We have a also developed in the if you're interested,
you'll see in the in the book there's a typology of of how actors in the theatre manipulate humanitarian action and of course,
donors, external states, the host states, third party states,
non-state actors are very often involved in instrumental izing what's happening on the ground,
but also our local communities who have their own interests in using humanitarian action to advance to their advantage,
and aid agencies, international organisations, NGOs, local INGOs advocacy groups.
One of the tensions in particular that we've noted is the tension between the advocacy,
human rights groups and NGOs or aid agencies providing assistance.
And of course, this passive instrumental is Asian instrumentation, but not doing things in addition to active instruments, rotation.
And one important form of instrumental ization that we've identified that often gets overlooked is instrumentalize action by storytelling.
For example, if you look at the situation in in Sudan, Darfur or in Afghanistan, in Afghanistan, it's even earlier than Sudan.
The way in which the story was told at different times in the history of the conflict defined who the players were and how they would operate.
And just to give one example, post 2009 11, the story that was told was a story.
This is a post-conflict situation. Therefore, there's no room for humanitarian players anymore.
You have to work for the government.
And of course, the more you tell this story that it's post-conflict, the more the story becomes disconnected from reality.
And now, fortunately, nobody or hardly anybody still uses a post-conflict narrative.
Now Afghanistan is presented as a crisis that we are cautiously optimistic.
But, you know, problems remain. And these problems have to do to a large extent with a continuing conflict.
Instrument transition, of course, is not a new thing. It's always been there.
It was there in the Boer War where you had a Red Cross.
Actually, this is not necessarily a violation of the Geneva Conventions, but the is in a uniform kind of,
you know child soldier is that was a and this one of course is a much more blatant violation of the code.
This is the Red Cross in 1948, 1940, in Berlin with the swastika and the emblem all wrapped into one.
So the use of humanitarian players and actors and and messages for political or military gain is something that is been going for a while.
And now this is an example in Sri Lanka is in Afghanistan,
where the Afghan army is the the U.S. American soldiers are in the background, but they were there as well.
They go up to a village in northern Afghanistan and distribute goodies and then issue a press release saying the Afghan National
Army and their coalition partners were delivering humanitarian aid to the populations of Syria in exchange for the aid.
They asked where the Taliban were hiding. So that's a clear example of instrumental ization.
And here is an example of perfidy the misuse of the emblem.
This is the Colombian operation to free Ingrid Betancourt and other hostages of the FARC,
where they made an elaborate scam, where they transformed the Army helicopter into an ICRC one.
So so is there a golden age?
Was there a golden age or a conclusion?
And, you know, we set up a straw dog.
So it was easy to say there was no golden age, that many of the pathologies of what we see today are very much the same.
That sort of, you know,
the way in which Lord Byron instrumentalized the the nascent media in the UK and what Bernard Kouchner did in the 1970s are very similar.
Hearts and minds in Vietnam, in Afghanistan also have very, very much similarity.
In fact, we haven't invented anything very new in terms of how hearts and minds in Afghanistan were instrumentalize the atrocities is.
This relates to the the the furore about massacres of Christians in Bulgaria in the 1860s, 1880s 1860s and.
Very much like the Save Darfur Coalition.
The media and the public were collecting money on trains in the newspapers to organise an expedition to Bulgaria to save the Christians,
which of course then the Russians intervened and that went quite badly, but for a number of different reasons.
However, there are a number of qualitative, in particular quantitative difference,
because the the humanitarian enterprise today is of a magnitude, you know,
it's worth $18 billion a year and it's due to the institutionalisation itself
make it much more powerful and as a source of potential instrumental position.
And it's key, it's in the centre of conflict. Whereas in the past it was the, in the, in the,
on the fringes and because of the sensitisation it has developed its own network power
where the is the enterprise has to act like a business or act like a government.
Or some people would say that humanitarian action has become part of government in itself.
And perhaps the most glaring examples of instrumental ization in recent years are around the global war on terror and how humanitarians were.
There was an attempt it to co-opt humanitarians in this global war.
But there are the politicisation.
The attempt to incorporate humanitarian action into wider designs is always there.
And we turn to that in a minute.
So when I was giving a presentation on this book in Berlin, Hugo was there.
Someone said that, you know, this book was full of gloom and doom.
Of course, we were focusing on the instrumental ization part and that in reality there is a golden age and it's now.
And you know, I think we could argue this case,
are we better now than ever before in protecting this fundamental work that we do from the from manipulation or has institutions
institutionalisation itself and the power that comes with it created more forms of inter instrumental ization so that there's issues here which,
you know, keeps some humanitarians awake at night.
