… I have been thinking about but have not had time to blog.
- A confederacy of shitholes.
It has been some months since Donald Trump (apparently) plastered that label across a large chunk of the global South not named Australia. One has to be surprised by the depth of irony in the humanitarian reaction, which seemed predictably incensed that Trump could be so racist and stupid but which also seemed, just as predictably, rather delusional on their own role in this affair. How far from the truth would it be to suggest that the humanitarian system is no stranger to loudly promoting a fair amount of shitholiness when it comes to these same contexts plastered by Trump? For the President, at least, ignorance seems a likely excuse.
2. The Wrong Red-Line.
The problem with lines in the sand is that they tend to generate a binary: on one side you’re ok, but on the other side you’re screwed. Saints and sinners. The use of chemical weapons, we are told, marks not just any line, but a red line. Recent history in Syria, Macron’s or Obama’s own words, validate this. The problem, of course, is that the prohibition on the use of chemical weapons is not so much a red line as a special line. The red lines of warfare prohibit the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals and playgrounds. I guess that means they prohibit the deliberate bombing of schools, hospitals and playgrounds over and over and over again. Red lines also prohibit the blockades on humanitarian assistance, starvation of civilian populations, torture and mass murder.
The next question is painfully obvious. Does a bright red line being drawn on the use of chemical weapons relegate the rest of international humanitarian or human rights law to a set of yellowish lines? Obvious, but what is our answer and where is it in public discourse? A less obvious question: What red lines do we as humanitarians draw, and why? Are we unwilling to defend the legal and moral red line against violence targeting civilians because it is a defense that fails to generate sufficient political traction or media attention? Do we effectively decide to sell out less sexy red lines in the name of needing to be heard?
3. The Zuckerberg Defleption (a manoeuvre that merges deflection with deception).
The red line Mark Zuckerberg has artfully drawn in the sand, complete with a mea culpa and genuine-sounding remorse, is the wrong one. It’s also a brilliant sleight of hand. We now have the crime: releasing or selling our personal data to unscrupulous outside parties. We can now ignore the original crime: Facebook harvesting and selling our data to everyone else (so long as they do not interfere with the democratic process but merely seek to stufficate our lives and kill the planet by targeting us with psycho-personalized dreams directly attainable through the consumption of their products and services)
It seems past time the humanitarian sector establishes its distance from the likes of Facebook, Google, or Microsoft. I have no doubt they will find their way into the most remote corners of our humanitarian world, but do we have to serve as the vector for their spread? Of course, there are incredibly effective uses for their apps/services. But that should not blind us to data (identity) harvesting, echo chambers (just what we need in the midst of ethnic or religious strife), internet porn and what George Monbiot calls the ‘infrastructure of comparison’.
4. Downward accountability? Or asking them to do our job?
There is an entire industry of humanitarian policy wonks calling for downward accountability to beneficiaries. And regardless the ineffectiveness of power bequeathing accountability to the less powerful, it seems more realistic than waiting for our beneficiaries to seize it. Is that good enough? I do believe I’ve declared downward accountability an ethical requirement on a number of occasions. What if I have this wrong? What if this disguises an unethical outsourcing of our own work? An offloading of our own baggage? I mean, why should people in crisis be forced to ensure the accountability of our projects because we can’t seem to manage them in a way that accountability overrides self-interest? Aren’t they struggling to survive crisis, overcome with grief, adapting to social upheaval, or find tomorrow’s meal? The last thing they should be asked to do is help us to achieve our oft-repeated good intentions and help us to satisfy donor requirements. Finally, I note that we don’t ask this of crisis-affected people in our own societies – it would be shouted down. In the West we have watchdog groups, journalists, and governments that watch over the do-gooders.
Good points there…
especially, accountability. However, journos tend to say they’re unable to keep track of what do-gooders do because they’re so busy covering politicians and economics. Which gives us women pretty much locked out of all the talks about South Sudan (for example) while Addis gets treated like an expensive cattle camp full of men playing dominoes and arguing about Power while women, children, and vulnerable men need to get the water supplies fixed, crops in, health clinics open, and justice in the courts. If we don’t foster accountability then those Outsiders won’t believe they have a right to demand it of the people who really DO owe it to them.
Sorry, I find myself verging on being very sweary about this. WE need to demand accountability from our donors. We have a lot more capacity than our participants. It should be part of MEL from the start, making our donors accountable for how they treat us and the people we work alongside.
Thanks for the comment. I sympathize with you’re feeling ‘sweary’ on this. The big peace talks seem like an expensive theatrical production, but when the lights come back on nothing has changed.
I still think that at the conceptual level we need for journos, watchdogs, etc to develop a stronger capacity to hold NGOs accountable. Somebody ought to develop training in this regard — as a strengthening of civil society. I mean, development work involves empowering people against the many forces of marginalization, or the many forces that have power over their lives, such as politicians, armed groups, landlords or drought. Seems to me that in many places, international (humanitarian) agencies fall into that category of holding power over people, so development agencies should be working to this empowerment (essentially, vis-a-vis themselves).