Anthropology in Humanitarian Assistance

CONTENTS

PREFACE PREFACE III

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS V

Chapter 1Chapter 1INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION (Voutira/Benoist/Piquard) 1A. The Concept of Emergency 2B. Cross-Cultural Justice and the Distribution of Assistance 6

Chapter 2Chapter 2ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO CRISES,ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO CRISES,CONFLICTS AND VIOLENT CHANGECONFLICTS AND VIOLENT CHANGE 9A. Reconceptualisation of Violent Change: The Sociology of Disaster (Voutira) 9B. Alternative: Anthropology of Contemporaneity (Piquard) 10C. The Global Scope of Disasters: Morbidity Profiles of a Disaster Scene (Voutira) 13D. Socio-Economic Aspects of Disasters (Voutira) 15E. Ideological Aspects of Violent Change (Voutira) 16F. The Sociology of War and Disasters (Benoist) 18

Chapter 3Chapter 3RESPONSES AND STRATEGIES FOR COPING WITH CRISESRESPONSES AND STRATEGIES FOR COPING WITH CRISES 22A. Choices and Constraints: Decisions about Displacement (Voutira) 22B. Strategies of Coping (Voutira) 24C. The Challenge of Adaptation and Survival Tactics (Voutira) 26D. Coping with New Perceptions (Piquard) 31E. Patterns of Belonging: The Social Organisation of Identities in Exile (Voutira) 39

Chapter 4Chapter 4THE LOGIC OF INTERVENTIONSTHE LOGIC OF INTERVENTIONS 44A. The Social Context of Interventions (Voutira) 44B. Intercultural Communication (Benoist) 56C. Social Relations and Power Games (Benoist) 60D. Anthropological Limits of Humanitarian Assistance (Piquard) 64

Chapter 5Chapter 5SOME CRITICAL ISSUES INSOME CRITICAL ISSUES ININTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN ASSISTANCE (Voutira) 67A. Introduction 67B. Gender 68C. Repatriation 75D. Ethics in Humanitarian Interventions 83

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Chapter 6Chapter 6CONCLUSION CONCLUSION (Voutira/Benoist/Piquard) 97

Chapter 7Chapter 7BIBLIOGRAPHY BIBLIOGRAPHY (Voutira/Benoist/Piquard) 101

CHAPTER 8CHAPTER 8ANNEXESANNEXES 120

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PREFACEPREFACE

Over the past decade, the scale of humanitarian crises has escalated dramatically. Naturaldisasters, war, famine or persecution have occurred in locations as diverse as the formerYugoslavia, Afghanistan, Columbia, Rwanda, North Korea and Liberia. These and manyother emergencies have demonstrated the importance of humanitarian assistance givento those in need. It has also become clear that humanitarian assistance, in the context of arapidly changing world, must be planned, organised and implemented on a professionalbasis. Since the early 1990’s, both international and non-governmental organisationshave instigated programmes aimed at guaranteeing the professionalism in humanitarianaid, which is essential in ensuring that the victims benefit.

The Network On Humanitarian Assistance (NOHA) was launched in 1993 as acontribution to a new and unique concept of higher level education in humanitarian aid.The project was jointly initiated by the European Community Humanitarian Office(ECHO), which finances the world-wide humanitarian aid of the European Community,and the Directorate General XXII of the European Commission (Education, Training,Youth). With financial support from and under the auspices of the SOCRATES pro-gramme, the NOHA programme is currently being taught at seven European universi-ties: Université Aix-Marseille III, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Universidad Deusto-Bilbao,University College Dublin, Université Catholique de Louvain, University La SapienzaRoma and Uppsala University.

The NOHA programme starts with a ten day intensive programme at the begin-ning of the academic year in September. This programme brings together all studentsfrom the NOHA universities, the lecturers, and representatives of international and non-governmental organisations. In the second part of the academic year, students study attheir home universities, while in the third part, they are offered courses at one of thepartner universities in the network. Finally, the students complete a practical componentas the fourth stage of the programme.

The programme uses a multidisciplinary approach with the aim of encouraginginterdisciplinarity in lecturing and research. There are five main areas which are taughtin the second part of the academic year and these correspond to the Blue Book series,which are also commonly referred to as the Module Books. These module books are usedthroughout the network and contain the basic teaching material for the second period.The first edition was published in 1994. This second edition has been significantly re-vised, updated and, in parts, completely rewritten as a result of the teaching experiencein the first 3 NOHA years. The volumes of the second edition are:

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Volume 1: International Law in Humanitarian AssistanceVolume 2: Management in Humanitarian AssistanceVolume 3: Geopolitics in Humanitarian AssistanceVolume 4: Anthropology in Humanitarian AssistanceVolume 5: Medicine and Public Health in Humanitarian Assistance

In addition to the second edition of the five basic modules, two new modules have beenpublished:

Volume 6: Geography in Humanitarian AssistanceVolume 7: Psychology in Humanitarian Assistance

All modules have been written by NOHA network professors, teaching at either theirhome university or other network universities. All NOHA universities, both past andpresent, have substantially contributed to the development of the Blue Book series. Foreach module at least two network university professors worked together to ensure a cer-tain homogeneity of the text, although each author was responsible for a specific part.The table of contents outlines the specific contributions.

