Rethinking Humanitarianism | In conversation with new CEO Tammam Aloudat

Melissa Fundira

 

Hello, Rethinking Humanitarianism listeners. What you're about to hear is a special episode of the podcast, featuring The New Humanitarian's new CEO, Tammam Aloudat, and hosted by our own Annie Slemrod. It's a wide-ranging and intimate conversation that covers everything from Tammam's childhood in Damascus, and his decades-long career as a humanitarian worker, to his expansive views on decolonising aid, and his vision for The New Humanitarian. Enjoy!

Annie Slemrod

Hello, and welcome to this special podcast from The New Humanitarian, I’m Annie Slemrod. The New Humanitarian was founded in 1995, in the wake of the Rwandan genocide. Then part of the UN’s Office of the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs – better known as OCHA – its founders believed that information sharing – back then done by fax and later email - could mitigate or even prevent future catastrophes.

As we gear up to mark our thirtieth anniversary next year – now as an independent nonprofit newsroom devoted to reporting on humanitarian crises and the aid sector – what’s happening in places like Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen - to name just a few - shows there is so much more work to be done.

Going forward, we will be doing that work with a new CEO: 

Tammam Aloudat

I am Tammam Aloudat, pronounced a little bit more harshly in Arabic: Aloudat. I am a Syrian and Swiss physician, and I've worked in humanitarian aid for the past 20-something years, and currently, as of a few weeks ago, the CEO of The New Humanitarian.

Slemrod

Tammam joins us from Médecins Sans Frontières Netherlands, after a long career in the aid sector. I’ve known him in my capacity as TNH’s Middle East Editor for quite a few years, but as a colleague for just a few weeks. So, as I had him in the hot seat, I took the chance to find out about his personal journey through the humanitarian system to the head of TNH. I started by asking about his childhood in Damascus.

Aloudat

As a younger kid, I come from Generation X where we didn't have seat belts or mobile phones, so I used to take my bicycle and disappear most of the weekend. And then I became a slightly older teenager, and you know, interests varied afterwards.

Slemrod 

Does that mean I shouldn't ask what your interests varied into?

Aloudat

I mean, people hear about Syria now, but there was a time in the 80s and 90s where it was a much more liberal country, and despite some social conservatism, with some consistency and potential charm, one could have a date every now and then, which included walking at a decent distance from each other in a street, and then go and tell friends proudly about it.

Slemrod

And if you're Gen X, you couldn't even text right afterwards. I...

Aloudat 

That wasn't something I could do until, I think, 2001 when I got my first mobile phone. On the other hand, we didn't really have access to much Western media at the time. Before satellite phones…satellite television was allowed, we had mostly access to the English channel of the Syrian TV, and they had probably two dozen English songs that they kept circulating. One of them sticks in the mind, which is Hello by Lionel Richie, with a cheesy video.

Slemrod 

Yeah! What an interesting choice.

Aloudat

I mean, I think they got whatever they got their hands on. Mind you, in the 80s, Syria was under economic embargo so, a lot of difficulty in getting stuff from the outside, apparently, including music, unless we had a major Lionel Richie fan in the Syrian TV.

Slemrod

Now that is what we need to be investigating. I think it's important to talk about regular stuff, because people forget that places that are at war now weren't always at war. And even when they are at war, people have normal lives and extraordinary lives and boring lives and just all sorts of lives. And I think it's really important like, you know, obviously, Syria has had a series of wars, and right now it's very different, but… So you went to university eventually, yes?

Aloudat

Yes. So, I went to medical school in Damascus University. And it wasn't necessarily a choice I would have made. I wanted to play with computers. So, I would have done engineering of some sort, but computers weren't common, and we didn't have computer engineering in university, and I got the grades for medical school. And, under the circumstances of Syria, medicine and dentistry and a couple of kinds of engineering are the only ways you could work for yourself, rather than for the government. So, that's an additional layer of desirability. So, yeah, I studied medicine for six years, and graduated in 2000.

Slemrod

And what was your specialty? 

Aloudat 

I was specialising in orthopaedic surgery, which was my way of finding the least boring bit of medicine. It turns out though that, if one wants to make a living, most of orthopaedic surgery would be very routine operations, like knee injuries and hip injuries and so on. 

