Just as they do every late December, the interviews and opinion pieces will come. Atypically, though, the end of the mere year of 2020 seems to have displaced the usual attention to the end of a decade (no, the decade did not end last December 31st).
Well, it has been a comparatively eventful year. So some form of this question will be asked over and again: What’s the biggest thing that happened in 2020? For humanitarians, given the unique qualities of 2020, perhaps the more interesting question is this: What will prove to be the fourth most impactful event of 2020, after all-too-obvious triumvirate of (1) COVID-19, (2) Trump loses the election, and (3) Black Lives Matter forces scrutiny on the humanitarian action’s neo-colonial hangover.
My answer comes in the form of news from late last week. Unicef will be supporting a feeding operation that aims to reach between 10,000 and 15,000 children. That will include for example delivering breakfast meals to 13,000 students over the next two weeks (in-school feeding programs will be closed for the holiday). This food aid marks as typical and maybe even as innocuous of a Unicef program as you might imagine. Happens every day. Literally. But in Unicef’s 70-year history it has not happened that the agency delivered food to children in the United Kingdom.
Returning to our eulogy for 2020, this small event may be one that eventually sneaks up on the humanitarian sector the way all good disruptions do, because it impacts on the level of ideology and perception. With delivery of this small program comes fruit, rice, bread and the power of South to North humanitarian action (even if the example is not specifically South to North). Not yet. Not yet an event like a Tanzanian medical mission to combat the pharmacalization of American childhood.[1] Those examples will come. They should come. And we should not wait for them to come. We should plan and execute their coming because that is one of keys to saving humanitarian action from itself, from its paternalistic, Othering, saviourism.
Unicef delivering emergency aid in the UK offers disruption via “a well-publicised humanitarianization (problematization) of the many crises in the global North.”[2] Aside from feeding destitute children, the (ulterior) purpose is to “shift the prevailing charity model to one of an exchange among equals, where the North and South partner in ‘saving’ one another.” In other words, to break the mindset which binds together so much of what is right with humanitarian action with so much that is wrong. This targets the narrative in which the rich, developed, scientific, virtuous and flat-out most excellent people of the world help those who are poor, primitive, irrational, corrupt and flat-out screwed. Further, this spoils the incentive structure by targeting the construct or dynamic in which we who live in humanitarian-giving nations are enabled to feel superior about ourselves, while those in humanitarian-receiving nations are helped to feel inferior.
The response of Jacob Rees Mogg, a living caricature of British superiorityness, highlights the received meaning of Unicef’s work here in the UK (which should, after all, have come as no surprise given Philip Alston’s blistering report). In Mogg’s vigorous rejection, he railed against Unicef’s action as a “political stunt”, arguing that Unicef aid should be given to what Donald Trump has less eloquently termed “shithole countries”.[3] The reaction of politicians on the UK left was identical in its assumptions, using the fact of Unicef’s local humanitarian action to shame the Prime Minister and his party, calling it “a disgrace” that Unicef had to help feed children in “one of the richest countries in the world.” As if Congo or Iraq weren’t nations brimming with riches and millionaires. As if the accumulation of the UK’s riches weren’t intimately connected to the production of either the crises being targeted by the humanitarians or the 14M people in the UK who live in poverty (pre-COVID stat!).
In ten (twenty?) years we will hopefully see that this small disruption forms part of a larger transformation, one in which millions of people will assume the wealth and social capital of a country like Yemen or South Sudan and feel the disgrace when children there need to be fed by international donations, and those people will be the Yemenis and South Sudanese themselves. And where we in the West will feel and see an identical disgrace in the opioid/drug deaths across the working class America, or the loneliness of the elderly in Japan. And where we can share this disgrace across the entire human family rather than excepting ourselves from it.
The appeal of that critique lies in certain égalité; in the realization that we are just like them. It certainly fits with my intermittently critical tone and mounting calls for a humanitarianism riddled with humility. But seeing ourselves just like them is also problematic. After yet another decade, perhaps greater humility will produce the parallel recognition as well. They are just like us.
[Edited for clarity on 27 Dec 2020].
[1] See e.g. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/big-pharma-s-manufactured-epidemic-the-misdiagnosis-of-adhd/
[2] DuBois The New Humanitarian Basics pp. 26-27. Or see this script of a rather unscripted Chatham House conversation on humanitarian disruption between me, Urvashi Aneja, Markus Geisser, and Champa Patel.
[3] Putting aside Trump’s language, I fail to differentiate his opinion from either mainstream humanitarian thinking or its public narrative. These places we work are exceptional in [insert here rephrasing of ‘shitholiness’ in terms of levels of violence, lawlessness, destitution and helplessness].
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