Student Journal

International Studies Journal

Taken from course: INST 28510, Winter 2011, "NGOs and Humanitarian Subjects: Politics of Humanitarian Intervention"

Links to individual entries are below

INTRODUCTION

Emergencies are both exceptional and habitual—they take place someplace all the time—both a sudden and insistent claim on our affective capacities and routinized as backdrop images and headlines to our own daily exigencies. In the Winter quarter of 2011 a group of us thought about humanitarian emergencies and relief response by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) within the framework of a class offered by the International Studies Program and cross-listed with Anthropology. The class entitled “NGOs and Humanitarian Subjects: Politics of Humanitarian Intervention” explored the nature of humanitarianism along two vectors in particular: the politics that intervention engenders and the experience of people who are interpellated in the position of humanitarian subjects. In the process, we broadened our understanding of politics with interdisciplinary insights from political science, anthropology, philosophy, and history. We also groped for something as elusive as the experience of people receiving humanitarian attention as well as the experience of “us,” global witnesses, on whose compassion, political mobilization, and funds NGOs—and their counterparts, UN, donors, and media—count.

To this aim, we exercised ethnographic sensibilities, reading for visceral, cultural, and schooled feelings and actions, as well as reading for the spatiotemporal and experiential details that make up the lives of people in emergencies. To put it simply, we paid attention to the spaces of displacement and settlement: how do refugee camps look like, for instance? We investigated lived time: how are the daily routines, from washing to eating to shopping, organized in displacement? What do the displaced people remember, what futures do they envision, how do they spend their time? We wondered about pain and pleasure, about urban landscapes and art-making, about threats and jokes, about overtly political commentary, in a besieged city of Sarajevo or the “safe-area” in Gorazde in the 1990s Bosnian war. We also examined the political passions and uncertainties of local people in Darfur, as well as their rebel leaders, in the midst of peace negotiations in 2006. Our ethnographic readings used variety of genres: from poetry to NGO reports, from art commissioned by NGOs to graphic novel and public art.

As a part of the class requirements, the students were putting together their own research projects. The aim was to use the class texts as lenses to bring to some specific humanitarian site or issue and to find there insights to bring back to our class themes and theories. When in the fourth week the students rehearsed their project proposals for each other, it became clear that the projects were so thoughtful and compelling that we ought to join them and share them. Hence this online publication.

The papers which I invite you to read share many ties of kinship, some of which I will attempt to trace here.

Mendelsohn and Wells-Qu write very poetic essays on art forms—installations, posters, photography in post-war Bosnia and poetry of Argentine Las Madres de la Playa del Mayo, respectively—and thoroughly involve the reader in the experience of images, even as they invite reflection on the critical and political potential of art. Mendelsohn poses a teeming multitude of questions surrounding and raised by the contemporary Bosnian art and then beautifully and skillfully threads her narrative back and forth from art pieces to artists, from war memories to daunting challenges of peace. She takes up philosophical imagination of Jean-Luc Nancy to wonder whether art can give rise to a community, and from where would such community come? In the process of writing such coming community, Mendelsohn’s writing moves, opens our appetites to search the images and search for the political potential in the image making. Sommadossi approaches the art of filmmaking with a different, far more critical disposition and her attention delivers a powerful reading of the ways in which cinematographic imagination takes part in the construction of the ideas of humanitarian subjects and ideals of humanitarianism. Drawing on local and foreign films made on Bosnian war, she proposes that movies craft alternative forms of being humanitarian, forms which, I might add to amplify an implicit point in her text, are unsettling inasmuch as they exalt minimal acts of witnessing or intervening, and thus reduce the historical failures of intervention in Bosnia into hopeful and heroic singular events.

