Catastrophe: Law, Politics, and the Humanitarian Impulse

6. Reintegration, or the Explosive Remnants of War

 6 Reintegration, or the Explosive Remnants of War Peter Redfield Edward B. Rackley The categories used to situate and analyze humanitarian issues in policy are far cleaner than most events on the ground. Perhaps nowhere does this truism grow clearer than at the end of emergencies, when exceptional suffering fades into normal misery. Whereas crises and catastrophes suggest the decisive lucidity associated with urgent need (however superficially or inappropriately applied), their aftermath remains deeply ambiguous and rarely featured in media reports. The “postemergency phase” identified by policy documents substitutes bland generalization for the patchwork of local and international uncertainties that accompany the end of crises, particularly conflicts that enter what anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom describes as the time of “not-war-not-peace.”1 Although shooting may have lessened or even stopped, neither guns nor alliances simply disappear. In addition, international systems developed to respond to sudden events confront the longer-term effects of upheaval on political and economic ties as well as on individual lives. The medical and legal edges of the humanitarian tradition grow unclear. In this chapter we examine the problem of defining the “end” of a crisis state when would-be humanitarians include the larger symptoms of social disruption within their purview. We will focus on recent concerns about child soldiers and efforts to reintegrate them into society in the aftermath of conflict. Deploying a technical euphemism for unexploded ordnance—“explosive remnants of war”—we consider how figures such as child soldiers disrupt simple definitions of a postemergency phase in both medical and legal terms. For empirical specificity, we refer to contemporary cases in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and in Uganda. We also describe the trajectory of an influential, crisis-oriented humanitarian organization with which we are directly familiar: Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), otherwise known as Doctors Without Borders.  reintegration, or the explosive remnants of war Observing that neither humanitarian organizations nor the medical or legal traditions they draw on are particularly well suited to the problems and contexts they now seek to confront, we suggest that current efforts represent a potential redefinition of international crisis in practice. Issues such as sexual and gender-based violence, mental health, and child soldiering suggest long potential time frames and reveal elements of inertia amid the volatile dynamic of crisis. Although organizations like MSF have typically shied away from chronic crises and development work, fearing the lack of a clear exit strategy, the growing range of humanitarian expectations and scope of humanitarian projects returns them to similar, unstable ground. By recognizing the extended effects of crisis states, humanitarian actors put themselves in a position in which it is increasingly difficult to limit their responsibility or withdraw. When they do so, it is amid a greater sense of uncertainty and incompletion than that which accompanies more immediate acts of “saving lives.” Crisis and emergencyTools The first step in our argument is a brief review of the significance of catastrophic moments of human suffering for the humanitarian tradition. Concepts of crisis have played a foundational role in humanitarianism, from the formation of the Red Cross and the initial Geneva conventions in response to war to the standardization of emergency medicine in response to natural disasters. Like older traditions of charity, humanitarianism frames the ethics of action in terms of a response to pre-existing conditions. Rather than individual misery or a general category like “the poor,” however, the modern humanitarian focus has rested on populations defined by particular misfortunes: wounded soldiers on a nineteenth-century battlefield, say, or the shocked survivors of a tsunami. In this sense, the history of the Red Cross movement connects with the practice of missionary medicine amidEuropean empire and the rise of the welfare state in modern governance, all of which connected actions with institutions beyond personal virtue. At the same time, however, the Red Cross lineage of humanitarianism conceived of suffering as an exceptional state and its response as an attempt to re-establish normal conditions appropriate for human dignity. Even if the Red Cross movement created lasting institutions and norms of expectation related to warfare and disaster, it cast its activity in emphatically temporary terms.2 Focused on the short-term needs of suffering people, humanitarianism has thus long oriented itself toward the present and the necessity of cha P ter s ix  urgent action. Unsurprisingly, humanitarian fund-raising appeals feature dramatic moments when the line between life and...