Rethinking Humanitarianism | What it means for humanitarians to be political

Jonathan Whittall  

The reality is that humanitarian action is political. We're saving lives of people that someone wants to kill. We're restoring dignity. We're alleviating suffering of populations that are besieged and under threat of erasure. This is a very political act to be involved in.

Tammam Aloudat

Welcome to Rethinking Humanitarianism, a show that explores the future of aid in a world of rising crisis. 

I’m your host, Tammam Aloudat, CEO of The New Humanitarian.

On a recent episode of Rethinking Humanitarianism where we asked whether humanitarianism has a marketing problem, the rise of illiberalism and politics came up. Sana Bég, Executive Director of MSF Canada, one of our guests, made an interesting observation.

Sana Bég

We are finding ourselves in a space where, you know, we're treading on being more political. It's not that we've become more political. Our governments have become less humanitarian. That is what is staring us in the face today, and we’re finding ourselves having to get down to the basics. 

Aloudat

The agreement on equal value of lives, on democracy, human rights, and so on, doesn't really exist in the same way as it did in the past. Hence, there's no need for politicians to respond to the suffering of others in the same way. So, with this crumbling of liberalism, does the aid sector need to pick up the slack? Is its major tenet of being apolitical sustainable in our current times?

To discuss this, we are joined by Shatha Elnakib, faculty and deputy director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University, and lead author of a paper published by The Lancet titled, “The humanitarian system: politics can not be avoided.”

We are also joined by Jonathan Whittall, executive director and founder of the KEYS Initiative, a political affairs strategic advisory organisation.

If you have any questions or comments, stick around for the credits to learn about how to reach us at Rethinking Humanitarianism.

Shatha, Jonathan, thank you very much for being with us today. 

Shatha Elnakib

Thanks very much.

Whittall 

Thank you.

Aloudat 

Let's break this down. The argument for the humanitarian collective response is neutrality, and it covers everything about everything. I'll give you a couple of examples. I've looked through the ICRC’s press statements from the beginning of the genocide until about a few months ago, the word Israel wasn't mentioned a single time in any press statement about Gaza, except once in the top, because it's Israel and the occupied territories, without mentioning Palestinian territories - although that was the accepted international law term, the argument is very neutral. I mean, with very few exceptions, people have managed to do feats of syntax and grammar in finding passive voices and not mentioning who's killing whom. Has this always been the case, or is there something new?

Elnakib  

Neutrality was born out of this idea that you need to be neutral in order to have access, right, in order to secure humanitarian access, but even by its own state of purpose, I don't know that this is working for us anymore. Maybe it worked one time in the past when we trace back the genesis of classical humanitarianism. And here I want to be very specific that we're not talking about humanitarianism in general, but rather a very specific project, which is, you know, a hegemonic humanitarian system, a contemporary one. And, that is one that is mostly located in Western Christian thought. It was born in the context of interstate conflict, where you had wars between state actors, metrical wars. That's this history in which some of these principles, like neutrality, were born, right? And, now conflict looks very different. Contemporary conflict is very asymmetrical. Siege warfare is now the new norm. You're Syrian, you know about Ruta very well, right? This is what warfare looks like now, helpless populations encircled by very powerful actors, the Assad regime, or you know, an apartheid, genocidal regime like the Israeli regime, brutal sieges, that's the new norm. And so, neutrality was maybe one time, fit for purpose, and maybe was utilitarian in the sense that it guaranteed access, but I don't think it's working anymore. And so, I think there's also a need to maybe revise some of our thinking about principles and what they mean, and whether they're fit for purpose, I would argue they're not really fit for purpose. They haven't really helped us. 

Aloudat  

They're sacralised. The principles are dealt with like a Bible or a Quran, and I find it funny, because in the exact same manner where we selectively sacralise bits of our scripture. And ignore the bits that don't suit us, our argument, and we argue that, you know, the landscape is different, like MSF is different from the ICRC, but it's like different churches, like they vary on some aspects, but you know, the eschatology is the same, the thought behind it is the same. Jonathan, you've been as far apart as the UN and MSF. How does the discussion happen internally, before we see the press release? Because I keep being told that people are having, you know, lively and vigorous discussions inside, and then we get a sort of wet towel press release afterwards. What happens before it?

