The Death of Humanitarianism

I’d love to know how many senior staff members at the Australian National University would call themselves humanitarians. I suspect a high number of them, given that the only way they seem able to sleep at night is by convincing themselves that the Socially Responsible Investment policy is sufficient. The University’s Ex-Vice-Chancellor, Genevieve Bell, probably went to bed after the senate inquiry thinking she was so brave and principled for defending academic freedom. This is embarrassing and nauseating to think about, and if you do so for long enough, you may too end up believing that humanitarianism is dead. But before we go down a spiral of embarrassing and sickening Genevive Bell moments, I want to explore the difference between an institutionalised humanitarianism and the Encampment’s, and investigate how the latter functioned as a grassroots campaign to challenge and reshape narratives of empowerment, solidarity and humanity.  

When the ANU Gaza Solidarity Encampment began, I was enrolled in a humanitarianism course at ANU, hoping it might offer some light at the end of the tunnel, or at the very least it would provide a space that condemned the structures that allowed human rights abuses to occur. This was my naive hope for such a blood-stained institution. Within the first few weeks, the convenor insisted that what was happening in Palestine was not technically a genocide. However, the one good thing about doing the course was experiencing the stark juxtaposition between the theory of humanitarian aid and practice of grassroots activism in real time. The Encampment demonstrated the power
of bottom up initiatives inspired by liberation and freedom, and challenged these institutionalised notions of peaceful altruism.  

Humanitarianism, by a textbook definition, seeks to improve living conditions, alleviate suffering, and protect human rights, especially during crises. Its problems, however, lie in the intersection of morality and power, and its predication on Western principals like neutrality, unity, and impartiality.

Humanitarianism is documented to be rooted in Christian “charity”, beginning in the Enlightenment era, when philanthropy and morality were used to justify conquest and violence (Paulmann 2013, p.217). This top-down hierarchy frames the aid donor-recipient relationship as one between the West and the “periphery”, reinforcing the extraction of wealth and exploitation of devalued bodies. The ever-widening gap between aid giver and receiver has continuously stripped agency from communities who have the right to self-determination by casting them as willingly grateful and silent subjects.

By presuming to know what’s best and ignoring Indigenous local and cultural knowledge systems, the West has often caused more harm than good in times of crisis (Reiff 2002, p.118, 119). In an attempt to justify such violent failures, many adopt the warped logic that ‘doing something good wrong is better than nothing at all’ (Rieff 2002, p.120, 121). This patronising stance reduces aid recipients to objects rather than people whose lives are directly affected by the decisions made by authoritarian figures in the West (Rieff 2002, p.113).

During the 1990s, Chinese intellectuals described humanitarianism as something only belonging to the bourgeois societies that profited from more vulnerable communities (Hirono 2013, p.208), which has proven to be true, time and time again. Humanitarianism as we know it today is in itself a form of power: deciding who gets funding, where the media turns their camera to, and who counts as a ‘victim’, lies in the hands of oh-so-generous aid providers (Donini 2010, p.230).

The notion of humanitarianism as an act of voluntary charity was a prominent element of its definition until a shift after the 2010 crisis in Haiti that widely exposed the voluntourism industry as a grossly parasitical relationship. Known as the “republic of NGOs”, Haiti, with a history of French colonisation and US imperial occupation, had the highest International Non-Government Organisations per capita at the beginning of the 21st century, with up to 10,000 of them taking up space prior to 2010 (Lemay-Hébert et al 2018, p.2).

The Haitian earthquake became a dual disaster: the catastrophe itself and the failure of the international response. Private jets with chefs for emergency workers displaced planes delivering aid supplies; beneficiaries tried to escape physicians in training that had never practised outside of their local GP setting; local businesses were forced to shut as they couldn’t compete with international actors; and local knowledge was discarded leading to inappropriate and inadequate care. On top of this, members of the International Committee of the Red Cross, known otherwise as the “high priest” of humanitarianism, and Oxfam, attempted to cover up the fact that many of their staff committed sexual abuses against survivors of the earthquake. These pillars of so-called charity proclaim to stand on politically neutral ground, in pursuit of the “most ethical” approach, which is evidently counter intuitive. In doing so they project a peacekeeping narrative as if their structures are not violent actors of systematic exploitation of those they are apparently helping.

