1 00:00:04,010 --> 00:00:10,399 Well, thank you all for coming today. We're really, really lucky to have Tommie Smith with us from the Department of International Development 2 00:00:10,400 --> 00:00:17,360 very often and promises to be a really interesting and topical talk started with him. 3 00:00:17,360 --> 00:00:23,890 Get straight to it. If you don't have your name and email address within this past year. 4 00:00:27,740 --> 00:00:28,850 And also just one more thing. 5 00:00:29,180 --> 00:00:36,319 Aside from 87 a few years ago, I was very keen to do this and bring together students who were working on issues related to humanitarian assistance, 6 00:00:36,320 --> 00:00:40,060 especially in conflict zones. If you are a student, you're not going anywhere. 7 00:00:40,640 --> 00:00:46,850 I'd like to present to you fantastic or even an artist of some ongoing work you like to get to be back on. 8 00:00:47,430 --> 00:00:52,550 You get in touch. And you know, I was until Monday evening, 30 minutes. 9 00:00:52,850 --> 00:00:55,880 Yeah, 30 or 40 minutes. And then we all have questions and. 10 00:00:57,870 --> 00:00:59,900 Thanks very much and thanks, everyone. Come in. 11 00:00:59,960 --> 00:01:05,910 It's a it's a really good opportunity for me to share some of the research I've been doing with people working on similar issues. 12 00:01:05,910 --> 00:01:13,110 And I'm really looking forward to the Q&A as well. I'm based at the part of international development and associated with the Refugee Studies Centre, 13 00:01:13,530 --> 00:01:20,850 and this paper that I'm going to deliver is primarily based on my own field research, which I'm expanding into a dphil. 14 00:01:21,270 --> 00:01:27,240 And broadly speaking, my research is looking into the history of humanitarian practices. 15 00:01:27,600 --> 00:01:33,120 So it's an examination of how humanitarian agencies provide the essentials of life in disasters 16 00:01:33,300 --> 00:01:37,770 and how these particular techniques that they use have emerged and developed in history. 17 00:01:38,880 --> 00:01:45,270 And I'm interested in this topic because of the way that humanitarian action has recently become such a regularised and standardised industry, 18 00:01:45,780 --> 00:01:47,430 particularly over the last 30 years, 19 00:01:47,640 --> 00:01:54,300 it increasingly purports to undertake these kind of objective interventions that are just concerned with saving and sustaining human lives. 20 00:01:54,750 --> 00:02:01,530 And my feeling is that any pretence to objectivity like this, especially when it comes to human lives, requires a lot more critical analysis. 21 00:02:01,530 --> 00:02:08,729 And it's probably been given so far. And obviously I can't present all my thoughts or my findings from my research today. 22 00:02:08,730 --> 00:02:14,580 So I thought I'd outline some of the main arguments that I'm making in my work with reference to this debate about humanitarian principles, 23 00:02:14,850 --> 00:02:18,540 most notably these principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence. 24 00:02:19,650 --> 00:02:24,510 It seems to me that this was a good way into my research because this neutrality debate continues to be one 25 00:02:24,510 --> 00:02:29,580 of those tricky and intractable problems that most people who are working on humanitarianism are aware of. 26 00:02:30,450 --> 00:02:35,670 And then you try to seize very. It was also what drew me personally into the study of humanitarianism in the first place. 27 00:02:36,120 --> 00:02:42,659 It seems to be so confusing when I first looked into it that activities that only sought to help people in the most minimal ways could be, 28 00:02:42,660 --> 00:02:46,050 first of all, so controversial. And second of all, so potentially damaging. 29 00:02:46,470 --> 00:02:50,370 And it was also particularly interesting for me that the activities that sought to assist 30 00:02:50,370 --> 00:02:54,510 people could often have the opposite effect of actually making things quite a lot worse. 31 00:02:55,860 --> 00:03:01,800 So I was determined to look into how and why this came about. And although there's already a very rich literature in this area, 32 00:03:02,010 --> 00:03:09,540 my intervention in general involves bringing in the issue of history and the issue of humanitarian techniques and bringing them stage. 33 00:03:10,740 --> 00:03:14,610 First of all, I think there's been very little attention to history in the study of humanitarianism, 34 00:03:14,970 --> 00:03:20,310 and humanitarianism is too often presented as a kind of a historical, transcendental, universal phenomenon. 35 00:03:20,940 --> 00:03:25,110 And I think humanitarian desperately needs to be placed in some proper historical context. 36 00:03:26,190 --> 00:03:33,000 And secondly, I think that there's been relatively little critical research into the particular mechanisms that humanitarian agencies use in disaster, 37 00:03:33,360 --> 00:03:37,680 the actual ways in which humanitarian agencies help people, the kind of foods they provide, 38 00:03:37,830 --> 00:03:42,540 the kind of shelters they build, the kind of information they process, the kind of outcomes they measure. 39 00:03:42,780 --> 00:03:47,640 Well, these particular techniques and practices, I think, are rarely critically analysed in detail. 40 00:03:48,810 --> 00:03:54,840 So my feeling is that both these areas, history and humanitarian techniques, can help us unravel the debate about neutrality. 41 00:03:55,440 --> 00:03:58,680 And so just briefly, the structure of my talk today, 42 00:03:58,800 --> 00:04:02,610 I'm going to begin with a description of this neutrality debate for people who are not familiar with it. 43 00:04:03,150 --> 00:04:06,480 But I'm going to have to trace out rather broad terms just because the lack of time. 44 00:04:07,080 --> 00:04:11,730 And then I'm going to highlight the way that scholars so far have contributed to this debate, pointing out the main gaps, 45 00:04:12,150 --> 00:04:17,400 which, again, I think in there is a lack of historical analysis and a lack of analysis of humanitarian techniques. 