Slemrod

What was it about orthopaedic surgery that you thought was most interesting? Because when I think about it, I think of knee replacements also.

Aloudat 

So, I liked surgery. I wanted to be a surgeon. During my medical school, I went to Beirut for a few months one summer, and did an apprenticeship under a cardiac surgeon. And, me being like 20 and impressionable, you know, a heart surgeon is the epitome of medicine. However, heart surgery is also mostly bypass surgeries. That is about 100 distinct steps that have to be done in a very particular order. What I've realised after three months of observing that on a daily basis was that repetition, and absolute perfectionism in repetition, wasn't my strong suit. So, I thought of what's the exact opposite of that? Accidents and emergencies, whereby you don't get the same thing and you have to deal with surprises and unexpected situations. But it wasn't going to be the case because you only do accidents and emergencies if you're a junior doctor. Once you become more established, you go and do knee replacements in a private hospital, probably working 18-hour days, most of them in a basement, making pretty good money that teenage, spoiled kids would enjoy rather than me. That wasn't very appealing. 

Slemrod 

So, you joined the Syrian Arab Red Crescent as what? What was your job?

Aloudat 

I joined it because of my cousin. She's a year older than me, and she was a volunteer there. I wasn't really convinced, until she said: Come on, just one time, come and attend the weekly meeting. And I went there, and I got hooked instantaneously. And I think what attracted me most at the time was a group of self-governing youth who were doing things they thought are useful to their community. I mean Syria, as you know, has always been – in my lifetime, at least – a military dictatorship where freedom of assembly was non-existent, and that was one of the very few places that aren't completely organised by the government, where you could meet other people from different backgrounds and actually work and communicate together. That, in itself, was extremely new and valuable. And I stayed there for as long as I stayed in Syria, and led me to interaction with the international staff that came to visit Syria.

Slemrod 

Okay. So, you started meeting people and became interested in aid work. Is that how it happened? 

Aloudat 

I wish it was that mature, but I was given an occasional task of accompanying visitors because I spoke reasonable English.

Slemrod 

Okay.

Aloudat 

So, I’d show them around, take them to meetings, and so on. There was an image of the aid worker. A British Head of Office that came and visited. His name was Alistair. He was this quintessential image of a cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones, and had the fancy British accent of a public school guy, and was fascinating. I thought, this is something I'd like to be. 

Slemrod

So, your view was, what? White guy, blond, with a flak jacket, and, I don't know, a tan.

Aloudat 

I don't know whether I was conscientious of ‘White’ as something at the time, or what does it mean, or its implications. But it was probably the confidence. The, you know, centeredness of someone who's used to being in unfamiliar places. The ability to take things easily. And it helps if you have a distinct English Queen’s accent and feel you're entitled to everything you have. It also came in the nearly standard unironed shirts, and chino pants, and boots of humanitarian workers. The casualness by which they dealt with things, but also the seriousness of the responsibility on them. It makes me laugh. I hadn't seen many foreigners before, so that was one of the first images. Another one is, actually, of the Land Cruiser. The same famous J90 Toyota Land Cruiser that was – I suppose, still is – symbolic of the humanitarian work. Both images of the humanitarian worker and the Land Cruiser are extremely problematic, and should be critiqued and understood now - better, at least - but you can imagine the impression that would leave on a 20-years-old version of me.

Slemrod

Well, did the 20-year-old version of you identify like an outsider, or did you think: this is what I want to be?

Aloudat 

So, that was in the early 2000s, before 9/11 and the Iraq War; and the feverish backlash against Arabs and Muslims hadn't materialised yet. Obviously, it was there in many forms, but I haven't experienced it in any way, and having a very limited understanding of that, of the sort of hierarchy of being that everybody falls into at some place or the other, I thought, if I am a humanitarian worker, I'll gain that confidence and ability to be all those things, barring my lack of understanding of the place of race and origin in the whole story. Yeah, it affected the way I conceived and understood this system I worked in for quite a few years afterwards, even as a humanitarian worker.

Slemrod

Okay, so tell me what was your first ‘job’ job?

