The trouble with humanitarianism

Review of International Studies

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 451-474

  Belloni, Roberto ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34547345269     PISSN: 02602105     EISSN: 14699044     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0260210507007607     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. Many different definitions of humanitarianism exist, most of which tend to stress the impartial, independent and neutral provision of relief to endangered individuals and groups. By contrast, my definition is broader. It includes both the norms and values of humanitarians and their actions - including coercive interventions aimed at stopping or preventing human rights violations. As such, it closely connected to the growing influence of human rights in international politics. See Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
2. See, for example, David Forsythe, The Humanitarians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
3. Dorothy V. Jones, Toward a Just World: The Critical Years in the Search for International Justice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
4. Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 65.
5. Michael Barnett, 'Humanitarianism Transformed', Perspectives on Politics, 4 (2005), pp. 723-40;
6. Kurt Mills, 'Neo-Humanitarianism: The Role of International Humanitarian Norms and Organizations in Contemporary Conflict', Global Governance, 11 (2005), pp. 161-83.
7. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Center, 2001);
8. Bernard Kouchner, Les Guerriers de la Paix: Du Kosovo à l'Irak (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2004).
9. Thomas Risse, Steven C. Ropp and Kathryn Sikkink (eds.), The Power of Human Rights: International Norms and Domestic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
10. Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
11. Fiona Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002);
12. Mary Anderson, Do No Harm: How can Aid Support Peace - or War (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999).
13. David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004);
14. David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
15. Noam Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (London: Pluto, 1999);
16. David Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International Intervention (London: Pluto, 2002).
17. I draw this distinction from Norberto Bobbio's work on political ideologies: see his Ideological Profile of Twentieth-Century Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).
18. Chandler, From Kosovo to Kabul, p. 36.
19. The expression 'fairy story' comes from Jonathan Benthall, Disasters, Relief and the Media (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993).
20. Larry Minear et al., The News Media, Civil War, and Humanitarian Action (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienuer, 1996), p. 37.
21. Sven Lindquist has traced the evolution of this slippery mindset from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the twentieth century holocaust. See his 'Exterminate Al! the Brutes' (London: Granta, 1996).
22. Michael Ignatieff, 'The Stories We Tell: Television and Humanitarian Aid', in Jonathan Moore (ed.), Hard Choices: Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), p. 294. 'Tranopole' is likely to be 'Trnopolje', the site of one infamous Serb-run detention camp.
23. I have heard this story many times on my several visits to Bosnia, but I have been unable to locate the original source, or the name of the journalist. Perhaps the fact that many Bosnians know and believe this story is true is in itself a sign of a broader disillusionment with the quality of media coverage.
24. Stanley Cohen defines this attitude as a 'cultural form of Attention Deficit Disorder' in his States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (London: Polity, 2001), p. 177.
25. Susan D. Moeller, Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine, War and Death (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 18.
26. Alex de Waal, Famine that Kills: Darfur, Sudan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
27. I. William Zartman, Cowardly Lions: Missed Opportunities to Prevent Deadly Conflict and State Collapse (Boulder, CO & London: Lynne Rienner, 2005).
28. Report by the Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions on His Mission to Rwanda, 8-17 April 1993, UN Document E/CN.4/1994/7/Add.1, 11 August 1993.
29. Romeo Dallaire, Shaking Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (London: Arrow, 2003), p. 548. The number of personnel requested by Dallaire was a third of the missions currently deployed to the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia; see: (www.un.org/depts/dpko) (accessed on 4 May 2005).
30. Scott R. Feil, Preventing Genocide: How the Early Use of Force Might Have Succeeded in Rwanda (New York: Carnegie Commission on Deadly Conflict, 1998).
31. This is the argument of Alan Kuperman, The Limits of Humanitarian Intervention: Genocide in Rwanda (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2001).
32. David Binder, 'Yugoslavia Seen Breaking up Soon', The New York Times, 28 November 1990.
33. Samantha Power, 'A Problem from Hell': America in the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 283.
34. Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 229.
35. At least Karadzić conceded this much in the 1997 BBC documentary The Death of Yugoslavia.
36. This is the main thesis of Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, 'A Problem from Hell.
37. Kennedy, Dark Sides of Virtue, p. 338.
38. On social movements see, for example, Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
39. and Doug McAdam, 'Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency', American Sociological Review, 48 (1983), pp. 735-54.
40. Alan J. Kuperman, 'Transnational Causes of Genocide, or How the West Exacerbates Ethnic Conflict', in Raju G. C. Thomas (ed.), Yugoslavia Unraveled: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, Intervention (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 55-85.
41. Susan L. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy: Chaos and Dissolution After the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1995), pp. 320-1.
42. Cited in Ivo H. Daalder, Getting to Dayton: The Making of America's Bosnia Policy (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2000), p. 10.