46 00:04:17,970 --> 00:04:24,450 And then finally, I want to argue that attention to history and humanitarian practices can help illuminate the whole phenomenon of humanitarianism, 47 00:04:24,600 --> 00:04:26,100 but especially the neutrality debate. 48 00:04:26,340 --> 00:04:32,850 And I want to illustrate this with some detailed attention to food and the way that food is provided by humanitarian agencies. 49 00:04:33,270 --> 00:04:38,730 I should note that my research I'm also looking at the way that shelter is provided by the sanitation is provided by the water provided. 50 00:04:38,940 --> 00:04:43,590 So different chapters on different areas of essential human life. 51 00:04:43,980 --> 00:04:46,050 But just today, I went to look at food in detail. 52 00:04:46,410 --> 00:04:52,500 So I've been looking at the techniques that humanitarian agencies use to provide food as revealed in their own operational documents. 53 00:04:52,760 --> 00:04:58,140 I'm going to look at archival documents from history to reveal the way that these particular techniques developed. 54 00:05:00,090 --> 00:05:08,410 And my main aim today, I think, will be to show that these mechanisms of humanitarian relief are not neutral and objective responses to suffering. 55 00:05:08,680 --> 00:05:11,420 But they're the product of a particular moment in European history. 56 00:05:12,370 --> 00:05:17,050 My argument, to put it very simply, is that humanitarianism can never be neutral and impartial. 57 00:05:17,350 --> 00:05:19,210 It can never be separated from politics. 58 00:05:19,900 --> 00:05:25,060 But this isn't because of the consequences of humanitarian action, the kind of unforeseen effects that humanitarianism has had. 59 00:05:25,510 --> 00:05:30,370 But I think it's equally due to the particular cultural history of its techniques and technologies. 60 00:05:30,760 --> 00:05:34,209 It's down to the way that humanitarian practices have been formed and the way 61 00:05:34,210 --> 00:05:38,350 that these practices are the product of certain Western European circumstances. 62 00:05:39,370 --> 00:05:42,640 So in essence, my aim is to shift the focus away from the consequences of humanitarianism, 63 00:05:42,820 --> 00:05:46,690 which are very often examined with the conclusion that they are almost always political. 64 00:05:46,870 --> 00:05:50,980 And instead of a focus to these technologies, these practices that humanitarian agencies use, 65 00:05:51,130 --> 00:05:54,940 the kind of mundane technologies at play when humanitarian agencies intervene. 66 00:05:58,090 --> 00:06:04,360 So let me start by summarising the neutrality debate in broad terms what it is, what it means. 67 00:06:05,410 --> 00:06:11,440 First of all, I just wanted to clarify that I'm using this term as a shorthand. This is really a debate about humanitarian principles more broadly. 68 00:06:12,250 --> 00:06:13,270 It's not just about neutrality, 69 00:06:13,270 --> 00:06:19,750 but it's also about impartiality and independence and a whole set of principles that have been articulated in various ways at various times, 70 00:06:20,200 --> 00:06:26,110 possibly most extensively by Peter, who I think outlined about seven of them in great detail. 71 00:06:26,590 --> 00:06:31,480 But just to give you a flavour of the idea, I thought I'd go through what neutrality, impartiality and independence actually mean. 72 00:06:32,890 --> 00:06:38,290 The principle of impartiality suggests that aid should be distributed according to need, 73 00:06:38,290 --> 00:06:44,980 only ignoring all other considerations like nationality and ethnicity, location, convenience, and all these other things. 74 00:06:46,210 --> 00:06:53,770 The principle of neutrality suggests that aid should be provided without attention to the grievances and opinions of either side in a conflict, 75 00:06:54,070 --> 00:06:58,750 and the aid should be delivered without benefiting one side in the conflict at the expense of another. 76 00:07:00,250 --> 00:07:03,489 The principle of independence suggests that agencies should not take money 77 00:07:03,490 --> 00:07:07,870 from or be associated with any party to a conflict or their political allies. 78 00:07:09,550 --> 00:07:17,590 So you can see that these three principles set out to distinguish a kind of partial political interest driven world of politics from an impartial, 79 00:07:17,590 --> 00:07:20,710 imperative, value driven world of humanitarianism. 80 00:07:21,430 --> 00:07:25,089 That basically about trying to situate humanitarianism as something that's apolitical, 81 00:07:25,090 --> 00:07:28,390 something independent of politics, something driven by morality and values. 82 00:07:30,650 --> 00:07:35,110 It's true that a lot of agencies have rejected some of these principles and accepted other ones. 83 00:07:35,120 --> 00:07:40,010 And it's also true that there are a number of subtleties in the different ways that these principles have been articulated. 84 00:07:41,030 --> 00:07:49,190 But for the purposes of clarity and brevity in this presentation, I want to identify two broad positions in this debate, in this neutrality debate. 85 00:07:51,770 --> 00:07:52,129 Basically, 86 00:07:52,130 --> 00:07:58,660 there are people who generally accept the idea of humanitarian principles and apolitical humanitarianism and those that generally reject them. 87 00:07:59,570 --> 00:08:04,400 Those that accept the principles have often been termed classicists or denominators, 88 00:08:04,730 --> 00:08:08,210 because the principles themselves go back to the beginnings of organised Unitarianism, 89 00:08:08,390 --> 00:08:16,280 to the establishment of the International Committee of the Red Cross by Henry Art and a number of other agencies in the middle of the 19th century. 90 00:08:17,630 --> 00:08:25,040 And those the rejection of certain principles have often been called political or politicised, and they've often been labelled also Christian areas. 91 00:08:25,160 --> 00:08:34,430 After Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontieres, who was possibly the most visible exponent of this view from the 1960s and 1970s. 92 00:08:35,540 --> 00:08:40,400 These are visionary and reject classical principles on the basis of two main arguments. 