Humanitarian Governance and Ethical Cultivation: Médecins sans Frontières and the Advent of the Expert-Witness
| Author | Michal Givoni |
| Date | 01 September 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829811406037 |
| Published date | 01 September 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
MILLENNIU
M
Journal of International Studies
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
40(1) 43–63
© The Author(s) 2011
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829811406037
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Corresponding author:
Michal Givoni, Department of Politics and Government, Ben Gurion University, Israel
Email: michalgivoni@gmail.com
Article
Humanitarian Governance
and Ethical Cultivation:
Médecins sans Frontières
and the Advent of the
Expert-Witness
Michal Givoni
Department of Politics and Government, Ben Gurion University
Abstract
This article seeks to analyse contemporary humanitarianism as an advanced-liberal formation of
global governance. It tracks the emergence in the 1970s of the French humanitarian organisation
Médecins sans Frontières and shows that its care for and control of distant victims has been
commingled with and dependent upon care for Western selves. The article contends that
humanitarianism ‘without borders’ was the outgrowth of the legitimacy crisis of the medical
profession, and that its practice of witnessing has ultimately been a mode of ethical self-cultivation
by means of which physicians could fashion themselves as more enlightened personae. It further
shows that the recent concern with the detrimental side effects of humanitarian action should
be deciphered as the culmination of the practices of the self in which global humanitarianism has
been embedded since the 1970s.
Keywords
advanced liberal government, humanitarianism, Médecins sans Frontières, practices of the self,
testimony, witnessing
Moral dilemmas, as Ilana Feldman has suggested, are endemic to humanitarianism.1 This
observation seems to have acquired a special poignancy in the 1990s, when – following
operation Restore Hope in Somalia (1992–3), the genocide in Rwanda (1994) and the
1. Ilana Feldman, ‘The Quaker Way: Ethical Labor and Humanitarian Relief’, American Ethnologist 34, no. 4
(2007): 689–705.
44 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 40(1)
wars in Bosnia (1992–5) and Kosovo (1999) – humanitarian organisations grew increas-
ingly aware of the dark sides of their own practices. Dozens of essays, monographs and
case studies published by practitioners, activists, researchers and journalists since the
beginning of the 1990s highlighted the unintended side effects of humanitarian action
and its adverse political consequences.2 Critics from within humanitarian circles have
claimed that the moral minimalism underpinning humanitarian engagement tended to
preclude consideration of the broader context of political crises and to function as a sub-
stitute for more effective but also more controversial modes of intervention. While most
of these critics were far from rejecting humanitarian action outright, they pointed to the
material support it provided to violent and oppressive authorities and to its tendency to
confer legitimacy both on the warring parties and on metropolitan governments, claim-
ing that humanitarianism fuels conflict and often fails in its promise to provide protec-
tion to civilians. Seen from this angle, the major challenge faced by humanitarian
organisations was no longer related to the fact that their message remained unheeded.
Rather, what has now become one of their greatest concerns is the mounting political
impact of the humanitarian cause, deplored as a victim of its own success.
Although ethical reservations were ingrained in humanitarian practice long before
the so-called ‘complex emergencies’ of the 1990s, what was peculiar about the debates
on humanitarianism that took place during this period was that they cast the humanitar-
ian endeavour as inherently problematic. Challenges and quandaries of intervention that
were previously considered a personal matter or a strictly organisational concern have
now become a public issue that fuel efforts to restructure humanitarian practices. As
Mark Duffield has shown, the troubles of humanitarianism have become inscribed in an
ethical discourse that strives to ‘develop systematic methods of prioritising problems,
judging one’s responsibility and analysing outcomes in order to make the best decision’.3
Framed by the ‘dilemmas’, ‘hard choices’ and ‘paradoxes’ of intervention, this new ver-
sion of humanitarian ethics endeavours to recalibrate relief efforts while ensuring their
moral efficacy, leading to a reaffirmation of the humanitarian impulse on more solid and
rationalised grounds.4
This heightened awareness to the costs and unintended consequences of relief opera-
tions is usually attributed to the emergence, in the 1990s, of new wars that accentuated
the implication of humanitarian aid in the political dynamics of conflict. It is typically
considered to be an offshoot of the bitter experiences of the aid community in places such
2. Some of the most notable works are Alex De Waal, Famine Crimes: Politics and the Disaster Relief
Industry in Africa (Oxford and Bloomington, IN: African Rights and the International African Institute,
in association with James Currey and Indiana University Press, 1997); Fiona Terry, Condemned to
Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002); Rony
Brauman, Humanitaire: le dilemme. Entretien avec Philippe Petit (Paris: Les editions Textuel, 1996);
David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004); David Rieff, A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
3. Mark Duffield, Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London
and New York: Zed Books, 2001), 91.
4. For an overview of this humanitarian ethics, see Hugo Slim, ‘Doing the Right Thing: Relief Agencies,
Moral Dilemmas and Moral Responsibility in Political Emergencies and War’, Disasters 21, no. 3 (1997):
244–57.
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