A Briefing Paper for ActionAid UK
HUGO SLIM
Centre for Development
and Emergency Practice (CENDEP)
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford UK
hslim@brookes.ac.uk
19 December 1997
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
This paper tries to present a concise view of the various debates surrounding international humanitarianism and its response to the civil wars and political emergencies of the 1990s, with particular reference to their implications for international NGOs. To this end, it sketches out the main theories and interpretations of the emergencies themselves and the international response to them, noting the main policy and practice implications for NGOs. It then explores the current issues which surround relief and development practice in today's emergencies as well as some of the perennial "old chestnuts" which always dog humanitarianism in war and which are still alive and well today.
PART ONE: THE NEW HUMANITARIAN ERA AND CIVIL WAR
The main structural change in the international response to civil war since the end of the Cold War stems from the relative consensus now evident in international politics and its particular manifestation in the United Nations Security Council. The internationalisation of civil wars is now conceived primarily as an impartial humanitarian pursuit through the UN rather than an aggressive and side-taking military strategy carried out on a bilateral basis. The main posture of international action in contemporary civil wars is thus one of third-partyism which seeks to engage between warring parties rather than bilateralism which seeks to support one side or the other.
This new international humanitarian engagement with civil war happens in the middle of "live" wars as much as on the periphery of war. The new form of interventionism has raised four main operational challenges for international society: the art of mid-war operations; the need to protect civilian populations (who are now within reach) from violence; the management of military-humanitarian combinations in UN operations; and the focus on peace programming as a means of ending war.
After describing the operational characteristics of the new humanitarian era, the paper moves on to summarise the main interpretations offered for the motives behind contemporary humanitarian action. Such interpretations range from the very positive to the more cynical. On the positive side, some commentators see the new humanitarian era as part of an increasing recognition that war is unacceptable. More cynical interpretations think that powerful international politicians are using humanitarianism as fig leaf to cover obvious political neglect and an essential policy of the containment rather than resolution of violent conflict. More subtly, one view shows how humanitarianism is being increasingly co-opted by the dominant neo-liberal political agenda which now uses humanitarian assistance as part of a wider policy of state-repair which aims to produce liberal democracies from war-torn societies.
The next part of the paper attempts to summarise current theories about the nature of contemporary civil war. It contrasts so-called "barbarism theories" with more analytical theories which link civil wars to globalisation, political and economic survival, warlordism and the political construction and manipulation of ethnicity.
The end of the first part of the paper looks at the role of the international and national media in contemporary civil war. It notes how the traditional place of the international NGOs as the hero of conventional disaster narrative may now be less guaranteed. Instead, NGOs may all too easily become the scape goat of western news reporting and local war propaganda. Efforts will be needed to monitor and to counter such trends.
PART TWO: NGO PRACTICE IN CIVIL WAR
The second part of the paper identifies six main issues affecting humanitarian practice in today's wars, all of which are still largely unresolved.
The first is the problem of the negative effect of humanitarian aid in war and its potential for resourcing and escalating violence in a number of ways. This so-called "dark side" of humanitarianism is increasingly well documented by commentators and is in danger of casting a shadow over the "bright side" of humanitarian action which is in need of more careful and articulate analysis by NGOs.
The second issue concerns the crisis of theory which exists around the relationship between relief, development and peace in NGO programming today. While there was, until recently, a general consensus that all three components should make up an appropriate response to war, there are increasingly differing positions over how such three-way programming might be feasible and even if it is desirable in the first place. A trend towards humanitarian minimalism in the international response to civil war is therefore being put forward from British academic quarters in particular.
The third issue relates to the recent tension between what has been perceived as the humanitarian agenda in war and the human rights agenda. This reflects a crisis of values in contemporary humanitarianism - is it enough to save lives alone or should humanitarians also actively pursue a more broadly based human rights agenda around the protection of civilian populations? It is emphasised that the distinction between humanitarianism and human rights is being exaggerated. Humanitarianism in its full sense is a human rights position encompassing many social, economic, civil and political rights beyond the right to life itself. The onus on NGOs is thus to own this position and find ways of securing as many of humanitarianism's rights as possible - as laid down in international humanitarian law.
The fourth issue is about humanitarian positioning in war. Should NGOs be neutral, impartial or in solidarity with people affected by war? It is noted that most NGOs are aligning themselves with the notion of impartiality but, in doing so, are adopting an increasingly robust version of the principle which allows them the freedom to speak out and criticise the various warring parties and the international community. Such a position has obvious implications for the levels of immunity that any NGO can expect within a war.
The fifth issue is that of humanitarian regulation and accountability. While some progress is being made in this area, the need for NGOs to become more accountable to technical standards and to the stipulations of international humanitarian law is paramount. It is stressed that such accountability should also be highly visible and transparent, so exceeding the cosy self-regulation of a private club.
Finally, the last issue concerns the characteristics of today's humanitarian practitioner. To operate effectively within the international, regional and local politics of today's civil wars, it is emphasised that today's NGO workers must embody a combination of political sophistication, humanitarian principle and operational imagination.
