Ethics, in their proper role, are not ends in themselves. They are expressions of deeper moral values – codified principles that guide our actions in alignment with what we believe to be right and good. But ethics can become unmoored from the values they are meant to serve, and when they do, they can lead not just to confusion but to complicity in harm.
In humanitarian action, this unmooring can manifest in what one aid worker during the Bosnia genocide termed as “total humanitarianism”: a perverse inversion where the ideals of providing aid replace the political and moral imperatives to address the root causes of suffering.
In Bosnia in the 1990s, the international community, faced with the horrors of ethnic cleansing and genocide, failed to intervene politically. Instead, it provided humanitarian aid as a substitute for decisive political action.
As Matthew Bywater has argued, this “humanitarian alibi” allowed Western governments to maintain the appearance of moral engagement by substituting the provision of aid for the harder and riskier work of confronting perpetrators of mass violence. Humanitarianism became a way to manage the consequences of conflict without addressing its causes or even protecting those whom the humanitarian action was meant to help.
He writes that “the mandate to protect humanitarian operations not civilians was repeated by UNPROFOR (the UN Protection Force deployed in Bosnia) commanders like a mantra. The protection extended only to the aid convoys, not to the civilian population, who were subject to large-scale violence, forced expulsion and mass killing even in the ‘safe areas’”.
Today, we see a similar dynamic in Gaza. Humanitarian agencies operating under siege conditions confront an impossible dilemma. Israel’s blockade has turned Gaza into a humanitarian catastrophe. Humanitarian organisations, driven by the imperative to alleviate suffering, desire to continue to deliver aid. Yet this aid operates within, and arguably legitimises, the very system of blockade and apartheid that created the crisis.
This is not merely a question of logistics; it is a profound moral quandary.
An extreme example of this is the Israeli aid scheme for Gaza, which is proposed as a solution to end immediate suffering. Humanitarian groups have refused to engage with it as it risks serving a more sinister agenda: facilitating ethnic cleansing by luring Palestinians from the north to the south of Gaza, concentrating them in a tiny area as a prelude to eventual displacement – the declared objective of the Israeli government. In doing so, the agencies acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: Aid cannot be given at any cost and under any circumstance.
Humanitarian principles prioritise alleviating suffering in the immediate term, often without regard to the long-term consequences or the systemic injustices that perpetuate crises.
They argue that their refusal is grounded in the fact that the scheme does not adhere to humanitarian principles, which prohibit a discriminatory approach to providing aid and reject its instrumentalisation for political ends.
However, even assuming all crossings were open and the agencies were allowed to deliver supplies as they were doing prior to the current siege, would that provision be moral or would it simply legitimise the nearly six decades of occupation by, for example, lowering its cost to the occupier obligated to provide it? Isn’t its moral justification deeply suspect, even when it adheres strictly to humanitarian principles?
The core problem is that humanitarian principles, as currently structured, lack a clear moral bottom line. They prioritise alleviating suffering in the immediate term, often without regard to the long-term consequences or the systemic injustices that perpetuate crises.
The result is a dangerous elasticity: Total humanitarianism justifies almost any compromise, as long as the immediate ledger of suffering appears to improve.
Where media go the same way
This is a trap journalists too can fall into. In the case of Bosnia, Bywater notes that the media focus on the partial success in providing humanitarian aid not only obscured the need to the conflict, it actually served to divert public attention from that imperative and prolonged the suffering.
Even as “the UN fed people and allowed them to be bombed”, as David Rieff, who covered the Balkan wars as a journalist, writes in his book, Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, Bywater notes that “sections of the British media... exaggerated the importance of the British military contingent in UNPROFOR, distracting from the failure to stop the war and reducing public demands for action to terminate the war”.
Many will recognise this same pattern in the coverage of Gaza.
Media organisations, especially those covering crises, have their own procedural ethics – objectivity, balance, neutrality – and news values that are meant to guide reporting. But these ethical codes, like those in humanitarianism, are meant to be expressions of deeper moral commitments: to truth, justice, and human dignity. When they become detached from these values, journalism too risks complicity in perpetuating injustice.
Journalists often rely on militaries and humanitarian organisations for access, information, and legitimacy, especially in high-risk environments where independent reporting is dangerous or impossible.
However, when they fail to interrogate narratives in order to preserve access, or slavishly adhere to ideas such as balance when giving equal weight to the testimony of survivors and the statements of perpetrators, they may validate problematic framings.
As Tanya Haj-Hasan of Médecins Sans Frontières told her BBC interviewer recently, “you don’t ask the perpetrator of genocide their opinion [on whether they are committing genocide]”.
The fundamental mistake in both humanitarianism and crisis journalism is the elevation of procedural ethics above the moral values they are meant to serve.
Furthermore, reporting that focuses on the mechanics of suffering – the destroyed hospital, the displaced family – while obscuring the human agents and systemic forces responsible for the crisis subverts the story, rendering it as one of needs met and lives saved, rather than of dispossession and injustice.
This feedback loop is deeply pernicious.
Humanitarians, driven by operational necessity and political pressure, narrow their focus to alleviating suffering, even if it means legitimising oppression. Journalists, driven by access needs and institutional pressures, mirror these narratives, amplifying a version of reality stripped of context, and the public receives a curated story of suffering that is real but incomplete, and that reinforces the very structures of injustice it purports to expose.
The fundamental mistake in both humanitarianism and crisis journalism is the elevation of procedural ethics above the moral values they are meant to serve. In humanitarian action, the procedural commitment to neutrality and impartiality can override the deeper moral imperatives of justice and truth. In journalism, the procedural commitment to balance and objectivity can suppress solidarity with the oppressed and obscure the systemic causes of suffering.
This is not an argument to abandon ethics. It is a call to reconnect ethical codes to their moral roots. Humanitarian actors must recognise that aid is not an end in itself, but a means to uphold human dignity and justice. Journalists must see that objectivity and balance are not virtues when they serve to normalise oppression or sanitise atrocity. Both fields must confront the question: What values anchor our decisions?
There will be moments when the only moral course is to walk away – to refuse to provide aid that facilitates ethnic cleansing, to refuse to report stories that merely echo compromised narratives. Without this moral compass, humanitarianism risks becoming an alibi for political inaction, and journalism risks becoming a megaphone for injustice.
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