History of Global Arms Transfer, 14 (2022), pp. 1-7

The Humanitarian Industrial Complex:
A Critique of Global Humanitarian Workand the Need for Reforms†
By BINALAKSHMI NEPRAM*
Humanitarianism nowadays seems to be having an identity crisis. We live in aworld where wars and conflicts are on the rise and the United Nations (UN) as an
institution seems unable to stop the violence. The UN was born in 1945 following
the two world wars to address global humanitarian multilateral issues. Years later,in 2006, a Global Humanitarian Platform was created1 and a decade after that, theWorld Humanitarian Summit was held in Istanbul in May 2016, which became apivotal UN moment. 2 Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon then put
forward a new Agenda for Humanity, calling on global leaders to stand up forcommon humanity and reduce humanitarian suffering. In 2019, global
humanitarian aid amounted to a $29.6 billion industry, and in the same year a
total of 483 humanitarian workers were killed, kidnapped, or wounded, withpandemic and health workers making up 40 per cent of the fatalities.3 The paper
will delve into historical aspects of humanitarian work and also how the work isoften skewed in terms of being used to downplay the damages done by empires
and their violent politics. In the past decades, the global humanitarian industry
has been facing numerous challenges both on a normative level and in practice.
This paper will discuss three challenges that the global humanitarian industry
faces and the future ahead for the industry.

Ⅰ Politics in a Nihilistic Age and the Fiction of Humanity
A humanitarian is often described as a person who is involved in or connected withimproving people’s lives and reducing suffering.4Every year, the UN commemorates 19
August as World Humanitarian Day.5 The origin of modern Western humanitarian work isoften traced to the setting up of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863 by
Henry Dunant who saw the suffering in the Battle of Solferino. Dunant also called for thedevelopment of international treaties to guarantee the neutrality and protection of those† This article is based on a paper presented at ‘Online Symposium Past, Present and Future of Humanitarianand Development Aid: Rethinking the Aid Sector with Binalakshmi Nepram’ on 4 Feburary 2021.
* Author’s Affiliation: Binalakshmi Nepram, founder of the Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network.
1 Agier, ‘Humanity as an identity’, p. 35.
2 United Nations, ‘Agenda for Humanity’, https://www.unocha.org/about-us/agenda-humanity (Last accessedon 25 April 2022)
3 Information available at Aidworkerssecurity.org
4 Cambridge Dictionary, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/humanitarian
5 United Nations, ‘World Humanitarian Day’, https://www.un.org/en/observances/humanitarian-day (Last
accessed on 25 April 2022)

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wounded as well as medics and field hospitals. The 1864 Geneva Convention emerged outof Dunant’s ideas and in 1901 he received the first Nobel Peace Prize for his work6. Various
other humanitarian organizations emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
especially following the two world wars in which nearly 100 million people were killed.
One of the challenges of the humanitarian industry is what Michel Agier calls the creationof ‘the fiction of humanity’, that emerges out of a humanitarian age which he refers to as a‘world of nameless victims based on the fiction of humanity as an identity and conflating
universalism and globalisation’. 7 Agier gives the term ‘the hierarchy of misery’ withreference to how wars and conflicts around the world have happened due to imposition of asingle thought and ideology and there is always the people, the community, the others whoface the brunt of skewed balance of power. As for instance, it is the colonization done by
the global North which has resulted in exploitation of the global south and the hierarchy ofmisery continues till today in today’s world. According to Agier, ‘The right to live in ahumanitarian fiction is attributed to a generic human just in so far as he is recognized in a
double form as the universal victim, the displaced person, the refugee woman, or the
refugee child’.8
The ‘fiction of humanity’, constructs ‘humanity as an identity’, and strengthens it basedon the ideological universalization and organizational globalization which consists of aworld of Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs), trucks, cars, tanks, UN agencies, and humanitarianorganizations. This is akin to a ‘humanitarian government’ whose principle of apparatus isa network that takes the shape in the many spaces and is dispersed across the globe.9 Agierdemonstrates that, inside the refugee camps, the refugee is divided into distinct subcategories of misery. All social conflicts in the camps are also conflicts over the meaning of
the words of the humanitarian discourse such as the word ‘ethnic’ vs ‘expatriates’,‘westerners’, ‘refugee’, ‘vulnerable’, ‘aid’, and ‘UN’. There are notions of ‘tent chiefs’,‘ministers’, and ‘preachers’.10