93 00:08:41,270 --> 00:08:48,980 Firstly, they argue that classical humanitarianism is of limited value because it fails to address the causes of suffering. 94 00:08:50,800 --> 00:08:57,400 David Rieff characterise this view in a memorable phrase that humanitarianism just involves putting Band-Aids on malignant tumours. 95 00:08:58,720 --> 00:09:03,010 In other words, it's a rather useless response. It doesn't really address the reasons people need help. 96 00:09:03,250 --> 00:09:09,490 It just offers some basic forms of relief. And as long as those root causes aren't tackled, people are still going to suffer. 97 00:09:09,640 --> 00:09:18,490 And relief is still going to be needed. But second, these people also attack classical humanitarians on the view that it's an unethical position. 98 00:09:18,790 --> 00:09:20,830 This is an ethical argument rather than a practical one. 99 00:09:21,640 --> 00:09:26,860 They say that staying completely neutral in the conflict often means staying quiet about human rights abuses. 100 00:09:27,880 --> 00:09:32,260 When you don't make a statement that could be considered to advance the cause of one side over another. 101 00:09:32,470 --> 00:09:38,230 You ignore the fact that one side actually might be worse than another, or that justice might actually lie with one side and not another. 102 00:09:39,340 --> 00:09:43,780 They argue that we have an ethical obligation to condemn what's wrong and to assist what's right. 103 00:09:44,680 --> 00:09:51,370 And if the delivery of humanitarian aid ends up people have committed atrocities, then humanitarian aid is counterproductive and unethical. 104 00:09:51,760 --> 00:09:55,630 And this, of course, is the situation that a lot of aid agencies from themselves in after Rwanda. 105 00:09:55,880 --> 00:10:00,070 And it's been the topic of a lot of academic work by people, actually, military movements. 106 00:10:00,280 --> 00:10:03,760 And of course, yes, then whoops is not here today, but has been involved in this group. 107 00:10:06,770 --> 00:10:11,000 So let me now briefly is the contribution of empirical academic work in this debate. 108 00:10:12,440 --> 00:10:18,260 When taken as a whole, academic work on humanitarianism appears to suggest that this classical idea 109 00:10:18,410 --> 00:10:22,190 of neutral and impartial humanitarianism has never really worked in practice. 110 00:10:22,970 --> 00:10:27,530 In other words, they highlight that it's impossible to actually implement classical principles, 111 00:10:27,830 --> 00:10:33,110 and they highlight the multiple ways that humanitarian agencies actually have very political consequences. 112 00:10:33,650 --> 00:10:35,200 And I'm just going to give three examples of this. 113 00:10:35,210 --> 00:10:42,710 It's a very, very big literature, but here is three illustrations of this view and overall of this body of work. 114 00:10:43,460 --> 00:10:46,850 So first of all, there's work on the economic consequences of AIDS. 115 00:10:47,090 --> 00:10:50,570 So when the agencies go into a new place carrying huge amounts of cash and resources, 116 00:10:50,690 --> 00:10:52,940 it's inevitable that some people are going to benefit more than others. 117 00:10:53,450 --> 00:10:57,080 Aid agencies might allow military forces to charge for the protection of deliveries. 118 00:10:57,470 --> 00:11:00,830 They might allow militias to seize goods at checkpoints. 119 00:11:01,130 --> 00:11:07,610 They might pay rents and buy items locally from traders and wholesalers who offer assistance to one side in the conflict or another. 120 00:11:08,510 --> 00:11:14,930 They might provide opportunities for the final recipients of aid to trade things like cash and food for. 121 00:11:15,140 --> 00:11:17,870 So to trade items like food and medicine, cash, weaponry. 122 00:11:18,530 --> 00:11:25,280 So all these interventions in the political economy of aid have inevitably political impacts. 123 00:11:25,280 --> 00:11:29,300 And David Keene is perhaps the most well-known author who makes this point. 124 00:11:31,400 --> 00:11:37,370 Second, there's work on the political consequences of aid, or rather, the consequences of aid on political institutions. 125 00:11:38,570 --> 00:11:45,440 When agencies intervene, they often end up acting very much like governments, and they often intervene where governments are already very weak. 126 00:11:46,730 --> 00:11:51,260 They end up replicating replacing governmental structures or providing services that national governments 127 00:11:51,260 --> 00:11:55,400 would otherwise provide or provide these kind of systems of patronage and opportunities for people. 128 00:11:55,610 --> 00:12:02,110 Again, the governments are normally providing they can be accused of undermining existing political structures, 129 00:12:02,450 --> 00:12:08,210 preventing democratic institutions from taking root and replacing the need for citizens to call their own governments into account. 130 00:12:08,810 --> 00:12:16,400 So undermine democracy in this fundamental way has been the argument of Alex the world, again, probably the most notable author who makes this point. 131 00:12:17,900 --> 00:12:23,420 And then finally, there's a lot of academic work on how donors and aid agencies themselves have very partial motivations. 132 00:12:24,290 --> 00:12:32,210 Agencies are reliant on their income streams, obviously, and they remain paralysed like a lot of international agencies, by the funding cycle itself. 133 00:12:33,110 --> 00:12:39,560 And they inevitably don't intervene purely on the basis of need, but also in the basis of where there's money available for them to intervene. 134 00:12:40,130 --> 00:12:43,550 And usually because this money comes from governments or large donors that 135 00:12:43,550 --> 00:12:48,110 influence by the geostrategic or political aims of those donors or governments. 136 00:12:49,400 --> 00:12:53,780 As a result, there's a lot of examples and a lot of studies about this imbalance between the amount 137 00:12:53,780 --> 00:12:58,040 of money that's spent on international aid and the level of need in a certain place. 