Whittall  

There's a couple of things. One is, I think this discussion has become increasingly self-centred, and it's a very Western humanitarian debate that is still happening within the MSFs and other big NGOs. I found in Gaza, whenever I met one of those big NGOs and this debate was still happening, I found it just ludicrous. It's not serving a purpose. The reality is that humanitarian action is political. We're saving lives of people that someone wants to kill. We're restoring dignity. We're alleviating suffering of populations that are besieged and under threat of erasure. This is a very political act to be involved in. I think the independence of humanitarian action is far more of an important discussion than the neutrality of it, because when we're independent, we can actually say what we see, and we can hopefully be a lot more clear about what we're witnessing. And indeed, you asked about, you know what is happening behind the doors when these statements are coming out? I think what's happening is a general lack of independence of thoughts, of inability to say what we see, because of the fears of the repercussions, whether it's funding, whether it's access. And I think the access point is overstated, but I think what we see on the ground and what we say goes through multiple different filters, and we need to make that distance shorter between what we see and what we say, and the filters that it passes through are just, I think you know, in the case of PRCS, what's interesting is, if you look at the statements of PRCS themselves, they were very clear, much clearer than ICRC was clear after the killing of their colleagues. So, we also need to be aware of whose voices we're listening to. In Gaza, what is happening to aid workers, to health workers, is being said very loudly and very explicitly by Palestinian aid workers, by Palestinian health workers. If you listen to them, it's a very different narrative when you listen to the filtered version that has been expressed by an international organisation. And, I think that's a symptom of the increasing irrelevance of the international humanitarian system in this kind of environment, and it is an adapt or die moment, where if the humanitarian community and humanitarian system is so far removed from what is being said by, for example, Palestinian health workers or local organisations on the ground, then we have to question the relevance and how we've got to this point, and part of that, I think, is this obsession with the principles.

Elnakib  

It's interesting that you mentioned independence. So, when I look at the history of the principles, it's really the three main principles: impartiality, independence and neutrality, that are being used to advocate for an apolitical brand of humanitarianism. Together, you know, neutrality, plus impartiality, plus independence, equal and a political moral universalism. And when we talk about, you know, being apolitical we don't really interrogate what that means. When I wrote a commentary in The Lancet on something that I thought would be very uncontroversial, that the humanitarian sector needs to reckon with its political engagements and entanglements, I got a lot of pushback from seasoned humanitarians who are telling me: what are you talking about? You're sending a very dangerous message. And, I'm a global health academic. In global health, that debate is closed. Obviously, health is very political. The Global Health Rationality Project has been completely debunked. We know that we are all shaped by power relationships, the field is shot through with power relationships, with politics. We're not evidence-based technocrats. We are also self-interested. We're not altruistic. We're pursuing professional interests, national interests, and the idea that being political is necessarily being partisan, I think is also something that the humanitarian sector needs to not conflate. Being political doesn't mean partisan, doesn't mean aligning ourselves with power. And then the other thing that I want to ask is, you know: should we be apolitical, and can we be apolitical? And, I think there's a difference there. We're definitely not apolitical. Should we be political? Should we try to discipline the fact that we're political, or should we just say we rise above politics? We are outside of the political ecosystem.

Aloudat  

I agree with Jonathan that the debate, at least internally, is self-centred. This is my worry. Is that we say, okay, let's agree to disagree, yet the umbrella statements cover for small and large narratives that allow the continuation of acts of aggression and violence. And that goes from most humanitarian organisations saying Israeli hostages and Palestinian prisoners, and still claiming to be, you know, independent and neutral. This is already far from neutral. So, solidarity gets thrown around so much in the humanitarian discussion. Everybody is in solidarity with everybody. No one defines it. What would solidarity look like in a humanitarian system? And here, I'm not talking about large international NGOs. What does it mean to be in solidarity with Iranians today, or with Palestinians, or with Sudanese who are neglected, or anyone else?

