Is humanitarianism indefensible?

In January earlier this year, I was sitting in a bar in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A few days earlier, in the East of the country, the city of Goma had just been captured by Rwanda-sponsored M23 rebels, displacing the already displaced. In response, rioters in Kinshasa had set fire to the French, Rwandan, and Belgium embassies the day before, smoke rising into the sky and mixing with the few trees still remaining in the city. And a few days earlier still, the Trump administration had announced its near-total freeze on foreign aid.

This firestorm of crises was not surprising for the people I was drinking a few beers with. No briefing paper, no academic analysis, no forecasting tool was needed for Congolese citizens to know that this storm had long been brewing. There was little shock in Kinshasa. Instead, the conversation with my Congolese colleagues in that bar was a pragmatic one about the aid cuts specifically. Importantly though, nobody was that upset by them. A PhD student at a University in kinshasa put it simply:

This is a good thing. We need to be independent. We don’t want the foreigners here. People will die, but they are dying already.

This sentiment was a general one. Humanitarianism as a form of neoimperialism hollowing out the state imposed from Copenhagen, Geneva, New York – the metropole. After more than thirty years in the Congo, it had little to show for itself. And so this was not a nihilistic sentiment, but a realistic one. A professor who was sitting with us expanded on the argument. He did so by quoting yet adapting a passage from that great postcolonial theorist Aime Cesaire’s text Discourse on Colonialism, which includes the words that “Europe is indefensible.” The adaptation went something like the following:

Humanitarianism is Europe and so humanitarianism is indefensible.
That’s what strategists in Geneva or New York are worrying about. How can we defend our funding? Diversify our strategies for a world moving on without us?That in itself is not serious.
What is serious is that ‘Humanitarianism’ is morally, spiritually indefensible.
And today the indictment is brought against it not by the European masses alone, but on a world scale, by tens and tens of millions of men who, from the depths of slavery, set themselves up as judges.¹Text adapted from Aimé Césaire. (2001). Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press: New York, 32.

Humanitarianism is indefensible. This discourse on humanitarianism – that it has failed, that it is a fraud, that its dreams of compassion across borders are naïve, even dead – has murmured in the background for many decades now. Yet, today, those murmurs have become screams. As genocides are livestreamed, late capitalist predation consumes what humanity could be found in the world, and Europe and North America retreat into their atavistic pasts, the question of whether a future for humanitarianism exists is now urgent.

Why are we here?

How did humanitarianism become indefensible? Why is it in this place? How are we failing? There are many reasons. But let me briefly articulate three. Three ways in which our responses are not falling short in terms of the number of people in need who are reached or not reached, but in terms of humanitarianism’s moral, spiritual, and political resonance for those on the ground. In terms of their belief or faith in humanitarianism.

Alienation (from beneficiaries)

Alienation from ‘beneficiaries’ – whomever they may be. This is the easiest to articulate, as it is the oldest of the problems always faced by international humanitarian organizations. We are too distant from the worlds we purport to help. We are too alien. Incapable of understanding. This is an old critique. Yet today it is getting worse – especially with the rise of mass digital media, misinformation, and other phenomena. For example, I was in Goma, the DRC, just before the conflict escalated, and had a conversation with an engineer based at the ICRC’s Water and Habitat Team. The team had been drilling wells in the mountainous, volcanic, hills above Goma to search for fresh water sources to supply the needs of the ever-increasing population of residents and IDPs. But in the East of the Congo, drilling into the soil is more closely associated with illicit miners searching for Gold and Cobalt, and so rumours swirled on social media about the nefarious activities of the humanitarians. Alienation from the worlds humanitarians purport to serve is only accelerating through processes like these, with the simple question being posed ever more urgently: What exactly are they doing? Why exactly are they here? Are they any different from the imperialists who came before them?

Acceleration (of professionalization)

20 years ago, the scholar of humanitarianism Michael Barnett predicted that the rise of a ‘transformed’ – professionalized, bureaucratized, and rationalized – form of humanitarian action, defined by indicators, surveys, deliverables, legalism, and beyond would undermine the ethical basis that humanitarianism was once founded upon. As Barnett put it:

The presumed difference between Wal-Mart and World Vision is that the former does not have moral authority while the latter does. What happens, though, when humanitarian agencies increasingly base their legitimacy on their ability to measure up to standards set by modern, commercial firms? Such a development might very well undermine what makes humanitarian action distinctive.²Barnett, M. (2005). Humanitarianism transformed. Perspectives on politics, 3(4), 733.

