Understanding the Humanitarian World

Daniel Maxwell, Kirsten Gelsdorf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367232931
• eBook ISBN: 9781000007619
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Conflict and disaster have been part of human history for as long as it has been recorded. Over time, more mechanisms for responding to crises have developed and become more systematized. Today a large and complex 'global humanitarian response system' made up of a multitude of local, national and international actors carries out a wide variety of responses. Understanding this intricate system, and the forces that shape it, are the core focus of this book.

Daniel G Maxwell and Kirsten Gelsdorf highlight the origins, growth, and specific challenges to, humanitarian action and examine why the contemporary system functions as it does. They outline the main actors, explore how they are organised and look at the ways they plan and carry out their operations. Interrogating major contemporary debates and controversies in the humanitarian system, and the reasons why actions undertaken in its name remain the subject of so much controversy, they provide an important overview of the contemporary humanitarian system and the ways it may develop in the future.

This book offers a nuanced understanding of the way humanitarian action operates in the 21st century. It will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in international human rights law, disaster management and international relations.

For more information, please see the authors' website: https://www.understandingthehumanitarianworld.com/

1 The origins of contemporary humanitarian action

From the early beginnings to World War II

• Religious charity as humanitarian precursor

• The beginning of a global humanitarian system

• World War I and the birth of NGOs

• The birth of global humanitarian action

• Conclusion: the multiple agendas of humanitarianism

There is no simple history of humanitarianism or the humanitarian system.¹ Many strands were formed that are now woven together to form a recognizable system. Understanding the history of humanitarian action is critical to understanding why the system—or “ecosystem”—of humanitarian action is the way it is today. And understanding history helps to identify the ways it can—or should—change in the future. One recent analysis noted the different forms that the humanitarian imperative can take, even while there is a consistency about the meaning of humanity and compassion across different contexts: “What is also striking are the many different forms that such compassion can take, in its underlying ethos and the practical expression of care, and in the ways in which such differences have shaped state and civilian perceptions of and behavior in humanitarian action today.”²

Understanding history reveals previously invisible constructs and allows them to be challenged. History demonstrates that original founding ideals can become distorted as organizations develop. It demonstrates that apparently inseparable alliances are in reality temporary conveniences, and it shows that, particularly in the case of humanitarian action, individuals can make a difference. The next three chapters recount the history of humanitarian action in a very encapsulated manner, drawing on specific examples to make particular points or highlight specific challenges. But this is by no means a comprehensive history.

This chapter highlights the early history of humanitarianism and some of its precursors, including charitable imperatives and actions in the major religions and histories that have helped shape today’s humanitarian system. Then it presents a quick overview of humanitarian developments in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter concludes with some over-arching historical themes still critical to understanding the humanitarian world of today.

Religious charity as humanitarian precursor

The earliest known precursors of humanitarianism stretch back millennia. Its early influences were mainly rooted in the traditions of Christianity and Islam, as well as the political and social circumstances of the times. The gradual development of charitable giving, between the beginning of recorded history and roughly the fifteenth century, laid the initial groundwork for the emergence of more clearly “humanitarian” actions that followed in later centuries.

In the ancient Greek and Roman empires, food scarcity, sometimes verging on famine, was a regular feature of urban life. Between 330 and 320 BCE, the state of Cyrene sent grain supplies north to 41 communities in Greece to alleviate famine there. In CE 6 during the reign of Emperor Augustus, and again in CE 12 and CE 32 during the reign of Tiberius, Rome was threatened with famine—the crisis of CE 6 being by far the most serious. Augustus reacted to the threat of famine with a series of measures that would seem strangely familiar today: He expelled “extraneous” personnel from Rome, including most foreigners; he introduced grain rationing; and he appointed a senior senator to manage the overall supply of both grain and bread across the city. He doubled grain handouts to the destitute. Looked at from a historical perspective, did his actions represent charitable action or self-interested defense of the state? Both interpretations seem possible. Over time, such charitable action became intimately tied up with the evolution of religious thought. Among the major religions, the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions have very likely contributed most directly to the development of today’s humanitarian system. Notions of charity are central to all.

The Judeo-Christian tradition

After CE 325, the Roman emperor Constantine effectively co-opted Christianity as a state religion, shifting the responsibility for providing charity onto the church and thereby saving money for the Roman state. Acts of charity were considered the business of the ordinary individual (as in the parable of the Good Samaritan) or the ruling elite (as in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians) but not necessarily the government per se. These circumstances established the norm for well over a thousand years of Catholic Church predominance in organized charity.

In the 1340s, the church’s role diminished. The Black Death (bubonic plague) killed between a third and half of Europe’s population. This led to major changes in demographics and established the unequal relationship between the landed elite and the working farmer. The preeminence of the church as spiritual guide and charitable giver was decimated. Mandated with providing cures, treatments, and explanations, it proved unable to provide any of these.³ These social upheavals laid the foundation for the discontent that gave birth to the reformation. In 1517, Martin Luther in Germany crystallized the discontent of the old world order and paved the way for the creation of Christianity’s Protestant denominations. Under Protestantism, charity and social order were more firmly linked. For the wealthy elite of the newly reformed Protestant states, poverty was not the enemy but rather the unacceptable social face of destitution.

