Neo-humanitarianism: The role of international humanitarian norms and organizations in contemporary conflict

Global Governance

Volumn 11, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 161-183

  Mills, Kurt ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Armed conflict; Humanitarianism; International humanitarian organizations; NGOs; Norms

Indexed keywords

EID: 20144377000     PISSN: 10752846     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/19426720-01102004     Document Type: Review

References (72)

1. "Rumsfeld and Myers Briefing on Enduring Freedom," news transcript, U.S. Department of Defense (7 October 2001), available online at www. defenselink.mil/news/Oct2001/t1007sd.html.
2. 1 define IHOs as organizations, either nongovernmental or intergovernmental, involved in the delivery of emergency relief assistance, usually in the midst or aftermath of an armed conflict.
3. Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore, "The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations," International Organization 53 (autumn 1999): 699-732.
4. James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990);
5. Thomas G. Weiss and Leon Gordenker, eds., NGOs, the UN, and Global Governance (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996);
6. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998);
7. Ann Marie Clark, Diplomacy of Conscience: Amnesty International and Changing Human Rights Norms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001);
8. Paul Wapner, Environmental Activism and World Civic Politics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996);
9. Katarina West, Agents of Altruism: The Expansion of Humanitarian NGOs in Rwanda and Afghanistan (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2001);
10. William E. DeMars, NGOs and Transnational Networks: Wild Cards in World Politics (London: Pluto Press, forthcoming 2005).
11. Martha Finnemore, National Interests in International Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 5.
12. For example, she points out that European states were not particularly interested in how war wounded were treated until Dunant put it on their agenda (p. 12). Others have also argued recently that international norms, and particularly human rights norms, can play a significant role in defining state interest and state practice. See Thomas Risse, Stephen C. Ropp, and Kathryn Sikkink, eds., The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
13. Judith Goldstein and Robert O. Keohane, eds., Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993);
14. Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, "International Norms Dynamics and Political Change," International Organization 52 (autumn 1998): 887-917;
15. Audie Klotz, Norms in International Relations: The Struggle Against Apartheid (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995);
16. Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
17. Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, pp. 12-13.
18. For purposes of this article, humanitarianism refers to both a set of activities and a set of norms. The activities involve providing food, medical, and other assistance amid conflict. The norms, as identified particularly in the Geneva Conventions and associated documents, refer to conduct during war and are paradoxically referred to as both international humanitarian law and the laws of war. In the former incarnation, they involve various rights to provide and receive assistance and also convey the ideas of neutrality, impartiality, and independence. In the latter formulation, they put limits on the conduct of parties to a conflict, describing, for example, how prisoners of war are to be treated and proscribing various activities such as torture (thus illustrating the overlap between humanitarian and human rights norms).
19. See Michael Ignatieff, The Warriors Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), especially pp. 109-118.
20. Also known as the "fig leaf theory." Hugo Slim, "International Humanitarianism's Engagement with Civil War in the 1990s," Journal of Humanitarian Assistance (June 2002), available online at www.jha.ac/articles/a033.htm.
21. See also Thomas G. Weiss, "The Politics of Humanitarian Ideas," Security Dialogue 31 (March 2000): 14;
22. Adam Roberts, "The Role of Humanitarian Issues in International Politics in the 1990s," International Review of the Red Cross, no. 833 (March 1999);
23. Mark Duffield, "NGO Relief in War Zones: Towards an Analysis of the New Aid Paradigm," Third World Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1997): 529, 541.
24. Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars (New York: Zed Books, 2001), p. 79.
25. Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars, Ibid., pp. 79-80.
26. In fact, more humanitarian aid workers were killed in attacks in 2003 than in any other year. Dennis King, "The Year of Living Dangerously: Attacks on Humanitarian Aid Workers in 2003" (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, 2004).
27. Larry Minear, "Humanitarian Action in an Age of Terrorism," UNHCR New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper No. 63, August 2002, available online at www.unhcr.ch.
28. David Chandler, "The Road to Military Humanitarianism: How the Human Rights NGOs Shaped a New Humanitarian Agenda," Human Rights Quarterly 23 (August 2001): 678-700;
29. Matthew S. Parry, "Phyrric Victories and the Collapse of Humanitarian Principles," Journal of Humanitarian Assistance (October 2002), available online at www.jha.ac/articles/a094.htm.
30. For a critique of the U.S. (and UN) efforts in Afghanistan, see Nicholas J. Stockton, "The Failure of Humanitarian Action in Afghanistan," Global Governance 8, no. 3 (2002): 270.
