Humanitarian Politics Research Articles

‘We have to tread warily’: East Pakistan, India and the pitfalls of foreign intervention in the Cold War

ABSTRACT This article examines the East Pakistan crisis of 1971 as a watershed moment in Cold War humanitarian politics. It argues that the absence of an effective international framework of multilateral foreign intervention or peacekeeping forced the key external actors to resort to covert forms of intervention, while publicly pledging adherence to non-interference in the domestic affairs of Pakistan. The article demonstrates that covert intervention by India, the United States and the United Nations not only undermined the credibility of the Cold War international system, but also fuelled the drift to the Indo-Pakistani war that ultimately ended the crisis.

Global Standards, Cultural Islam: Syrian‐led Muslim Humanitarianism in Turkey

AbstractThis article focuses on Syrian‐led Muslim humanitarianism, and asks what types of discourses and practices emerged in the context of the Syrian Muslim diaspora's increased involvement in global refugee management as humanitarian actors. Through a case study of a major Syrian‐led humanitarian organization in Turkey founded by wealthy Syrian diasporan businessmen, the article examines how class differences, market discourses, and nationalist visions shape the contemporary politics of Muslim humanitarianism. I argue that Syrian Muslim humanitarian politics has featured complex struggles for legitimacy and recognition, which have led to new constellations of religious, neoliberal, and nationalist imaginations. Syrian Muslim humanitarians have claimed their legitimacy through negotiation of the Turkish state's neo‐Ottoman policies that render them invisible, and of Western organizations' and donors' Islamophobic biases that suspect them of supporting terrorism. Through strategies such as culturalizing Islam and enacting market discourses of professionalism and flexibility, Syrian Muslim humanitarians have claimed to embody global standards of humanitarianism, and have carved out a space in which their Syrian and Muslim identities are recognized. This article is among the first studies that highlight Syrian actors' growing influence in shaping the global field of humanitarian aid for Syrian refugees. Looking at the intersections of religion, class, and ethnicity, the article also expands our understanding of Muslim humanitarianism by emphasizing the often‐ignored themes of social class and nationalist imaginations.

The future of Brazil-Venezuela partnership under a migration crisis context: confidence building measures by border understandings

The history of international relations of Brazil and Venezuela is fundamental for South American security and stability. The Venezuelan-Brazilian migratory crisis (2015-2021) created a certain level of uncertainty but also generated confidence-building measures capable of mobilizing public opinion, integrating governmental public policies, inducing multilevel and multiactor coordination, and networking international organizations with civil society organizations. By critically assessing Brazilian-Venezuelan border relations we could draw some insights on how to think on security and humanitarian functioning in 21st Century global politics. An in-depth perspective based on historical bilateral relations makes it possible to realize that today's Venezuelan-Brazilian migratory crisis connects itself to multiple tensions of the past that echoes through the present and paves the way to re-imagine the future of South America’s international relations. The historical background produces, at the same time, nodes of tension and the platform of the strategic partnership between Brazil and Venezuela. In the second part, we move on to critically thinking on ideas, discourses, and actions taken in face of. The Venezuelan-Brazilian border relations under a migratory crisis make the case for an improved context of defense, security, and humanitarian politics grounded on confidence-building measures, envisioning the future of a strategic partnership.

Refugees as new Europeans, and the fragile line between crisis and solidarity

This piece draws on recent research focused on the humanitarian politics of the refugee ‘crisis’ and its relationship with European futures. Our aim is three-fold: first, we contextualise the rise of right-wing populism and the politicisation of refugees in Europe. Second, we reflect on how state austerities place precarious refugees alongside marginalised European citizens, with under-explored consequences and tensions. Third, we point to the hopeful practices around the ‘experimental humanitarianism’ that we encountered across the four capital cities in which we conducted research. The paper highlights the limitations of state-centric provisioning and the potential pathways that existing experiments of solidarity can build on the margins of European cities. These are often unseen or off-grid nodes of hope set against a backdrop of generalised European political malaise.