Whittall 

What I think we need to move away from is thinking that, yes, if we speak out, it's not going to make things easier, that's for sure. I don't think there's any context I can think of where speaking exactly about what's happening as we see it, and speaking truth to power - to use the cliche - I don't think that's anywhere going to make our work easier on the ground. But that's not our job. I mean, our job is not to do things that will make it easier for us. That shouldn't be the way in which we are deciding how to navigate these kinds of environments. The argument that others are saying things, I think, is also deeply problematic, because we know that it's not about one or two voices. It is about collective and within the humanitarian system, it's not enough that one or two are saying something and others are not, which then brings us to the point of what is the political identity of humanitarianism and humanitarian actors? And, we definitely need to not conflate this with partisan politics, but what I do believe is that we're intrinsically political, and humanitarianism is a political act, and it's something that I think we need to accept and then embrace what that means for how we navigate environments. I use the word solidarity, Tammam, because we need to go beyond, we're in solidarity with communities. It is thrown around. If we look at the Cuban medical missions in the past, for example, I think that's an interesting model of how healthcare, humanitarian aid is provided in a way that's not completely divorced from power dynamics. It's not completely illiterate to the power that exists and the root causes of what is generating humanitarian needs and humanitarian suffering. They were willing to admit what that problem was, and that they were a band aid, but they were band aids that was not trying to hide the wound, and I think that's where humanitarianism can accept that we're not going to solve the world's problems as humanitarian organisations, and I think in a complete absence of political courage to engage in solving many of the crises that we're dealing with, there's a tendency for humanitarians to think that we should be the ones ending genocide and solving conflicts. I don't believe that's the role that we should play, but we shouldn't use neutrality as a way to hide behind the diagnosis of what we're seeing, and holding power to account.

Elnakib  

I want to give two examples of acts that I think are solidarity by humanitarians: the White Helmets, and I want to also give an example of the Sumud Flotilla, which I think is very similar to what MSF’s rescue operations in the Mediterranean looked like. I don't see them as very different. Let's talk about the Flotilla first. The flotilla was a group of activists and humanitarians who decided to break siege. I think that is very much in line with the humanitarian ethos. I think it's very much in line with the origin of humanitarianism, which if we look at organisations like Save the Children and Oxfam are classic humanitarian actors. They actually began with the same idea to break siege, to help enemy children who were starving under siege. But, how the humanitarian sector looked at the Flotilla was very negative. It was, you know, they were lambasted. They were told: do not choose humanitarian labels. You are not humanitarians. I see that as an act of solidarity, very much in line with the humanitarian ethos to break siege, and again, very similar to MSF’s search and rescue missions, which the EU challenge the migration deterrent strategies of the EU and the Mediterranean. In the beginning, they were seen as very political activists, but then they kept doing it, you know, they kept saying, this is a humanitarian obligation. Now, it's been squarely accepted as a humanitarian act. The White Helmets. The White Helmets did much more than a lot of humanitarian actors can claim to have achieved. They've rescued, what, 300,000, 100,000 civilians from under the rubble, that's more than a lot of agencies can claim to have achieved. And yet, their positionality was used against them. They are very much against the Assad regime. They were seen as not neutral. They were seen as political. And so, they were seen as not humanitarian, but what they were doing, I think, is squarely humanitarian, and very much in solidarity with the Syrian people. So, this is an example of acts of solidarity that are very humanitarian, that haven't been seen as such, because there's a hegemony, a monopoly, that Western humanitarian actors have in the field, and there’s a club. Only certain people can be viewed as humanitarians, and they have to be, not embedded in civic struggle. They cannot be embedded in political struggle. They cannot feel too much for the people that they're helping, right. Suffering has to be sanitised, else you’re viewed as not impartial or not neutral. And so, I think it's a very artificial distinction that we're making between what is humanitarian, and what is not humanitarian.

Aloudat  

It takes us to: who is the humanitarian? And the idea of political and apolitical is related to also the idea of humanitarianism being an outside force that comes out of the goodness of its heart to help people who are helpless, otherwise. Has that changed? I mean, we have now, Sudan emergency rooms - the mutual aid in Sudan - which has gained a lot of leverage. We have plenty of examples of local humanitarian aid that have taken off on basis that are different. Do we look at humanitarians in the humanitarian public imagination differently?