138 00:12:59,120 --> 00:13:02,150 Again, perhaps the most famous example comes from the late 1990s, 139 00:13:02,300 --> 00:13:07,250 when many more millions was spent by humanitarian agencies in the Balkans compared to Central Africa. 140 00:13:07,640 --> 00:13:10,520 And this was at a time when, according to pretty much every indicator, 141 00:13:10,520 --> 00:13:14,600 the situation in Africa and the needs in Africa were far, far greater than in the Balkans. 142 00:13:15,800 --> 00:13:21,860 So these three examples demonstrate the inevitably political consequences of humanitarian aid, 143 00:13:22,100 --> 00:13:27,980 and they provide strong evidence that these classical principles that I went through are pretty much impossible to achieve in practice. 144 00:13:28,610 --> 00:13:32,329 But curiously, and this is the beginning point, really, for my intervention, 145 00:13:32,330 --> 00:13:37,510 this kind of empirical evidence doesn't seem to have led to a revision of the ethical position as it 146 00:13:37,520 --> 00:13:44,510 relates to a revision of the way the agencies and the see themselves and the principles that they adopt. 147 00:13:45,920 --> 00:13:51,139 In fact, if anything, there seems to have been an intensification of classical humanitarianism since the 1990s, 148 00:13:51,140 --> 00:13:54,380 since these studies first came out in response to them, 149 00:13:54,800 --> 00:14:01,220 and especially after Rwanda, a lot of agencies insisted the classical principle should remain as a key operational guide, 150 00:14:01,820 --> 00:14:09,650 even if they appear impossible to sustain in practice. A lot of agencies ended up intensifying their search for this kind of classical ideal, 151 00:14:10,820 --> 00:14:16,670 and the growth of standardised guidelines and handbooks I think is the main manifestation of this trend. 152 00:14:17,780 --> 00:14:25,370 Over the past 40 years and the practical techniques used by humanitarian actors have become more and more standardised and prescriptive. 153 00:14:26,060 --> 00:14:32,930 They've been set down in increasingly detailed hand lines and books and guidelines, these handbooks. 154 00:14:33,230 --> 00:14:40,070 I think if you look at them from a distance, seem to be stipulating objective response to suffering. 155 00:14:40,640 --> 00:14:45,320 They're trying to manage humanitarianism in a lot of detail. They're trying to control it scientifically. 156 00:14:45,710 --> 00:14:50,000 They're trying to prevent and minimise the political consequences that reported by 157 00:14:50,180 --> 00:14:55,100 Keenan de Waal and others by managing it in a much more bureaucratic and detailed way. 158 00:14:55,730 --> 00:15:00,920 And they've expanded in reach and significance within pretty much every organisation. 159 00:15:01,730 --> 00:15:05,990 So to take also as an example, when I was doing archival research with Oxfam. 160 00:15:06,800 --> 00:15:10,340 The first humanitarian policy that I could find was produced in 1971. 161 00:15:10,370 --> 00:15:13,400 There was nothing before them, and it was about 30 pages long. 162 00:15:13,610 --> 00:15:21,020 It was typed. It was just an internal document. And it set out guidelines for Oxfam, who monitor interventions in its entirety. 163 00:15:21,050 --> 00:15:28,460 Absolutely everything was there. But by the late 1990s, there was an extremely massive range of lengthy documents. 164 00:15:28,640 --> 00:15:35,900 Every area of humanitarian practice had separate books that were published, often by and published and available for everybody. 165 00:15:36,300 --> 00:15:40,730 And the catalogue of humanitarian equipment, the kind of technical things the humanitarian agencies used. 166 00:15:40,910 --> 00:15:45,230 That catalogue alone is over 200 pages long. It's an absolutely massive list. 167 00:15:46,970 --> 00:15:52,340 And this remarkable expansion in the length and detail of handbooks and guidelines is not exclusive to Oxfam. 168 00:15:53,150 --> 00:15:56,990 And often humanitarian agencies are governed by handbooks collectively. 169 00:15:57,740 --> 00:16:02,240 For example, many of you are probably familiar with the Sphere Handbook, which was produced according to them, 170 00:16:02,240 --> 00:16:10,220 in consultation with over 400 organisations, and is adopted certainly by many more locally and internationally, and it's about 350 pages long. 171 00:16:10,640 --> 00:16:12,470 It is quite brief in its descriptions, 172 00:16:12,680 --> 00:16:21,500 but it does stipulate in quite astonishing detail the kind of requirements and minimum standards that humanitarian agencies are expected to adhere to. 173 00:16:22,610 --> 00:16:28,010 And there are other handbooks as well that concentrate on just a particular area like this one I'm showing now on nutrition, 174 00:16:28,340 --> 00:16:32,270 which is produced by the World Health Organisation and is also adopted by a number of 175 00:16:32,270 --> 00:16:36,440 agencies and is equally long as this very handbook but just concentrates on nutrition. 176 00:16:38,420 --> 00:16:41,180 So I suppose the first argument that I am making is that this whole project of 177 00:16:41,180 --> 00:16:45,320 standardisation is driven by the idea that there is such a thing as a perfectly objective, 178 00:16:45,500 --> 00:16:48,290 a neutral intervention, or at least it's something that we should aim at. 179 00:16:48,860 --> 00:16:56,180 And it's suggesting that agencies can avoid being political by following these kind of intricate procedures that manage human life in a lot of detail. 180 00:16:57,580 --> 00:17:02,590 And my feeling is that the content of these handbooks has been really critically examined historically. 181 00:17:02,600 --> 00:17:06,830 And what I am setting out to do in my research is to look at where these particular prescriptions originated. 182 00:17:07,280 --> 00:17:11,450 Is there really such thing as this objective response to suffering or other prescriptions in the handbook? 183 00:17:11,660 --> 00:17:15,410 Actually, products of certain cultural and historical conditions that we can look into. 184 00:17:16,400 --> 00:17:23,930 And I suppose my approach can be seen as the application of science and technology studies, science and sociology to humanitarianism. 