This prediction has come to pass. Its most grotesque manifestation has been the predations of the so-called ‘Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.’ But there are other, less noticed, forms. For example, the critique of my colleague in Kinshasa was also about the way humanitarianism has replaced state authority, in doing so risking folding itself (back) into a neoimperial logic of action. One sees this development even vis-à-vis discusses of localization, to which I will return, which despite their honourable intentions, have further accelerated economic distortions in humanitarian settings. Funnelling cash to select ‘partners’ – expanding the organigramme of the organisation, and ultimately continuing a rational-bureaucratic form of humanitarianism that is accelerating its alienation from local populations globally. While we believe we are getting ‘closer’ to the ground of crisis, we are in fact simply reproducing professional cadres of ‘locals’ who replicate the technocratic logic of humanitarianism in distinct geographies.

Abandonment (of the future)

But the third issue is the most serious. At its base, humanitarianism is dream about a different future. The original goal of humanitarianism is that it should be abolished, that it should not exist. That its very existence is an ethical and political failure. Indeed, if its professionalization is stripped away, humanitarianism finds its origins in wider dreams of improving society at a systemic, structural, level. To architectural projects to permanently improving living conditions in the urban slums of London or Paris. To the development of social welfare states that would permanently transform societies for the better.

But this vision is not provincial to the ‘West.’ In his City Dreams series, the Congolese artist Body Isek Kingelez constructed a series of models of Kinshasa that imagine a city “that breathes nothing but joy, the beauty of life… a melting pot of all races in the world.” In that city, there is no real need for a police force, for soldiers, for doctors, or prisons. The city is a total utopia – an Afrofuturist image of cities built through pan-Africanist solidarity – a place where there is no one to arrest, so no police, no one to fight, so no soldiers, and there is no crime – so no prisons exist. And, of course, no humanitarians either.

Today, those visions of the future are hard to find. Alongside its professionalization, humanitarianism has increasingly naturalized crisis. The idea of “resilience” is the most obvious example here – the proposition that we should work to help people “mitigate, adapt to and recover from shocks and stresses” to “reduce their vulnerability.” Shocks, crisis, and violence are naturalized in this discourse. There are no dreams of a future without these shocks. Crisis is permanent. Cleavages in wealth and power normalized.

But the world wants a future, a future without humanitarianism being necessary.

And we are not providing that future.

So, the situation thus seems bleak.

The critiques levelled above are well known. But with critique, must also come action. What do we do? Where else do we go? What pathways forward are there? Answers are difficult. Humanitarianism is a paradox. Its very existence is indefensible. Yet sometimes the indefensible is necessary. In a world, to speak with the Congolese poet Sony Labou Tansi, still populated by millions of “rag-humans” who “inhabit both the world of the dead and the world of the ‘not entirely living,’” humanitarian action must occur.³Sony Labou Tansi. (2011). Life and a half. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 9. If humanitarianism is indefensible, abandoning humanitarianism is also indefensible.

The demand of the day is therefore simple and complex: to critique what has become of the humanitarian-industrial complex but also to convert that critique into a different – radical, yet pragmatic – future. And – above all – we must avoid being seduced or paralyzed by global crisis, succumbing to a narcissism of the present, and instead design a future in which slowly, painfully, but surely – humanitarianism does not exist, because we have cultivated a better future. We must fight this long and difficult battle to abolish ourselves, for the good of everyone. This does not mean dismantling the humanitarian sector, as some advocate for; this is not a call to burn it all down. On the contrary, it is a call to use all resources to slowly yet surely build a future in which we are redundant. Humanitarian abolitionism is a utopian dream. But how can we make that dream a reality?

Abolishing humanitarianism above requires accelerating and diversifying the forms of humanitarian prevention at our disposal. Of course, in humanitarianism, the term ‘prevention’ already has many meanings, associated with different approaches. It can refer to anticipatory action, sometimes involving military or peacekeeping actors, with macroeconomic stabilization, discourses of democratization, forms of norm-shifting or internalization, and so forth. I want to advocate – however – for a more radical view, one that goes further. An approach to prevention that moves:

• from legal to ecological forms of humanitarian design in its programming;
• from innovation to emancipation in its deployment of technology;
• from localization to autonomy in its long-term operations.

These three moves go beyond the idea of prevention being simply proactive, as opposed to the reactivity of protection, instead holding the potential to generate radically new futures, futures in which humanitarianism will not exist.