The paper concludes with a view of how the shaping of international response to civil wars by the major powers will continue to be characterised by misunderstanding; selectivity; isolationism; unilateralism; fluctuating multi-lateralism and containment. All this will be governed by a shared policy which mixes a modicum of altruism with a lavish faith in liberal democracy as the best means of protection against war for states.
Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to try and present a concise view of the various debates surrounding international humanitarianism and its response to the civil wars and political emergencies of the 1990s. To this end, the paper will sketch out the main theories and interpretations of the emergencies themselves and the international response to them, noting the main policy and practice implications for NGOs. It will then explore the current issues which surround NGO relief and development practice in today's emergencies as well as some of the perennial "old chestnuts" which always dog humanitarianism in war and which are still alive and well today.
At the outset however, it should be emphasised that the debates and interpretations reviewed in this paper are essentially western and driven by commentators, practitioners and policy makers in Europe and North America - the intervenors and not the intervened. The international community's system of humanitarianism is still extremely hierarchical and this is reflected in the discourse which surrounds it. By far the most deafening part of humanitarian discourse is still that part of the conversation voiced by the international (and largely western) humanitarian system in discussion with itself. Comparatively little in-depth discourse by, about or between people who actually endure war permeates the barrage of this dominant institutional conversation. Alas, this paper is no exception.
PART ONE: THE NEW INTERNATIONALISATION OF CIVIL WAR
The great majority of commentators recognise that something new has come about in the international response to internal war and its attendant suffering since 1991. The new consensus within the United Nations and the evaporation of inevitable Cold War dynamics in civil wars has given rise to a new freedom of humanitarian action for the international community - the bulk of this freedom being exercised by the UN Security Council which has increasingly linked humanitarian concerns with its concerns for peace and security (Malone, 1997; Somavia, 1997). Civil wars are now internationalised in a way that is very different to their predecessors during the Cold War when they were internationalised as proxy wars between the two superpower blocs. Throughout the Cold War, a strongly divided international community applied Cold War logic to chose between competing sides in civil wars. In the current world order, the internationalisation of civil war is no longer a relatively simple matter of superpowers taking sides and international humanitarian agencies mopping up as and where they can. Instead, a more united international community has used the United Nations and international NGOs to represent its concern in the middle of wars.
The crisis surrounding the humanitarian internationalisation of contemporary civil wars is not therefore a crisis of bilateral politics but the politics of multi-lateral third-partyism. The international UN-framed responses of recent years have not sought to take one of two sides but to come between all sides in civil wars as a third party. The internationalisation of civil wars in the 1990s has thus moved largely from a war-making to a humanitarian and peace-making paradigm. Sadly, but not perhaps surprisingly, the latter has proved considerably more difficult to operate effectively than the former. As symptom of this, the phenomenon of civil war which was not previously described as "complex war" has now been described as "complex emergency". The increased complexity of today's civil wars does not, of course, refer to an increase in the difficulties of war for those who suffer them. For them, the horrors of war remain much the same as they always have been. Instead, this rather gratuitous and obscurantist term refers to the more taxing experience of the outsiders in the international community who seek to respond to such wars as essentially non-combatant, humanitarian and peace-promoting third-parties. The appalling atrocities of war and genocide in the 1990s have precedents in previous wars in this and other centuries. The great majority of the 20 million people who died in the Cold War did so as a result of political and military strategies similar to those deployed in today's wars(1). The aspect of today's emergencies which has much less of a precedent is thus the determination of such a large part of the international system to join together to some degree and intervene in so many civil wars in the name of peace and humanity - the so-called new interventionism (Mayall, 1996). Within this new interventionism, humanitarian intervention is no longer adequately understood in its former minimalist form as forcible international military intervention in the affairs of a state on humanitarian grounds. Instead, a much wider array of international actors (UN agencies, NGOs and new variants of UN forces) are all recognized as conducting humanitarian interventions in contemporary conflict with the use of force as an option in, but not a determinant of, a humanitarian intervention (Ramsbotham and Woodhouse, 1995).
International relief and development NGOs have emerged as organizations of choice in this new process. Alongside UN agencies and UN forces, they have become the main instruments of humanitarian policy. Already singled out by the neo-liberalism of the 1980s as primary motors for the creation of western-style civil society around the globe, NGOs have been developed still further (and developed themselves) as primary organizations in the international community's response to civil war in the 1990s (Duffield, 1994). Their pre-existing presence on the ground in many of the countries concerned, their self-mandating humanitarian missions, their willingness to take on often huge emergency grants from western donors and their readiness to act as sub-contractors to UNHCR, have seen them quickly (and voluntarily) inserted into the front line of the international community's response to civil war. In the process, their numbers and the volume of their aid has often obscured the more official international mandates and operations of the ICRC and UN agencies. This has frequently, and damagingly, given international humanitarianism an increasingly anarchic image as a movement seemingly driven more by the "humanitarian market" than by international humanitarian law (IHL), human rights law and the obligations these place on state and non-state actors in war (African Rights, 1994).