31. Certainly the rhetoric from the United States putting the post-September 11 situation in stark "you are either with us or against us" terms may leave little room for maneuver on the part of IHOs.
32. For an overview of the humanitarian system, see West, Agents of Altruism, especially pp. 13-37.
33. On the evolution of humanitarianism and rights-based humanitarianism, see Slim, "International Humanitarianism's Engagement with Civil War in the 1990s";
34. Chandler, "The Road to Military Humanitarianism."
35. See Kurt Mills, "Refugee Return from Zaire to Rwanda: The Role of UNHCR," in Howard Adelman and Govind Rao, eds., War and Peace in Zaire/Congo: Analyzing and Evaluating Intervention, 1996-97 (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press/Red Sea Press, 2004).
36. Raimo Väyrynen, "Funding Dilemmas in Refugee Assistance: Political Interests and Institutional Reforms in UNHCR," International Migration Review 35 (spring 2001): 143-167.
37. Raimo Väyrynen, "Funding Dilemmas in Refugee Assistance: Political Interests and Institutional Reforms in UNHCR," International Migration Review Ibid., p. 150.
38. The question remains as to what effect widely distributed pictures of brutality on the part of U.S. soldiers in Iraq will have.
39. However, the so-called CNN effect is by no means equal in its ultimate outcomes. Robert I. Rotberg and Thomas G. Weiss, eds., From Massacres to Genocide: The Media, Public Policy, and Humanitarian Crises (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1996);
40. West, Agents of Altruism, pp. 50-53;
41. Gorm Rye Olsen, Nils Carstensen, and Kristian Høyen, "Humanitarian Crises: Testing the 'CNN Effect,'" Forced Migration Review 16 (January 2003): 3941, available online at www.fmreview.org/FMRpdfs/ FMR16/fmr16.13.pdf.
42. One senior UNHCR official has observed that "humanitarians have become the special paratroopers of this world."
43. For an overview of these developments, see UNHCR, The State of the World's Refugees: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000);
44. Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics;
45. "UNHCR at 50: Past, Present and Future of Refugee Assistance," special issue of International Migration Review 35 (spring 2001).
46. UNHCR, Refugees by Numbers, 2003 edition, available online at www. unhcr.ch.
47. Barnett and Finnemore, "The Politics, Power, and Pathologies of International Organizations," p. 71.
48. Kurt Mills and Richard J. Norton, "Refugees and Security in the Great Lakes Region of Africa," Civil Wars 5 (spring 2002): 1-26.
49. Kurt Mills, Human Rights in the Emerging Global Order: A New Sovereignty? (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 149-150.
50. Nicholas O. Berry, War and the Red Cross: The Unspoken Mission (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997).
51. David Reiff, A Bed for the Night (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), pp. 178-179.
52. Clark, Diplomacy of Conscience;
53. Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders;
54. Peter Haas, "Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination," International Organization 46, no.1 (1992): 1-35;
55. Richard Price, "Reversing the Gun Sights: Transnational Civil Society Targets Land Mines," International Organization 52 (summer 1998): 613-644.
56. In fact, most do, although advocacy activities will often undermine this.
57. James Orbinski, Nobel lecture given by the Nobel Peace Prize laureate 1999, Médecins Sans Frontières (Oslo, 10 December 1999), available online at www.nobel.no/eng_lect_99m.html.
58. Melissa Labonte, "Norm Entrepreneurship, Management, and Humanitarian Politics: The False Paradox of Balancing Between Neutrality and Advocacy," paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Portland, Oregon, February 2003.
59. Howard Adelman and Laurence J. Baxter, "The Multi-National Force for Eastern Zaire: The Conception Planning and Termination of Op Assurance," in Adelman and Rao, War and Peace in Zaire/Congo, p. 256.
60. Howard Adelman and Laurence J. Baxter, "The Multi-National Force for Eastern Zaire: The Conception Planning and Termination of Op Assurance," War and Peace in Zaire/Congo, Ibid., pp. 270-272.
61. Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 203-204, 230-231.
62. Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action Ibid., pp. 177, 186-190.
63. Irving Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), p. 174.
64. Slim, "International Humanitarianism's Engagement with Civil War in the 1990s."
65. Condoleezza Rice, "Promoting the National Interest," Foreign Affairs 79, no. 1 (2000): 48.
66. Such use of accusations of violations of humanitarian norms as a tool of propaganda is not new. Indeed, during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, the first war in which both states were parties to the new Geneva Conventions of 1864, both sides used accusations of violations or claims of compliance for propaganda purposes. Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, p. 83.
67. Thomas Risse and Kathryn Sikkink, "The Socialization of International Human Rights Norms into Domestic Practices: Introduction," in Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink, The Power of Human Rights.
68. Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, pp. 23-24.
69. Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, Ibid., p. 23.
70. Neil A. Lewis and Eric Schmitt, "Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush," New York Times, 8 June 2004.
71. Finnemore, National Interests in International Society, p. 30.
72. Ken Adelman, "Commentary: U.N. Inspections," All Things Considered, 13 February 2003, available online at www.npr.org/programs/atc/ transcripts/2003/feb/030213.adelman.html.