But, you know, if you're an NGO and you have to balance the the money that you're getting from states with your principles,
that creates very difficult questions.
As, for example, in when Colin Powell said to the US, INGOs, you are force multipliers, you are part of our combat team.
NGOs were split down the middle. The fundraising people said, Oh, we have to go there.
You know, there's a lot of money coming this way. And the policy people said, Oh my God, no, this is unbearable.
And the I mean,
I don't think that the more that the and then Jos actually had a very strong moral compass to guide themselves through this complicated situation,
because many of the NGOs that we've been brought into the the global war on terror enterprise were, you know,
partly in agreement, philosophically or politically with the objectives that the US government was.
They were Wilsonian in the sense that they identified themselves with the foreign policy objectives of their government,
but at the same time they wanted to maintain some kind of humanitarian principles,
maybe not neutrality, but certainly an amount of a large amount of impartiality and some independence.
And so they they were they were faced with really difficult issues.
So one of the consequences of the institutionalisation has been that the ethos with which we do things has changed.
We, a humanitarian enterprise, have become a very networked enterprise.
We are intrinsically linked with the way in which globalisation functions, even if we're sometimes the sort of critical voice of globalisation.
But de facto we are linked into, we are substantial with globalisation.
But at the same time, what has happened is that the sort of voluntary nature of the enterprise, particularly angels,
has been lost on the altar of institutionalisation and professionalisation, which of course are good things in many ways.
But we've lost the flavour that's allowed NGOs to be a small player in a context
with providing essential services that were not seen as linked to a state agenda.
NGOs tended to be state avoiding. Now you can ask yourself if Oxfam in particular, since we're in Oxford,
is Oxfam Oxfam still an NGO or is it a branch of the foreign policy of the UK government?
Maybe that was clearer under Blair, but still, you know,
there's a kind of crossover politics going on here between what NGOs are doing and what governments are doing.
So that's by way of background.
The other point I wanted to make is about the increasing remoteness between foreign NGOs,
U.N. agencies and the populations that they are there to support or assist in crisis countries.
There is a an expansion of the enterprise, but at the same time, a physical withdrawal in places like Afghanistan or Darfur or southern Sudan or DRC.
NGOs are in bunker ized compounds.
The mode of operation because of security concerns obviously has been increasingly in these fraught environments, remote management.
So it's kind of a virtual humanitarian action, a bit like virtual war using drones.
Well, that's a very real war. But, you know, I think remote management is the is to humanitarian action, what drones are to military action.
So there's some issues there about, you know,
how we conceive our role and what it means if we've lost this proximity with the people that we are supposed to be working with.
Okay. A couple of examples of dilemmas.
Well, dilemmas I think Hugo will correct me. Dilemmas are actually situations where there's two bad options.
Is that correct? Yeah. Okay. These are not real dilemmas.
And, you know, they can be couches, bad practice or awkward challenges or difficult moral choices,
but not necessarily dilemmas of the Sophie's Choice variety.
And if we look at these two examples that I'm going to show you, you know, you can ask,
are we better today at dealing with some of these difficult moral issues than in the past?
I think in Afghanistan, partly because I was there, we were successful in Sri Lanka.
Look, we were not successful in Afghanistan by any means.
But in Sri Lanka, I think there are very, very serious issues that that arose in the last phases of the war.
So this is a case of Afghanistan.
In western Afghanistan 2021, there was a very serious drought and there was a population movements also triggered by by conflict.
And what happened was that people concentrated in in camps.
And we, the UN agencies and the NGOs were struggling with dealing with should we create camps or not?
That was the first question. So we tried to convince the Taliban that they should house the refugees in, you know, existing structures.
But people kept on coming and they kept on coming for a variety of reasons.
One of the reasons was that assistance was being provided, so that acted as a pull factor, but there was undoubtedly a very serious humanitarian need.
And what happened was that this huge camp, modular camp, emerged.
This is a part of it. And the Taliban was saying, oh, there's more than 100,000 people here.
You need to increase the the assistance that being provided.
At the same time, we knew that some of the food the WFP was providing.
Was being diverted by the Taliban for their own uses, including to feed combatants.
So we were in a bit of a quandary should we try to keep assistance to a minimum?
But then we would potentially face riots that the Taliban could also orchestrate.
Or do we go ahead? Humanitarian imperative. You know, close our eyes to the the diversion of the assistance.
Of course, the donors weren't too happy with that. So in that particular instance, we were smart.
And we we decided that a vaccination campaign was required.
And by vaccinating all the kids in the camps, we had proxy indicators of how many people were there.
And that showed that there were not 120,000 people.