Many contemporary Western humanitarian NGOs—whether faith-based or not—trace their origins to this Protestant ethic of charity. But the state-sanctioned churches founded during the Reformation era established the basis for organizing charity as a state responsibility. The Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War a century later established the state—not the church—as the ultimate arbiter of sovereignty, with the understanding that states would be responsible for their own citizenry—and not interfere in the internal matters of other states, a state of affairs that went largely unchallenged for 350 years.⁴

The Islamic tradition

Islam was founded in the early seventh century by the prophet Muhammad in what is now Saudi Arabia. Like Judaism, it embodied a notion of charity as a duty. The notion of zakat, or dutiful charitable giving, is derived directly from the Quran. In contemporary Muslim societies, the application of zakat takes many forms, from individual acts of charity to institutions fully incorporated in the state and tantamount to a national tax-welfare system.⁵ Some Islamic scholars have held that zakat is fundamentally different from the Christian concept of charity, being based on the premise that both individual need and class distinctions run counter to Islam and the good of society. They assert that the doctrine of zakat, where it was incorporated into state institutions, represented the first formal social security system.⁶ A closely related notion in Islam is sadaqa—a voluntary action to be done without fanfare. Sadaqa and zakat are often used interchangeably but, in their original meanings, zakat was an obligation while sadaqa was voluntary.⁷

The other Islamic tradition of importance is that of waqf, the Islamic equivalent of a charitable foundation which dates back almost to the foundations of Islam. It is often used to set up an endowment to fund the purchase of land for the construction of a building that will be used for Islamic purposes—a mosque or a school. At the start of the nineteenth century, at least half of the lands of the sprawling Ottoman Empire were administered under waqf.⁸ Between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries, a vast system of public feeding programs was established across the empire to hand out free food to the needy.⁹

Hence the ideals of charity, the obligation to alleviate the suffering of others, and the formation of organized bodies to carry out these acts are not solely the prerogative of the state or of any one religious or philosophical tradition. The present humanitarian system, historically dominated as it is by the patronage of the powerful states of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, reflects a predominantly Christian, and Protestant, philosophical heritage. But, the philosophy that underlies contemporary humanitarian action has its roots in a universal altruistic human ethic. It is expressed and practiced in all major world religions and philosophies.

The emergence of humanitarian activity in Europe

The modern notion of humanitarianism began to emerge between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In response to specific disasters, states and other actors mobilized to support populations affected by crisis—though often in ways that would seem problematic today.

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I at the end of the sixteenth century, some 50,000 French and Walloon Protestants fled Catholic Europe to seek refuge in Protestant England. This was the first recorded instance of a major movement of people fleeing religious persecution rather than economic deprivation. It was also the first known time that a state deliberately sought to assist with the mass movement of a population and its subsequent support in the country of refuge.¹⁰ The analogy between modern refugee action and that of Elizabethan England is limited: No attempt was made to be impartial—England did not assist the equally persecuted Jews, or indeed other Protestant sects less popular in England. England’s actions were politically motivated and its treatment of the arriving refugees, although better than the norm for previous foreigners (that is, hostility), was at heart, self-serving.

The first recorded instance in modern history of a comprehensive disaster-response strategy—and international relief action following a disaster—was the earthquake that destroyed the Portuguese capital Lisbon in 1755. Portugal’s first minister, the Marques de Pombal, is credited with ordering the burial of the dead the day after the quake and the distribution of food the next day, along with a freezing of grain prices, the placement of troops to keep the peace, and the planning for the city’s reconstruction within a week of the quake—a response plan and operation that puts that of many modern cities to shame.¹¹ Both the Spanish Crown and the British Parliament, upon hearing of the disasters, sent aid. Writing three years after the event, Emmerich Vattel notes that “the calamities of Portugal have given England an opportunity of fulfilling the duties of humanity.” Vattel went on to lay down what he saw as one of the precepts of good nationhood: “If a nation is afflicted with famine, all those who have provisions to spare aught to relieve her distress without, however, exposing themselves to want.”¹² Vattel was essentially postulating humanitarian action as an intrinsic property of sovereignty.

The beginning of a global humanitarian system

Several events in the middle of the nineteenth century transformed humanitarian action from a disconnected collection of activities into a more organized global system. This era also marks the first true period of globalization. Under the European and Ottoman empires, the world was connected like never before. The railways and telegraph revolutions had bolstered trading routes and eased travel across the world.¹³ For the first time, the enlightened, the philanthropic, and the politically ambitious had a global stage to play on.

Over this period, suffering on the other side of the world was no longer “far away”, remote, and reported only many weeks after the event. It was close to home and reported almost immediately by the telegraph and mass-circulation newspapers. The names of affected countries—often those that supplied tea, coffee, and the raw materials of empire—were familiar. This early manifestation of a “global village” provided the grounds on which notions of international humanitarian action could take seed.

Humanitarian action against famine

The famine of 1837–38 in India marked the first time that modern principles of relief emerged in the history of humanitarian action. Organized public works, providing food or cash in return for labor, coupled with free food distribution for the most destitute, were first experimented with in northern India, despite the British rulers’ formal adherence to an unfettered free-market economy. The fear of public disorder, a sense of humanitarian responsibility, and simple pragmatic concerns over maintaining a governable nation all pushed the British administration to act. The language used to describe those seeking assistance in the face of famine at that time is instructive. They were referred to as “destitute,” “paupers,” “vagrants,” and the “laboring poor”—all terms that essentially set them up as a threat to law and order. Relief works not only sought to put the laboring poor back to work but were seen as opportunities to encourage discipline and obedience to authority w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The origins of contemporary humanitarian action: From the early beginnings to World War II
• 2. Humanitarian action in the Cold War and its aftermath
• 3. Humanitarian action in the twenty-first century
• 4. Contemporary humanitarian actors
• 5. Contemporary humanitarian architecture and action
• 6. Changes in policy and practice
• 7. Unresolved (and unresolvable?): Understanding the humanitarian world in the twenty-first century
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index