Elnakib 

I think the question of local actors is a really important one. And Tammam, people like you and I, we weren't part of the humanitarian sector a couple of decades ago, right? People who are part of the humanitarian sector look differently. I'm somebody who is Egyptian Palestinian. I am shaped by the political lineage of the Egyptian Revolution and the struggle for Palestinian Liberation. These are things that are very paramount to my identity. And if I were to run an organisation, a humanitarian organisation, there's no way that this positionality is not going to impact the way I run an organisation. It's easier for somebody who comes from a different positionality to claim neutrality, you know, they're working in some of these conflicts. But for me, there's no way. There's absolutely no way that I'm not going to have skin in the game. And I would say, you know, by the same token as we talk about localisation, and there's consensus now that we need to localise response. How can you expect the local actor who's embedded in civic struggles in their context to be apolitical, neutral, just completely, you know, distant outside of what's happening in their country? It is an illusion. It's a myth. And so, what does that mean for local actors? Are they not humanitarians? Is the humanitarian just somebody who's not local, who's an outsider? And how do we reconcile that with the consensus in the field that we need to localise, so something is not adding up, the math isn't math-ing.

Whittall  

Yeah, I agree. And I think the discussion around localisation is still completely upside down, because it's still very much the North localising to the South, and actors on the ground are being localised, you know, they're having it done to them by the goodness of the donors' hearts or of the UN system. I think localisation is a reality as power shifts and changes and the humanitarian landscape is changing, and the reality today is those that are saving lives and on the frontlines are predominantly, arguably, always have been, local actors. And I think the question that we need to ask now is, you know, power has changed. We are no longer living in an entirely unipolar world order where the US was the only dominant power that could dictate and take humanitarian action in a certain direction. I think that proximity between Western humanitarianism and the US has created a crisis of legitimacy for humanitarian action. But I think the increasingly multipolar world where power is shifting is an opportunity for humanitarianism to rethink what it means in this stage, and there - to be practical - it's about building, you know, infrastructures of solidarity that can provide for what people need. And those infrastructures of solidarity can be built with different inputs, but it's ultimately horizontal aid. It's between equal partners, if you like. And there, I think the traditional aid system needs to rethink how it operates, and how it functions, and how it contributes to that infrastructure of solidarity that can then be carried out by actors on the ground. I think it's, for example, crazy that we can think of localisation to organisations in Sudan, or in Gaza, and then stop short of giving an infrastructure where those local actors can have influence on a global stage, where they can have access to regional powers to influence the outcome of certain discussions that might be happening in capitals of emerging powers. So, I think there's a much bigger rethinking that needs to happen of the humanitarian architecture that recentres the whole discussion away from this top down. I agree with you the positionality is so important, because, of course, if you have certain privileges, it's much easier to disconnect from political realities. I reference, you know, non-alignment movement and tri-continentalism, because I'm South African and I have a background in thinking about anti-Apartheid struggles, that's something that informs how humanitarianism, for me, should look on the ground, and I think that's something that needs to be embraced, not rejected, because that's the majority of the world. The minority of the world has the privilege of being disconnected from their political reality.

Aloudat  

Where do we stand now if we're talking about discarding the old and building the new, between using whatever still seems to work of the system like, at least the general admission of international law, despite, you know, Chancellor Merz saying Iran shouldn't be protected by international law and the General Assembly, or saying even that is going to break down, and we need to go even beyond that. How do we calibrate that approach?

Whittall 

I think this is where there is a need for political pragmatism, and we have to deal with the cards that we’re dealt. So, my criticism is that we keep wishing that we had a different set of cards, or that we had the older cards that we were dealt, you know, in the past. Now, we have a certain set of cards, and we need to engage with those and again, build something new. But that does mean, yes, I mean, China is a critical player in South-South cooperation. I don't think we have, as a humanitarian system, engaged sufficiently in discussions and understanding how to shape that, how to build on that, how to tap into that. The same with the Gulf, the same with other powers. There's a need for us to be pragmatic about what has existed, what does exist, and what we want to build. And today, we do have the General Assembly - as imperfect as the UN system is, as under attack as multilateralism is - I think we also have new formations, like The Hague Group that's come out of Gaza, where you know, you have a coalition of states that are claiming, reclaiming that international law applies equally to all. And that's something that I take as one of the few positive developments out of the last years of horror. It's a demonstration of new coalitions that are forming, new coalitions of power. Yes, they each have their own interests. Yes, they each have their own track records. But we need to, I think, tap into those possibilities and build on them. I don't think we should accept that funding only has to come from large donors down to implementing organisations on the ground. I think we can look at how we can create mechanisms of actual pooled funding that's brought together without the kind of strings that come from a single donor. I think these are the practical and pragmatic discussions that we need to think of, and when I talk about that infrastructure of solidarity, it entails very specific discussions and initiatives that we have to look at.

