Charity or Right?

This strikes me as an astute observation, Khaled, and one that is well-worth expanding upon — particularly now as we are challenged to arrest a global pandemic on top of multiple ongoing humanitarian crises. It seems to me that both the moral and legal high ground of humanitarianism has been ceded in a glacially slow and incremental way. Perhaps this is why it has gone largely unremarked. Those of us who are old enough to recall an earlier trend toward rights-based approaches will remember how the Convention on the Rights of the Child enabled UNICEF, for a time, to make great strides on the ground in immunization campaigns and gaining access to people in need. It enabled senior leaders of UN agencies to make forceful, rules-based arguments to combatants and to their own Executive Boards for a far more inspired and unapologetic humanitarianism than we see today. Results on the ground? There used to be far greater assertion of access and active expansion of humanitarian space, animated by top-level humanitarian leadership, in comparison to today’s far more passive approach in which problems of access and constrictions of humanitarian space are lamented and condemned, but not effectively addressed on anything approaching the needed scale. Of course it’s complicated, but we can track all the incremental adaptations and maladaptations that have led to such a fundamental shift toward this inadequate new normal, not the least of which is a creeping change to the skill-set of top-level humanitarian leadership. It’s a cop-out to think that the level of complexity we face today as humanitarians is so much different from what it used to be, just as it’s a cop-out, I believe, to place wholesale blame on a lack of sufficient political will for enabling our work. The humanitarian ethos — and how it animates action — has changed more than the environment. The change has become manifest in a shift to a largely technocratic approach. To be sure, many sorely-needed improvements have accrued from that shift, and few would argue for a return to the unaccountable and slap-dash methods that have blighted our past responses. But the shift has also proved to be dreadfully self-limiting in terms of how we see the realm of possibility for mounting effective humanitarian responses. It’s a problem mostly of our own making. The over-arching challenge now is to reclaim what was so useful to us in that earlier, more assertive and unapologetic humanitarian culture, while preserving and building upon the many advances we’ve made as the enterprise has become more professionalized.