Special thanks go to all the authors and in particular to Dr. Horst Fischer from theInstitute for International Law of Peace and Armed Conflict (IFHV), Ruhr-UniversitätBochum, who has undertaken the role of editor throughout the whole process of pro-ducing this second edition Blue Book series. His staff, and in particular, Mr. Guido Hester-berg, prepared the manuscripts and layout of the books.

Information on the NOHA network and the Blue Book series can be obtained by ac-cessing the ECHO’s internet homepage (http://europa.eu.int/en/comm/echo/echo.html)or the IFHV internet homepage (http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/ifhv).

As the NOHA course seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice, I hopethat these reference books will help to improve the quality of work for those involved inhumanitarian assistance, especially because efficiency in the field is measured not only infinancial terms, but above all, in number of human lives saved.

Alberto NavarroDirector of ECHO

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NOTES ON THENOTES ON THECONTRIBUTORSCONTRIBUTORS

Jacques BenoistJacques Benoist

Jean Benoist has a PhD in medicine and a PhD in anthropology. He was Head ofLaboratory at the Overseas Pasteur Institute, Professor of the Department ofAnthropology at the University of Montréal (Canada), and furthermore, since 1980,Professor at the University of Aix-Marseilles. He is currently chairman of AMADES,Association for Medical Anthropology in Development and Health. He has publishedmany articles on the anthropology of Creole societies and numerous books, including therecent “Anthropologie médicale en société créole”, Paris, UTF, 1993, and “Hindouismescréoles”, Paris, C. H. T. S., 1998. He has also edited important books, amongst others:“Soigner au pluriel, Essais sur le pluralisme médical”, Paris, Karthala, 1996, and“Anthropologie et Sida, Bilan et perspectives”, Paris, Karthala, 1996.

Brigitte PiquardBrigitte Piquard

Brigitte Piquard (PhD) studied at the University of Louvain in Belgium. She is ananthropologist and works as a Research Associate also at the University of Louvain. She iscurrently an ESF Fellow at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and amember of the CEIAS (Centre d’Etudes de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud). Her overseasexperience includes work and research in the Afghan Refugee Camps in Pakistan as wellas research related to the political situation in Pakistan, where she has conducted fieldwork annually since 1987. In addition, she has been conducting ongoing research inother Muslim countries, for example Egypt, Morocco, Malaysia, amongst others.

Eftihia VoutiraEftihia Voutira

Dr. Eftihia Voutira is a philosopher, an anthropologist and a Senior Research Officer atthe Refugee Studies Programme, Queen Elizabeth House, and the Department ofGeography, University of Oxford. She regularly teaches courses at the University onnationalism and ethnicity in Eastern Europe and on identity and displacement. As ananthropologist, she did extensive work since 1991 in the Caucasus and Central Asia onethnic minority patterns of forced migration and resettlement during the Soviet era. Sheis currently doing comparative research on the repatriation, reception and settlementpolicies concerning ex-Soviet citizens in Europe (Germans and Greeks), on resettlementand asylum policies in the Russian Federation and, on the processes of the newcomers’integration into local societies. Her research on refugee issues and settlement policies is

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aimed at both academics and practitioners. Author of Improving Social and GenderPlanning in Emergency Operations (Refugee Studies Programme / WFP Report, Oxford,July 1995); Conflict Resolution: A Cautionary Tale. A Review of Some Non-Governmental Practices (Studies on Emergencies and Disaster Relief – SIDA, Stockholm,1995); of numerous articles, encyclopaedia entries and reports on forced migration,minority issues, repatriation and refugee resettlement.

CHAPTER 1CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION

This book introduces the role of anthropology in humanitarian crises. From an anthro-pological standpoint, disasters represent radical disruptions that challenge the existingsocial and cultural orders, including those of the helpers.1

Attempts to understand the lives of societies and, in the present sphere, the acti-vating mechanisms and effects of conflict and catastrophe, are expressed through verydifferent approaches. Some favour a specific theme, based on specific technical know-ledge, whether in a legal, economic or medical dimension. Other approaches, however,endeavour to unite these sectorial methods through a principal concern to emphasise thesequences, causal relationships and consequences of such phenomena. The geo-politicalapproach and the anthropological approach are both of this nature.

For anthropologists, knowledge should be gained regarding a reality which is situ-ated on the level of locality, the place where individuals, as social beings, live their dailylives. These individuals are not necessarily aware of the forces and structures which in-fluence their decisions, their way of thinking or their behaviour, but these make an im-pression upon their daily lives, their idea of the world, their family relationships, theirneighbourhood, their environment and beliefs, their perceptions and influences oper-ating in their societies. Disruptions (wars, disasters, forced population movements),which humanitarian aid attempts to alleviate, tear apart the invisible social fabric whichsurrounds the victims and gives meaning to their lives.