Ⅱ The Humanitarian World as a Globalized Apparatus and Humanitarian
Projects as the Left Hand of the Empire11
The second challenge in the humanitarian world can be attributed to the emergence of a
globalized apparatus that uses the label ‘humanitarianism’.12 This apparatus consists oforganizations, networks, agents, and financial means distributed across the different
countries and crises crossing the world as they herald a ‘universal’ cause referred to as the‘moving sovereignty’ which means a simple implemented by various organizations andagents – people who often are committed and trained in the disciplines of human rights andsocial and political science or in the profession of health or humanitarian logistics.13 A
single global mobility thus emerges that is regulatory in nature with surveillance
6 New World Encyclopedia, ‘Humanitarian Aid’, https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Humanitarian_aid (Last accessed on 25 April 2022)
7 Agier, ‘Humanity as an identity’.
8 Ibid. p. 39.
9 Ibid. p. 34.
10 Ibid. p. 42.
11 Agier, ‘Humanity as an identity’.
12 Ibid. p. 34.
13 Ibid. p. 33.

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administration that affects individual mobility.14 The globalized apparatus involves not justNGOs but all actors, that is, private, public, government, inter-governmental, NGOs, and
UN. In the article, ‘Humanity as an identity and its political effects’, Michel Agier calls‘Humanitarian Projects as the left hand of the Empire’.15 According to him, ‘The left handsmoothens over the damage wrought by military intervention and striking with one handand healing with the other’. 16 He also states that as war is constantly brewing, thecompassion and the care actually provided by the humanitarian projects serves as a ‘politics
of containment’ of poor countries and of the migratory flows coming in from areas that arepolitically, sociologically, or ecologically weakened.
In the politics of the nihilistic age, defined by multiple ages which are disconnected fromone another and contained in space and time, an identity emerges between the ‘whole’,
represented by the state, institutions of ‘international community’, or even by the ‘world’,
while on the other hand is ‘humanity’. It is only the gathering of the equals that constitutes
the space of freedom and the possibility of the public.17 Scholars Aleinikoff and Zamore
thus describe a world that is facing record numbers of persons displaced by conflict andviolence where more than 70 million people have been forced from their homes; they also
describe an emergence of an international regime of norms and a comprehensive set ofpractices for the relief of refugees that has developed and is referred to as the ‘arc ofprotection’18, an international refugee regime that remains fundamentally broken.19

Ⅲ Inequality and Racism Within Humanitarian Industry
The third challenge in the humanitarian industry can be understood from the highly unequal
resource allocation and the skewed nature with which the global humanitarian industry
operates as for instance the United States provides more than any other nation to global
humanitarian relief efforts while it continues to be the top military spender in the world
having 800 plus military bases. Besides USA, the nine other top humanitarian donor
countries are Canada, the European Union (EU), Germany, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Norway,
Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom.20 It is to be noted that a dozeninternational non-governmental organizations control 90 per cent of the total funding of thehumanitarian Non-governmental organizations (NGOs).21According to Graham Hancock,author of the book, The lords of poverty, some 80 per cent of the overall expenditures ofthe various UN bodies engaged in ‘relief and development’ work goes towards personnel
and related costs. Hancock describes the ‘perks’ enjoyed by the staffers of ‘Development,
Inc.’, including first-class travel, six-figure salaries, and lavish conferences. 22 Hancock
writes that most foreign aid programs are ‘designed by foreigners and implemented byforeigners using foreign equipment and foreign markets’. According to Peter Hoffman,
humanitarianism is increasingly instrumentalized by donors and belligerents as anorientation between the works of North as sacred and the South as suffering and secondly
14 Schiller and Salazar, ‘Regimes of mobility’.
15 Agier, ‘Humanity as an identity’.
16 Ibid. p. 29.
17 Ibid. p. 30.
18 Aleinikoff and Zamore, The arc of protection.
19 Ibid.
20 Hartman, ‘Top humanitarian’.
21 Agier, ‘Humanity as an identity’, p. 35.
22 Sherman, ‘Lords of poverty’.