185 00:17:24,110 --> 00:17:29,090 It's going to attempt to look at the sociological and cultural context of these technological practices. 186 00:17:30,800 --> 00:17:34,480 So I'm going to illustrate the kind of work I'm doing by looking at food. 187 00:17:34,490 --> 00:17:37,760 Like I said, I want to first of all, 188 00:17:38,240 --> 00:17:43,100 look at the way that food is conceived and presented in humanitarian documents and these handbooks that I've just presented. 189 00:17:43,310 --> 00:17:49,830 And secondly, began to look at the history of this presentation. So the provision of food is obviously a very important part of relief. 190 00:17:49,880 --> 00:17:53,720 And like other areas, it's been subjected to this kind of rationalisation process. 191 00:17:54,200 --> 00:18:01,580 And I think we can identify two main features of humanitarian food programs, or at least there's only two that I want to concentrate on today. 192 00:18:02,450 --> 00:18:07,070 The first one relates to the way that food is conceived and the relationship of who happens to the human body. 193 00:18:08,780 --> 00:18:12,770 Humanitarian relief programs present food in terms of its biochemical properties. 194 00:18:13,160 --> 00:18:17,450 That great food down is their carbohydrate, the protein, the vitamin, the mineral, the fat content. 195 00:18:17,750 --> 00:18:23,840 And they define foods often by these kind of invisible nutritional parts rather than their visible forms. 196 00:18:24,560 --> 00:18:28,640 So rather than being a plate of maize or lentils or rice things that people I mean, 197 00:18:28,880 --> 00:18:32,630 the beneficiaries understand, they become a matter for expert intervention. 198 00:18:32,930 --> 00:18:35,990 They become categorised according to the terminology of nutritional science. 199 00:18:37,370 --> 00:18:40,460 And this is an example of a table from one cornerstone handbook, 200 00:18:40,820 --> 00:18:45,050 which demonstrates the way that Russians are broken down into their component nutrients. 201 00:18:45,830 --> 00:18:49,370 And this is a table for another one which shows common foodstuffs. 202 00:18:49,610 --> 00:18:55,129 Again, by their nutritional content, but as well as food being conceived in this way, 203 00:18:55,130 --> 00:18:59,720 the human body and the human need for food is conceived as a purely biological need. 204 00:19:00,890 --> 00:19:05,990 Food is seen as an input which allows human to function. It's seen as a kind of fuel which drives human activity. 205 00:19:06,260 --> 00:19:12,350 Providing food to populations becomes a matter of calculating what amounts are required to maintain bodily functions. 206 00:19:12,350 --> 00:19:20,060 And then providing this table I put on the PowerPoint now demonstrates one handbook summary of a person's need for food, 207 00:19:20,300 --> 00:19:23,480 which is articulated a set of exact quantities of each nutrient. 208 00:19:25,960 --> 00:19:29,260 And these nutritional requirements are often adjusted depending on different 209 00:19:29,260 --> 00:19:34,090 characteristics which relate to the population and adjusted according to age, 210 00:19:34,360 --> 00:19:38,200 gender activity level and the ambient temperature of the country. 211 00:19:39,220 --> 00:19:41,380 These factors affect the functioning of the body. 212 00:19:41,590 --> 00:19:48,490 The point is that they affect the biological processing of food, the conversion of food into energy, and they take these into account. 213 00:19:48,520 --> 00:19:51,790 Humanitarian agencies when they're planning for a disaster. 214 00:19:53,350 --> 00:19:56,469 So can see in all these charts where the food is perceived as this biochemical inputs, 215 00:19:56,470 --> 00:20:01,330 the human body and the humans are seen somehow as motors or machines or at least physical beings. 216 00:20:01,480 --> 00:20:06,740 And food is seen as fuel, which drives these physical beings and this circulation of food. 217 00:20:07,090 --> 00:20:13,240 The social values of food and eating are often replaced by this purely physical requirement to drive the human machine. 218 00:20:13,630 --> 00:20:18,340 All the different cultural categorisations of food, which have enormous relevance in a lot of societies, 219 00:20:18,610 --> 00:20:23,950 are replaced by an articulation of the nutritional content of food and its role in biological organism. 220 00:20:25,210 --> 00:20:29,890 So I'm arguing in this part of my research that there's a very specific understanding 221 00:20:29,890 --> 00:20:34,390 of food as a culturally and socially and historically specific understanding of food. 222 00:20:34,930 --> 00:20:38,920 I suppose the first thing to mention is that food is perceived quite differently in other cultures. 223 00:20:39,490 --> 00:20:41,620 There's obviously a rich anthropology of food. 224 00:20:41,620 --> 00:20:46,150 There's a very large literature that one can draw and showing the different perceptions of food around the world. 225 00:20:46,660 --> 00:20:53,290 And there's a number of fascinating books by anthropologists revealing how food and eating are so central to cultural life, social life. 226 00:20:53,800 --> 00:20:59,320 They have social roles. They create food, create and maintain social bonds. 227 00:20:59,500 --> 00:21:04,810 It's often laden with very rich, symbolic meaning. It has quite profound religious significance in a lot of places. 228 00:21:05,320 --> 00:21:09,250 And there's even a large literature about how tastes about food. 229 00:21:09,250 --> 00:21:14,920 The kind of foods that people Willimon eat is extremely different from French culture, and it remains very important to people, 230 00:21:14,920 --> 00:21:19,330 even when on the brink of death, even when they're starving, they'll be very fussy about what they eat. 231 00:21:21,860 --> 00:21:27,920 So my argument is that this idea of food as a biochemical input to the human body is culturally specific. 232 00:21:28,160 --> 00:21:30,800 But my main emphasis is on how it's historically specific. 