Humanitarian Politics and the Spectre of Illegitimacy

The political landscape in which the humanitarian movement took current form has changed radically. If humanitarian certainties have been upended, it is not in Sri Lanka, or even Syria or Afghanistan, but in the NGO response to the migration crisis in Greece and in the Mediterranean. However overstated, the claim of neutrality has always played an important role in establishing the legitimacy humanitarian action has enjoyed in Europe. But it is no longer possible, if it ever was, for relief workers to separate their ethical commitment to helping people in need from their political convictions, including about what the EU should stand for.

An Imperative to Act: Boarding the Relief Flights of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Biafra (1967–1970)

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) humanitarian politics of intervention during its relief operation in the Nigeria–Biafra conflict (1967–1970). The humanitarian response to the conflict was a foundational moment for everyday humanitarianism marking a shift from “traditional” state-oriented humanitarianism to an expansion in scope, actors, and practices operating outside of the formal structures of the state. By examining recently declassified archival records, I trace the ICRC’s shifting categorizations of victims in a changing humanitarian landscape. The article makes two main contributions: First, I demonstrate empirically how the Nigeria–Biafra conflict challenged the ICRC’s definition of humanitarian engagement and understandings of victimhood. Second, I argue that the ICRC had a clearer understanding than usually conveyed of how the Biafran leadership used the language of humanitarianism and victimhood to deploy an international response. Conclusively, I reflect on what the history of the ICRC in Biafra can teach scholars of contemporary humanitarianism.

The limits of agency: Emily Hobhouse’s international activism and the politics of suffering

This article pieces together the activism of the British welfare worker and feminist-pacifist Emily Hobhouse (1860–1926) during two largely unrecorded episodes of transnational activism: firstly, her ministry of Cornish miners in Virginia, Minnesota, in the United States; and secondly, her interventions during the period of reconstruction following the South African War (1899–1902). The article endeavors to contextualize Hobhouse’s activism and offer a broader understanding of the limitations and restraints on her actions. Ultimately, her activism required a platform that was in the gift of political actors and establishment figures, and dependent on fluctuations within specific political and bureaucratic situations. Based on close inspection of undocumented material in both South African and British archives, the article investigates Hobhouse’s repertoire of missionary and philanthropic roles within a wider context of humanitarian politics. It demonstrates how women’s activism and their behind-the-scenes politicking informed political decision-making in modern imperial and international affairs.

Between Humanitarian and Political Realism: Anthropological Perspective on the Refugee Crisis in Germany


 
 
 The article historicizes the German ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 in the context of post-World War II politics of migration and asylum in the country, focusing particularly on the reactions to the ‘crisis’ of 1992. That time, government reacted to more than 400,000 refugees from the Balkan wars with severe restrictions of the right to asylum, framed also within the ‘Dublin Regulation’ of the European Union. It is argued that German politics of immigration was mostly a kind of Realpolitik that subordinated humanitarian considerations to closed-border politics geared at keeping migrants out. Summer 2015, however, saw elements of humanitarianism in German refugee politics, understood, following Didier Fassin, as the introduction of moral sentiments into politics. This ‘humanitarianism’ was mostly accredited to Chancellor Angela Merkel. Yet the commitment of thousands of members of the German public ensured the sustainability of a ‘welcome culture’ intended to accommodate refugees, government politics quickly reverted to new restrictions that keep immigrants for many months or even years in a limbo of waiting. While to some extent government’s humanitarian discourse continues it becomes apparent that humanitarian politics is often a cover up for ulterior political motives. It is concluded that marking the events of 2015 as a refugee crisis enables in the first place the legitimization of politics of restriction like the externalization of EU borders into North African countries.
 
