Aid in Danger: The Perils and Promise of Humanitarianism

Chapter 2. The Twin Challenges for Contemporary Humanitarianism

CHAPTER 2 The Twin Challenges for Contemporary Humanitarianism Both the Baghdad bombing and Muttur tragedy occurred in the years following the terror attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001. More broadly, writers, social scientists, theorists , and theologians, among others, have analyzed and written about the profound cultural shift and pervasive sense of fear that marks the Western post-9/11 world (Bauman 2006; Altheide 2002; Bader-Saye 2007; Amis 2008). The prominence of global terror, especially after the September 11 attacks and the war in Iraq, the discourse of the “war on terror,” and pervasive government responses to terror all feed the beast of fear.1 Those of us living in the West live with constant reminders of the threats we face: insurance agencies remind us to buy insurance in case of the unexpected, weather experts warn us to prepare for “catastrophic” floods and hurricanes, the global financial meltdown has “decimated” pensions and assets and uncertainty dominates future economic scenarios, security guards search us and our belongings in buildings and airports, and disembodied voices in airports remind us not to leave our bags unattended or that airports are operating at “threat level orange .” Fear, or reminders to be fearful, permeates our modern existence. The publicity that accompanies terror attacks reinforces the discourse of fear at a societal level (Altheide 2002; Bauman 2006). The repeated reminders of potential terror or other attacks perpetuate this discourse and create an individualized sense of fear that “I” will be attacked or that “our” way of life is in danger of imminent and violent destruction. They reinforce the notion that violence is ubiquitous, and therefore all we can do is hunker down and protect ourselves from those who wish us harm. The Obama adminis- Twin Challenges for Humanitarianism 47 tration’s moratorium on the use of the “war on terror” language has moderated some of the polarization of the George W. Bush era, but the entrenched perceptions and enemy images of the years immediately following 2001 remain strong in places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, where security concerns for humanitarians are prevalent and immediate. Given how pervasive and multisectored the discourses of fear have become, it is thus not surprising that a similar affliction befell many in the humanitarian community. It is against this backdrop that the amalgam of the practical and analytical challenges of understanding aid in danger, both described in this chapter, is revealed. The practical challenge fundamentally concerns the most effective strategies of protecting aid workers and maintaining access to beneficiaries in the contemporary world, where discourses of fear and terror are prevalent and pernicious. The violence that befell aid workers in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s, in particular, shifted the terms of the debate around security and security management. It entrenched humanitarian exceptionalism and the fortification and professionalization of security management and drew humanitarianism further away from its relational core. In seeing the causes of violence in all their complexity and in challenging humanitarian exceptionalism, however, an alternative vision begins to emerge. The related analytical challenge arises from the persistence of the externalthreat discourse as the primary, or even sole, explanation for incidents such as the Muttur tragedy and the Baghdad bombing. A broad-stroke analysis of incidents consistently dominates and interprets incidents through a political lens, downplaying how individual or organizational actions might have played a role. These explanations privilege the political context, thereby framing the overall analysis for the violence in terms of external threat. Thus, context serves as a convenient and easily accessible hook for the violence aid workers experience and builds momentum for the exceptionalism narrative. While context is no doubt important, it is not everything—and in some cases, it is not decisive. The tenacity of the external-threat discourse arises from a reluctance to publicly delve into factors that point toward aid agencies and aid workers and that inevitably raise questions of blame and responsibility. Using the example of the Baghdad bombing, I describe various explanations for the attack and the ways in which they illustrate the competing tendencies to look internally (emphasizing blame) or externally (toward terrorism) to explain the causes of violence. Individually, the internal-vulnerability and externalthreat explanations are lacking and impede understanding. Moreover, the 48 Chapter 2 hunt for blame in the Baghdad bombing highlights the tension between the immediate need to react to an act of violence...