When considering the presented perspectives on humanitarian aid, I think it important to keep in mind the position of those writing. While I admire all of the attached works (including that of Professor Arcaro), I find it difficult to entirely sympathize with any of the articles. It doesn’t seem to me that we (the writers) analyzing how to best “solve” world issues can come to any complete conclusion, when we are not those experiencing the problems.
We spoke in class about what it means to be an active/engaged global citizen. There seemed to be more or less agreement amongst our group that this definition includes the participation in aid and action towards change. So, if we are going to denounce the idea that someone who simply reads and reacts passively to world issues can claim to be an engaged global citizen; then the question follows at what level of engagement are we successfully reaching said status? I don’t believe that there is any point of aid at which we (as such privileged persons) will ever fully understand what “needs” to be done for those requiring “help”. If this is held to be true, then only those in the developing countries know what is required.
By this I do not mean to say, that they (the poor) can only help themselves, but rather only they know what help is needed. While humanitarian aid may not alone solve the world’s problems, it may be the best avenue to provide help towards doing so. For this reason, I do not agree with the ideal that aid work is strictly a validation of privilege (as stated by Teju Cole).
“Poverty never has been ended and never will be ended by foreign experts or foreign aid. Poverty will end as it has ended everywhere else, by homegrown political, economic, and social reformers and entrepreneurs that unleash the power of democracy and free markets
“Yes, some specific problems are fixable by aid and there has been progress on some already in health and education, as both Sachs and I have noted”
While this may often be true, I think that also and more importantly aid work is an opportunity to do “real” good that is simply being misused.
“We [aid workers] are band-aids born of affluent guilt and survive almost entirely on the donated profits of unjust privilege and power.”
Although this statement may seem too harsh a perspective against aid to be aligned with my beliefs, I agree with it entirely. To contest the idea that aid is provided through privilege and power is ignorant. To contest the idea that privilege and power come justly is just the same. Yet who is to say that these donated profits cannot be used for good, even if they were not born as such. Unfortunately, I would expect that those naming aid as a guilt induced band-aid, would also agree with the following:
“WTO, WB and IMF policies and corrupt/ignorant/criminal national elites matters million times more any humanitarian program implemented by NGOs.”
While I myself don’t feel educated enough on the specifics of these organizations, to either agree or not, I do feel as though aid work (formally organized or otherwise) is too often a moral excuse. Upper society is no less hungry for a clear conscious than the hard working individuals at the bottom of the pyramid. Foreign aid is unfortunately one of the most successful ways for affluent persons to “help the world” and “make a difference”, or at least as will be perceived by the common eye. This perspective reaches into the realm of conflict theory, by assigning power to the involvement of aid workers. If foreign assistance is perceived to reap greater benefits for those assisting rather than those receiving, the motives and consequences of the entire system begin to sway negatively.
“Donors commonly use aid to promote their own reputations or further their causes, and aid can be conditioned upon stipulations unrelated to true recipient need.”
“The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”
And so, the more often this motive for aid proves true, the farther the true intent of humanitarian work slips away. When considering this shortcoming, the term ethnocentrism is worth understanding. As defined by Caroline Abu-Sada, “Ethnocentrism is the evaluation of other people’s cultures according to standards of one’s own culture.” She follows with the assumption that, “There is nothing so ethnocentric, so particularistic, as the claim of universalism”. I think that foreign aid must hold this to be true in order to really “do good”. Foreign aid must be approached with the most sincere of intentions, and must operate in a way that best suits those in need rather than what the assisting country may believe to be right. Similarly, it is important for us to understand interactionism, regardless of if we adhere to the theory as a way of life. It must be understood why people (affluent and poor) choose to make the choices they do, and what meanings are being assigned to said actions. If we wish for foreign aid intentions to be pure, we have to first understand that one country’s “pure desires” may not align with those of another. As explained by William Easterly:
“How, for example, could a well-meaning American “help” a place like Uganda today? It begins, I believe, with some humility with regards to the people in those places. It begins with some respect for the agency of the people of Uganda in their own lives.”
To return to my original argument, I believe foreign aid to be inherently good, although sponsored by unjust systems. If the question is in what direction aid should be pointed, I think that a functionalistic structure may best suit our scenario. If we as a world are as interconnected as the humanitarian philosophy suggests us to be, there must be away to supply basic aid despite diversities, and we should approach foreign aid as an adaptable structure. Of course, then we must also consider to what extent we are obligated to be sorting through the systemic issues of foreign nations. Perhaps the most important question is that which determines where and how we establish boundaries for foreign assistance.
Bovard, James. “The Continuing Failure of Foreign Aid.” Cato Institute, Chicago Tribune, 31 Jan. 1986, www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/continuing-failure-foreign-aid.
Cole, Teju. “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 11 Jan. 2013, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/.
Easterly, William. “’The White Man’s Burden’.” The New York Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, 11 Jan. 2007, www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/01/11/the-white-mans-burden/?pagination=false.
Samuel, Larry RosenAlexandra, et al. “Conquering Digital Distraction.” Harvard Business Review, 29 May 2015, hbr.org/2015/06/conquering-digital-distraction.
Seo, Hyeon-Jae. “Politics of Aid.” The Role of Visual Media in Humanitarian Crises | Harvard International Review, Harvard International Review, 8 Apr. 2017, hir.harvard.edu/article/?a=14512.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii_k_AUqo8I&feature=youtu.be
3 Comments
What really stuck out to me about your post was the fact that foreign aid is inherently good. I totally agree with this and I don’t think it is the intention of the humanitarian aid sector to impose corruption and to only provide aid that mostly benefits aid-workers. The entire sector of aid stems from good intentions and a desire to help struggling people, but somewhere along the way corruption and ethnocentrism became interwoven. I think that the only way we can provide long term and effective aid is what you stated: to understand that the country’s “pure desires” may not align with ours and that that is okay. We need to leave behind our ethnocentric point of view and put ourselves in the shoes of the people we are helping in order to understand their needs and desires.
I actually agree with the basic premise of your post, which seems to be that humanitarian aid work is important and necessary and that it can be used as a force for good in the world, but because it’s often tainted by power, privilege, and injustice, it needs to return to its basic values and ideals to live up to its potential (let me know if I missed the mark). I think where we depart, however, is on the “inherent goodness” of such foreign aid, and the extent to which our efforts should be on sustaining foreign aid as members of the Global North vs transforming the unjust systems, structures, and practices we directly and indirectly contribute to that make such foreign aid necessary in many cases. Taking an uncritical stance toward the role of the Global North as both “instigator” and “savior” in conflicts and crises around the world is indeed a consequence of power and privilege. That is also why many people, particularly humanitarian aid workers themselves, believe that engaging in humanitarian aid work as if we are indeed “saving” and “fixing” the world while ignoring the harm that we create and perpetuate is extremely problematic.
I agree that the point at which we are an engaged global citizen is an unclear line, but I do believe that with engagement directly with the people who are in need, we can better understand their perspective and what they could benefit from. I think that rather than supplying aid to such countries in need, that we form better relationships where we are learning more about the actual situations occurring in the country, rather than going in with the same sort of aid for every underdeveloped country.