dialogue to encourage the implementation of peace accords and the consolidation of peace — could make aid a more effective tool for building peace. In Bosnia, for example, donors have attempted to link aid to the protection of human rights, co–operation with the international war crimes tribunal, and the right of people displaced by ‘ethnic cleansing’ to return to their homes. Yet the conventional practices and priorities of aid donors pose constraints to the exercise of peace conditionality. This article examines several of these constraints, including the reluctance of donors (particularly the international financial institutions) to acknowledge responsibility for the political repercussions of aid; the competing foreign–policy objectives of donor governments; the humanitarian imperative to aid people whose lives are at risk; and the incentive structures and institutional cultures of donor agencies.     

Humanitarian Space as Arena: A Perspective on the Everyday Politics of Aid

‘Humanitarian space’ denotes the physical or symbolic space which humanitarian agents need to deliver their services according to the principles they uphold. This concept, which separates humanitarian action from its politicized environment, is widely used in policy documents and academic texts, even though empirical evidence abounds that this space is in fact highly politicized. To some extent the uncritical use of the concept of humanitarian space is understandable because of its aspirational character. This article explores a different angle: how different actors use the concept and the language of humanitarian space and principles in the everyday politics of aid delivery. It proposes an empirical perspective that approaches humanitarian space from the perspective of everyday practices of policy and implementation. It maintains that the humanitarian space is an arena where a multitude of actors, including humanitarians and the disaster‐affected recipients of aid, shape the everyday realities of humanitarian action. The paper develops this perspective for two humanitarian operations: a protracted refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya, and the tsunami response in Sri Lanka.     

The Rise and Fall of ‘Internally Displaced People’ in the Central Peruvian Andes

This article analyses the possible effects of the introduction of the category of ‘internally displaced people’— IDP — in the context of violent conflict in central Peru. It gives an account of the ways in which the IDP category has been introduced and appropriated by local NGOs, people affected by violent conflict and displacement, and by the governmental organization, PAR, set up to facilitate return and repopulation after the declared end of the armed conflict. The category has facilitated and given leverage to a national organization of IDPs. However, the agencies and programmes that work in support of IDPs tend to regard existing mobile livelihood practices as an impediment for advocacy and longer‐term development strategies. This article suggests that, instead of considering displacement (and return) as an absolute break with the past, a focus on networks and mobile livelihoods may be a better way to help people affected by violent conflict to move beyond emergency relief.     

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.     

‘Humanitarianized’ Development? Anti‐trafficking Reconfigured

Over the past three decades humanitarianism has broadened considerably in scope. Humanitarian aid agencies have increasingly moved beyond a traditionally narrow concern with immediate relief aid to engage the wider implications of their work. Humanitarian arguments have also become central to policy legitimation in a range of contexts outside the humanitarian aid sector. By contrast, this article, based on research into anti‐trafficking programmes in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia, considers a case where a particular humanitarian discourse has in fact narrowed. Anti‐trafficking, once informed by development discourses of poverty reduction and long‐term well‐being of populations, has become increasingly shaped by a humanitarian emergency logic of exceptionalism. Long‐term development modalities have contracted into a zeal for the immediateness of ‘rescues’ and saving lives. By drawing attention to how development and humanitarian discourses intersect in anti‐trafficking interventions, this article explores how such shifts in legitimization and mobilization have taken place, in turn transforming actors and practices. The article will suggest that it is the different temporal registers of the two discourses — development and humanitarianism — that help account for this shift from the former to the latter.     

Work in crisis: managing fantasies about distant strangers,managing aid workers

This article provides an insight into the world of Polish development workers operating in South Sudan. It shows that the conceptualisations of aid work in terms of a ‘mission’, a unique job with a special, ethical goal, a difficult, risky operation requiring specific skills are not incidental. Instead, the point is made, that such ways of thinking about foreign aid and distant locations are strongly institutionalised sets of values and behavioural patterns, here defined as ‘work in crisis’. This specific notion is shaped by aid organisations who actively promote this rhetoric firstly through producing ‘truth’ about the aid work and project locations, and secondly through governing lived realities of the aid workers. The ‘work in crisis’ rhetoric helps to draw people into a development movement as devoted and allegiant followers. It also enables the management of these employees who are the most crucial for the industry – project coordinators – but who are separated from the organisational headquarters and NGO management by thousands of miles. Finally, it assists in the promotion of foreign aid among wider audiences in donor societies.     