From Legal to Ecological Humanitarian Design

Humanitarianism is technocratic. Its institutionalization was founded in the catastrophes of Europe, and the – quite cynical – shock those catastrophes generated. What emerged was a humanitarianism undergirded by the law. When we speak of prevention, we thus design programming around norms that have been legally enshrined somewhere, somehow. We prevent abuse or neglect of fundamental rights.

This bedrock of the humanitarian mission is critically important. But it is also weak. Especially today. We therefore need to design humanitarianism beyond the law.

Luckily, this situation is not unusual.

The word of the law is weak everywhere.

Consider road traffic safety. In Copenhagen, as anywhere, a whole legal regime dictates norms for driving and road use. Do not drive drunk. Do not drive fatigued. And so forth. If one does so, one risks being prosecuted. Yet people do drive drunk or fatigued, every day. The solution to this problem, inspired by preventive medicine, has been to draw on ‘ecological’ forms of design that consider social, material, and environmental factors as drivers of undesirable behaviour. These factors – stress, relationship problems, etc. – cannot be dealt with legally, rationally, or through norms. Instead – today – when we buy a car it will beep incessantly if we do not wear our seatbelt, little ‘rumble strips’ on the side of the road will alert us if we drift outside our lane, and so forth. These little designs work alongside legal-normative provisions to shift the ecology of our world. They work at the unthought level of human beings to shift their behaviour.

And, despite typically being very small, micro-level, and innocuous interventions, they are highly effective.

But examples in humanitarian programming are relatively few and far between, despite us knowing very well that these ‘ecological’ dynamics of life – the interplay between the material, social, cultural, etc factors in driving behaviour are critical to humanitarian crisis. Consider prisons. As the diagram below illustrates, prison violence and neglect is driven by a vicious feedback loop connecting poverty, insecurity, violence, and prison design itself that creates forms of psychosocial trauma that then worsen humanitarian crisis afterwards.

Why can we not imagine reconfiguring the ‘choice matrix’ – in the technical terms – that drive these dynamics? Or the dynamics of armed actors, governments, or others for humanitarian purposes? When this can be achieved outside humanitarian settings? Why must we settle for ‘resilient’ equilibriums in this process? Why can’t we nudge things forward differently?

One main thing seems to hold us back: the ethical complexities of working with ‘bad’ actors which such interventions must target. Here, humanitarianism must work with those who have power, and use it for bad purposes. It is they above all who must  be nudged into behaving better. But why do we find this so difficult to stomach? Frantz Fanon, that great student of Aime Cesaire, was a psychiatrist whose clinical work and political theory was all about preventing the violence of colonialism and its destruction of humanity. But to get there, he – quite literally – worked with his enemy, treating French torturers in his clinic in Algiers – to comprehend the ecology that produced them and, eventually, fight it. In short, those who abuse humanity, those who are dismantling the fragile order that existed, they must also be at the centre of our attention. They must be engaged ecologically for their harm to be prevented.

But we need a stronger weapon than the law to do so. A form of design that embeds humanitarian, or simply humanist, norms into the world very concretely, providing a pragmatic route towards the abolition of the behavioural drivers of violence, crisis, and suffering.

From Innovation to Emancipation

Thinking about designing humanitarianism ecologically also takes us to questions of technology. Given the challenges facing humanitarianism, technology is increasingly posited as a key potential driver of change for the better. Yet, we must be very careful not to embrace technology in humanitarianism unthinkingly. Our innate attraction to buzzwords like innovation, systems-thinking, foresight tools, and so forth risks further replicating Barnett’s critique of the embrace of commercial logics in humanitarian action, diluting the uniqueness of the sector. Technology is no panacea.

This is doubly important given humanitarianism has typically deployed technologies in ways that have entangled it with the oldest form of design – design for killing, for violence, for death. Every time a new technology, tool, program, or process hoped to alleviate suffering is invented it further feeds the rise of design for violence.⁴Antonelli, P. (2020). Design and Violence. Marg, A Magazine of the Arts, 71(4), 94-102. Gleaming designs for more humane refugee shelters make rampant displacement permanent. However effective they might be at improving everyday life, they freeze that life in a state of crisis. High-nutrition plastic tubes of paste-like ‘food’ sustain the continued functioning of hellish detention centres across the world. They keep detainees alive, but only to suffer further. And so forth. In all this, technologies for humanitarian ‘protection’ sometimes feed longer cycles of slow violence.

What is needed, instead, is a more radical preventive deployment of technology that shifts from discourses of innovation to discourses of emancipation.

Consider a concrete example.