 

Outsiders in their own nation: Electoral violence and politics of ‘internal’ displacement in Kenya

This article foregrounds the overlapping continuum of local to global fault lines that structure the human security experiences of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Kenya. Drawing on data from the 2007–2008 electoral violence-induced displacement of ethnic minorities in the Rift Valley region, the article discusses how the intersections of ethnicity, national politics, land rights, and global humanitarian politics on displacement positioned IDPs as outsiders in their own nation and how this shapes their ability to live secure lives. By so doing, the study transcends nation-state border focused forced migration to question the relevance of dichotomizing IDPs and refugees, which shapes their protection. The author argues for the need to critically examine the less visible and fluid borders which displace people from their homelands in order to address the human security of all who are forced to flee from their homes regardless of whether they have crossed national boundaries.

Conventional Thinking? The 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Politics of Legal Restraints on Weapons during the Cold War

Though largely unknown, the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) has been successful in many areas. The treaty remains in force today and has helped to regulate many types of weapons, including landmines, incendiary weapons, and blinding laser weapons. Additionally, it has helped to clarify terms important for international legal norms, such as “unnecessary suffering” and “military necessity.” The CCW was the first treaty to regulate conventional weapons in more than 70 years. Why is this seemingly useful treaty relatively unfamiliar compared with other laws of war treaties, remembered only by humanitarians who occasionally invoke it to denounce it for being conservative or even a “humanitarian failure”? This article shows that besides “humanitarian politics,” Cold War politics had a major and underappreciated impact on conventional weapons treaty negotiations from the late 1960s through the 1980s. In particular, Cold War politics established the different sides in the negotiations (West, East, and South), which had a far-reaching impact on the conduct and tone of the negotiations, determined the weapons and issues under discussion, and ultimately affected implementation of the 1980 CCW following its ratification. By tracing the history of conventional weapons negotiations from 1968 to 1980 and examining the key impact of Cold War politics on the process, this article sheds light on the politics of conventional weapons negotiations today.

You-Will-Kill-Me-Beans: Taste and the Politics of Necessity in Humanitarian Aid

Despite their nuanced palates and cooking skills, as guests at the humanitarian table, Liberians living at the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana were expected and assumed to adapt to the “tastes of necessity.” In the refugee camp, the sensory experiences and pleasures of the taste of liberty—or “luxury”—existed, if at all, as an indicator that one was no longer in need of aid. In this article, I consider how innovations in cooking and taste shape humanitarian politics and argue that Liberian refugees subverted the biopolitics of necessity through biographies of taste. Through their sensuous encounters and critical responses to the taste of necessity, humanitarian subjects are able to produce biographies of food aid and a public accounting of the historic and contemporary conditions of humanitarianism. By prioritizing the taste of refugee food, camp residents have challenged the reason of humanitarian reason by expanding the sensibility of food aid and repositioning recipients as essential figures in humanitarian aid.

“We Are Sure of Your Sympathy”: Indigenous uses of the politics of protection in nineteenth-century Australia and Canada

The rise and fall of humanist imperial policy across Britain’s nineteenth-century empire has received considerable attention in terms of how the principles of Indigneous protection that underpinned the 1837 Report from the House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines fared as a governmental imperative to meet the obligations of humane colonisation. In particular, scholars have examined the gulf between the theory and the practice of protectionist policy as an Indigenous legal right, the tensions between metropolitan initiatives to protect subject peoples and the neglect of those initiatives by local governments and settler lobbies, and the transition of protectionist agendas from an earlier model of Indigenous “amelioration” to a later model of Indigenous governance and surveillance. In comparison to the uses and failures of protection as a mechanism of colonial governmentality, less attention has been given to the strategic value that the humanitarian politics of protection, with its rhetoric of obligation and solicitude, might have held for Indigenous peoples. Within the comparative framework of nineteenth-century Australia and Canada, this paper will consider some of the contexts in which Indigenous people enlisted the humanitarian agendas and rhetoric of protection in encounters with representatives of the British Crown. As emergent British settler states, nineteenth-century Australia and Canada represent divergent ends of colonial governmental efforts to bring Indigenous people within the Crown’s jurisdiction. In much of what is now Canada, treaties were signed between Indigenous peoples and the Crown. They endorsed a principle that resources would be exchanged for the Crown’s protection, although in the years that followed, many of the expectations established by treaties would be disappointed. In Australia, the absence of treaty negotiations, and the subsequent violence that followed the path of settlement wherever it went, made the promise of the Crown’s protection a significantly ineffectual concept from the outset. Yet even if being within the Crown’s protection had little practical purchase in a daily sense, there were times when Aboriginal people found cause to enlist their status as the Crown’s subjects to call upon its obligations and sympathies. In different settings and across different times, their strategic engagements with the humanitarian politics of protection have much to say both about practical tensions in colonial conceptions of humane governance, and about the degrees of agency Indigenous people could deploy in asserting a political place within the colonial order.