There were more like 80,000, maybe even 70,000. And that a large amount of assistance was being diverted.
Then we faced another question. Do we say this to the Taliban?
And what's going to happen if they you know, they were in the camps and they were orchestrating things.
They were technically managing the camps. So we struggled.
And finally we came up with the best possible solution, which was to give warm food that was self targeting.
We set up bakery and not bakeries or cooking stations where there's gruel, which was not very good, but the kids liked it was be provided.
But of course, no Taliban fighter would want to be seen eating this this gruel.
So in a sense, we solve the problem, at least for a time.
Manipulation continued in other ways, but I think we found a practical solution to a difficult issue.
In Sri Lanka, however, things went.
Has anybody worked in Sri Lanka? Does anybody know? Sri Lanka?
Oh, okay. I haven't actually worked in Sri Lanka, been there a couple of times and I've followed the last phases of the war.
And, you know, there was the culmination of a long process of 30 years of conflict.
The conflict goes back to independence, actually, and that's the number of failed peace process processes.
And one of the questions that arises in Sri Lanka is to what extent the the international community's
insistence on trying to get the warring parties to talk to each other using aid as an incentive,
in effect, backfired. But the issue that I think is important for us now to look at is what happened in the final phases of the war.
And as you probably remember, the I don't have a map here, but the Tamil Tigers controlled the north east of the country.
And when Rajapaksa was elected in 2008, 78, I think was eight, he basically although there was still technically a ceasefire between the two sides,
it wasn't very well respected, decided to go for a final military approach to solving the problem.
And what was interesting was the extent to which they developed a sophisticated narrative talking
about instrumental opposition by sort of storytelling about how this was a humanitarian war,
how no civilian casualties, where there was zero tolerance for civilian casualties,
and how somehow they were able to convince the donors or some of the donors or certainly of the key players,
the US, India, China, Pakistan, who all had interests in Sri Lanka, that this was the way to go.
And of course the Tigers had lost whatever legitimacy they had and whatever support they had outside the Tamil diaspora around the world,
they had no friends. And that in a sense allowed the government to set up the Colombo government to pursue its strategy.
This was combined with a discourse that equated NGOs and to some extent the UN with neo imperialist control of the country,
and how Colombo was asserting its sovereignty and basically was able to say no to Western donors because China is here to help us.
That was one element.
The other element was how Rajapaksa and his clique or regime were able to couch the conflict in the north as part of the global war on terror.
So again, a a instrumentation by storytelling.
And of course, the LTTE in the North was equally culpable of instrumental izing humanitarian action over.
Long periods of time, they were controlling what was entering the territory that was that they were
controlling and they were quite abusive in in using assistance as you know,
it's fungible. So it supported their, their military efforts and forcible recruitment of child soldiers, etc., etc.
So what happened in September 2008 is particularly from the perspective of the people who were on the ground,
and I've interviewed a number of them, the kind of challenges and moral quandaries that they were put in in September.
The government basically told all expatriate personnel to leave the North because they could no longer assure their security.
And what happened there was that on the one hand, the government was prepared to allow,
at least in theory, the UN agencies, the NGOs and their national staff to leave.
But the LTTE blocked the national staff from from leaving the the value of the north with the northeast of the country.
And so that created a first split in the community on how do we handle this dramatic issue of families being torn apart.
And in effect, many staff decided to stay with their family.
And that's also how a lot of the information subsequently came out through national staff, aid workers who were there.
But so very quickly, there was a split in the aid community about what to do.
Should we continue to negotiate access or do we speak out about the indiscriminate shelling that the government is doing on this rapidly
decreasing area controlled by the Tamils where there were no no fire zones and where all the medical facilities hospitals were.
You know, the GPS coordinates had been given to the Colombo military forces and and the government says, yes, yes, no, no, no civilian casualty.
But there was documented evidence that hospitals were being shelled.
And for a number of reasons, the UN agencies were not keen to speak out.
One reason was that, of course the LTTE didn't have any friends.
Another reason was that the development agencies in Colombo were keen to maintain the their their
relationship with the government that they would have to continue to work with in the past.
And they were not prepared to anger the government by raising issues of human rights violations.
But even the whether it was lack of labour leadership or incompetence or just particularity,
I don't know, the the aid the humanitarian aid agencies were reluctant to speak out.
And I think that's one of the. Looking back and interviewing people who were there, particularly the the UN and NGO staff were clearly not here,
then had to be evacuated and some witnessed the carnage that was going on as they were retreating from that area.
For me, it's incomprehensible to understand why the aid agencies didn't speak out more or didn't convince the
Secretary-General or the media or the donors in Washington or or London to speak out more of what was happening.
