The Humanitarian Imperative

The humanitarian imperative. How does one begin to explain such a concept? Well, I’m going to try at least. The humanitarian imperative is, in my opinion, the unignorable urge for humans to help each other. Rooted inside of us is the need to help those we see in trouble. Certain societal factors have caused us to be able to turn off this urge, for example growing up I learned to ‘mind my business’ so when I would see a fight happening in the street I ignored it instead of stepping in. But, at the end of the day I truly believe that it is innately within humans to want to help each other. This humanitarian imperative is just another term to empathy. It is a large scale action due to the worldly socioeconomic disparities in the world. Where the problems lie with this term is how this empathetic need to help is played out. For example, when we view ourselves as the only way people in poor living conditions due to things like war (sometimes one’s that we caused ourselves) we are giving ourselves power over those people’s lives. Like Jennifer Lawfer said “[a]ny words or phrases like “empower” or “capacity building” that can contain, assume, uphold, or cover up a giver/receiver dynamic.” Applying the symbolic interaction theory as told by Mead we have given words meaning over time. The problem with this is we never really talk about language from a symbolic interactionist view point (Schwalbe, 198: 291). It is interesting that this hasn’t been explored much especially since it seems that language is the perfect example of symbolic interactionism. But, we have given meaning to the word empower and those meanings are mostly positive. Again, it all comes back to the execution of how we apply those words and their meanings to into action. We always talk about empowering people as if it is the only possible solution, and I too am guilty of this, without thinking of the implications that our words have on our actions. We consistently view these people as not able to help themselves therefore it is up to us to do this work. One of the problems I have with this is that we begin to view who we see as worthy as help. For example, we are willing to help Syrians by building transition camp sites for them to escape their war torn homes but reject their asylum applications when they try to come to the United States. We send missionary groups to places like Haiti but continue to ignore the water crisis in our own backyard of Flint, MI.

Expanding on this idea of picking and choosing who we give that aid to we must look at the societal identifiers, such as race, nationality, age, and class. These four identifiers, specifically, seem to play a big role in the humanitarian imperative; even more so the intersection of these identifiers plays a large role. We tend to have the most gut reaction to injustice when it is foreign brown children in a war torn country in the Global South. Because of this feeling I believe that the humanitarian imperative is mostly a Western perspective concept because of the power dynamics created by this imperative. The thing that solidifies this point of view for me in the word ‘imperative.’ Because we were lucky enough to be born into the socio-cultural status we were born in we have this guilt weighing on us to help those less fortunate than ourselves. It is one of the biggest reasons Elon University students are so eager to help the Alamance County area. But, with this is also the denial to admit that we are part of the problem. As Cole said “[t]here is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner,” (Cole, 2012). We constantly want to help fix the problem but in order to accurately assess the problem we have to look at where those problems developed. We don’t want to admit that the instability in the Middle East and the Global South is due to the interference from the West. Further, we feel that guilt goes away as soon as we help once. That is one of the reasons that the photo attached is so problematic. No one wants to notice the problems with them being a white person positing a picture with a little Black kid from Haiti along with the caption saying “I don’t know how these kids are so happy with so little but this week has taught me so much!!” As discussed briefly in class even these kind of photos perpetuate the power dynamics surrounded around aid work (SOC371: 2-13-19). We see our imperative of helping as the only possible solution for these people to live a better life. Looking at a macro-economic standpoint we place our own economic success globally as the standard for success everywhere. We forget to educate ourselves on their culture and assume that Western aid is the only aid (Howe, 2015 :33). This brings me back to the point of language. Whenever we raise money for aid we use the word ‘gift.’ Saying that helping these people is a ‘gift’ is saying ‘we are choosing to do this out of the goodness of our hearts and we just wanted to remind you that if we didn’t you would continue to live in the horrid conditions you do.’

The humanitarian imperative is not inherently a bad thing. It is just when we don’t drop our ethnocentric views that the problems begin to arise. We have to remember that cultures have their own identity and that the Western perspective is not the only perspective out there. Further, we must develop the language that does not create the power dynamics that currently exists such as First v Third world and calling aid ‘gifting.’ These problems may seem vast and impossible to fix but with just these first steps that we as a class are taking it is possible. No change was ever made over a day or even a year but that doesn’t mean we need to stop trying.

References

Arcaro, Tom. “The Humanitarian Imperative.” Class Discussion. Class Discussion, 13 Feb. 2019, Elon, NC.

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/.

Howe, Lorien. The Problematic Nature of Humanitarian Aid. University of Colorado, Boulder , 2015.

Lentfer, Jennifer, et al. “Two Ideas to Retire.” How Matters, 16 Mar. 2018, www.how-matters.org/2018/03/15/two-ideas-to-retire-empowerment-capacity-building/.

Schwalbe, Michael L. “Language and the Self: An Expanded View from a Symbolic Interactionist Perspective.” Symbolic Interaction, vol. 6, no. 2, 1983, pp. 291–306. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/si.1983.6.2.291