Operational Implications of the New Interventionism
The emergence of this new commitment, albeit to varying degrees, of humanitarian intervention in civil war by the international community has had a domino effect on the nature of relief and development operations in war. With international intervention of some form into the heart of ongoing civil wars like Somalia, Bosnia, Liberia, Rwanda and Zaire becoming increasingly common, four particular operational challenges have been knocked into play for NGOs, UN agencies, donors and UN military forces alike.
Mid-War Operations
The first is the principle of mid-war operations. With increasing international commitment to humanitarian action in the midst of war, UN agencies and international NGOs have found themselves pulled in from the periphery of war to much nearer its epicentre. No longer confined to refugee camps across borders from a war or to famine camps well behind the lines of a particular combatant, relief agencies are now required to operate mid-war much more than ever before. Their programming now typically sees them crossing lines of conflict, operating between them and becoming a target of violence themselves. Equally, relief programming has interacted with war economies and war politics in extremely volatile ways (see below).
Protection
The second operational challenge to arise spectacularly in recent years is the question of protection. Operating traditional humanitarian assistance programmes in the midst of war, relief agencies have been frequently and horrifyingly privy to the atrocities of war. As a result, most agencies have come face to face with the limits of humanitarian assistance and the (often greater) need for humanitarian protection for people in war (Roberts, 1996). In the heat of war, people's greatest threats are often those posed by outright violence, the destruction of their homes, rape, unfair detention, summary execution, organized and forcible displacement. Alongside such violence, people's protection is being further reduced by the erosion of asylum and the crisis of protection developing in the new refugee policy. As the international community increasingly favours repatriation to asylum, people's right to international refuge is increasingly under threat (Roberts, 1996 and Cairns 1997).
NGOs have seen at first hand how traditional relief commodities like food, medicine and temporary shelter can ameliorate suffering but do not pre-empt violence or protect against it. In short, relief agencies have observed in terrible proximity how humanitarian assistance meets some basic needs but does not restrain violence or right wrongs. This has led many to wonder how best they can affirm the protection inherent in true humanitarianism, so assuring that the political and civil rights enshrined in international humanitarian law (IHL) can also be guaranteed in today's civil wars. The minimalist, commodity-based humanitarianism which predominated during the Cold War is no longer acceptable to most relief agencies. Protection is now paramount alongside assistance, even above it on occasion, in a more rounded full humanitarianism which is rightly being pursued, if not actually realised, by many NGOs (Cairns, 1997, MSF 1997). The problem of how to implement humanitarian protection remains tragically elusive. Three main strategies have been tried to date: advocacy, force and law. Many NGOs have tried to go on an advocacy offensive against the excessive violence of today's wars hoping that by exposing it they may chasten and restrain it. Equally, many have despaired of words and called for the use of UN armed force to ensure protection in Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Zaire. Finally, NGOs like Oxfam are campaigning (along with the British Government) for legal redress of such violence through a permanent international war crimes tribunal (Cairns, 1997, British Government, 1997).
Military-Humanitarian Combinations
Calls for force in the name of humanitarian protection have combined with the need of the relief system to protect itself to produce the third main operational development in contemporary conflict - the pursuance of military-humanitarian combinations in the international response to civil war. Protection issues (of people and relief) have led the international community to apply UN forces alongside international humanitarianism. The rise of the new UN peacekeeping means that UN militarism is probably here to stay as an integral, if variable, part of international response (Roberts, 1996). But even before UN militarism was reborn in the Kurdish operation, international relief agencies had militarised themselves in Somalia and continue to do so in Northern Iraq. If relief agencies continue to operate mid-war, then some form of accommodation between militarism and humanitarianism (arms and alms) seems inevitable. The debate looks more likely to be over procedure rather than principle (Dobbie 1997; Slim, 1996; Mackinlay 1996).
The other area in which military-humanitarian combinations have emerged more forcefully (and seem set to do so in future) is in relief logistics. The phenomenal scale of flight and destitution which sudden massive violence can set in motion (Iraq 1991, Rwanda 1994, Zaire 1996) or the protraction of a vicious siege (Sarajevo) or inaccessibility of militarised terrain (Somalia) will presumably mean that the military stand-by arrangements set up by the UN relief system will continue and the strategic lift capability of the US army in particular will remain significant in occasional humanitarian operations. In all of these military-humanitarian combinations, NGOs will need to have an understanding of their differences with militarism and devise ways of safeguarding them.
Peace Programming
The fourth new operational challenge posed by the new interventionism and the humanitarian internationalisation of civil war is that of peace programming. Operating in the midst of wars, UN and NGO relief agencies have also been faced with war as the immediate cause, if not the root cause, of suffering and impoverishment. The need for peace as a pre-requisite of human rights, justice and development has thus inevitably led NGOs in particular to put peace at the centre of their programming concerns. For a relief and development community which is only just coming to terms with notions of gender and environment as central to all their work, the addition of peace-building as a new cross-cutting and programme-wide theme in their strategic planning is posing a huge challenge. Few agencies yet know how to do things "peace-fully" in the way that they are beginning to understand how to do things environmentally or gender sensitively. For many NGOs with mandates which reach beyond humanitarianism, what might be called the "peace-ability" of their programming in the coming years will be one of the acid tests of their role in war.