So only a handful of of aid personnel argued for a full push for a full exposure of the direct impact of the war on civilians.
So, you know, I think maybe it was a kind of a wicked problem where there was no easy solution.
But with the benefit of hindsight, I think one can ask, could things have gone differently?
Could the the balance between the objectives of access and the objectives of protection be handled differently?
Was too much focus put on access, on getting in,
on being able to provide assistance and not enough on the plight of civilians who were being shelled and or roped into camps or so.
That's a. You know,
a dilemma that maybe is the shape of things to come because of what we faced in Sri Lanka is a and this picture
here is placards for the May Day celebration last year in or maybe the year before and 2010 in in Colombo.
These are the friends of Rajapaksa and Chavez, Fidel Gadhafi, Putin.
And I forget who was the Chinese president of the time.
And basically this was the message that Sri Lanka was giving that, you know, we are a sovereign state.
As states, we are able to coordinate and provide the framework for aid.
And we don't want Ban Ki moon or human rights NGOs to come and tell us what we should be doing.
And that is a trend that we're seeing elsewhere as well.
We are seeing it very clearly in places like Sudan, but you also see it in more muted ways in in Nepal.
You see it in even in Afghanistan, where the government now, because of the uncertainty of what's likely to happen in 2014 and beyond,
is not affirming its sovereignty and trying to provide the barriers to the entry or the work of aid agencies.
So I think one of the conclusions that we talk about in the book, but that also, you know,
Sri Lanka reminds us of is the changing relationship between the humanitarian enterprise and the states.
And this relationship is rapidly changing. On the one hand, Western agencies are increasingly caught, coaxed wittingly or unwittingly,
into becoming servants of the state in the pursuit of liberal peace agendas and many NGOs,
sort of because that's where the money is in Afghanistan, in Iraq, elsewhere, we've seen that happening.
And the agency there are able to withstand this pressure of being incorporated
in in states strategies or liberal peace strategies are few and far between.
It's the ICRC because ICRC, although it gets money from Western donors,
is able to launder this money and to make it neutral and impartial and independent.
And a few NGOs like Medicins Sans Frontieres, who as a matter of policy, refuse to take money from belligerent states.
If you look at Afghanistan today, all the major donors in Afghanistan except Switzerland are belligerents in Afghanistan.
And of course, that creates, you know,
interesting discussions between NGOs and and and diplomatic personnel about, you know, who is doing what and why.
And clearly, the the embassies are keeping an eye on what their NGOs are doing.
Well, I have to tell you a small anecdote about the parties.
The parties are provincial reconstruction teams in Afghanistan,
which are kind of a military civilian hybrid that is supposed to provide basic services to local populations,
sometimes services of a humanitarian nature, but very much part of the hearts and minds exercise.
So I was at a conference in Norway a couple of years back, and the government officials were talking about the great work that the Norwegian
party up in Faria was doing when a couple of NGOs in the room started saying,
Well, you know, this is not this is a violation of our codes.
We don't want to be involved in this. And, you know, it's going to look worse in a few years from now.
You know, it might look okay now, but these things, you know, the chicken come home to roost kind of arguing.
So the Minister of Defence who was there, got up and said, no, no, no, no, you don't understand.
The party needs the NGOs around it.
So basically saying that the NGOs were there to protect the party from the population, which is an interesting twist in in in reality.
And of course, NGOs were split on on how to manage these situations.
And those who compromise or who agreed to be the,
the implementing partners of party or government projects are now finding because of the instrumentalized and by storytelling,
that they are in a difficult, if not dangerous position,
because how are they going to re-establish their credibility if the political dispensation in in Kabul changes all of the same?
All of a sudden?
Basically, what I think we have seen happening over these past 20 years of massive growth of the humanitarian enterprise is that we are much more.
Predictable. Competent professionals in addressing humanitarian issues.
But the basic challenge is the basic clash between practical pragmatism and the
realpolitik kind of approach and the ethical values of the humanitarian message.
This and this clash remains unresolved.
And maybe I don't know, but maybe this is a question for you.
Is this clash bigger and more worrying today than it was in the past because
of the quantitative and qualitative qualitative changes that have happened?
Or is it are we sort of on the same kind of level of instrumental position as the past?
I think that one should look at how the enterprise has changed.
The humanitarian surprise has changed in terms of how stubbornly self self-referential there remains,
how stubbornly embedded it is in Western modes of thought, but also of of organisation, of networked power that comes with this organisation.
And I think but you know, I'm not sure I'm right that this clash,
this tension between principles and pragmatism is bigger today than it was in the past, partly because of the huge size of the enterprise.