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what he calls the ‘fetish’ of the humanitarian aid organization that values the mantle andresponse more than saving lives.
In his book, Humanitarianism, war and politics, Peter Hoffman writes about the‘humanitarian industrial complex’.23 In a podcast titled ‘Critical humanitarianism and thepolitics of aid work with refugees’,24 Hoffman also states that critical humanitarianism
must be seen as a way of understanding the ‘international sacrificial order’ and thathumanitarianism is having an identity crisis. There are challenges that one must address as,
for instance, when UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) started in 1967, it wasmeant to help refugees in Europe only. Now UNHCR runs refugee camps all over the world
and the camps themselves have become a problem. Refugee camps have become places ofinhuman conditions where people are dehumanized and objectified.25
The ‘infantilization’ of refugee camps, where refugees are often portrayed as people
without agency is also one of the concerns. Hoffman states that ‘refugees are enormously
resilient’ and do not want to be infantilized, and he talks about the ‘refugee economy’,
which is becoming a source of growth and describes how the proto-typical camp is
disappearing. Hoffman also argues that the responsibility to protect comes as an arm of‘imperialism’ and hence the system is as explained above built on hierarchy.

Ⅳ Securitization of Humanitarian Work
The fourth challenge that can be identified about the global humanitarian industry is its
securitization; for instance, Didier Bigo writes that migration is increasingly interpreted asa security problem. The prism of security analysis is especially important for politiciansand others who benefit from this. 26 Competition for budgets and missions and thetransformation of technologies uses such tools as computerized data banks, profiling andmorphing, electronic phone tapping, and so forth. Didier Bigo calls it the ‘Europeanizationand the westernization of the logics of control and surveillance of people beyond national
policies’.27 In refugee camps, thus, one can see the paradigm of a humanitarian space that is‘total’ and, at least in theory, revels in tension. An apparatus of power that consists ofprofiling, recording, control, and enclosure that realizes itself locally in a governmental
space that does not need ‘democracy’ in order to operate.28 The camp then becomes a
metaphor and the concrete fulfilment of the exceptional treatment of a human ‘waste’ thathas no voice and no place in the world, a way of managing the undesirables, in whichhumanitarian government operates, as it were, as a ‘subsidiary’ form of ‘government of theworld’.29 There is a dialectics of hospitality and hostility, of host and hostage.
Jacques Derrida gives a psychological reading of it when he says, ‘One can become
virtually xenophobic in order to claim the protection of one’s own hospitality’. 30 The
continued importance of camps, the development of waiting areas on the borders, or the‘internal asylum’ areas in the global South are part of a broader political process that
23 Hoffman and Weiss, Humanitarianism.
24 Hoffman, ‘Critical humanitarianism’.
25 Ibid.
26 Bigo, ‘Security and immigration’.
27 Ibid. p. 64.
28 Ibid. p. 42.
29 Ibid. p. 49.
30 Derrida, Of hospitality, p. 53.

