Cathrine Brun writes:
More and more of today’s crises are in non-traditional
humanitarian settings where the relations between relief and development are
blurred; where current humanitarian principles, guidelines and manuals may not be
helpful for the humanitarian workers present on the ground.
Increasingly, humanitarians engage in situations that are
less distinguished by urgency, but where, nevertheless, the humanitarian
community plays a crucial role. One clear example is long-term displacement. In
2015, UNHCR identified 26 years as the average duration of the 32 protracted
refugee situations in which they worked. In these inbetween spaces where needs
are between relief and development, humanitarians continue to operate with a
humanitarian logic distinguished by emergency, urgency and out of the ordinary
measures that to a large degree concerns saving people’s lives rather than
development. The challenges humanitarian workers face, however, are far beyond
the humanitarian mandate, its ethical register, principles, laws and
guidelines.
In long term displacement, when needs may be closer to
development than to relief, the host state may not approve of a development
strategy for refugees. There is often a political interest to focus on return
or resettlement. A shift in policy towards local integration and consequently
more long term presence of the refugees is not an acceptable strategy at the
national political level. In these settings, relief and humanitarian practice is
often the only accepted way for the international community to assist. But both
refugees and humanitarian workers feel hugely constrained by this situation
where they are restricted from developing lives. In their day-to-day practice,
humanitarian workers try their best to create a future for people they work
with and with whom they and their organisations often establish long-term
relationships due to the duration of displacement and of the humanitarian
operation.[i]
In my current research, I explore how the current ethical
register of humanitarianism can be expanded in ways that allow a more relevant
humanitarian practice in long term refugee situations. The most dominant stance
in humanitarianism today is a so-called ‘principled approach’ where the
humanitarian principles (of which the first four are humanity, neutrality,
impartiality and independence) are guiding the work and decision-making of an
organisation. The principles have become a common vocabulary for people working
in the system and are often the main moral compass for humanitarian actors. However,
to put it simply, the principles are largely about how to not become part of the
local context in which humanitarians work. Detachment becomes a way to stay
neutral, impartial and independent. But in long term refugee situations where humanitarians
have a long-term presence, this detachment becomes more problematic. Many humanitarian workers that we have interviewed call for more focus on
understanding the multiple and complex relations that they are part of when
assisting in long term crises. For such contexts, the humanitarian principles are
less useful because they place less emphasis on the face-to-face encounters
that humanitarian workers are always involved in: the particular day-to-day
interactions with refugees and other actors. With the humanitarian inbetween
spaces in mind, I would like to suggest that current humanitarian ethics can
open up for a more relational approach and an ethics of care could help us here.
Ethics of care has been largely dismissed or avoided in
humanitarianism. In long term displacement, however, an ethics of care helps to
capture better than the traditional humanitarian principles what humanitarian
workers do in the field. Caring “may be said to include everything we do
directly to help others to meet their basic needs, develop or sustain their
basic capabilities, and alleviate or avoid pain or suffering, in an attentive, responsive and respectful
manner.”[ii]
Care ethics concerns caring in four phases[iii]:
Caring about is the recognition that
care is necessary, identifying a need; caring
for is to take care of and assumes some responsibility for the need; care-giving is the direct meeting of
needs for care; and, care-receiving
recognizes that the subject of care will respond to the care she or he
receives.
Based on the reflections above, I would suggest that an
ethics of care can help humanitarianism become more relevant because it is practice-based, it is an ethics
developed through what humanitarian workers do in their interaction with others.
An ethics of care opens up for a more nuanced understanding of the multiple and
often complex relations involved in
humanitarian practice. With an ethics of care, we bring in contextualisation to enable attentiveness towards localised
practices of care. While humanitarianism is oriented towards solving an urgent
need in the present, an ethics of care opens up for a more future oriented approach where assistance is always attached to
specific individuals, their biographies and the possible development of their
future.
[i]
Brun, C. 2016. There
is no future in humanitarianism: Emergency, temporality and protracted
displacement. History and Anthropology 27(4):
393–410.
[ii]
Engster 2015: 55, original emphasis
[iii]
Tronto, J. 1993. Moral Boundaries. A
political argument for an ethic of care. London: Routledge.
