Against Humanitarian Impunity: Rethinking Responsibility for Displacement and Disaster in Northern Uganda

Abstract

Given that humanitarian organizations can often be responsible for enabling, prolonging or intensifying violence and conflict through their interventions into war zones, it is important that these organizations, despite their presumed neutrality and beneficence, be held accountable for the deleterious consequences of their actions. The case of northern Uganda will be used to demonstrate how humanitarian agencies have made possible the government's counterinsurgency, including its policy of mass forced displacement and internment, which has led to a vast humanitarian crisis. The Ugandan government policy will be assessed as a war crime, making aid agencies accessories to this crime. This case study is used as an example to highlight that processes which demand the post-conflict accountability of those responsible for violence may be dramatically incomplete, and unjust, if they do not include the humanitarian agencies. In conclusion it will be suggested that if humanitarian organizations built popular accountability mechanisms into their daily operations this might prevent them from being complicit with egregious violence in the first place.     

The Iraq War and the Responsibility to Protect: Uses,Abuses and Consequences for the Future of Humanitarian Intervention

Before the 2003 Iraq war, the political leadership of the United States and United Kingdom had to sell the case for war to their people and the world. This was attempted through a number of speeches that employed rhetorical justifications for the war. Two prominent justifications used during this period involved the employment of security and humanitarian narratives. The security narrative focused on claims regarding Iraq's undermining of international law, possession of weapons of mass destruction and threat to the world. The humanitarian narrative revolved around claims about human suffering in Iraq and the need to liberate its people. While it is widely assumed that security is the dominant casus belli in the post-9/11 world, there is much evidence to suggest that the humanitarian justifications that played a critical role in the military interventions of the 1990s were still important after 9/11. The use of humanitarian justifications for the Iraq war clearly has implications for the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement, which has gained prominence since the December 2001 publication of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) report. Based on an extensive content analysis of speeches by the US and UK political leadership before the war, this article will quantify the relative importance of each narrative and analyse what the findings mean for the ongoing debates within the ‘responsibility to protect (R2P)’ movement.     

Humanitarian Intervention: Past, Present and Future

Bellamy, A. (2006) Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq . London: Polity Press.
Weiss, T. (2007) Humanitarian Intervention . London: Polity Press.
Reed, C. and Ryall, D. (eds) (2007) The Price of Peace: Just Wars in the Twenty-First Century . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Seybolt, T. B. (2007) Humanitarian Military Intervention: The Conditions for Success and Failure . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Heazle, M. and Islam, I. (eds) (2007) Beyond the Iraq War: The Promises, Pitfalls and Perils of External Interventionism . Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.     

Redefining Humanitarian Intervention: The Historical Challenge of R2P

Through analyzing the various factors in R2P's genesis and expansion as an international norm, this article contends that the office of the UN Secretary-General has provided steady backing of R2P, allowing for its ongoing consideration within the UN bureaucracy and among member states. In this respect, R2P has been able to assert itself in a meaningful way, with member states compelled to revisit the central tenets of the norm within the General Assembly and special dialogues. The office of the Secretary-General has clearly interpreted R2P as a strong and effective reinforcement of Article 1 of the UN Charter and the overall UN mandate, using the norm to more strongly anchor existing UN principles and values.     

Humanitarian implications of armed conflict in cities

The Syrian civil war and the military campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, have prompted a major reconsideration of responses to armed conflict in cities. The growing consensus among practitioners is that responses to urban armed conflict should extend beyond short-term aid and lay the groundwork for dealing with longer-term challenges posed by urbanisation.     

Biased Altruism: Islamophobia and Donor Support for Global Humanitarian Organizations

Providing humanitarian assistance to displaced individuals is a critical policy challenge. Many refugee camps are run by charities supported by Western donors. If refugees are predominantly Muslim, might Islamophobia suppress donations to these charities? Using a survey experiment conducted in the United States, the authors examine whether donors' willingness to support a charity is influenced by the dominant religion of the refugees, the regions in which refugee camps are located, and/or the religious affiliation of the charity. The authors find modest support for Islamophobia: while willingness to donate is not affected by the location of camps or the predominance of Muslim refugees, it declines significantly for Islamic charities. Respondents overall tend to be especially willing to donate to a charity that serves Christian refugees in the Middle East. Among self‐identifying Christians, respondents are more willing to donate to a charity serving Christian refugees than one serving Muslim refugees.     

Interventionism by Design or Failure: The Coalition and Humanitarian Intervention

The Coalition took office in 2010 in what seemed to be a relatively benign foreign policy environment. Since then, the international environment has become far more treacherous and the government has considered war on humanitarian grounds on three occasions. In light of the silence of early Coalition documents on humanitarian intervention, together with the two parties’ different positions on the issue, this article assesses the extent to which the Coalition has adopted a distinctive approach to humanitarian intervention. In so doing, it evaluates the relative importance of Conservative and Liberal Democrat traditions in determining the direction of Coalition foreign policy. The article also considers whether there are other, more pertinent factors driving foreign policy, and offers an explanation for its relative isolation from coalition tensions. It concludes by reflecting on the likely future of humanitarian intervention after the May 2015 general election.     