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secures any position for humanitarian action in the world at large.31 The camps become themost developed example of the contemporary governmental reality and assume extraterritoriality, relegation and exception.32

Ⅴ Covid-19 Pandemic and Continued Relevance of Humanitarian WorkIn view of all this, can one assume the demise of humanitarianism? The following analysis
proves otherwise. Today, the total global infection of Covid-19 stands at more than 100
million, and more than 2 million people have died since the pandemic erupted. The virus
has also affected the free movement of people within communities and nations. The UN
Security Council led by Secretary-General Antonio Gueterres approved UN Resolution
2532, which supported a months-long ceasefire. Some governments have used Covid-19 tojustify strict immigration enforcement measures that directly impact the safety and mobilityof asylum seekers and refugees seeking protection internationally.33
The UNHCR announced on 22 April 2020 that 161 countries from all over the world had
fully or partially closed their borders in an attempt to contain the spread of Covid-19.34
According to Alex Aleinikoff, ‘millions of migrant workers have been rendered immobile,
unable to work or to continue to send money to families back home. Millions of others
have been forced to leave cities for home villages, and countries of destination for countriesof origin, as jobs have disappeared’.35 The International Rescue Committee estimates that
there would be over there could be 1 billion infections and that 3.2 million deaths could beseen in 34 fragile nations.36
The implementation of lockdowns by many countries from the global North and global
South have impacted 1.6 billion informal workers, with women being affected the most.37
The Covid-19 pandemic echoes the calls of the Grand Bargain, which was launched during
the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in May 2016. The Grand Bargain is a unique
agreement between some of the largest donors and humanitarian organizations who havecommitted to get more means into the hands of the people in need.38
During Covid-19, numerous international and local humanitarian organizations haveurged governments to reopen borders for displaced peoples seeking protection across theborders. While governments have used the public health crisis to justify strict immigration
enforcement measures that directly impact the safety and security of asylum seekers,
humanitarian organizations such as Amnesty International have fought against the abrupt
closures and claimed that they directly violated international refugee law. During Covid-19,
several indigenous people, women, and marginalized groups also worked for many whowere stranded and gave humanitarian relief and support.
Several groups, such as the Danish Refugee Council and the Red Cross, also supported
vulnerable populations around the world and provided psychological support including
providing access to legal aid, supporting quarantined shelters, and distributing food andother items. Doctors Without Borders also worked to move refugees at high risk from31 Agier, ‘Humanity as an identity’, p. 38.
32 Ibid. p. 38.
33 Ibid. p. 9.
34 Ibid. p. 4.
35 Aleinikoff, ‘The fragility’.
36 Kim, et al., The impact of.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.

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Greece into hotels on the mainland.39 There is work that still needs to be done and it iscritical that organizations work together in order to support one another and address thisglobal issue coherently and strategically.40
The UN continues in spite of challenges to be one of the most engaged humanitarian
actors, building isolation wards, conducting temperature screening, and providing hygienic
kits. The International Organization for Migration and United Nations Children’s Fund
(UNICEF) also initiated a relocation program during Covid-19 to ensure that 49
unaccompanied refugee minors were rehabilitated from Greece to other EU member statessuch as Portugal and Finland.41 Another important aspect of the Covid-19 crisis was in thefield of education, where 1 billion children were feared to be out of the education system inthe developing world. Several agencies of UNICEF worked during the pandemic to ensurethat children in refugee and other displaced camps still have access to education. It is
critical to recognize the central role of civil society and other relevant local stake holders inaddressing the gaps left by national governments and international institutions.42

Ⅵ The Global Humanitarian Industry Needs Rethinking
The underlying values of humanitarianism we would like to believe are universal and thenotions of charity and solidarity with fellow human beings are well rooted in our culturesand belief systems. On the other hand, the formal international humanitarian system and its
principles, organizational architecture, and standards, which have their origins in Western
Europe and North America and, culturally, in the Western value system, is under scrutiny43.
Several scholars have reiterated that humanitarian action was born and matured at a time
when the West was dominating. This dominance of the West is increasingly being
challenged and today’s international humanitarian action reveals a rise in ‘non-Western’ or‘non-traditional’ donors and operational actors, which will only increase in the years tocome.

39 Ibid. p. 18.
40 Ibid. p. 17.
41 Ibid. p. 18.
42 Ibid. p. 29.
43 Labbé, Rethinking.

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