Interpretations of the New Humanitarian Era
The emergence of third-party UN-led humanitarianism at the forefront of international policy responding to civil war in the last six years has been greeted by commentators with a variety of theories. Some of these look with great optimism on the new international action and its emphasis on humanity (Keegan, 1993). Others are more pessimistic about the elevation of humanitarianism and treat it with suspicion, seeing behind it a somewhat cynical abuse of humanitarianism by an essentially disinterested great power realpolitik (Oxfam 1996; MSF 1996; Prendergast 1997). Somewhere in the middle, a more subtle view has emerged which combines highly localised and highly globalised accounts of the significance of civil war and the international humanitarianism which it attracts (Duffield 1997a and b). This view describes the emerging global system coalescing with simultaneous interest and disinterest around contemporary political crisis and civil wars in peripheral parts of the global system. This middle view - although the most challenging to understand - is probably closest to the truth.
The most optimistic interpretation of the political ascendancy of humanitarianism is made by those who link its new pre-eminence into an end-of-war theory and theories of post-military society. Often formed from an essentially Eurocentric viewpoint, such interpretations see the increase of humanitarian intervention and concern as signs of international society moving beyond war. Arguing that warfare is becoming increasingly unacceptable and obsolete as a political means, such theories point to the use of force in humanitarian interventions as signals of a new idealism in humankind's use of war. This view argues that the fact that wars in places like Somalia can have no real political interest to great powers must indicate that recent UN military-humanitarian operations are part of an attempt to restrain and eradicate war per se rather than to wage war for specific material gain. Thus John Keegan writes of such operations that their "effort at peace-making is motivated not by calculation of political interest but by repulsion at the spectacle of what war does" (Keegan, 1993, p58). For Keegan and others, the international community's new emphasis on humanitarian action is part of a deeper and increasing objection to war itself.
In contrast, pessimistic interpretations of the new era take completely the opposite view. They broadly share Keegan's analysis of the major powers' strategic disinterest of many civil wars but draw a radically different conclusion about their subsequent emphasis on humanitarianism. They argue that it is precisely because the great powers which dominate UN policy have no strategic interest in most of today's civil wars that they choose to intervene with an essentially "humanitarian only" response to such political crises. Thus, while the international community looks very busy in terms of humanitarian aid, it is essentially absent in terms of political commitment and concern for human rights. This interpretation of new world order international humanitarianism might be described as the feigned engagement theory. It argues that humanitarianism is over-emphasised in current international action at the expense of concerted political engagement. Such a view lies behind the "partial solution" critique (Oxfam, 1997a) and the substitutionary critique which claims that the international community is abusing humanitarianism as a substitute for political action (Prendergast, 1997). Most poetically, this interpretation has been termed the "fig leaf theory" of international action by MSF (1993) - the idea being that the fig leaf of humanitarianism is worn by the international community to cover up a real political strategy of naked neglect.
A theory of poverty containment often underlies this pessimistic interpretation which sees Security Council led international humanitarianism as no more than a cover for political disinterest and feigned engagement. Building on theories of the failure of development, an increasing number of NGOs and commentators are now seeing the rise of international humanitarianism as little more than the shift from development to welfarism in international policy. With the world evermore dramatically divided into "have" and "have not" economic areas and groups within national and international society, many commentators argue that, having given up on universal development, international policy sees humanitarianism as having an ever greater part to play in the containment of poverty and discontent.
The most intricate current interpretation of the international community's new concern with humanitarianism is that made by Mark Duffield (1997 a and b). It hinges on a particular understanding of globalisation and the responses it attracts at the local (national and sub-national) level and the global (inter-state and supra-national) level. Duffield's interpretation argues for a post-modern understanding of the violent conflict which determines complex emergencies (see below) and the international response to them. His understanding of globalisation leads to a view of the global system which is essentially beyond the control of states and prone to certain "tendencies" which can pull it in particular and often contradictory directions. Within this system Duffield describes the recently triumphant project of western liberal democracy attempting to replicate itself around the poorer, war-prone parts of the world while fundamentally failing to understand the political and economic implications of globalisation and misconceiving the nature of violent conflict in "the south". He argues that humanitarian assistance has become increasingly identified with ideas of state repair and the cultivation of pluralistic civil society. He is thus particularly concerned that development has become narrowed down to the project of "transition" into liberal democracy. Humanitarian assistance, increasingly framed as developmental relief, has simply become a part of this minimal, transition-based idea of development. More significantly still, he argues that humanitarian assistance has lost its unconditional and universal value and, like development aid, has become conditional as an upstream part of the wider conditional aid package now offered by western liberal democracies to those who would emulate them.
