I pitched this article to The New Humanitarian – an outlet I used to write for semi-regularly – but it was rejected. At the start of this week they published this bizarre article painting local and national humanitarian actors (including the state) as the “proletariat” in a naive class-based reading of humanitarian action. See for yourself – it’s a genuinely baffling piece of writing.
I think this is terrible analysis, a gross misunderstanding of Marxist theory. It’s also troubling that it’s written by a senior research fellow at the ODI – the institution which published my paper on Network Humanitarianism in 2018 – a paper which they don’t reference despite the fact that it includes a much better economic analysis of what I term “Market Humanitarianism”.
In the absence of other outlets, I’m publishing my piece here, despite the fact that everybody tells me I should be on Substack or LinkedIn. One of the points I make below is the lack of intellectual depth in the humanitarian sector – which I think that article in TNH well represents, even if it was just meant to be a provocation. My apologies to the authors, it’s nothing personal.
*
The humanitarian sector was already in a slow-motion crisis before the inauguration of Donald Trump, but the rapid unscheduled disassembly of USAID has been an earthquake. Like an earthquake the aftershocks have the potential to be even more serious than the initial shock, with even the largest organisations facing destabilisation which may bring them down.
The question now being asked in the mountain halls of Geneva is: What Comes Next? It’s more clear than ever that the humanitarian sector is unlikely to survive in its current form, but there is a glaring absence of meaningful discussion about what other forms might be possible. The lack of intellectual depth in discussions about the future of humanitarianism is more obvious than ever.
It sounds strange to write those words, given that the humanitarian community sometimes seems to debate itself continuously. Much of that debate is about values, however, and almost none about structures. We lack the language to talk about structural change, although recent discourse around decolonisation has taken us in some interesting directions.
Tammam Aloudat, CEO of the New Humanitarian, recently called for a “radical shifting of the power structures and political economy of the whole system,” yet even this is not new. Six years ago I was part of an ODI project called “Constructive deconstruction” which was not interested in incremental change, but in a complete re-imagining of humanitarian action.
My report for that project, Network Humanitarianism, presented a model of contemporary humanitarianism as a hybrid of its post-World War II hierarchical structure and a post-Cold War “market” structure. This hybrid possessed the worst characteristics of both models of aid, and rendered the system completely unable to cope with the rapidly-changing societies of the twenty-first century.
One of the key characteristics of those societies is that they are increasingly networked. The report gave specific examples of how aid – particularly at the local level – has been reshaped by networked technologies – and described a series of characteristics of networks which humanitarian organisations could use to guide their decisions about which types of changes to pursue in order to be fit for purpose in today’s network society.
I am not writing now to sell the idea of Network Humanitarianism, but to note that there have been precious few similar attempts to envisage new paradigms for aid. One bright spot has been the rise of decolonisation – which has thankfully displaced earlier anemic discussions about “localisation” – yet even that discourse is long on inspiring rhetoric and short on practical guidance on what specific structural changes might be required.
In response to Tammam, Jemilah Mahmoud and Oliver Lacey-Hall argue that there is a middle path of “pragmatic, principled reform”. Their proposals are simply more of the same – more localisation, more technology, more donors – incremental reforms which have been tried and which have not worked. Despite all the good it does, the aid industry remains unfit for purpose, and now events have overtaken us.
In the end I gave this article the title “Change or Die” because these are two things which the humanitarian industry will never do. It’s been nearly 15 years since I’ve been pointing out these fundamental problems: that change will never come because humanitarianism was once a radical idea but is now “cast in concrete”; and it will never die because what we have now is a “zombie humanitarianism”.
Where does that leave us? It leaves us in exactly the same place which we’ve always been. The political economy of humanitarian aid renders it unable to change because it is the priorities of donor governments which shape the priorities of the humanitarian system overall – and the single biggest donor government has decided that humanitarian aid is not a priority. This is the inevitable result of reform led by institutions rather than principles.
While I respect people like Jemilah and Oliver, their article feels like a message from the archives, voices from an era of aid work which is now gone for good. Their argument rests on the structural assumption that “change has always been gradual” – but the rapid disappearance of USAID demonstrates that this is not a safe assumption. We can’t expect the aid industry to reinvent itself with the same speed – but we might at least make some effort.