ABSTRACT
It is no secret that humanitarianism is in crisis. At least it is no secret among humanitarians themselves. “How can so many well-educated, cosmopolitan, and to a fair degree well-intentioned people,” asks a leading practitioner (de Waal 1997 , p. 66), “work within institutions with such noble goals to such little effect?” Yet what troubles humanitarians goes deeper than the specter of ineffectiveness. A more disturbing issue is how humanitarian action itself actually becomes part of the problem it is supposed to remedy. In spite of their most solemn of principles, Primum Non Nocere – “First, do no harm” – humanitarians confront the unforeseen ways in which in crisis after crisis their saving work aids and abets violent confl ict, famine, and human rights abuse (Anderson 1996 ). Few episodes demonstrated this more traumatically than the Rwandan refugee camps, where humanitarian assistance intended for victims actually strengthened the power of genocidaires . Though an extreme case, Rwanda is not unique. It is but a horrifi c incidence of a recurrent dilemma. Yet many practitioners contend that the so-called “paradox of humanitarian action” goes deeper still (Terry 2002 ; Tirman 2003 ). In some places – most famously Darfur – it functions as a substitute for direct international political action, while in other places – most notably Iraq – it is increasingly indistinguishable from the strategic aims of an occupying force. According to Samantha Power ( 2008 ), the 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad, which killed twenty-one diplomatic and humanitarian personnel, “made it clear that the United Nations and humanitarian groups had moved from the 1990s, when their fl ags no longer offered protection, to a phase in which their affi liations made them outright targets of Al Qaeda and other violent extremists.”