Thus, Duffield's essential critique of humanitarian assistance today is that it has become co-opted by a liberal democracy project which seeks to apply it to rapidly changing political societies in the hope that it will help them to become liberal democratic states. Simultaneously, however, he demonstrates how liberal democratic powers in globalisation have not realised that the war and violence in these same societies is itself a sign of the fact that they are becoming something very different to conventional states. Showing the irrelevance of medical and evolutionary theories to describe civil wars, Duffield redefines the crisis of states very differently to the diagnosis made by liberal democracy. He argues that their violent condition is not that of a sick state in need of healing and capable of recovery, but that of a transforming society adapting to marginalisation and impoverishment in innovative but exceedingly brutal non-state ways. These societies, for whom classical notions of borders and government are increasingly irrelevant, are therefore transitioning fast but not towards liberal democracy. To treat them as if they are is mis-diagnosis and mis-treatment of a most fundamental nature.
Duffield's thesis thus observes how humanitarian assistance has now become a conditional and selective part of the western world's mis-engagement with the real tragedy of the marginalisation of many parts of "the South". Such an interpretation reveals that the most striking aspect of the humanitarian relationship between "north" and "south" is its complete dissonance: the formal, state-centred response of the international community being so singularly out of harmony with the national or sub-national, non-state or post-state formations and their grey economies. It is an atonality one would expect from two such very different hymn sheets - a cacophony, as Duffield has pointed out elsewhere, which is as chilling as the symphony of the damned (Duffield 1996).
Interpretations of Contemporary War
If international humanitarianism is subject to varying shades of interpretation, so too is the war and violence to which it aims to respond. Whitman has observed how all emergencies are "constructs as well as palpable human tragedies" (Whitman, 1996). How one understands the violence and war behind a humanitarian crisis determines the way one responds to it. As has been noted, "complex emergencies" are so-called primarily because they present complicated interventionist choices for the international community. But the wars that cause them may also be more complex than those of the Cold War period and is open to different interpretation. Although the atrocities and suffering they produce are not unprecedented, the driving forces of these wars and their political end games may indeed be very different from the wars of ideology and self-determination in the Cold War period. The last few years have seen a significant re-examination of war theory in which the conventional concentration of theorising around war between states and nuclear war is gradually giving ground to the need to understand apparently new forms of civil war and communal violent conflict. In such efforts, there is a tension between those who seek general theories for conflict and those who prefer to find particular explanations for a given conflict. Such particular analysis of every war is seen as essential to avoid an overly simplistic general analysis of all wars.
Barbaric or Rational?
Two notoriously generalised theories of contemporary and future war have been put forward in the nineties. The first, which stereotyped all contemporary civil wars as totally anarchic, was proposed by Robert Kaplan in his idea of encroaching anarchy (Kaplan 1994). The second is Samuel Huntington's (1997) theory, with its natural disaster metaphor, which suggests that all future wars are set to occur along a "fault line" between Judeo-christian and Islamic cultures. In contrast to these general theories, anthropologists and political economists have been careful to analyse different wars and their particular violence at the local level and identified distinct cultural, economic and political phenomena within them (Keen, Richards, Duffield, de Waal and Vayrynen). Nevertheless, these particular explanations of particular wars, grounded in political-economy and anthropological enquiry, do all share a common idea of the logic, rationale and function of war for political groups, whether that logic is rooted in economics, political power or a culture of violence and its ritual. The work of Keen, De Waal, Duffield and Richards has deliberately set out to challenge and debunk spectacular general theories. Richards' work on Sierra Leone is a particular counterpoint to Kaplan's reading of the country and of his general ideas about contemporary civil war for which Richards coined the term the "new Barbarism thesis" or "Malthus-with-guns" theory(2) (Richards, 1996, pxiii and xiv).
Protracted Social Conflict
Despite the increasing influence of the new and essentially functional understanding of civil war, the more traditional conflict resolution and peace studies theory surrounding protracted social conflict still makes a useful contribution to analysis of the causes and patterns of war with its emphasis on structural violence and distorted relationships (Ramsbotham and Wodehouse, 1995, chapter 2). These basic models and assumptions still continue to underlie the practice of most current attempts at conflict resolution and peace-building efforts by NGOs, although they are now increasingly under fire by those who think that simple attempts to change behaviour and relationships are woefully inadequate and misconceived when dealing with today's political violence and war (Duffield 1997b, Voutira and Brown, 1995). Also important in recent theorising about civil war is the contribution of gender theory. Initially focused on the particular experience of women in war (Lentin, 1997, el Bushra and Lopez 1993), gender theory has more recently moved beyond a tendency to concentrate on women and war and begun to address the subject of masculinity and war (Sweetman, 1997). In doing so, it has recognized that the causes of much contemporary war may flow from a crisis and distortion of masculinity, but that men also suffer from war and can also be understood as its victims. Similarly, research by African Rights and others have highlighted the role women play in shaping war efforts, supporting and ennobling warrior culture and even perpetrating violence themselves (African Rights, 1996).