Humanitarian Dispossession: Celebrity Activism and the Fragment-Nation of the Sudan

This paper examines U.S. actor George Clooney’s activism on the Sudan to show how the intersection of human rights and humanitarian politics constructs a grand narrative of rescue and salvation that is both potentially positive and problematic. In the case of Africa in general, and the Sudan in particular, celebrity activism produces subaltern actors whose voices are submerged in the fragmented stories of suffering and salvation presented by humanitarian outsiders. I show how this master narrative overshadows the post-Cold War politics and confrontation among different national and transnational actors. To highlight this point, I demonstrate how Clooney’s activism counters the rescue vision of the Sudanese Islamist regime, with both narratives celebrating transnationality on different moral grounds. While Clooney’s activism employs a salvation narrative rooted in human rights and humanitarian practices, the Islamist state’s narrative envisions regional alliances based on pan-Islamism. The two narratives however work through the assimilation and/or exclusion of other political visions and strategies of struggle. I take Clooney’s celebrity activism as an entry point to examine these complex dynamics: to explore the historical and neoliberal contexts that produce the clashing narratives of Islamism and humanitarianism, the limited effects of humanitarian visibilities, and the counter-narratives of Sudanese activists.

Risky Business: Race, Nonequivalence and the Humanitarian Politics of Life

Analyses of humanitarian imagery generally highlight how images are used to mobilize empathy and collective action. Recent critical ethnographic accounts of humanitarianism have either disregarded or underplayed the role of race in the practice of humanitarianism, focusing on risk as crucial to a “humanitarian politics of life.” In this article I suggest that combining textual and visual analysis deepens the evidentiary base for claims linking race, risk and humanitarianism. I argue that heroism and humanitarianism are often conflated, and that this conflation relies on racialized perceptions of risk, in which blackness is a central mediator.

The International Humanitarian Regime and its Discontents: India’s Challenge

In recent years, concerns over whether the humanitarian regime as we know it will survive a many-pronged challenge have spurred humanitarian organisations to embark on processes of soul-searching and innovation. With a steadily increasing aid budget and its more active and vocal role in development and humanitarian politics—and in global politics more generally—India has acquired the label of ‘emerging’ humanitarian actor. This article, however, shows that in many ways India has been a humanitarian pioneer, and connects the norms and values of the international humanitarian regime with India’s own philosophical, religious and democratic traditions. It also discusses how Indian policy-makers have critiqued the current United Nations-led international humanitarian regime and investigates how the government of an increasingly powerful and influential Commonwealth country from the South interacts with an international regime created in Europe. For many Indian policy-makers, current humanitarian practices are tainted by what they see as North American and European interventionist and highly political agendas in the South. The article concludes that while there is still a lot to be said for a global, multilateral humanitarian regime led by the United Nations, it need not be Western-biased, either in theory or in practice.