Aloudat 

I was seconded as a volunteer to the IFRC, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ regional office in Amman to help translate and design a training for medical workers for disaster response, and then shortly after that, to work on preparing the refugee camps that were anticipated to host Iraqis fleeing the war, when the war became all but certain in early 2002. And then I had a strike of luck – if one could see it like that – when the war was being launched. The British Red Cross couldn't send British citizens because the Red Cross, at the time, said citizens of countries involved directly in the invasion shouldn't go for security reasons. So, my job was to support the health services that are done by the Iraqi Red Crescent in the country. That included assessment of the post-invasion health situation, and support to multiple facilities and programs in Iraq.

Slemrod 

And, so now we're talking about, you're immediately a foreigner. You're in a new country. Do you feel like James Bond slash Indiana Jones? 

Aloudat

I mean, for me, in retrospect, Iraq was a liminal space. I was sort of foreigner, but not foreigner enough. At the same time, Syrian fighters were fighting in Iraq against the US Army, which made it fairly complicated at times for me, because it was difficult to distinguish a Syrian as a humanitarian worker and one as a potential enemy fighter. So, Iraq was a very schizophrenic experience. The first weeks we spent in one of the hotels in Baghdad, which had the only functioning swimming pool. So, a lot of people came to that hotel to swim, including military contractors and humanitarian workers, while effectively war was still outside their door.

Slemrod

Yeah, and now you're living in a post-9/11 world. Massive anti-Muslim sentiment [and] bias was spreading like so obviously. Did this impact you right away, or did it take time? I mean, as you said: you were sort of an outsider, but also an Arab in Iraq. Complicated.

Aloudat 

I have to say, I had several privileges that shielded me to an extent. Actually, speaking English reasonably well is an incredibly useful protective layer, because people expect you to not be able to. But also, being employed by an international organisation and being adaptable. I mean, every time I traveled, I traveled with a whole bunch of documents, proofs of everything. For years and years, I had my social media without security, because if I was arrested, I wanted people to be able to access my social media and see what I do, how I live, and so on. But there were always the random checks in airports that were never random, and the searches and the interrogations, but also the rituals you create through your understanding of that risk. So, for example, I used to text my wife every time I'm on a flight, after they close the door, and when the flight is taxiing. So, this way she knows that I was on it when it took off, and text again when we land, before they open the doors. So, if I disappear – which wasn't unheard of after the invasion of Afghanistan – she'd at least know at which part of the trip did I get stopped. So, it was real. The fact that things like that can happen, was real.

Slemrod 

So, you have a really long career. I don't know if we can go into great detail: like Yemen, Niger, Iraq. What are the big ones I'm missing? I mean, I'm cherry-picking from many of your bios. 

Aloudat

Iraq taught me that I really wanted to do this for longer.

Slemrod

Okay.

Aloudat

So, the next step was a Master's of Public Health in London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which was incredibly new to me; this whole exposure to the whole academic environment, the ability to discuss things, to write essays – that was a torture at the time. That wasn't part of our curriculum in Syria, I had to learn it from scratch. But, I went afterwards to Indonesia, after that tsunami, and I spent a period of time in Aceh, also with the IFRC. And that was another completely different experience: the Aceh culture and settings, but also the humanitarian setting in one of its massive manifestations, what is called – sarcastically but also lovingly, sometimes – the humanitarian circus. Where everybody comes, they land in and they see what they can do, because there's money in it. After that, I was given a position as an emergency health coordinator in the IFRC headquarters in Geneva. And this was when I came to Geneva to work here for the first time in 2006. But, some of the more memorable experiences were less high-profile emergencies. For example, in 2006, I worked in the north of Mozambique, where there were floods on the Zambezi River that were hardly covered. And that was my discovery of neglected emergencies. Another one was in 2009, where a major cholera outbreak happened in Zimbabwe. Those were some of the more educational experiences for me. Others include Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, which is another humanitarian circus. But, one thing I wouldn't have figured at the time also, was the absolute link of Haiti's aftermath of the earthquake, the devastation that happened, with the historical neglect that has happened over 200 years of Haiti, that led to a place where that vulnerability was such a devastation.

Slemrod

Well, it sounds like you were becoming the perfect fit – this is going to sound like I'm trying to get a promotion – to become the CEO. When you talk about, like, neglected crises, it's sort of part and parcel of what we do. I think, [we] sometimes call them forgotten crises. I hate that, because I think people who live in them haven't forgotten them, but they are neglected. So, you were getting on the timeline of life to 2011, and you are from Syria, when protests, a revolution, eventually, war started. Where were you when it all began?