Identity and Ethnicity
Running alongside and between these theories of new barbarism, cultural fault-lines, protracted social conflict, gender, and the political and economic rationale of post-modern conflict, there also exists a large body of theory devoted to the idea that identity is the critical determinant of contemporary civil war. Theories of identity conflict have perhaps become the most popular of conflict theories in the 1990s with the potentially sinister notion of ethnicity as their catchphrase. The notion can be sinister because it represents the vocabulary of the violent in whose interests it is to shape differences between people and manipulate their "ethnicity". Yet, at the same time, the word ethnic has also become an acceptable, even politically correct way, to talk about tribalism and hatred. In such popular discourse and in the unreflecting words of the non-specialist, the notion of ethnicity is thus frequently a coded form of racism which tacitly accepts the distinctions drawn between people in any given conflict. Its indiscriminate use has, albeit perhaps inadvertently, fostered a view that ethnicity in itself exists and is an inevitable and ultimately irrational and unstoppable cause of war. This is a pernicious doctrine and one all too easily seized upon by evil leaders. As Johan Galtung has observed, in political discourse the language of ethnicity is usually the language of fascism (Galtung). This means that any theory of identity conflict which relies on the notion of ethnicity treads a dangerous path, prone to accommodating the racism of the conflict it seeks to analyse. Perhaps the most responsible way to talk about ethnicity in war is as "politicised ethnicity" - a phrase which recognizes that ethnicity is manipulated and to some degree constructed by the politics of war (Turton, 1997).
Failed State Theory
Somewhere over and above all these approaches lies the conventional view of western politicians that most civil wars are the result of a "failed state". As the view most commonly held by western governments and the UN system, this very statist approach to war still assumes that flourishing states can prevent war and that the recreation of such states will end war. Such an approach has been at the heart of UN policy in the 1990s (Boutros Ghali, 1992). However, the work of Duffield and others has challenged the idea that the state itself is both the problem and the solution of war (Duffield, 1997b, chapter 2). Instead, Duffield argues that globalisation, and the need for rulers to survive it, is the problem which creates war and which sees them engaged in the creation of brutal but "innovative" non-state political formations and parallel illegal economies which guarantee them the power of a state without the bureaucracy and institutions which typically disperse power and weaken states. The analysis of Duffield and others of "warlordism" with its minimal command apparatus, its reliance on force and atrocity and its lucrative links with international business is a case in point of what Duffield calls the "post-modern transformation" underway in many parts of Africa. Rather than states which have somehow decayed into failure and general malaise, Duffield and others argue that such states have been deliberately destroyed in a process designed to dismantle state structure and supersede it. The outcome of such a process is now frequently described by western observers in metaphors drawn from medieval Europe like "the new feudalism". Such tactics are not confined to non-state warlords. Many state-actors increasingly adopt warlordism while retaining the outward appearance of statism.
The Dominant View of Today's Violence
At present, therefore, theories of "ethnic conflict" or classical ideas of "failed states" may persist as the most popular and dominant theories around today's civil wars. However, an ever increasing body of theory is now gaining ground around notions of "post-modern conflict" and its logic, rationality and ritual as a form of lucrative and politically powerful adaptation to, or protest at, the marginalisation of particular social groups to the process of globalisation (Duffield 1997b, Turton 1997, Richards 1996).
The Media and Emergencies
The international and national media plays a crucial part in war, with the former shaping international response to war and the latter influencing local behaviour within the war. NGOs can expect the international media to continue to operate as they have done throughout the 1990s with continuing selectivity, the increasing role of the "celebrity reporter" at the expense of the country specialist, and an increasing volume of real-time news. However, NGOs should be prepared for one traditional aspect of disaster media coverage to change - the script itself. The conventional disaster narrative relayed by the western media usually portrays the western NGO as something of a hero (Benthall, 1993). But with increasing awareness of the ambiguity of relief in war, NGOs should be prepared for the traditional story to flip on occasion and cover them as the "bad guys" - at best naive meddlers, at worst negligent professionals.
At national and sub-national level, NGOs need to be well aware of the use of the media as a weapon of war - a process all too evident in Rwanda and Serbia. NGOs must therefore make it a priority to monitor and be aware of the tone of local broadcasts and press comment as they cover the international aid effort and its various players. Within this script too, NGOs may easily be cast as the bad guys and such broadcasts will seriously affect the way they are perceived and treated within the war. In many situations, NGOs might usefully consider entering the information space with media contributions of their own. Such humanitarian or peace broadcasting has developed significantly in recent years in countries like Afghanistan and may well be a strategic area for NGOs (Slim, 1995).
PART TWO: THEORIES OF NGO PRACTICE IN WAR
If the above sections summarise current theorising and understandings of the so-called external environment affecting NGO operations in complex emergencies, this final section relates to matters concerning NGO engagement with that environment - the process of practice. In doing so, it seeks to identify the fundamental questions facing NGO relief and development practice in civil war rather than the detail of programming itself.