Dillard and Cordeman both find humanitarian emergencies at unlikely places: in the United States prison system and in the post-hurricane New Orleans. With notable similarities, their papers demonstrate how humanitarian response stumbles upon categories and agencies that jar against the conventional understanding of victimhood and on which understanding humanitarian hinges: namely of prisoners and looters. Rizvi examines another categorial confusion in the established field of humanitarianism; this time of humanitarian agents in Pakistan, a regional NGO, with the international history of allegations of terrorism. The Pakistani NGO relief agents whom local people term “angels,” are not the sole examples of the conflation between military, political ideology, and humanitarianism but rather a case of a broader trend that disconcertingly interlocks military and humanitarian objectives and means. Yu’s paper is also located in Pakistan but turns our attention to the challenges facing the humanitarian relief community, that turns out is deeply divided over the issues of how to maintain their presence and respond effectively in the country where Western presence is compromised by the military engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the most contested issues, perhaps surprisingly, is that of “branding”: the advertisement of the aid’s provenance—USAID (US Agency for International Development)—with the stickers whose display on items or vehicles, required by this powerful donor, is placing NGO workers at added risk of being identified as American, and hence possibly targeted or at least denied easy access.

While both Rizvi and Yu point to humanitarian negligence in case of Pakistan, Tong investigates the conditions of possibility for affective responses to the emergencies, and more specifically wonders whether affective can be achieved at all without a prior effective campaign that renders people thinkable as proper humanitarian subject, within the slippery sphere of public opinion and public culture and the realm of formal policy making and international relations. Shifting sites with the paper by Tench, we can appreciate the singular importance that subject-making has for the NGOs: far from simply rehearsing the well-known argument ventured by Michelle Foucault that power works through production of subjects, Tench looks at the conflict between Chinese state and international NGOs over the ideals and pedagogies that turn China’s migrant workers, the so-called “floating population,” into citizens. Ahmat’s paper, makes the point about the humanitarian subject-position travel to Malaysia where she describes the government’s paradoxical treatment of Aceh refugees: as welcome if they were fleeing Tsunami and unwelcomed if they fled the regional violence. She unpacks the national rhetoric of sympathy with the Aceh victims, rooted in the shared culture, to show that sympathies stop at the level of politically implicated humanitarian subject. Finally, looking at the example of Mumbai slums Krishnan shows how an NGO deeply devoted to improving the dwellers’ lives inadvertently operates as the government’s counterpart in the project to free the city of slums. The NGOs’ good intentions discourage the overtly political mobilization of slum dwellers and in effect become anti-political, to rehearse the famous charge that James Ferguson (1994) issued against development NGOs.

Investigation of the meaning of political underwrites this class. If some texts come across as weary of defining politics or referring vaguely to biopolitics, multitude, or politics of affect, this is because our reading across political theories has been rather ambitious. Reluctance and weariness can be here taken as a testimony to our collective troubling of the realist, narrow treatment of politics as having to do with states, statesman, and exercise of or struggle over institutional power. Nevertheless, many authors here daringly take on the problem of the political: Lurie, in a thought experiment about a role for a specifically political humanitarian NGO and Inal in an account of refugees’ experiment at starting a newspaper in a camp in Kenya. Revisiting the long-standing distinction between humanitarian and political, the distinction that rarely holds in the practice, Lurie wonders whether there could be a role for an NGO devoted to addressing the political aspect of any humanitarian crisis: from briefing the humanitarians on the local political complexities to figuring out the micropolitical dynamics of a refugee settlement to enabling the conversation between the parties at conflict and their mediators. One could imagine, to take Lurie’s offer further, a staff of political philosophers, activists of all ideological bents—from pacifists to revolutionaries, from feminists to socialists—and seasoned relief workers as well as former “humanitarian subjects” staffing the operations of this odd agency with all kinds of competing agendas but perhaps grouped around the common goal of thoroughly divesting humanitarian agents of any possibility or excuse of naïvete. Lurie has not yet started recruiting but we can only hope that this is a beginning of an ongoing bright thinking project. Inal pursues her long-standing interest in voice: finding, giving, granting, hearing a voice as an exercise of power and as a powerful experience constitutive of a subject, to examine issues of representation that the class examined on many occasions. She shares with us a genuine puzzle: why would refugees’ own print media cause so much anxiety to the humanitarians, UN and NGOs, administering the camp? Her answers bring to the fore the stakes of humanitarian biopolitics.