Aloudat  

What should we do in terms of changing the discourse? The humanitarian system is really good at writing reports and at writing, you know, academic stuff occasionally, and that there is a disconnect. People don't know us. They know fragments. They know, you know, images and flashes, but they don't know us. What is it that we could do about that? And asking that from a newsroom point of view, what do we want to influence in terms of public discourse for that political, Jonathan, you know, the second, third degree politics of humanitarianism that we could do?

Whittall

Part of it, in my view, is about who we're talking to. So, it comes back to states and public, I think we need to be talking to different audiences, and that includes in the form of states, but also in the form of general public. And, I think we still talk amongst ourselves, amongst people that understand us and that understand what humanitarianism is from a Western construct, but we're not very good at engaging - and I say we, as a humanitarian sector - with different audiences, and I think that's part of the rebuilding this infrastructure of the future, is how we communicate to a much wider audience. And, I think part of that, it's also about recognising the political agency of others, and recognising the political agency of the people that we are working with in responding to crises. It's recognising the political agency of people whose lives we're saving in the emergency rooms of hospitals in war zones. And, I think recognising that political agency of those that we're providing humanitarian assistance to is part of the political identity of, you know, what the political identity of a humanitarian aid worker would look like in the future? I also just wanted to mention more political honesty. I think that's something that's really important. I think we have to be much more honest publicly in our engagement politically with states and with the public around the challenges and the compromises that we face. I think in the case of Gaza, a lot could have been done by simply explaining the challenges and the pressures and the political forces that were at play and that were influencing humanitarian action on the ground. And, I think that requires a certain kind of political literacy, which I think we're lacking in the humanitarian sector. And, it comes back to the points around positionality, and what influences how we think about humanitarian aid. I don't think we are politically literate as a sector, there's a general kind of lack of political literacy that we need to address, and then that's how I think we can also better engage with a wider public and audience, and explaining who we are, and what we do.

Aloudat 

Where do we get political literacy? Who are our allies and teachers? We've spent decades talking to ourselves and learning nothing much, at least, from the outside world. Who should we go and apprentice under today in this political environment to gain our political literacy that is solely needed?

Elnakib  

Yeah, it's a good question, and I would caution us against going to those who frame the dominant political narrative, because there's just so much of that out there, and we, unfortunately, have been, you know, part of those narratives. We have helped shape some of these narratives. So, I would say, you know, I'm going to go Frankfurt School on you now, alternative. And it's true. I think people like you, Tammam, are so important because you give a different narrative. You give people exposure to something different, a different narrative. Like, what's happening right now with Iran. You know, if I go to the big journalists, they're all saying the same thing. I want us to go to the people. I want us to go closer to people on the ground. I want to go to political actors in different places that aren't featured in the media. I want to hear their voices. I want to hear their narratives.

Whittall  

What I think we need to be doing as well is looking at some of the successes of the past. You know, we've had anti-colonial movements in the past that have been built around solidarity, that have provided aid to each other, that have created cross-continental connections. We're obviously living in a different era to what we were in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. So, I'm not promoting a nostalgia for the past that's completely disconnected from the reality that we live in today, but I think we need to learn from some of that and update it for our contemporary reality of how power is being expressed, and how that's generating humanitarian needs, and then how we build solidarity to counter that, and then how we navigate the changing power. So, I'm not sure that there's an apprenticeship under one thinker or school, but there's certainly, I think, lessons from the past that we have to adapt to the reality of today and build something different for the future.

Aloudat

This was really intriguing. Thank you very much. 

Whittall 

Thanks.

Elnakib  

Thanks so much, Tammam.

Aloudat  

Thank you for listening to Rethinking Humanitarianism. Our show is produced, edited and mixed by Levi Sharpe, editorial oversight provided by Irwin Loy. If you have any questions or comments, you can email us at [email protected]  Please rate and subscribe to our show, wherever you get your podcasts. Also consider becoming a member of The New Humanitarian to help us continue reporting from the heart of crises. Go to www.thenewhumanitarian.org to find out more.