The Challenge of the Dark Side of Relief in War
At the point where humanitarianism and war meet in today's civil wars, the ambiguity of relief has been keenly observed in the last few years by almost every commentator (see for example, Keen and Wilson 1994 and Anderson 1996). In general, their observations concern the negative effect of relief in war. Most commentators have noted how, directly or indirectly, relief can affect the violence around it in the following ways:
This dark side remains the fundamental problem of the humanitarian project. It is not new but perennial to humanitarianism but is perhaps being better scrutinised than ever before.
At the end of the day, the balance between the positive and negative effects of aid in war must be the true test of any intervention. Neither effect is consistently easy to quantify. However, more academic attention is being paid to the negative effects at present and it would seem somewhat urgent for NGOs to be able to assess and advocate the positive effects more clearly in the years ahead. Such assessment of the "bright side" of humanitarianism must move beyond traditional quantitative indications of output (food and blankets given etc) to a more subtle analysis of impact and outcome which can stand up to the increasingly rigorous analysis of the dark side of relief in war.
A Crisis in the Theory of Emergency Practice
Another significant point to note in any analysis of NGO practice in protracted war is that such practice is currently characterised by a crisis in the theory which would normally guide it. This crisis of theory is usually located in agonising over the so-called relief-development continuum - a debate which might be better described as the relief-development conundrum. This crisis of theory does not simply exist in the attempt to understand the relationship between relief and development, but also between relief, development and peace. For the search is now also on for a way of harnessing peace to all relief and development programmes in war. The ideal of absolute good practice in war which currently mesmerises as much as it eludes most agencies would represent a form of programming where relief, development and peace overlap. Here in such three-way programming, if only it could be found, would NGO practice find bliss.
However, although NGOs have a sense of where they want to be, they have very few theoretical guides on how to get there. The few that do exist have been put together by Mary Anderson under the "Do No Harm" principle and based on the development of "local capacities for peace" (Anderson, 1996). Paul Richards has also introduced the idea of "smart relief" which shifts the emphasis "away from relief in bulk items and more towards knowledge intensive assistance" which develops cross-conflict trade and the delivery of small multiplier aid like seed, expertise and peace orientated broadcasting (Richards, 1996, p157). The arrival of the term "peace-building" in relief and development speak is also symbol of this search for some new theory of practice. Yet, just as these new ideas and their guides are gaining ground, the pendulum has begun to swing back the other way. Several commentators are now saying that developmental-relief is probably politically inappropriate in most protracted war and runs the risk of capacity-building rival warring parties rather than sustaining suffering populations (Macrae et al 1997). Thus a return to some kind of humanitarian minimalism looks set to emerge in some quarters.
With such revisionism on the horizon, NGOs are left wondering how to apply all the sound practice of developmental relief which they learned through natural disaster theory and are left to conclude, quite rightly, that war is not a disaster in the way that natural disaster theory understands the term (Duffield, 1994). The state of play in the crisis of theory at present can therefore be caricatured as torn between can-do enthusiasm on the one hand and dour scepticism on the other. Anderson and others argue that we can do it all (relief, development and peace) but that we must do it carefully. Macrae et al suggest that development activism in war should be restrained by rule-based relief guided by the classical humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality. Going further still, Duffield would argue that developmental-relief with its emphasis on institution-building and civil society is in fact little more than the beginnings of the export of liberal democracy to war-torn societies and the implementation of the political and economic policy of "transition". Such a process is therefore an abdication of real universal humanitarianism (Duffield, 1997b).
A Crisis of Values
Underneath the crisis of theory in NGO practice in war, there lies a perhaps more fundamental crisis of values. Usually manifest in the apparent clash between humanitarianism and human rights, this problem of values is essentially that of feeling forced to chose between responding to the right to life or the right to justice and the broader values of civil and political rights. This tension is essentially the healthy frustration which comes from realising that saving life is not enough when wider human rights abuses endanger that life in the first place and continue unabated with, without or even because of humanitarian relief. Such a tension in values is perennial to the humanitarian project and is expressed in the twofold concern of humanitarianism with assistance and protection. Striking a balance between the two is at once the art and the agony of true humanitarianism (Slim, 1997b).
However, the conflict between assistance and protection is in danger of becoming unhealthy as it is fought out institutionally between humanitarian agencies on the one hand and human rights agencies on the other - or even between relief and development departments within the same NGO. The conflict is leading to caricature because the real distinctions are not that great. What all organizations need to strive for is a "full humanitarianism", not a heretical variant which over-emphasises assistance or protection at the expense of one another (Slim, 1997b). Humanitarianism is a human rights position which, under international humanitarian law, seeks to ensure rights well beyond the physical right to life. In a war, people do often need food and protection, but while a certain form of relief food delivery is now well honed, the delivery of protection is still extremely problematic. Nevertheless, ending the false distinction between assistance and protection (relief and rights) within NGO practice must be one of the great challenges of the next few years. While there are difficult choices to be made in balancing them in practice, there is no contest between them as values. They are both integral to a full understanding of humanitarianism. To reach a greater understanding of this point, it is increasingly important that NGOs read, reflect upon and develop the principles of international humanitarian law in their work in war and also form alliances of various kinds with appropriate human rights organizations.