Humanitarian Crises and the International Politics of Selectivity

How has the international community responded to humanitarian crises after the end of the Cold War? While optimistic ideational perspectives on global governance stress the importance of humanitarian norms and argue that humanitarian crises have been increasingly addressed, more skeptical realist accounts point to material interests and maintain that these responses have remained highly selective. In empirical terms, however, we know very little about the actual extent of selectivity since, so far, the international community’s reaction to humanitarian crises has not been systematically examined. This article addresses this gap by empirically examining the extent and the nature of the selectivity of humanitarian crises. To do so, the most severe humanitarian crises in the post-Cold War era are identified and examined for whether and how the international community responded. This study considers different modes of crisis response (ranging from inaction to military intervention) and different actors (including states, international institutions, and nonstate actors), yielding a more precise picture of the alleged “selectivity gap” and a number of theoretical implications for contemporary global security governance.     

From Resettled Refugees to Humanitarian Actors: Refugee Diaspora Organizations and Everyday Humanitarianism

ABSTRACT

This article describes the everyday humanitarianism of refugees resettled in Australia who form small voluntary organizations to help “their people” displaced elsewhere in the world. The people involved in refugee diaspora organizations (RDOs) are animated by forces that reflect their distinct history, positionality, and relationship to the “suffering others” they help. What the everyday humanitarianism of RDOs suggests is that we live in a world of many-humanitarianisms, where there are different possibilities to care and connect to strangers in need. While “humanitarianism” has become synonymous with a set of dominant practices and actors, there is need for other actors – including refugee diaspora humanitarians – to be given space within both humanitarianism discourse and practice.     

On Humanitarian Refugee Biometrics and New Forms of Intervention

This article traces the development from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) initially using biometrics in a few pilot projects (in the early-to-mid-2000s) to the emergence of a policy in which biometric registration is considered a ‘strategic decision’. It then engages key insights from current debates about ‘materiality’ and agentic capacity in combination with current debates about new forms of intervention. Finally, these insights are combined into a framework through which the article engages critically with this development of humanitarian refugee biometrics by posing the following question: how does an approach to technology that takes seriously the idea of matter as capable of agentic capacity enhance an appreciation of the ways in which these humanitarian technologies may contribute to the emergence of new forms of intervention? Through an analysis of how the emergence of digitalized biometric refugee data has affected the relationship between the UNHCR, donor states, host states and refugees, the article shows how the UNHCR’s trialling of new biometric technologies – combined with actual and potential data-sharing practices – has advanced the technology’s performance and acceptability whilst at the same time also rendering new dimensions of refugee life intervenable, not only to humanitarian actors.     

Misreading the Post-tsunami Political Landscape in Sri Lanka: The Myth of Humanitarian Space

The 2004 tsunami is one of several recent high profile natural disasters that raise important questions about ‘disaster geopolitics’ or the relationship between humanitarian assistance for victims of natural disasters and the stabilisation of political spaces. In Sri Lanka, it was thought that a ‘silver lining’ would result from the collaborative effort on behalf of victims of the tsunami by the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, belligerents in a decades-old war. Ultimately, however, the contest over tsunami aid deepened the rift between the two sides. This paper considers this misreading of the post-tsunami political landscape in Sri Lanka by examining two key spatial assumptions contained in popular humanitarian discourses: that humanitarian space can be identified, represented and maintained separately from political space, and that humanitarian relations are confined to the places where a disaster has occurred and chiefly serve its victims. Several key events are highlighted in the paper including the curtailed visit of the UN Secretary General in January 2005 and the failure of the Post-tsunami Operational Management Structure, a mechanism designed to allow both parties to the conflict to distribute aid. The paper concludes with a discussion on the difficulties of setting politics aside even during times of humanitarian crisis.     

Human Interest and Humane Governance in Iraq: Humanitarian War and the Baghdad Zoo

Abstract

This article argues that the story of the Baghdad zoo in the Iraq war and the ‘human interest’ it attracted are important for the analysis of warfare and humanitarian intervention. The activities at the zoo are notable precisely because they provide a specific site through which to analyse the increasing entanglements between war and humanitarianism, and practices associated with civil–military cooperation. The recovery and reconstruction efforts at the Baghdad zoo brought together a diverse, ad hoc assemblage of civilian, military, local and international actors around a common problem: how to turn a symbol of the tyranny and ‘backwardness’ of the Hussein regime into a space that would foster liberal humane values amongst the Iraqi population. The activities at the zoo thus tell us much about the kind of warfare that not only involves lethal force, but also fosters civilian and military action in reforming a carceral and leisure institution. They also reveal a broader aspiration of reforming the whole Iraqi population around an idea of humane governance, while providing a potentially profitable investment opportunity for foreign speculators.