233 00:21:31,310 --> 00:21:37,160 I've been tracing the emergence of this particular idea of food through history and how it became central to humanitarianism. 234 00:21:38,850 --> 00:21:43,950 Nutritional science as an idea and a bulk of ideas first emerged in the mid-19th century, 235 00:21:44,460 --> 00:21:48,540 and it was a new discourse on food that's generally accepted to have created 236 00:21:48,540 --> 00:21:52,110 a revolution in the way that people understood what went into their bodies. 237 00:21:52,650 --> 00:21:59,700 Within Europe, food became less a matter of cultural life or social status, and it became more about health and energy. 238 00:22:00,060 --> 00:22:04,500 People began to relate their intake of their food more precisely with energy and health. 239 00:22:04,800 --> 00:22:10,290 It became less of a social thing and the intakes of food more exactly quantified by scientists. 240 00:22:11,520 --> 00:22:16,380 There was this new language of nutritional science, which was very quickly adopted by states and within industry. 241 00:22:17,100 --> 00:22:21,540 The science of food became central to the mechanisms of the modern bureaucratic state. 242 00:22:23,240 --> 00:22:29,690 Nutritional scientists drove standard diets, which articulated the minimum quantities of each nutrient are working man and woman would need. 243 00:22:30,350 --> 00:22:35,270 This is a slide which summarises the work of nutritional scientists in the late 19th century. 244 00:22:35,570 --> 00:22:41,719 They were disaggregating the kind of people who needed food and the occupation and their nationality and 245 00:22:41,720 --> 00:22:45,350 the different types of workers in different places and how they needed different types of nutrients. 246 00:22:45,650 --> 00:22:50,930 So you can see on this chart the difference between a French bourgeois with moderate exercise and a Swedish worker. 247 00:22:53,850 --> 00:23:02,370 This standard diet was rapidly adopted by industrialists who in the late 19th century were increasingly concerned with efficiency and productivity. 248 00:23:02,670 --> 00:23:06,420 There was the movement of tailor ism which involved the careful control of 249 00:23:06,420 --> 00:23:10,829 production to minimise sorry to maximise efficiency in the workplace and tailors, 250 00:23:10,830 --> 00:23:14,790 and began to see the intake of food by workers as a crucial part of their drive for efficiency. 251 00:23:15,510 --> 00:23:19,110 They began to offer nutritionally balanced meals on the work floor in the workplace to 252 00:23:19,110 --> 00:23:23,430 ensure that the energy that workers expended was matched by the meals that they paint. 253 00:23:23,910 --> 00:23:31,290 And in the process, the human being began to see increasingly like this machine, which took input and produced and outputs industrial waste. 254 00:23:32,760 --> 00:23:41,280 But this vision of the human body, which has been called the human motor by a very influential book by Robyn Buck, was also adopted in the military. 255 00:23:41,310 --> 00:23:43,900 It was very common in the military, particularly the early 20th century. 256 00:23:44,310 --> 00:23:47,880 The military became preoccupied by the health and the strength of their fighting troops. 257 00:23:48,540 --> 00:23:54,599 But they also began to intervene directly in the policies of government to make sure that not only their troops were nutritionally well-off, 258 00:23:54,600 --> 00:23:59,160 but the general population was, so that when they were drawing conscripts in population, 259 00:23:59,340 --> 00:24:05,100 that they were healthy and sturdy and whole policies like canteen feeding, nutrition, education, 260 00:24:05,100 --> 00:24:12,900 fortified foods and very detailed attention to the Russians that soldiers were given all manifestations of this kind of trend. 261 00:24:13,920 --> 00:24:16,380 So this idea that food is a fuel that drives human motor, 262 00:24:16,740 --> 00:24:22,740 I think is a cultural idea that emerged in the 19th century and became very much associated with the motor bureaucratic state, 263 00:24:22,890 --> 00:24:24,570 particularly the military and the industry. 264 00:24:27,180 --> 00:24:33,330 And I suppose the broad and provocative question I went to us today and I'm going to return to this is can we really see this as humanitarian? 265 00:24:33,360 --> 00:24:39,810 This view of food, doesn't it failed to respond to people as humans with social and cultural lives of their own? 266 00:24:40,290 --> 00:24:46,080 Doesn't it just respond to people as physical machines that require certain amounts of chemical energy in order to operate physically? 267 00:24:46,980 --> 00:24:51,120 And what are the implications of these techniques? Actually, when we get into the field. 268 00:24:53,020 --> 00:25:00,240 I return to these questions at the end and I hope we can talk about them because of course I recognise that it's a comparative question. 269 00:25:01,080 --> 00:25:04,740 But secondly, I'll go through the second main characteristic of humanitarian feeding, 270 00:25:04,920 --> 00:25:11,700 which is the actual delivery of food itself, the items that are provided in order to assist people in humanitarian situations. 271 00:25:12,990 --> 00:25:14,940 And what I found when looking at these handbooks particularly, 272 00:25:14,940 --> 00:25:20,549 is that if you take this specific vision of food as something as a biochemical input that you 273 00:25:20,550 --> 00:25:25,410 need physically and you translate it and you end up with this kind of technical intervention, 274 00:25:26,100 --> 00:25:32,790 you end up with these this desire to provide the required nutrients in the most efficient, most rational way possible, 275 00:25:33,510 --> 00:25:36,839 and consequently humanity and feeding can involve it doesn't always, 276 00:25:36,840 --> 00:25:43,830 but it can involve the distribution not of common foodstuffs like rice or lentils or so on, but industrial products. 277 00:25:44,200 --> 00:25:48,150 And so these have been quite an important part of humanitarian action ever since the beginning. 