Humanitarian Positioning in War
Another important area of debate in NGO practice in war is that of organizational positioning. How should NGOs position themselves in relation to the various combatants within the civil wars in which they choose to intervene? Where should they stand in other people's wars? Here lies the debate about neutrality, impartiality and solidarity (Slim 1997, Levine 1997, African Rights, 1994). NGOs need to think hard about these terms, all of which are legitimate and important positions which merit possible adoption in war. The implications of each position are significant, not least in the way they relate to the levels of immunity from war which the agency can reasonably expect.
In their choice of position, more and more NGOs and UN forces are adopting a robust form of impartiality which allows them not just to dish out relief in proportion to needs, but also to dish out criticism (advocacy) or military bombardment in proportion to human rights wrong doing. This hardened impartiality may be the NGO posture of choice in the future, but it will have operational implications and no doubt be met by an equally hard response on occasion.
Accountability and Regulation
Each NGO, and all NGOs together, must continue to get their humanitarian house in order and be accountable in terms of international humanitarian law, human rights law and quality of service to those they seek to help and those whose money they spend in doing so. Programming standards are a part of this but by no means the whole picture. Humanitarian programmes must be judged on their legal fit with IHL, their social and economic impact as well as on their technical competence. Like justice, it is important that accountability is not just done but also seen to be done. Thus the process of regulation needs to be transparent and public. But regulation must also be carried out in such a way as to increase rather than undermine NGO credibility. The very process of regulation and policing of an industry can cast suspicion on it - the assumption in the public mind that there can be no regulatory smoke without operational fire. The transparency and repute of accountability procedures and regulatory bodies must therefore be beyond doubt. In this respect, a clubish type of self-regulation is unlikely to set the right tone - tending more to a suspicion of whitewash than a sense of impartial enquiry. Some form of independent regulation, perhaps linked to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, would be preferable but a more self-regulatory option around agreed standards and principles is more likely to emerge.
The Humanitarian Practitioner
All NGOs are made up of people - their staff. Academics like to refer to such people as "practitioners" because they actually try to practice what academics merely contemplate. As a collection of people, an NGO's effectiveness in responding to the suffering of civil wars is heavily dependent on the quality of its people. To operate effectively within the international, regional and local politics of today's civil wars, NGO workers must embody a combination of political sophistication, humanitarian principle and operational imagination (Slim, 1995). Unless they have adopted a position of solidarity, they must be non-political, but must always have a detailed political analysis which informs their work. They must know and respect international humanitarian law, always being guided by it in their work. They must have an understanding of conflict and of the role of third-parties within it. They must be creative in their practical support of civilian populations and work with them in the design and provision of such support. They must have an approach which works with people and thinks as much longterm as short-term. They need to be excellent negotiators, well able to articulate and embody their position to all parties. They must also be ethical in their work and able to make considered moral judgements when the precepts of law are cast aside around them (Slim, 1997a). And, finally, they must be courageous. They will need great personal resources to endure the suffering around them, the risk to themselves and the constraints placed on their work.
Conclusions
Whatever one's interpretation of the new humanitarian era, it would still be a safe bet to assume that the realpolitik of international humanitarian policy in the future will be influenced by six main positions taken by its most powerful member states.
In the years ahead, therefore, despite the new consensus and effective working relationship at the UN Security Council, the shaping and implementation of international political and humanitarian policy will continue to be constrained and compromised. To different degrees and at different times, powerful members of the international community will misunderstand civil wars, avoid them, intervene in them primarily on their own or in limited concert with others. And if such positions characterise the nature of their actions, the intentions behind such actions might be expected to be of three main kinds: altruism; neo-liberalism and containment. Any altruism will always be mixed with, and seriously diluted by, political interest which will be of an essentially neo-liberal hue. Aid policy will essentially drive towards the transformation of war-torn societies into liberal democracies in the belief that such societies are less prone to war and make more lucrative trading partners.
For their part, NGOs will have to continue to grapple with the perennial risks of the humanitarian project in war (its dark side and its positioning) as well as with problems about its appropriate limits in practice (the relief-development-peace debate). In doing so, they will have to juggle such problems of practice with the continuing likelihood that they will remain the organization of choice for international intervention in civil war - a dubious privilege.
HUGO SLIM
19 December 1997
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Notes:
1. The Rwandan genocide has been distinguished as unprecedented in its popular mobilisation and implementation. Similarly, the sharp rise in and brutalization of child soldiers may also be seen as unprecedented, but child soldiers have their precedents in Uganda in the 1980s and in Pol Pot's Cambodia.
2. Thomas Malthus was the 18th century English social theorist whose Essay on Populations (1798) put forward the "principle of population" which stated that there is a natural tendency for human population to grow exponentially beyond the means of natural resources to sustain it, so making famine and epidemic inevitable. Malthusians-with-guns would argue that this mismatch between population and resources also makes war inevitable.