Humanitarianism presents itself as an altruistic enterprise. The growth of humanitarian agencies last fifty years, both intragovernmental and nongovernmental, has advanced an agenda for improving world to protect human rights and human dignity aftermath of conflict or disaster.1 As international agencies penetrate, override, or work concert with nation-states, they increasingly seek not only to preserve human life by providing food, medical care, and short-term shelter but to help victims reestablish themselves socially and economically with everything from psychosocial assistance and peace-building seminars to microcredit and business development courses. Humanitarianism thus presents itself as an apolitical regime of care, one concerned with not only keeping people from dying but making them live.Recently, humanitarianism has been portrayed as not altruistic but nefarious. Critics such as Barnett and Calhoun argue that aid is not a charitable gift but continuation of politics by other means.2 Fassin and Pandolfi, for example, argue that pretext of protecting individual human rights allows first-world states to override principle of national sovereignty which undergirded international system from World War II until end of Cold War and to involve themselves politics of third-world states.3 Here is humanitarianism as what Agier calls the left hand of empire, use of NGOs and intragovernmental agencies as what Colin Powell famously called force multipliers for neo-imperialist military action.4 Even as humanitarians seek to preserve victims' lives, humanitarian aid supposedly reduces socalled beneficiaries to bare stripping them of their individuality, their social statuses, and their capacities for political action.5 Humanitarianism is thus presented as a regime of violence as well as care, seeking not just to keep people from dying but to make them live particular ways as dominated political subjects.6Michel Agier presents this argument its strongest form when he calls humanitarianism totalitarianism.7 Alleging that humanitarianism is in secret solidarity with police order, Agier calls it a powerful and enduring apparatus that embodies Western world's desire to Third World.8 He writes, this moment of lurching toward limit of power over life, humanitarian world becomes a totalitarianism, which has power of life (to make live or survive) and power of death (to let die) over individual it considers absolute victim.9 It seems ironic that humanitarianism, as a paradigm of post-Cold War politics, should be couched same terms as critique of Communism, one of central paradigms of Cold War. (Indeed, it is not just phraseology of totalitarianism that underlies critique of both Cold War and post-Cold War politics; two depend on same text, Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism.)10 Yet if there is one thing that anthropology of Cold War Eastern Europe has shown clearly, it is that Communist regimes were far less total than their Western critics ever realized. In taking Communist officials at their word about their practices of rule, rather than paying attention to problems of everyday life caused by how officials really did exercise power, Western analysts grossly overestimated Soviet regimes' ability to control all of social life and thereby completely missed forces that undermined supposedly totalitarian state socialist power. Whatever impulses of Communist system were, totalitarianism was not total. It was interrelationship between attempts at repression and domination and way that people responded to lapses of power everyday life that formed dynamics of system and, eventually, undermined it.11In this essay, I would like to suggest that like Cold War- era Communist regimes, new regimes based on humanitarianism are much more limited their reach than their ambitions might suggest. …
Read full abstract
May 1, 2012
Kasey F Robb + 1
Open Access