When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves. — Confucius
This World Humanitarian Day two messages will resonate strongly leading up to and during the day: humanitarians are not a target, and aid needs to be “decolonized.” While these themes highlight the perilous and dramatic environment for current humanitarian work, the first is unequivocally clear, whereas the second is loaded with meaning that needs to be unpacked to frame the problem accurately — and start solving it.
The call for “decolonizing aid” divides the humanitarian world into those who provide assistance on quasi-colonial terms and the aid recipients, on whom the terms of this aid are imposed, reinforcing dependency, and making the whole system self-serving. The proposed solution is to remove layers of intermediaries before aid reaches the intended recipients and/or change the composition of that layer from foreign to local groups. But is this problem statement accurate, and is the proposed remedy going to be effective?
In my experience working in the UN’s volunteer programme, the answers are not clear-cut.
First, and perhaps unique to volunteer action within the overall humanitarian system, volunteers tend to reject the “us-vs-them” lens. Solidarity is intrinsic to volunteering, and for my colleagues, the default is always “us-vs-the problem.”
Time and again in emergencies, local community volunteers are the first to help, often followed by volunteers from national Red Cross or Red Crescent societies, and soon after them, United Nations Volunteers or other groups — all united to solve the same problem.
“Us vs them” oversimplifies the diversity of humanitarian groups and masks a wide range of concerns. From the perspective of a UN Volunteer from Ethiopia providing midwifery training in India, who is ‘us’ and who is ‘them’? Is ‘us’ the ‘Global South’ and ‘them’ the ‘Global North’? How about a UN Volunteer from the Republic of Korea protecting the rights of children in Bosnia and Herzegovina, are they ‘North’ or ‘South’?
In a world already full of fractures, we shouldn’t emphasize yet another divide, especially as most bipolar designations present the world in more divisive terms than reality. Incidentally, the term ‘Global South’ was first introduced by the Brandt Commission on International Development in 1980 — a concept, like Ptolemy’s world map, useful in another era and context.
The humanitarian world is a mosaic of ‘us,’ more ‘us,’ others ‘like us,’ yet others ‘not quite like us,’ and indeed possibly a few of ‘them.’ Perceiving tensions within this multitude from a binary perspective may lead us away from real solutions. Instead, we need to scratch the surface and interrogate all of the tensions — and the power disparities behind each of them:
• Between international groups and national counterparts. From the experience of volunteers — whether they come from North, South, East, or West, from far away or from a neighbouring country — international groups can work in unison with national counterparts when there is a clear intent from the outset.
• Between national groups and local counterparts. For Indigenous people of Colombia and the tribal population of Bangladesh, merely replacing international groups with folks from Bogotá and Dhaka won’t “decolonize aid” nor make it community-owned, until the Indigenous groups step into their power to lead the action.
• Gender-related power disparities. To female community champions in South Sudan, it won’t matter whether assistance comes from an agency based in Madrid or Juba or a local organization. As long as aid providers remain mostly male, aid reinforces gender stereotypes. For female community leaders working with UN Volunteers across Sub-Saharan Africa the fact that their aid counterparts are also female often matters more for them to take power than the source of the aid or even its scale.
• Disability exclusion is another form of entrenched power disparity in humanitarian assistance. As with any other group, “nothing about us without us”: it’s overdue to uphold this principle by letting persons with disabilities to design and deliver emergency assistance.
Humanitarian action requires much more power sharing among all groups than unilinear narratives allow. Eliminating all power disparities will take time, persistence, and perhaps many half measures before full solutions become possible.
Some may say that compared to “decolonizing aid,” the narrative of “power sharing” sounds equally ideological but more idealistic. Perhaps. However, idealistic doesn’t mean naive, as UN Volunteers have learned through the experience of working alongside people to take their power as humanitarian champions.
____________________________
This opinion editorial was originally published in Devex to mark the World Humanitarian Day.