Edds has also wondered about representation and has conducted a thorough investigation of tactics and politics of representation at work in BBC and New York Times. Looking at their coverage of Darfur crises over the period of five months she finds the two venues to have divergent approaches to depiction of conflict, such as for instance the usage or avoidance of terms “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide,” and challenges the dominant assumptions that media works exclusively by affective means. Her study also raises a question worthwhile pursuing in further research: how do different politics of representation compare to the mobilization of the readership’s sentiments and funds? Poeter examines the politics of affect as they play out in a different context and to different effects. Poeter reads the political opportunity that the Argentine floods emergency afforded to the president Chavez, the opportunity which he puts to work most skillfully. The charismatic president is televised promising refugees ice-cream and inviting them to spend their displacement in the presidential palace and Poeters asks, what if this indulgent response works to alleviate the suffering and speed up the recovery, and what if the emergency bill that gives him unlimited powers in the course of the emergency sets a good example of wedding of populism and humanitarianism.
Garrido Sarda and O’Neal bring to the fore different kinds of populist political practice: that of NGOs and local activists whose engagement resonates with the promises and limitations explored under the concept of “transnational civil society” (Nash 2004). Garrido Sarda’s insights into the transnational relationship between Catalan activists and Sahrawi refugees, grants much longer a history to the phenomena that Pandolfi and Fassin (2010) describe as the cotemporary states of protracted emergency. Her essay adds an unusual item —“Vacation in Peace”—to the idiom of humanitarian response and reads in it some explicit political objectives. O’Neal’s essay examines the emergence of the so-called “Republic of NGOs” in post-earthquake Haiti and inspires us to wonder whether powerful international NGOs are acting like sovereignties rather than horizontal communities that Nash had in mind, while she also points to a different site of communitarian potential.

Two essays in the group evade most of the class categories but complement each other and the class discussions with attention to NGO counterparts and to the activism that is associated with transnational civil society, to which NGOs belong. Patrick Ip draws on first-hand observation and participation in the ongoing UN efforts to plan a reform and broaden its reach and appeal by including youth and recruiting forms of social media. Cruz on the other hand looks at the indigenous movements that fail to garner international attention for their grievances.

It is worth noting the broader historical moment within which the class took place. In the Winter of 2011, floods in Columbia that displaced more than 2 million people barely caught the global media limelight; floods in Venezuela with over 1 million internally displaced people received more media attention by the virtue of overtly political turn of disaster response by the charismatic president Hugo Chavez, about which Poeter writes in lucid detail; Cholera outbreak among the population affected by Haiti earthquake was being attended to in the midst of Haitian government and nongovernment relief workers’ mutual suspicions and accusations about the allocation of massive funds that Haiti appeal collected, the tangle that O’Neal investigates so well; thin aid response to Pakistan floods was strangely out of balance with the severity of the disaster, as Tong, Rizvi, and Yu critically demonstrate; Italy was receiving, “struggling with” as BBC put it, refugees from Tunisia, following the political upheavals. The list should go on to include protracted states of emergency in Afghanistan, Iraq, across African continent, and in post-conflict Balkans. The class ended as earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear plant meltdowns shook Japan. The list does no justice to the political, military, and humanitarian complexities of each and every crisis nor does it adequately gesture towards the suffering, and in face of it all, fighting, striving, preserving, dreaming, dreading, income-generating, pleasure-seeking, routine-making people whose lives are immediately upturned by the disasters and conflicts. However, the list is an abbreviated form, an effective reminder, of the perennial timeliness of a class on humanitarianism. Our collective thinking was most productive, not least of an impassioned, committed, and critical engagement with the projects and experiences of humanitarian aid despite the distances that separate the above listed places from our community here at the University of Chicago.