Humanitarian Aid and the Responsibility to Protect: NGOs between Neutrality and Instrumentalization

Abstract

By endorsing the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), the UN General Assembly aimed to protect civilians from severe crimes. The state-centric discourse in the International Relations discipline often ignores that humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are also expected to contribute to the implementation of R2P. However, R2P also suggests that humanitarian NGOs could play an important role in the prevention of and reaction to such crimes against humanity, and thus places them in a context of military-led “humanitarian interventions”. This changes the conditions under which humanitarian NGOs provide humanitarian aid: it threatens their neutrality and risks that other actors perceive them as being instrumentalized. NGOs react by discussing what R2P means; in general, for the practice of humanitarian aid, and for the NGOs’ role of protecting people against severe crimes in situations of armed conflict and violence. This article identifies different positions of and within humanitarian NGOs on these issues. The analysis also shows that R2P urges humanitarian NGOs to reflect more on their political role and on their potential to protect civilians and promote peace.