Aloudat

I was in Geneva. I had quite a few big changes in 2011. One of them is the start of the Syrian Revolution, you know, the Arab Spring. I don't know if it's possible for people who don't come from the region to understand how much of a boost that was to everybody's morale, like almost an unreal transformation. Those are dictators who sat there forever and suddenly they started crumbling. And I remember very distinctly, we used to go out after work to a café de commerce, called ‘Meeting Room Six’ or something like that in the IFRC, because people went there after work all the time. And the day Mubarak fell, there was an Irish colleague who yelled across the room: When is it Assad's turn? And I said: It's not going to be, and if it is, I'll buy a round for everybody. Because I did have a more realistic conception of how much more brutal the Syrian regime is to everybody else. I mean, Mubarak had at least a pretence of other candidates in elections. I've lived most of my life under the influence of this Syrian dictatorship, and I know the everyday cruelty of a totalitarian regime like that. So, I had no illusions. But yet, when it started, I was so full of hope that things would change, and that carried me through 2011 to 2015, when the Russians decided to crush the, whatever it is, the conflict, the opposition at the time, and they did burn the country. The other big change was, the IFRC, after five years of working in the headquarters, gave me a permanent contract, which is such a valued thing, and my reaction was freaking out and quitting. You know, it's a very attractive life convenience to have a permanent contract, especially when you’re on a Syrian passport, and I was about what? Thirty-four. And I didn't want to stay in a position where my biggest motivation was keeping my contract. Too early for the convenience of a good job for retirement, so I quit, without really knowing what would I do exactly afterwards.

Slemrod

Were you still able to go back and forth to Syria at the time?

Aloudat

No. The last time I went to Damascus was, actually, November 2010. I had a meeting in Amman, and I had an extra day before my flight. So, I decided to go see my parents. I didn't go afterwards, because you never know with the Syrian Government if you're on some list or the other and you'll be arrested on arrival or not. So, it's been 15 years now since I've been home, and that November was actually the last time I've seen my father, who passed away in 2022. Yeah, that was the last visit home. 

Slemrod

I’m so sorry, Tammam. So, your parents decided to stay in Damascus?

Aloudat 

Yes. Not that there were many opportunities to leave. My father was a government employee. He was a researcher, and leaving as a government employee wasn't feasible. So, was quite adamant that he's not going to spend the end of his life as a refugee.

Slemrod 

Do you think that being from a place that – in humanitarian terms – has been in crisis for more than 13 years, do you think that changes how you look at the system, and look at how reporting on these crises is done?

Aloudat 

Absolutely yes, and I can measure that change in myself. I've worked as a humanitarian eight years before the Syrian war started. And this is interesting, because I would have been able to detach much better before, you know, my world became part of the world I work in. Before home became a humanitarian context. Of course, it changes everything. 

Slemrod 

So, you mentioned working, by this time with MSF. Working on the Syrian response, you have this particular experience of coming in across the border as sort of a foreigner, but also you are from Syria. What was that like for you?

Aloudat 

It was very unusual. It's not common that you come as an expatriate to your own country. And at the time I was the head of the medical department of MSF in Amsterdam, and I went to cover a position which is called ‘medical coordinator’ in Syria for a while. It also was one of the times where I started recognising the disparities of treatment in humanitarian systems. And here - I want to be clear - I mean, we're talking about issues that aren't individual. It's not decisions of people. It is part of the coding of the system altogether. So, when I arrived to our base in Turkey, I was put in the expat house, which is not really accessible for national staff. And that wasn't the first time it happened with me as a foreign aid worker, but it was the first time that it happened where the people who were not allowed into that place were my compatriots. It didn't necessarily hit me that strongly then, but it did later, when I started thinking about issues of the inequalities and the problematic relations within humanitarianism. And at that time, I was privileged to be in the convenient, secure, safe, and well-serviced place that is the expat house. And people who I may have been in school with, or would have been my neighbours were not. And that was not easy to absorb, as you can imagine, especially when that started being thought of as part of a bigger issue of how humanitarianism is affected or conditioned by its existence in the West, by its Western narratives and values, and how that is taken for granted, until you hit a place where you can't reconcile the narrative with the reality – from a personal perspective, at least.