278 00:25:48,960 --> 00:25:52,140 This image that I'm showing on the PowerPoint is the BP five. 279 00:25:52,740 --> 00:25:58,140 It's a compressed tablet which contains, and I'm quoting, everything necessary for the maintenance of a healthy body. 280 00:25:58,740 --> 00:26:03,150 All moisture is removed from their stream processing, so it has to be eaten with lots of foil. 281 00:26:03,450 --> 00:26:10,530 There's instructions for the eating, as you can see on the box, and it becomes a bulky wrapping foil and has to be eaten with lots of water. 282 00:26:12,280 --> 00:26:15,990 But here's another example. It's what's known as the humanitarian daily ration. 283 00:26:16,320 --> 00:26:22,530 This is what caused all the consternation a few years ago during the Afghan war, because it was kind of the same shade of yellow as the cluster bombs. 284 00:26:23,180 --> 00:26:26,220 And again, they're industrially produced and preserved and packaged meals. 285 00:26:26,460 --> 00:26:30,330 And the aim is that they contain all the nutrients that the body requires. 286 00:26:31,710 --> 00:26:37,470 And again, what I want to do is link these techniques of feeding to the emotions and additional science 287 00:26:37,470 --> 00:26:41,460 and the rational techniques that the modern bureaucratic state began to use to feed people. 288 00:26:42,000 --> 00:26:44,970 And in the military particularly, the main concern, of course, 289 00:26:45,180 --> 00:26:51,930 was to deliver nutrients to their soldiers in the most efficient manner, possible concern with health and strength of troops. 290 00:26:52,140 --> 00:26:55,410 They led to this massive attention on the character of rations, 291 00:26:55,800 --> 00:26:58,620 and military planners began to find new ways to provide the nutritional needs 292 00:26:58,620 --> 00:27:02,160 of soldiers in the most durable and efficient and portable manner possible. 293 00:27:02,940 --> 00:27:05,670 This document I'm showing comes from an Army handbook. 294 00:27:06,570 --> 00:27:10,260 It shows the way that the British army planners were comparing the Russians of different countries 295 00:27:10,260 --> 00:27:14,610 around Europe to give themselves a kind of nutritional advantage over their adversaries. 296 00:27:15,600 --> 00:27:22,229 But these Russians had to be compact and portable. And we can see in this next image how army planners tested the biscuits that 297 00:27:22,230 --> 00:27:25,799 were the mainstay of the Russian and not only for their nutritional content, 298 00:27:25,800 --> 00:27:31,680 also for their durability and whether they could survive being transported big distances. 299 00:27:33,060 --> 00:27:36,510 You can actually see and also both of these images how essential biscuits and 300 00:27:36,510 --> 00:27:40,560 tin beef or beef were in military rations at the turn of the 20th century. 301 00:27:41,070 --> 00:27:45,690 And when tracing the content of humanitarian rations by looking in the archives of humanitarian agencies, 302 00:27:45,990 --> 00:27:53,070 you find an almost exactly mirroring of the kind of foods that they were giving to people in disasters and the kind of foods and technical food. 303 00:27:53,150 --> 00:27:56,090 Staffs that the military were also pioneering at the same time. 304 00:27:58,160 --> 00:28:01,520 After all, the concerns of the military in humanitarianism with respect to food were very, very similar. 305 00:28:01,550 --> 00:28:06,740 Both were concerned to provide rations in the most efficient manner, the most powerful men of the most durable manner. 306 00:28:06,950 --> 00:28:11,750 And both were concerned with meeting people's physical needs. Using these technological and rational means. 307 00:28:12,740 --> 00:28:18,830 There's a large amount of work in, say, the shows in archives, particularly about the efficiency of the Russians and how you can find the Russians, 308 00:28:18,830 --> 00:28:21,500 which get best value for money for their donors in the Ukraine. 309 00:28:22,760 --> 00:28:27,950 And in fact, you could argue that the military biscuit in particular remains an essential part of humanitarian feeding. 310 00:28:28,670 --> 00:28:34,820 In the 1960s and seventies, there were lots of experiments with modernising the biscuits and making these high protein varieties, 311 00:28:35,210 --> 00:28:38,580 and I think a number of aid agencies continue to give out biscuits. 312 00:28:38,780 --> 00:28:43,400 And in fact, the BP find, which I showed, could be seen as a kind of variety of biscuit since the moisture is removed. 313 00:28:43,640 --> 00:28:48,770 But it's a much more modern, technologically, nutritionally balanced biscuit for the modern age. 314 00:28:49,910 --> 00:28:54,560 But again, the point I suppose I'm trying to make here is that culture and taste are sidelined. 315 00:28:54,710 --> 00:28:58,610 And what we're looking at is a rational and a modern solution for nutritional needs. 316 00:28:59,900 --> 00:29:01,760 So just before I finish and I'm about to conclude, 317 00:29:02,090 --> 00:29:07,940 I just wanted to and draw weight inclusion was based on the other part of my research about this relationship, 318 00:29:07,940 --> 00:29:11,840 this particularly interesting relationship between military technologies and humanitarian technologies. 319 00:29:12,320 --> 00:29:13,100 Because in my research, 320 00:29:13,100 --> 00:29:19,130 I often noted the similarity between the techniques that were adopted in the military and those that were used by humanitarian actors. 321 00:29:20,420 --> 00:29:26,479 And after I mean, it became fairly obvious, actually, when you think about it, that it was a 19th century military who, 322 00:29:26,480 --> 00:29:31,460 first of all, responded to the kind of situations that humanitarian agencies would later face. 323 00:29:31,910 --> 00:29:40,150 It was them who first tackled these challenges of sustaining large numbers of people who were on the move a long way from civilisation, 324 00:29:40,400 --> 00:29:41,420 as I suppose they would have put it. 325 00:29:42,410 --> 00:29:49,400 It was the army who had to provide food and shelter and water and sanitation to soldiers en masse, often a long distance from established settlements. 