The unintended consequences of emergency food aid: neutrality,sovereignty and politics in the Syrian civil war, 2012–15

This article dissects the role of emergency food aid during the current Syrian conflict. Drawing on Séverine Autesserre's concept of frames and Giorgio Agamben's theory of sovereignty, we argue that the neutrality frame, which undergirds the majority of humanitarian relief efforts in Syria, obfuscates the impact of emergency food aid, both on sovereign power relations and local political dynamics. While neutrality appears benign, it has had a tangible impact on the Syrian civil war. Through close scrutiny of various case‐studies, the article traces how humanitarian efforts reinforce the bases of sovereign politics while contributing to a host of what Mariella Pandolfi (1998) terms ‘mobile sovereignties’. In the process, humanitarian organizations reaffirm sovereign power while also engaging in similar activities. We then analyse how and why ostensibly neutral emergency food aid has unintentionally assisted the Assad regime by facilitating its control over food, which it uses to buttress support and foster compliance. By bringing external resources into life‐or‐death situations characterized by scarcity, aid agencies have become implicated in the conflict's inner workings. The article concludes by examining the political and military impact of emergency food assistance during the Syrian conflict, before discussing possible implications for the humanitarian enterprise more broadly.     

History,memory and ‘lessons learnt’ for humanitarian practitioners

Abstract

This article concludes the special issue on the history of humanitarian aid by reflecting on the role of memory and history in relation to humanitarian aid. To address a special issue as a conclusion is to embrace the opportunity to reflect on its papers, aims and ambitions. It is also for us an opportunity to reflect on the role history has for a community of practice often forging ahead in response to the latest demands and emergencies. Historical thinking is now coming into greater salience for the world of humanitarian aid because, we argue, the ‘humanitarian sector’ has grown and aged – and professionalized and institutionalized.     

The Great War,the child’s body and the American Red Cross

Abstract

This article examines the child-relief activities of the American Red Cross in Hungary in the aftermath of the Great War, offering an insight into the workings of humanitarianism in interwar Europe. A close look at this one Central European ‘playground’ of transatlantic intervention helps us understand the logic and the underlying political, economic and ideological motives behind Allied humanitarian aid to ‘enemy’ children. Analysis of the ways in which the war’s aftermath affected children, their bodies and their relief throws light on the relationship between violent conflicts, children in need and humanitarian intervention. The article looks particularly at the role of the child’s damaged body and its photographic representation, making it what Cathleen Canning calls an ‘embodied experience of war’. Exploration of the humanitarian discourse around the suffering child helps us identify the humanitarian reaction to the unforeseen social consequences of wartime confrontation. The article argues that the harmed body of the ‘enemy child’ served to mobilise transnational compassion that challenged the war’s deeply anchored ‘friend–foe’ mentality. The child turned into a means of configuring and translating human suffering beyond ideological and political borders. At the same time humanitarian child relief helped to further consolidate asymmetric international power relations.     

The Gendered Human of Humanitarianism: Medicalising and Politicising Sexual Violence

This article examines the relationship between gender and the human through the lens of humanitarianism, whose key mission is to protect ‘humanity’. More specifically, it traces the recent history of the entry of gender‐based violence into the medical humanitarian portfolio, quickly becoming the poster‐child for humanitarian aid. The article argues that this unprecedented attention to gender‐based violence, and its incorporation into the mandate of humanitarians and their mission to protect a universal humanity, works to medicalise and depoliticise the issue, limiting the ability to address violence in all its manifestations. The article also suggests that paying attention to the details of this attempted incorporation, and its ultimate failure, actually offers us something more important and interesting to think with: it opens the way to new possibilities for the political, and hence for addressing such forms of violence and inequality.     