Slemrod

So, I mean, you've been really involved in various efforts to decolonise aid. When did you get to that point where you couldn't reconcile personally?

Aloudat

I think my journey from being completely fascinated by the humanitarian equivalent to Indiana Jones, to being part of a decolonising discourse was quite long. It’s a bit embarrassing sometimes, that it took me all that time to figure out what is fairly obvious. I properly read Edward Said in 2014, and I couldn't help but think: How does that apply to what we're seeing every day? And for me personally, I ended up being part of the spokespersons of MSF in Arabic and partially in English. And this is where one of those contradictions emerge. I was asked repeatedly to speak to the media, and I did, but particularly when the sieges on humanitarian enclaves started happening, like in Madaya and others, I was confronted by quite a strong push against me speaking on Syria. And the argument was: you wouldn't be perceived as neutral, or you wouldn't be able to be neutral. You can't detach. That hit me quite hard, because I've asked one of the people who were in a significant position of power, who was French: Would you recuse yourself from talking to French media, because you cannot detach? And the answer was no. So, that was one of the first times I was confronted by, my ability to detach was not conditioned by my skills, or my experience, or my convictions, it was conditioned by my being Arab or Syrian or for whatever reason. And again, that person didn't mean it this way, but the structure conditions it this way. This starts extending into when we talk about localisation. One of the risks identified was corruption in local organisations, so they needed minders and babysitters to not be corrupt. But the same discourse never happens about Western organisations. They don't need minders or babysitters. The basic assumption is, as a Western organisation – or person for that matter – you're good until proven bad. As one from an underdeveloped setting – and here I use ‘underdeveloped’ intentionally – an organisation or a person, you're bad until you prove repeatedly, if you can, possibly, that you're good enough. That, I started experiencing on a daily basis. And it happens more as you grow in the hierarchy of humanitarianism, because you start becoming more exposed to some of those: How do we pay people salaries? Do we pay everybody the same if they come from rich or poor countries? Or do we balance their salaries, the richness and poorness of their countries? The talk about, for example, gender imbalances, completely separating them from race and class, as if, you know, you resolve one without being able to resolve the others. For me, it happened as I was reading about, and learning from people, about those issues, and it didn't make sense. A lot of the humanitarian discourse is years or decades behind others who thought about the issues.

Slemrod

Yeah, I mean, it just goes on and on and on. Localisation is a very good example. Since these things that you started to realise, and these things that you started to experience, have not been fixed, unless I'm missing something. Do you think there's been progress made in this direction?

Aloudat 

I think over the past years, the discourse about decolonisation or adjacent discourses about racism in the humanitarian sector, which The New Humanitarian was part of exposing actually, have become more commonplace. Whether that solved the problem, I am not entirely sure. It is very difficult to resolve historical wrongs in ahistorical terms, whether that is the humanitarian crisis themselves, or the function and form of the humanitarian system. So, to not be too vague, the humanitarian workers used to be white, European, North American, and they used to be parachuted in and solve the problem of people. The argument is, we really aren't problematic because now we have many more African, Middle Eastern, Asian, humanitarian workers who are equally being parachuted into places to solve problems. Is that a solution? Partially. But is it really a solution when most of the people who become humanitarian workers come from the bourgeoisie or the upper classes of their countries? Is that really a representation of a real change and adoption of local view, or is it just taking people who mirror the Western appearance and behaviour and values while being from outside Europe? This is a question that isn't resolved. 

Slemrod 

This is a massive, massive industry that is not reported on with as much attention as, say, the oil industry or some other massive industry. It's seen by a lot of people as a sector that only does good, but it's obviously much more complicated than that. You've laid out some pretty clear criticisms. If you had to make really clear fixes, what would they be? 