In the wake of the ICRC and Oxfam scandal, other cases came to light, revealing neocolonial intentions of actors, namely, as Graham Hancock coins it, the “disaster capitalisation” of Somalia as a site for exporting US values and Bosnia and Kosovo as projects to legitimise NATO (Finnemore 2001, p.197). All efforts have been made to brush these injustices under the rug, with dominant analyst David Rieff stating “given the choice between liberal imperialism and barbarism, the former may well be the best that the people of Sierra Leone or perhaps even Bosnia can hope for at the moment”. Imperialism, as a violent instrument of oppression and extraction of capital from subjugated bodies, land and resources, is put above “barbarism”, entrenching the highly debunked Modernisation theory and superiority complex the West still upholds. We saw this same narrative in Palestine where the US and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation used the front of aid giving to massacre hundreds of Palestinians. Humanitarianism, under the belt of those who wield such power, can cover any scandal because of the way that some human lives are so starkly differentiated from others.

Palestinian people have been dehumanised by the humanitarian sector, as people who are in power debate over the international humanitarian legal framework on whether it is a genocide, whilst their colonisers slaughter them in broad daylight, gun in one hand, a handful of flour in the other. Can this narrative even be salvaged or rewritten? How do we dismantle a system that so clearly is beyond corrupted.

In order for humanitarianism to benefit those it claims to help, its underlying norms and structures need to be dismantled, and mechanisms must be put in place to bridge the responsibility gap. Supposed humanitarians and world leaders should look to grassroots  organisations and activism, such as Encampments, for models of empowerment and support.

Threatening money making businesses that pose as beacons of education exposes the systemic violence enacted by universities under the guise of charity and good-will. The power we held in organising on the ground was an act of resistance, disrupting the lines between aid giver and receiver. I ate delicious food cooked by Banan, a Palestinian woman who came to camp daily to donate her time, efforts and mind-boggling dishes to a bunch of random kids, mostly privileged students with access to university and a home to go back to. Academics from the university as well as professionals in the community donated their knowledge and wisdom, teaching us history of protest, holding free panel discussions and documentary screenings and suffering patiently as some of us attempted and butchered Arabic for the first time.

Through sharing meals, organising events, and listening at teach-ins, the Encampment became a space of learning, growth and connection. This has been done for hundreds of years all around the world dating back to the 17th century and includes movements in recent history such as the Polisario Front in Western Sahara resisting violent illegal Moroccan occupation, and here on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the longest running protest camp to date. Protest camps are so powerful because they challenge the idea of land ownership, placing liberation and sovereignty at the forefront of the resistance – apparently this was even the case for Zionists who all of a sudden cared about “freeing” Kambri Lawns – and they centre community relationships by bringing unseen social reproduction into public spaces, facilitating a temporal space where people can work, create and replenish each others energy through meals, discussion and rest (Brown et al. 2017, p.4).

The Encampment is a place of protest and dissent, and in that, it is a space of healing and sustenance. It is not happening on politically neutral nor peaceful grounds because it recognises, obviously, that our space and our bodies are inherently politically charged. By setting up camp, we were also, definitionally speaking, seeking to improve living conditions by bringing a visual symbol of liberation to public domains and defending human rights by facilitating a space for conversations about the university’s $1.05 million investment in weapons companies and its ties with the scholasticidal Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The “humanitarian” efforts we have seen in a bottom-up initiative like the Encampment fulfills the definitional aims of humanitarianism while refusing institutional hierarchies.

The erasure of non-Western aid initiatives is central to upholding Western elitism and the white saviourship of humanitarianism. By moving from a top-down approach to aid to a commitment to continual learning, rejection of rigid classifications, and shifting paradigms rooted in Western dominance, the pursuit of humanitarian goals can be renewed.  Humanitarianism as we know it may be dead, and I welcome that, but the fight for justice, liberation and freedom is carried through our history, our connection to community and those who came before us.

‍

Cover image: @anu.bipoc.department