Reinventing the firm: from post-war relief to international humanitarian agency

Abstract

This article focuses on the humanitarian non-governmental organization (NGO) CARE, Inc., and its transformation from a temporary non-profit agency working in post-war relief to Europe, to a permanent humanitarian enterprise delivering food aid and technical assistance to the so-called ‘developing world’. It analyses CARE’s shift from its early days as an American voluntary agency delivering food and consumer products (donated by private individuals in America) to individuals in Europe to a large NGO that co-operated closely with the US government in food-aid distribution to the Global South. Its expansion and professionalization was embedded in the development of new forms of public-private co-operation in humanitarian affairs, as well as in the overall setting of an emerging competitive ‘humanitarian charity market’ in the non-profit sector. In order to expand its organization and mission CARE implemented new and innovative business strategies and fostered the increasing ‘managerialization’ of its humanitarian activities. The article stresses the economic dimension of NGO activity as one perspective (among others) that helps us to better understand the complex dynamics of the ‘rise’ of humanitarian non-state players during the twentieth century.     

Surplus precaritization: Supply chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of hope in Myanmar's borderlands

The Thai-Myanmar border represents one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world, while the Myanmar-Bangladesh border is now home to nearly one million displaced Rohingya, making it the world's most populated refugee camp. During the period of “democratic transition,” pre-emptively terminated by the February 2021 military coup, foreign direct investment continued to flow into Myanmar despite ongoing humanitarian crises. Rather than being presented as exacerbating ethnic tension, economic development was frequently deployed as a panacea for conflict in ways that rendered borderland residents increasingly precarious. In this article, we draw on multi-sited ethnographic research carried out between 2014 and 2020 in Myanmar's borderlands and along the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor to examine how aid donors' support for displaced ethnic minority populations is supplanted by widespread geoeconomic hope for the ameliorating effects of capitalism. We home in on the role of aid flight, special economic zones, and China's Belt and Road Initiative to argue that geoeconomic hope surrounding Myanmar's deepening integration into circuits of global capital obscures processes of surplus precaritization in which populations progressively approach the point at which they become absolutely surplus or beyond reabsorption into labor markets. The article contributes to emerging scholarship on migrant labor exploitation, supply-chain capitalism and the geoeconomics of BRI in Myanmar's borderlands and beyond.     

Le territoire englouti de Mologa

The fate of the people of Mologa, a provincial village in central Russia, was forever marked by two consequences stemming directly from a single major event when the Rybinsk dam went into service in 1941. Not only did the waters of the lake it created cover their homes, but ene entire population was displaced as well. From then on, the inhabitants' new-found mobility was assimilated to the attachment to their territory, which on a symbolic level constituted their collective identity. In this sense, their forced displacement was incorporated into a culture of mobility: based on the spatial overlaying of individual and collective identities, it expressed its true dynamic nature in the principle of a potential return. The case of the community of Mologa is in many ways emblematic of the Soviet redistribution of populations; the bond between identities (personal, familial, or collective) and a territory seems to have been constructed in such a way that the displacement, rather than putting this bond into jeopardy, established or activated it. It did this by stimulating a living relationship within the spatial dimension. This dialectical movement between distance and return contributed to the formation and the preservation of a communal identity taking the form of mobility.     

UNTAC in Cambodia: A New Model for Humanitarian Aid in Failed States?

This article examines the impact of humanitarian aid on conflict, focusing especially on two main issues: the usefulness of a political economy approach in analysing the impact of international humanitarian aid on conflict dynamics; and the way that humanitarian aid organizations confront some of the major policy dilemmas inherent in working with failed states, such as military protection, aid conditionality, and neutrality. After a discussion of these issues, a case study is presented which compares the nature of humanitarian aid in Cambodia over two time periods, with the intention of illuminating alternative models that have been utilized by the international community in responding to state failure with humanitarian aid.     