Aloudat

I don't think that there are magic fixes to the humanitarian system, but the late David Graeber, who was an anthropologist in LSE and a famous anarchist, said something like, I'm paraphrasing, the amazing hidden secret of the world is that we can actually change it. And the same goes for the humanitarian system. And here, the change should aim at improving the lives of people who are affected by injustice and crises, rather than at preserving the humanitarian system. And here, I'm being very intentional. Most of the efforts at reform aim at keeping the integrity of the humanitarian sector, rather than at improving its outcome. Hence, we see the feverish protection and defense of issues that have no value in themselves, like being neutral, which excludes many of the humanitarians who aren't neutral in the same way the ICRC is neutral. The White Helmets in Syria have saved the lives of tens of thousands of people, arguably more than any humanitarian organisation, but they are being condescended to because they are not neutral. This argument about the humanitarian system being an apolitical system – outside politics, above politics – that is a luxury that can't be afforded at this time. Politics is integral, even the choice of being apolitical is a political choice, because it opens the space for other politics to take place. Now, when we are seeing, not only Trump's win and his terrifying, honestly, appointments for his cabinet, we're seeing a regression towards reactionary politics in Europe. These are the donors of humanitarianism. Those are the ones who write the narratives, and those are the ones who also sell the weapons that get used to cause humanitarian crises. So, we are coming towards a time where – as delusional as they are at times – the liberal ideas of the West are not there anymore. If Gaza did anything in the past year, it’s blow the lid at the hypocrisy of the West, and expose the fact that the multilateral system is only sacred when it serves some interests and not others. 

Slemrod

You were inside the system, the humanitarian system for so long, although also a critic at the same time, and now, this is a big move for you, to come to The New Humanitarian, to come to a newsroom. What made you want to do that?

Aloudat

A lot of people tell me, you can't be that critical and still be in the system. I think there's a legitimacy to this. You can't get your pie and eat it too. But I've always said the humanitarian system has defects, but it's irreplaceable under our circumstances. When the opportunity of working for The New Humanitarian – who I've been traveling alongside for a few years now – was presented to me, it gave me that opportunity of being able to speak about the system without being limited by the interests and the red tape of the system itself. If you are inside, you need to know your limits in being critical, in being oppositional, in being contrarian. And there are clear limits that weren't imposed. They were common sense to me as part of a big organization. And being presented with the opportunity to not have that red tape in a completely different role, where the responsibility lies entirely in the discourse, rather than in the humanitarian programming, was logical to me and completely irresistible. 

Slemrod 

And, what is your vision for The New Humanitarian?

Aloudat 

I mean, I quoted David Graeber because I really like him, and because he's an anarchist, and I do not lack some anarchist tendencies myself. So, I don't want to talk about my vision being a CEO. I think it's a bit pretentious for me to have a vision, you know, four weeks into my job. 

Slemrod 

So, what do you think the role of journalism is? 

Aloudat 

I think the role of journalism, particularly committed and clear-headed journalism, is to keep challenging the system. Keep exposing the articulations of power. Keep putting forward the propositions that are being hidden by politics and politicians. Keep asking the questions that are not comfortable, until more facts are exposed, until the narrative is changed. This is not going to happen fast, and as I moved away from the glorified image of the humanitarian Indiana Jones, I think a different way is talking the truth of people who are subjugated to oppression. I would take a statement of a Palestinian in Gaza, or a Syrian in Idlib, or a Sudanese in Darfur, as a journalistic value, as much, if not more, than a statement from a people in power that… I mean, it's not that difficult, given we've been listening to spokespersons of the US for the past year, you know, bare-faced denial of what's happening in Palestine. My point here is, journalism has an opportunity of breaking away from the mould of what is true and what's not, that fits in a Western discourse and a Western journalistic tradition – much of it is still valuable and important – but of carrying voices that haven't been heard, and we have been doing this at The New Humanitarian and it needs to be done more. And keeping the stubborn pressure on the system, in a way that is non-compromising, to expose the fault lines, to allow others to find their way around it, to find opportunities for change by us and by others, through that journalistic exposure of the system.

Slemrod 

Thanks so much for speaking with me today. I am looking forward to working together for a long time to come.

Aloudat 

Thank you.

 

Fundira

Tammam Aloudat is The New Humanitarian’s CEO. A quick update from the Rethinking Humanitarianism team. We've been working on an exciting new series with a very unique format. It's called Power Shift, and it brings together decision-makers in the aid world and the people affected by their decisions for honest one-on-one conversations about the sector's most pressing and enduring power inequalities. Look out for Power Shift in The New Humanitarian's podcast feed in the new year. This episode was hosted by Annie Slemrod, and produced and edited by Freddie Boswell. Sound engineering by Tevin Sudi. Thank you for listening to Rethinking Humanitarianism.