326 00:29:49,670 --> 00:29:54,830 And it was then that developed technologies that were mobile and efficient and easy to construct when establishing a camp. 327 00:29:55,970 --> 00:30:00,770 So I found that techniques of shelter provision that humanitarian agencies use often mirror and 328 00:30:00,770 --> 00:30:04,400 are based on the prefabricated housing and the tents that were originally developed in the army. 329 00:30:04,850 --> 00:30:08,960 And again, if you trace the humanitarian documents and the military documents, you find a very interesting similarity. 330 00:30:09,860 --> 00:30:15,470 And I've also found that techniques of providing emergency sanitation very, very closely to those developed by the Army. 331 00:30:16,430 --> 00:30:20,659 And there's also an extremely interesting resemblance between the handbooks that humanitarian agencies 332 00:30:20,660 --> 00:30:25,880 use today and the handbooks that the Army Medical Corps used from the beginning of the 20th century. 333 00:30:26,030 --> 00:30:31,430 I'm just going to show you a few examples here, but the chapters in the chapter headings almost identical. 334 00:30:31,790 --> 00:30:37,249 Those two examples and the technologies and the solutions that they recommend are also very similar, 335 00:30:37,250 --> 00:30:43,550 including the diagrams, the way that the diagrams are set out. And there's and there's two more examples there. 336 00:30:43,670 --> 00:30:49,250 But these are just some examples from the wider research that I'm doing. So it's not just food that draws on these military technologies. 337 00:30:49,400 --> 00:30:54,260 I think there's a great number of other areas of humanitarian work that also do, including sanitation, shelter provision. 338 00:30:54,470 --> 00:30:56,960 You can also see a number of cross-referencing between the handbooks. 339 00:30:57,200 --> 00:31:01,850 And of course, a large number of military men went on to work in humanitarian agencies after the Second World War. 340 00:31:03,740 --> 00:31:10,040 But I suppose just to return to my original argument that a lot of these techniques are not mutual and objective, 341 00:31:10,040 --> 00:31:13,249 but we can really place them in historical context. We can see where they came from. 342 00:31:13,250 --> 00:31:15,740 We can see the cultural ideas and priorities that went into them. 343 00:31:16,400 --> 00:31:22,670 And my aim in this talk is really even to focus on these techniques and practices and give some examples of how they've emerged in history. 344 00:31:23,330 --> 00:31:26,299 And I suppose I really just want to rethink whether it's possible to have this 345 00:31:26,300 --> 00:31:31,310 objective scientific intervention and to argue broadly that it's not possible, 346 00:31:31,430 --> 00:31:36,290 but not because humanitarianism has political effects in the field, which I think is very well established in the literature, 347 00:31:36,530 --> 00:31:40,250 but also because of the characteristics of these technologies that they use. 348 00:31:41,240 --> 00:31:47,270 Of course, the big theme of the talk has been about how humanitarian relief is increasingly governed by these ideals of bureaucratic efficiency, 349 00:31:47,390 --> 00:31:54,440 rationalisation, standardisation. But I think that maybe we can see this is the opposite of what humanitarianism should be. 350 00:31:55,160 --> 00:32:01,850 I mean, this is a personal opinion that I feel that politicians should be more politically engaged and should stop trying to be an objective science. 351 00:32:02,250 --> 00:32:07,100 Should respond to people more as a political beings. As cultural beings with political views and opinions. 352 00:32:08,420 --> 00:32:13,820 I think that often humanitarianism, as it exists in the document, not necessarily as exists in the field, 353 00:32:14,690 --> 00:32:18,379 tends to destroy the kind of diversity in the complexity of human life and all the 354 00:32:18,380 --> 00:32:21,410 facets that really make people human and make them different and make them interesting. 355 00:32:21,620 --> 00:32:24,710 The relationships, the cultures, the histories, the feelings, that opinions, 356 00:32:24,980 --> 00:32:30,980 all these things end up being abstracted away and people are treated as purely physical, biological beings. 357 00:32:32,270 --> 00:32:36,259 And so I was going to make a few comments about the kind of, I suppose, 358 00:32:36,260 --> 00:32:41,659 the provocation that I'm making for some people today and defending myself against the 359 00:32:41,660 --> 00:32:45,200 accusation that it could be accused of being rather nihilistic to make these points. 360 00:32:46,070 --> 00:32:52,910 But I suppose the only point to make was the humanitarian community as a whole, I think has a. 361 00:32:52,980 --> 00:33:02,640 Tendency to be not so much immune from criticism, but it tends not to be criticised or looked analytically by by scholars. 362 00:33:02,880 --> 00:33:06,750 It's partly because of the image that it holds in the public eye. 363 00:33:06,780 --> 00:33:13,080 It's partly because of the way the funeral agencies rely on the goodwill and the donations of the public, and therefore they need to retain this. 364 00:33:15,120 --> 00:33:23,100 But I think it was Alex Doyle who originally said that nobility of aim doesn't confer immunity from sociological analysis or ethical critique. 365 00:33:24,150 --> 00:33:28,770 But I also think that maybe we should go further and that there is this nobility of aim that makes the sociological 366 00:33:28,770 --> 00:33:34,800 analysis so important because it's people who've got noble aims and that do things that are often amazing. 367 00:33:35,610 --> 00:33:39,900 So in aware of the kind of power that they have, I think the negative things that they can end up doing. 368 00:33:41,070 --> 00:33:45,600 I mean, people work so hard to try and change the world for the better and they often don't have the time 369 00:33:45,990 --> 00:33:50,550 to examine what actually happens in the noble attempts and the kind of techniques that they use. 370 00:33:50,850 --> 00:33:54,750 And certainly they will never have time to examine in a lot of detail. 371 00:33:55,890 --> 00:33:56,400 Thanks very much.