The New Humanitarian Frontier

Thomas G. Weiss studies the challenges of humanitarian work in the context of modern warfare and recommends some reforms.

Since the founding of the International Red Cross in 1863, humanitarian organizations have based their efforts to alleviate human suffering on the principles of impartiality, neutrality, and independence. Generally speaking, humanitarians took pride in staying clear of politics and rushing to the rescue of any population that needed help. However, today’s armed conflicts, which continue to generate humanitarian crises in places like Darfur and Iraq, demand that humanitarians not only reexamine their traditional guidelines but also prioritize reflection over immediate reaction, argues Tom Weiss, presidential professor in the Graduate Center’s Political Science Program and director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

As the co-director of the United Nations Intellectual History Project, the co-editor of The Oxford Handbook on the United Nations and the author of a number of books on refugees, terrorism, and international organizations, Weiss is no stranger to international peace and security. In two new books – Humanitarianism in Question, which he co-edited, and Humanitarian Intervention, which he wrote – Weiss focuses his gaze on the humanitarian impulse in the context of contemporary armed conflicts.

Both books point to the post-Cold War era as a period of new challenges and opportunities for humanitarians. The concept of state sovereignty has begun to be redefined to accommodate the rights of individuals within a state. “If a government refuses to respect human rights or is unable to protect the rights of its citizens, then the rest of us are responsible to do something,” explains Weiss. “The responsibility to protect” – the emerging norm from the title of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, for which he served as research director – became central to the argument about using military forces to protect human beings, a now largely accepted practice.

Humanitarians now find themselves in the throes of civil wars in which civilians are being attacked as part of war strategies, and the old humanitarian principles of impartiality and neutrality no longer prove helpful. The aftermath of the Rwandan genocide is a prime example, according to Weiss. In 1994, after hundreds of thousands of the Tutsi minority had been massacred, Rwandans flooded into refugee camps in Zaire. Many who had perpetrated the genocide actually ran the camps, distributed the food that relief agencies delivered, and had begun planning to reenter Rwanda and topple the new government. “So agencies were caught between a rock and a hard place, if you will,” says Weiss. “Do you let people starve, or do you give them food and let them regroup for violence?”

This and other humanitarian quagmires of the 1990s in Somalia, Kosovo, and East Timor produced a quandary over the effectiveness of humanitarian intervention. The question for those who study humanitarianism became, says Weiss, “do we make things better or worse by coming to the rescue of strangers?” At the very least, the aspirations of humanitarians diminished in the late 1990s. “The new motto was ‘do no harm’ as opposed to ‘let’s do some good,’” says Weiss.

The aims of humanitarians have been compromised even more in Iraq and Afghanistan. “While interactions with militaries in the 1990s was one thing, working side by side with occupying forces became quite another,” Weiss says. “Humanitarians became an extension of a military occupation.” The invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were given a humanitarian justification after the fact, differ from true humanitarian inventions that are initiated in response to humanitarian crises. 

Weiss believes that the way for humanitarians to become more effective is to be political, which he defines as choosing alliances and actions that are based on situation-specific information. “You need to take a hard look at the donor money. You need to take a hard look at whether the military is helping the humanitarian cause or hurting it. You need to take a hard look at whether the aid you’re providing in a camp in the Congo is actually feeding the violence that’s going on,” he says, emphatically.

To make good policy choices, humanitarians – and those who donate money to humanitarian work – need to invest in research and analysis and not just supplies, Weiss insists. The current dearth of reliable data and lack of resources devoted to gathering better numbers make it difficult to assess crises, he says. In the mid-1990s, when Weiss was a member of the academic advisory board for the U.N. High Commissioner of Refugees, he discovered that the agency, which had an annual budget of around a billion dollars, was only willing to fund one half-time position for statistical work.

A conscientious objector during the Vietnam War, Weiss has since become a proponent of using armed forces to facilitate humanitarian relief and offers up the military as a model for humanitarians to emulate when it comes to research and decision-making. “The officers and the decision-makers for the armed forces go through intensive training before they go anywhere,” he points out. “After they’ve been somewhere, they come back and they look through what they’ve done. This doesn’t mean that militaries are flawless, far from that. But it does mean that they have made a serious investment in continued learning, in continued evaluation, in historical analysis of strategies and tactics.”

Weiss acknowledges that part of the challenge of assessing a crisis involves the difficulty of understanding other cultures. He notes that half of the world’s refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) are Muslims while most relief agencies employ white westerners. “We may have good intentions,” he says, “but good intentions are not enough. There’s a vast investment that needs to be made in understanding these kinds of societies.” To help and empower local populations, anthropologists and sociologists who specialize in the region should be called upon to work side by side with aid administrators and operational specialists, Weiss advises.

While Weiss himself spent two decades, as he says, “riding around in the back of a jeep” in such hotspots as the Sudan, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, and Rwanda, he has devoted the last nine years to synthesizing his fieldwork into big-picture analyses. “Since I’ve been at the Graduate Center, I’ve been working more on macro issues than being in the weeds,” he says.

He has also pushed for change in the field of humanitarianism through his work at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. In the fall of 2006, the Institute and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Foundation organized a series of brainstorming sessions for experts from academia, the U.N., and private organizations to come up with recommendations to the incoming U.N. Secretary General on an array of policy issues, including human rights and humanitarian intervention.

Weiss hopes his applied research will help practitioners find solutions as well as promote humanitarianism as a serious topic of study. He has already begun to see the next generation of political scientists embrace the subject.

The Inter-University Consortium on Security and Humanitarian Action, a three-year program that ended in 2005 and was administered by the Bunche Institute, funded the fieldwork of Graduate Center and other New York City doctoral students who are now writing their
dissertations on various aspects of humanitarian emergencies. “That,” he smiles, “was a really good investment in the future.”

—Suzanne Wise