The Rise of a New Humanitarian Governance at Home (original) (raw)
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Humanitarian Aid, Security and Ethics
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The article examines the relationship between humanitarianism, security, and ethics in the case of the provision of medical humanitarian aid by Israel to casualties from the Syrian civil war, between 2013 and 2018. We argue that this humanitarian project differs from the type of humanitarian intervention commonly seen in conflict zones and can be identified as a new form of humanitarian governance. Our case study deals with humanitarian care provided in the country of origin of the medical and security forces involved, rather than in the country of the injured. In this articulation of humanitarianism at home a new nature of life governance and new subjects of security, emerge. We argue that the politics of life shifts and is subordinated to two different ethical frameworks founded on two different logics: that of the human (as in the type of medical treatment seen in traditional humanitarian aid provision, which is often related to short-term immediate treatment) and that of the cit...
Humanitarian medical aid to the Syrian people: Ethical implications and dilemmas
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Medical professionals providing humanitarian aid in times of crisis face complicated ethical and clinical challenges. Today, humanitarian aid is given in accordance with existing guidelines developed by international humanitarian organizations and defined by international law. This paper considers the ethical aspects and frameworks of an atypical humanitarian project, namely one that provides medical support through an Israeli civilian hospital to Syrian Civil War casualties. We explore new ethical questions in this unique situation that pose a serious challenge for the medical community and conventional ethical norms, a challenge Israeli medical staff meet on a daily basis. Before discussing the ethical challenges, we give a description of the project and its unique status.
Res Militaris, an online social science journal, ERGOMAS issue n°6, March, 2019
This article discusses the concepts of borders and boundaries by analyzing the medical treatment provided in Israel to Syrian casualties, in field hospitals along the border zone between Israel and Syria but also in public hospitals elsewhere in the country. At these hospitals, security personnel and IDF soldiers guard the wards where the Syrian patients receive treatment, which rapidly transforms the surroundings into a cooperative medical/ security environment. The Israeli medical staff and the Syrian casualties also develop their own special relationships during the treatment periods. A boundary zone emerges, in which security and medicine, as well as enemies and allies, interact through the provision of medical aid. In this process, security arenas adapt to the humanitarian aid agenda, while civilian medical spheres are readily transformed into security spaces. In the intersection of the two elements, boundaries between the civilian and the military, and between medicine and security, become blurred. Moreover, boundaries between enemies also shift, as Syrians and Israelis begin to view each other as friends - and even as family. Whereas the concepts of bordering or border-making refer to establishing distinctions between spaces or groups, we suggest using the concept of the “boundary zone” to describe the new space that here creates a bridge between two different (medical and security) spheres of expertise and two different peoples.
UJAH: Unizik Journal of Arts and Humanities, 2022
The doctrine of Responsibility to Protect popularly known as R2P was adopted by the international community as a response to complex emergencies of the post-Cold War era. Nearly two decades of its proposal and adoption, R2P is still a controversial doctrine that is yet to go down well with most humanitarian organizations especially relief agencies. Consequently, humanitarian organizations engaging in humanitarian assistance often dissociate their activities in theory and practice from R2P. Despite the challenges which the doctrine poses to humanitarian actors, this study, using historical and analytical method, demonstrates that there are common grounds from which a synergy could be built for effective intervention and assistance. Such grounds, it posits exist because the rejection of R2P by humanitarian actors is not informed by inadequacies in the content of the new framework, as both old and new humanitarianism appear to be pursuing similar goal – protection of the helpless victi...
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The principle of the Protection of Civilians (PoC) in armed conflict has ethical repercussions in various actions undertaken by states and international organisations, from humanitarian relief, development aid, and peacekeeping, to warfare and military intervention. While the ethics of humanitarian intervention are instructive in this regard, most PoC practices should be conceived rather as modes of humanitarian governance across borders—from interventionist to resilience‐oriented kinds. The consequences of this for the ethics of PoC are explored in this paper, highlighting questions of power, culture, and complicity. By relating these questions to the ethical strands of solidarist and pluralist internationalism, it positions the ethics of PoC within the broader field of the ethics of world politics. Examples are drawn from recent scholarly debate on PoC efforts in war‐torn countries such as South Sudan. This analysis of the ethics of PoC reconfigures central positions in the debate on humanitarian intervention to an era of global humanitarian governance.
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Humanitarian intervention has increasingly become the prevalent means of providing protection and aid at a global level. Yet alongside its success concerns have been raised that humanitarianism has increasingly become an economic enterprise and a political tool for controlling territories and governing international relations. In The Politics of Humanitarianism authors from a variety of disciplines provide a comprehensive critique of the humanitarian enterprise. How are those on the end of humanitarian action influenced by different epistemologies and applications of international law? What is the complex relationship between values - what humanitarian action is intended to be - and practice - what happens on the ground? Combining international case studies with critical theoretical evaluations, and including chapters on international aid, refugees, childhood and women's rights, The Politics of Humanitarianism offers a timely and critical analysis of the contemporary humanitarian system.
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This paper explores how speakers manage the dilemmatic tension between competing demands for accountability in mundane explanations of humanitarian assistance in settings of armed conflict. Taking as analytic data talk recorded in interviews with the personnel of aid agencies and various non-governmental organizations (NGOs) who work in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we examine how demands for both non-partisan impartiality, on the one hand, and sympathetic alignment with the victims (or losing parties) of armed conflict, on the other, feature in the explanations that humanitarian aid workers formulate to account for their professional activities. While non-partisanship features as a source of legitimacy given that humanitarian assistance is regarded as a response to universal human suffering, the source of that suffering in armed conflict necessitates recognition of the antagonist-protagonist and victim relationship in order for aid recipients to be identified. Everyday accounts of aid work function to mitigate the otherwise mutually exclusive relationship between competing assumptions that inform the logic of humanitarian assistance.
Medical humanitarianism, human rights and political advocacy: The case of the Israeli Open Clinic
In the context of neo-liberal retrenchments humanitarian NGOs have become alternative healthcare providers that partially fill the vacuum left by the welfare state's withdrawal from the provision of services to migrants and other marginalized populations. In many cases they thus help to build legitimacy for the state's retreat from social responsibilities. Human rights organizations play an important role in advocating for migrants' rights, but in many cases they represent a legalistic and individualized conceptualization of the right to health that limits their claims for social justice. This paper analyzes the interactions and tensions between the discourses of medical humanitarianism, human rights and political advocacy using the example of an "Open Clinic" run by an Israeli human rights organization as a case-study: In 2007 dramatically increasing patient numbers provoked an intense internal debate concerning the proposal to temporarily close the "Open Clinic" in order to press the government to take action. Based on protocols from internal meetings and parliamentary hearings and in-depth interviews, we have analyzed divergent contextualizations of the Clinic's closure. These reflect conflicting notions regarding the Clinic's variegated spectrum of roles e humanitarian, political, legitimizing, symbolic, empowering and organizational e and underlying conceptualizations of migrants' "deservingness". Our case-study thus helps to illuminate NGOs' role in the realm of migrant healthcare and points out options for a possible fruitful relationship between the divergent paradigms of medical humanitarianism, human rights and political advocacy.