So if this clash, this tension between the moral values that somehow seem to be universal, I mean,
are studies on the perceptions and the listening project and other projects that have looked
at whether the humanitarian message resonates around the world seem to conclude that,
you know, there's a humanitarian substratum that is common to all cultures,
but it's the baggage is the organisation, it's the way in which money flows.
It's the the the the surrogate sovereignty that humanitarian agencies sometimes provide.
That is the, the cause of tension between the outsiders and the local populations.
So, you know, it what we have seen is that despite the best intentions, this tension is always there.
So you could ask yourself, is instrumentalize ation fundamentally in the DNA of humanitarian action,
or is it possible to conceive of a change in the way in which the enterprise functions that would
make it a more equal relationship or a relationship that is not based on the dominant nature of the,
you know, the unbalanced relationship between the giver and the receiver.
And I think that's one argument that has been made by Mark Duffield and others is that there's a clash
between the ontological duty bound approach to humanitarianism and the consequentialist approach.
You know, do we look at what we're doing now, saving lives now,
or should we look at what the consequences are of the saving lives of what we do now for the future?
And this clash also has not been resolved.
What what Duffield is saying is that basically the humanitarian, the ontological message is a very clear one.
You know, if you it's clear evident and the way in which it was portrayed in the public emerging, for example,
during the Seychelles famine in the 1980s was a very simple message We need to go and help our brothers and sisters who are suffering.
The consequentialist agenda is more complicated and it's probably it's probably more political.
It's more linked to the ethical foreign policy that Tony Blair was talking about when he came to power in Aden.
When was it? In 1997.
And that was clearly the way in which DFID, the reorganise itself in those years was all about consequentialist issues.
It was about, you know, addressing root causes and dragging the humanitarian duty bound people into addressing root causes potentially creates a clash
of principles and a clash of we always have to deal with the politicised environments we are when we work in crisis situations.
The context by definition is. Extremely political. But if, as in Afghanistan, you're dealing with advocacy,
you're dealing with working with the government on structural violence issues, on gender, on the on advocating for better policies.
That may be a completely legitimate activity in itself.
But in a country in crisis, it puts you in a difficult position if you are also claiming that you want to do humanitarian work according to principle.
When all your offices are in government held territory, all your money comes from donors that are also belligerent.
So I think there is an argument about being more the ontological in certain situations.
I'm going to wrap up because the enterprise has grown so much and because humanitarianism has transitioned from being a powerful discourse,
it discourse that everybody can understand to a discourse of power,
a discourse where we are part of the powerful people who can decide on your fate and the you know,
and the triage that comes with it is also a manifestation of humanitarian power.
So has the humanitarian. The very simple, clear, convincing, powerful message of of humanitarianism.
Has it been lost now, with the complexity of everything that is is linked to humanitarianism, whether, you know,
the the tension between the negotiating axis and advocating for rights, for example,
is a continuing tension that in some cases makes access and addressing need much more difficult.
So the question here, I put myself there because the last time I saw Hugo,
he talked about Simone de Beauvoir in similar vein, so I can talk about examples.
Limassol is a play that's probably not shown much anymore by Jean-Paul Sartre,
and it's a story of a communist, militant young man who needs to prove himself,
who is tasked with killing a bourgeois politician who is well-meaning but linked to a bourgeois view of things.
And what's interesting in in this play is the the tension between purity and collaboration.
And it's a tension that we see a lot in humanitarian action.
And, you know, we have to dirty our hands by speaking to the Taliban, by speaking to the LTTE, by, you know,
sitting down even with very, very long spoons, with, you know, eating from the same plate as people that we find objectionable.
And the ambiguity in the play is that it's unclear whether the guy kills the bourgeois reactionary gentleman
because he's bourgeois reactionary because the party told him to him or because he's kissing his wife,
you know, kissing the wife of the killer.
So, yeah, you're left with this ambiguity and this the fundamental similar ambiguity in the humanitarian endeavour where we have,
as George AGAMBEN says,
we have this secret solidarity with the people that we are really supposed to be fighting, but somehow we have to engage with them.
And the disengagement is the the ethical terrain that we have to navigate very often.
And that is quite difficult to negative to to navigate.
So what is there a solution to this tension between principles and practice and this the ontological versus consequentialist ethic?
And would a return going back to basics, would that provide a way forward to, you know,
maintain a kind of protected niche for the ontologies to work in crisis fraught situations?
And you know, the others have very important things to do, but let's not call them humanitarian, let's call them something else.
So I think I'll stop here and leave you with an example of policing in progress.
And then you. Thank you very much and.