Humanitarian Assistance and Propaganda War: Repatriation and Relief of the Nationalist Refugees in Hong Kong’s Rennie’s Mill Camp, 1950-1955 人道救援與宣傳戰爭: 香港調景嶺國民黨難民之 接運與救濟, 1950-1955 年

In 1949, the world witnessed a tidal wave of involuntary migration out of China when the Chinese Communists came to power. Among this vast sea of human misery were tens of thousands of exiled Nationalist supporters in Hong Kong — common soldiers, low-ranking civil servants, and their families. In June 1950, a minor clash occurred between the Nationalist refugees and the pro-ccpelements in the colony. To prevent further political upheaval, the British authorities transported the former to a remote location called “Rennie’s Mill” or Tiu Keng Leng and built a temporary internment camp to house them. The initial plan was to gather the Nationalist supporters in the colony and shipped them to Taiwan as soon as possible. Yet Chiang Kai-shek’s government was reluctant to receive these people for both economic and security reasons. As the repatriation process dragged on, the Nationalists used the refugee camp as an international showcase in their propaganda war against the People’s Republic of China (prc) much to the chagrin of the British. Consequently, a considerable number of the Nationalist refugees were stranded in Hong Kong. They became victims of their own government under the pretense of humanitarian assistance. This paper examines the early history of Rennie’s Mill community with an emphasis on the interplay between humanitarian relief, propaganda war, and international politics. It sheds light on the actual lived experiences of Rennie’s Mill refugees against the conflicting ideological constructions and humanitarian discourse surrounding them.

The American Red Cross and the International Committee of the Red Cross' humanitarian politics and policies in Asia Minor and Greece (1922–1923)

This article examines the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) politics and policies in Asia Minor and Greece during the months that followed the end of the war between Greece and Turkey. It is articulated around two moments. The first takes place in Asia Minor during the summer and fall of 1922, right in the midst of the disastrous retreat and final defeat of the Greek Army, which eventually brought to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands Christians. I highlight the rising and relatively suspicious interest of the ICRC for Muslim civilian populations. The second moment takes place in Greece during 1922–1923 and focuses on the range of activities undertaken by the ICRC delegate Rodolphe de Reding Biberegg, when the Greek capital and the rest of the country faced the arrival of hundreds of thousands refugees.

“But the UN Said So …”: International Organisations as Discursive Authorities

Many scholars take it as given that international governmental and non-governmental actors play a decisive role in international politics as regulative, moral or epistemic authorities. Hence, a denationalised “multi-centric world” (James Rosenau) is said to be emerging, although empirical evidence for this is incomplete at best. Building on a variety of communication theoretical approaches, I argue for a clear-cut differentiation between authority and the power of the better argument. Moreover, I claim that, by looking at the way actors select and refer to the statements of others (“authority talk”), we can research the reproduction of authority as a specific type of relational power exercised by a variety of political actors, including governments, international agencies and non-state actors. The usefulness of this kind of analytical framework for researching an emerging “world authority structure” (John Boli) is illustrated, using speeches and news pieces on the humanitarian crisis in Sudan/Darfur. Results suggest that the common perception of an existing “non-governmental order” in humanitarian politics is highly exaggerated. Instead, what we see is a high degree of “UN-isation” of debate and a pivotal role of national governments that are widely acknowledged as authoritative sources of meaning.

Humanitarian Affairs: David Forsythe's Contribution to the Study of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Humanitarian Politics

For decades, David Forsythe has been interested in humanitarian intermediaries in the context of international relations. Early in his career, he chose to focus on the little known (at that time) I...

From Street into the World: Towards a Politicised Reading of Celebrity Humanitarianism

Since John Street's article on celebrity politics in 2004, the integral role of celebrities in contemporary humanitarian politics has been increasingly acknowledged in the study of international relations. However, as argued in this article, this research has been limited to analysing appearances rather than examining the aesthetics of celebrity representations and their ‘thought worlds’ that contribute also to the structures, relations and processes of world politics. This article addresses this dearth of critical attention and proposes an approach to engage with celebrity humanitarian imaginaries politically by turning to critical humanitarianism and cultural and post-colonial studies. It concludes that by failing to acknowledge the historicity, conditions and effects of celebrity humanitarian intelligibilities and imaginaries in a globalised world, research in this area is in danger of missing the very location of politics. What is called for is future research that broadens the understanding of this activity in world politics without closing the question of the political.