In Mexico’s marginalized rural areas, populated by poor and indigenous communities, internet access was once very expensive and minimal coverage existed. There was no infrastructure. There still isn’t in many places. These spaces are disconnected – isolated – yet also half-folded into the globalized economy: an in-between space, one also marginalized for their political activism. Yet, through a collaboration between an organization called Indigenous Communities Telecommunications and a group called Rhizomatica – based in the US –that focuses on developing ‘Community Infrastructure Autonomy,’ this began to change in the early 2010s. Indeed, in 2014, one community received approval from the Mexican government to begin experimental attempts to develop forms of ‘community cellular telephony.’ Working with both local and foreign technical specialists, they developed the first fully government licensed yet entirely community owned mobile telephone network. They installed the cell towers necessary, using special equipment, and maintain it to this day, providing free or cheap access to telephone calls and internet.⁵See https://www.rhizomatica.org/.

This initiative is a humanitarian one. Connectivity of this kind reduces urban poverty, vulnerability to natural disasters, and helps prevent danger from the armed violence common in Mexico. And while the initiative relied on transnational hep, it was built bottom-up, with solutions defined from the ground, and abolishes the need to rely on outside commercial, political, or humanitarian actors. It is a form of technologically mediated emancipation from below. Globally-mediated, yes, but built from the bottom-up. Very pragmatic, very technical – but orientated towards opening a new future for disenfranchised peoples.

It is initiatives like these that humanitarian action must learn from. Interventions that are ecological in the way their mix of cultural, political, and technological elements prevents harm to populations, but which are developed outside the silos of humanitarian organizations and – eventually – led by stakeholders elsewhere. This – in fact – was the dream of many postcolonial states, as the first Prime Minister of the Independent Congo Patrice Lumumba once wrote:

The Western technicians to whom we make an urgent appeal will come to Africa not to dominate us but to serve and aid our countries.⁶See Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 73. and https://humanitarian.design/2024/08/05/hors-piste-juste-sous-lequateur-technical-dreams-in-kinshasa/

Humanitarianism must serve the emancipation of communities above all else.

From Localization to Autonomy

The notion I have just sketched, that a radical form of prevention must be grounded in an ecological sensitivity producing technologies for emancipation requires one third element to be achieved: autonomy. This takes us back to the question of ‘localization’ in humanitarian action. This discourse has also produced, as I said, a parallel but still professionalized industry of local partners around the world for iNGOs. While preferable to the centralization of power in the Global North, this process is unlikely to lead to initiatives like ‘community cellular telephony.’ Conditions of dependence among ‘local partners’ lead to a necessary conformity with existing humanitarian norms, jargon, and bureaucratic procedures – not the cultivation of radical alternatives. In this, any ‘capacity building’ initiative is structured around the selection of desirable ‘capacities’ defined in places like Copenhagen or Geneva, not from the ground of humanitarian struggle.

As such, we need to cultivate a logic of what Arturo Escobar would term autonomy for humanitarianism.⁷Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press. Indeed, developing radical forms of prevention cannot proceed on traditional models. Take the idea of ecological design thinking, and its hopes of shifting the ‘choice matrix’ of actors to reduce violence or other undesirable outcomes. That proposition is deeply controversial even in Western Europe and North America. It implies manipulation, at least tacitly. That being said, there are many such initiatives – like seatbelts, or police offers being obligated to record interrogations – that the vast majority of us agree with. But such agreement requires deliberation on the ground of the spaces they might be implemented, and the autonomy to approve or reject such proposals. They cannot be developed or initiated from Copenhagen.

The same is true for any preventive technology purporting to emancipate people. The history of technology in the global south is one of exploitation, especially humanitarian and development technology. Indeed, the Jamaican economist Norman Girvan described in the 1970s how technologies that would purportedly emancipate the world became presented as a form of “white magic” – objects or systems produced far away to which populations outside Europe and North America had no real control of power over.⁸Girvan, N. (1978). White magic: The Caribbean and modern technology. The Review of Black Political Economy, 8(2), 153-166. A logic that we still risk repeating with newer technologies – forecasting tools, LLMs, shelter designs, etc. – today.

At the same time, the extreme interdependence and inequalities of our world mean that an ethos of autonomy is difficult to navigate. While these initiatives cannot be proposed in Copenhagen, they may well still need to be funded from Copenhagen. This requires an abandonment of control over programming decisions – difficult though that may be. Indeed, while much attention is put today on increasing the evidence base for existing interventions, radical prevention in humanitarianism requires a focus on expanding the intervention space. And, in particular, giving autonomous decision making power to local actors to define those interventions on the ground.