43. Tim Judah, Kosovo: War and Revenge, 2nd edn. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), pp. 124-5.
44. One of NATO's key reasons for intervening was evidence of a Serbian 'final solution' to the Kosovo problem: a plan called Operation Horseshoe', in which Albanian Kosovars would be surrounded on three sides and driven through the gap into Albania. The German foreign minister disclosed the existence of the plan at the beginning of the NATO bombing, but he did not share the details of the plan with NATO's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, whose job it was to counter it. For this reason, many even doubted 'Operation Horseshoe' ever existed; see Roberto Belloni, 'Kosovo and Beyond: Is Humanitarian Intervention Transforming International Society?' Human Rights & Human Welfare, 2 (2002), pp. 35-43.
45. Adam Roberts, 'Nato's "Humanitarian War Over Kosovo" ', Survival, 3 (1999), pp. 102-23.
46. Roberto Belloni, 'The Tragedy of Darfur and the Limits of the "Responsibility to Protect" ', Ethnopolitics, 4 (2006), pp. 327-46.
47. He further added that 'no action is dictated by this determination', disappointing human rights groups who demanded more assertive intervention. See Testimony before the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate, "The Crisis in Darfur', available at: 〈www.state.gov/secretary/rm/36032. htm〉.
48. Quoted in Scott Anderson, 'How Did Darfur Happen?' The New York Times Magazine, 17 October 2004.
49. Saadia Touval, Mediation in the Yugoslav Wars: The Critical Years, 1990-1995 (London: Palgrave, 2002), p. 182.
50. Sadako Ogata, The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the Refugee Crises of the 1990s (New York: Norton, 2005), p. 169.
51. Woodward, Balkan Tragedy, p. 321.
52. Cited in Anderson, How Did Darfur Happen?.
53. Hugo Slim, 'International Humanitarianism's Engagement with Civil War in the 1990s', Journal of Humanitarian Assistance (June 2002), at: 〈www.jha.ac/articles/a033.htm〉;
54. also, more generally, Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars (London: Zed Books, 2001).
55. Ogata, The Turbulent Decade, p. 90.
56. B. S. Chimni, 'Post-Conflict Peace-Building and the Return of Refugees: Concepts, Practices, and Institutions', in Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm (eds.), Refugees and Forced Displacement: International Security, Human Vulnerability, and the State (Tokyo: United Nations University Press, 2003), pp. 195-220.
57. Ogata, Turbulent Decade, p. 317.
58. This number includes Palestinians expelled and their descendants. See UNRWA in Figures', at: 〈http://www.un.org/unrwa/publications〈.
59. Morton Abramowitz and Samantha Power, 'A Broken System', Washington Post, 13 September 2004.
60. World Bank, World Development Report. 2003: Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2003), p. 3.
61. Peter Uvin, Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda (West Hartford, CT: Kumarian, 1998).
62. Jeffrey Sachs, 'The Development Challenge', Foreign Affairs, 2 (2005), p. 87.
63. Larry Minear, The Humanitarian Enterprise (Bloomington, CT: Kumarian, 2002), p. 52.
64. Ibid, p. 144.
65. Gorm Rye Olsen, Nils Carstensen, Kristian Hoyen, 'Humanitarian Crises: What Determines the Level of Emergency Assistance? Media Coverage, Donor Interests and Aid Business', Disasters, 2 (2003), p. 117.
66. Romilly Greenhill and Patrick Watt, Real Aid: An Agenda for Making Aid Work (Johannesburg: ActionAid International, May 2005), p. 4.
67. For an update see Larry Elliott and Kate Connolly, 'In 2005, G8 Pledged $50 bn for Africa: Now the Reality', The Guardian, 25 April 2007.
68. Daphne Eviatar, 'Spend $150 bn per year to Cure World Poverty', The New York Times Magazines, 7 November 2004.
69. Alexander Cooley and James Ron, 'Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action', International Security, 27 (2002), pp. 5-39.
70. Colin Powell, Remarks to the National Foreign Policy Conference for Leaders of Nongovernmental Organizations, US Department of State, 26 October 2001; at: 〈www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2001/5762pf.htm〉.
71. For an assessment, see Sarah Kenyon Lischer, 'Military Intervention and the Humanitarian "Force Multiplier" ', Global Governance, 13 (2007), pp. 99-118.
72. Sarah Kenyon Lischer, 'Collateral Damage: Humanitarian Assistance as a Cause of Conflict', International Security, 1 (2003), p. 106. A similar mechanism has arisen in the controversial and still critically unstable situation in Iraq following the 2003 war;
73. see Rony Brauman and Pierre Salignon, 'Iraq: in Search of a Humanitarian Crisis', in Fabrice Weissman, In the Shadow of 'Just Wars: Violence, Politics and Humanitarian Action' (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, in association with Médecins Sans Frontières, 2004), p. 271.
74. Tony Waters, Bureaucratizing the Good Samaritan: The Limitations to Humanitarian Relief Operations (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001).
75. Antonia Chayes, Adam Chayes, George Raach, 'Beyond Reform: Restructuring for More Effective Conflict Intervention', Global Governance, 2 (1997), pp. 117-45.
76. Minear, Humanitarian Enterprise, p. 154.
77. Ivan Illich, De-Schooling Society (London: Penguin, 1971).
78. Terry, Condemn to Repeat? p. 46.
79. See Mohamed Sahnoun, 'Mixed Intervention in Somalia and the Great Lakes: Culture, Neutrality and the Military', in Jonathan Moore (ed.), Hard Choices.
80. Julie Mertus, 'Improving International Peacebuilding Efforts: The Example of Human Rights Culture in Kosovo', Global Governance, 10 (2004), p. 340.
81. Roberto Belloni, 'Civil Society and Peacebuilding in Bosnia-Herzegovina', Journal of Peace Research, 38:2 (2001), pp. 163-80.
82. Iain King and Whit Mason, Peace at Any Price: How the World Failed Kosovo (London: Hurst & Co., 2006).
83. William G. O' Neill, Kosovo: An Unfinished Peace (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002), pp. 46-8.
84. Mertus, 'Improving International Peacebuilding', p. 333.
85. K. R. Roane, 'Muslim Visitors Called Mortal Dangers by Serbs', New York Times, 28 May 1996.
86. International Crisis Group, The Konjic. Conundrum: Why Minorities Have Failed to Return to Model Open City (Sarajevo: ICG, 19 June 1998).
87. Zartman, Cowardly Lions.
88. Statistics taken from UNDP, Human Development Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).