Righting the course? Humanitarian intervention,the war on terror and the future of Afghanistan

The US‐led post 9/11 ‘intervention’ in Afghanistan was, by definition, not a humanitarian intervention. The intervention in Afghanistan was defined as an act of self‐defence by the US and it was one of the first steps in the ‘war on terror’ by the US and its allies: it had no intention or clear strategies for long‐term stabilization, state‐building or development. The US‐led international coalition failed to ‘find’ Al‐Qaeda in the short term and new arguments had to be made to justify continued international presence. The initial agenda was quickly blurred by a mismatch of intentions including those of long‐term stabilization and state‐building. The ideas developed through the Bonn Agreement (2001–5) and continued through the Afghanistan Compact (2006–10) have focused on building a centrally governed state (sometimes defined as democratic) that has a monopoly on the use of force. Their shortcomings are already well‐documented: the urgency of the Bonn Conference and of the adoption of the Bonn Agreement ostensibly meant trading expediency and stability for accountability and a clean slate, which is not to say that there were no good intentions at Bonn from stakeholders, but that Afghans and the international community put power‐sharing before progress. The choices made at Bonn may have contributed to the culture of impunity and the entrenched poverty that is gripping Afghanistan today. This article responds to the claims that state‐building and all that goes with it are not the responsibility of the ‘international community’ by addressing the accountability and humanitarian paradoxes. The question remains, however, about who should be responsible for reform and politically accountable in the aftermath of non‐humanitarian (and indeed even humanitarian) interventions?     

Heritage and participatory governance: An analysis of political strategies and social fractures in Spain

In the heritage field, institutions tend to see social participation as a synonym for good governance practice. This extends to other areas such as the environment, humanitarian aid, and sustainable development. In this article, the authors analyze the use of participatory models in the management of heritage through the study of three heritage sites in Spain: the prehistoric paintings in Altamira, the Mosque‐Cathedral in Córdoba, and the Cabo de Gata‐Nijar Natural Park. Their study suggests that, despite the promises of more democratic heritage governance, participatory methods are commonly bounded by social fractures that are concomitant to certain ‘heritage regimes’. They conclude that the critical study of participation in heritage should go beyond the dichotomy between ‘good and bad’ participation. Rather, it should focus on understanding what participation does to the entire heritagization process.     

‘The Dirty Vat’: European Migration to Australia from Shanghai, 1946–47

At the end of World War II, European residents of Shanghai included Jewish displaced persons and ‘White’ émigrés. While the Jewish refugees were initially viewed by Australia as a humanitarian crisis, they then became a controversial sideshow to a planned mass resettlement of displaced persons from Europe. This article contextualises the actual and proposed Jewish and Russian migration from Shanghai with regard to Australian attitudes towards postwar European migrations from the East. This argument traces the anti-Semitic and anti-Russian sentiments that pressured Calwell into ultimately blocking Russian migration from Shanghai as well as placing a tight curb on the migration of Jewish displaced persons from both Asia and Europe.     

Policing the Desert: The IOM in Libya Beyond War and Peace

The war that took place in Libya in 2011 forced 1.5 million people to leave the country. Many of them, from sub‐Saharan Africa, were helped to return to their countries of origin by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). This paper questions the purely humanitarian nature of the IOM intervention with references to its activities before and after the conflict. It shows that this organization has long participated in the implementation of European migration policies in Libya, and more widely in the Sahara, without being accountable to any people. Through the replacement of local politics by international crisis management, the Sahara is gradually integrated into a zone of international bureaucratic expedience. War and humanitarian intervention appear as contingencies in the progressive implementation of a global system of surveillance, spatial control and management of mobility in Africa.     

Transitional Justice and Political Economies of Survival in Post‐conflict Northern Uganda

This article explores the interplay between transitional justice and ‘everyday’ political economies of survival in post‐conflict Acholiland, northern Uganda. It advances two main arguments. First, that transitional justice — as part and parcel of conventional liberal peacebuilding packages — promotes a repertoire of normatively driven policies that have little bearing on lived realities of social accountability in post‐conflict settings. Second, that in transcending the epistemological and ontological boundaries of transitional justice and using concepts developed in the critical peacebuilding literature — the ‘everyday’ and ‘hybridity’ — a nuanced understanding of this dissonance emerges. Based on extensive fieldwork in Acholiland in the period 2012–14, using a range of qualitative research methods, the author examines the means through which people negotiate social and moral order in the context of post‐conflict life and analyses the tensions between these forms of ‘everyday’ activity and current transitional justice policy and programming in the region.