A kind of bottom-up needs assessment is needed, one I have been experimenting with in the Congo at the moment vis-à-vis the problems facing detention and prison facilities. That has involved a very long – over a year long and still ongoing – process of listening to an intensely diverse array of actors. Prison authorities, yes. Civil society, yes. But also former detainees themselves, who have mapped prison conditions out visually in workshops. Artists who have imagined different futures in these spaces. And those academics who spoke of the indefensibility of humanitarianism that I was drinking beers with in Kinshasa, as well as their colleagues from other disciplines – architecture, engineering, computer science. All working without pre-definition of needs to expand our intervention spaces.

In short, a logic of radical prevention must be grounded on taking the risk of moving more slowly, without predefined objectives, in ways that return autonomy to the ground of humanitarian crisis tout court. In this, we also move towards a future in which we are abolished as the leaders of humanitarian action.

Towards a humanitarian abolitionism

So, three possible ways of getting towards an ethos of radical prevention, which can now be translated into this list of eight principles:

1. IHL is not enough for radical prevention;
2. Changing ecologies of social action is core to radical prevention;
3. Changing the material-technological world is core to radical prevention;
4. All ‘bad actors’ must be engaged-with for radical prevention;
5. Discourses of innovation rarely alone lead to radical prevention;
6. Emancipation is the ultimate goal of radical prevention;
7. Autonomy is central to the ethical deployment of radical prevention;
8. In radical prevention, every intervention must cultivate a future where there is less intervention.

These eight principles are just one proposition for reforming humanitarianism to meet the demands of the day. Many others will be needed to return a future for those humanitarianism wants to help. But to conclude, the question remains how we can ‘abolish’ humanitarianism.

To be clear, humanitarian is indefensible. But while this proposition sounds fatalist, in reality it encapsulates an opportunity. Because – what is humanitarianism? If we strip away its professionalization, then the history of humanitarianism can be read very differently: as a revolutionary struggle for transnational solidarity, something that can be found in places of relative power, such as Copenhagen, to be sure, but which also – to speak with the late radical feminist Gloria Anzaldúa also “germinates in the open mouth of the barefoot child in the midst of restive crowds.”⁹Gloria Anzaldúa. (1980). “Fragment of Speaking in Tongues: A letter to third world women writers,” 173. Or which, in the words of Achille Mbembe, is about a “rise in humanity” that transcends borders.¹⁰Mbembe, A. (2012). Metamorphic thought: the works of Frantz Fanon. African Studies, 71(1), 19-28. Humanitarianism as a dream exists outside the workings of any metropolis of power. It is a dream about a future in which we are all able to live without the need for humanitarianism. To abolish humanitarianism is to achieve the true dream of humanitarianism. And, so, if we are looking for strategies of where we want to be in five, ten, twenty, or fifty years, that dream must always be kept in mind, as something that we must work slowly but surely, politically yet technically, and critically yet pragmatically towards. To return to Aime Cesaire, his dismissal of ‘strategists’ trying to save Europe, or in our case humanitarianism, was a dismissal of continuing the status quo, with all its violence. But his manifesto did carve out a strategy. A strategy for building a “humanism made to the measure of the world.”¹¹Aimé Césaire. (2001). Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press: New York, 73.

NOTES

• 1
  Text adapted from Aimé Césaire. (2001). Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press: New York, 32.
• 2
  Barnett, M. (2005). Humanitarianism transformed. Perspectives on politics, 3(4), 733.
• 3
  Sony Labou Tansi. (2011). Life and a half. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 9.
• 4
  Antonelli, P. (2020). Design and Violence. Marg, A Magazine of the Arts, 71(4), 94-102.
• 5
  See https://www.rhizomatica.org/.
• 6
  See Lumumba, P. (1963). Lumumba Speaks: The Speeches and Writings of Patrice Lumumba, 1958-1961, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 73. and https://humanitarian.design/2024/08/05/hors-piste-juste-sous-lequateur-technical-dreams-in-kinshasa/
• 7
  Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
• 8
  Girvan, N. (1978). White magic: The Caribbean and modern technology. The Review of Black Political Economy, 8(2), 153-166.
• 9
  Gloria Anzaldúa. (1980). “Fragment of Speaking in Tongues: A letter to third world women writers,” 173.
• 10
  Mbembe, A. (2012). Metamorphic thought: the works of Frantz Fanon. African Studies, 71(1), 19-28.
• 11
  Aimé Césaire. (2001). Discourse on Colonialism. Monthly Review Press: New York, 73.