It is this social fabric which requires better understanding, with its distinctive fea-tures within a certain culture, a certain society. For when a humanitarian operation islaunched, it does not find itself faced with a mass of isolated individuals, cut off from allrelationships (except in extreme cases), but with people who are suffering, not onlyphysically, but also as a result of the dismantling of their social and cultural world. Theirstruggles for survival are accompanied by another struggle which is often in vain andwhich requires assistance and attention, that of rebuilding this social fabric around them-selves.

To be unaware of this is to run the risk of dangerous simplification, as has indeedbeen demonstrated by the failure and unnatural effects of some aid programmes. It isnot a question of advocating an exclusive approach by this route, but it is necessary to beaware of it, and the aim of these chapters is to introduce the anthropological issues tothose who have cause to intervene in a foreign society. 1 Dynes et al. (1987).

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A. The Concept of Emergency

The lack of clear criteria to define emergencies is one of the educational dimensions to beaddressed. It is because the key terms are essentially ambiguous (e. g. crisis, disaster,humanitarian, emergency) that they need to be contextualised and interpreted. For in-stance, although “disaster” typically refers to some misfortune causing widespread dam-age and suffering, there is no agreement as to what constitutes a disaster at all; what ap-plies to one community does not necessarily apply to another. Typically, what launchesan “emergency” response is the recognition of the high risk of survival of a group.

An anthropological approach to disaster is intended to:

1. “Put the last first” 2 to introduce in the formulation of assistance programmes, as pri-mary criteria, the people’s perceptions of events, their needs and strategies for cop-ing with the extreme conditions of survival that constitute an emergency.

2. Offer an analysis of local power-relations that are being redefined in the context ofan emergency situation. These do not merely include changing relations amongmembers of the affected populations, e. g. redefinition of kinship and social obliga-tions, they also entail new delicate balances among the victims, their hosts and thevariety of “outsiders” that move in to assist.3

3. Finally, it addresses the factors that lead to a situation that is labelled as an“emergency” (e. g. who decides?, with what criteria?, in whose interests?) and theimpact aid programmes have on the affected populations.

Humanitarian emergencies constitute critical loci where different cultures are forced tointeract, bringing the anthropological perspective into the picture. Givers and recipientsof aid may share concern with the elimination of the immediate effects of crises, but theydo so from different cultural perspectives. This entails a series of problems concerningdaily communication, most notably on the level of language and the shared assumptionsunderlying social behaviour in different cultural contexts. Different cultural codes de-termine the way people see, experience the world, and structure their expectations.4

Even the so-called “natural” instinct for survival is culturally mediated. A veiled, injuredAfghan refugee will refuse to be flown to a distant hospital without male kin, even if thisjeopardises her life. Such behaviour is often misunderstood by relief agencies who mayconstrue this response as part of “a plot to fool the system”.

Survival in emergency situations involves cognitive and physical responses to vari-ous forms of violent change.5 The archetypal response to such crises involves the pre-dicament of dislocation;6 to survive, people are forced to choose between staying or flee-ing, and then find ways to adapt to radically different social and material conditions. It iswith respect to these micro-level social processes of conflict and survival that anthropolo- 2 Chambers (1983); Cernea (1985); Harrell-Bond (1986), p. 250.3 Firth (1959); Vaughan (1987); Voutira / Harrell-Bond (1994).4 E. g. Boas (1928); Benedict (1936); Sapir (1949); Whorf (1956); Gregory (1969); Frielich (1972); Geertz (1973),

Spradley (1975); Keesing (1981).5 See Chapter 2.6 Ager (1994).

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gists have made significant contributions by focusing both on the situations of local ac-commodation and in host societies (Annex 9).

Focusing on the cultures and culture-contact in humanitarian interventions re-quires an introduction to some basic anthropological tools. Briefly, culture is understoodto include a system of knowledge, norms, and beliefs, the terms through which a groupunderstands and interprets the world.7 Culture also refers to a set of institutional ar-rangements within which social life takes place,8 and a political and socio-economicframework of recurring systems of exchanges.9

I. Models of Aid in Other Cultures

The duty to assist in life-threatening situations is legitimatised in various religious andcultural traditions. A number of cases point to the range of such variations. Norms ofhospitality in southern African societies allowed western survivors of shipwrecks to bewelcomed into local communities even as chiefs and benefactors of these regions;10 out-siders were integrated through rituals of feeding, helping and entertaining one’s neigh-bours in a “disinterested” fashion in the Buddhist tradition of the Sherpas in Nepal;11

among Afghan refugees, tribal codes of honour ensured temporary shelter among kin, orthe obligation of asylum to the mohajer – the refugee or exile in the Koranic tradition –provided by Islamic cultures.12

II. The Western Model of Humanitarian Aid

The mythological origins of the first humanitarian emergency can be traced back to theBiblical Flood. “The human history of humanitarian aid [...] began with Noah as the first aidworker running relief operations as best as he could during the Flood”.13

Modern humanitarianism14 “is identified with the 18th century which established the mod-ern secular declaration of human rights as the touchstone of new state constitutions”. The inter-changeable use of mankind, human kind and man throughout these documents bearsimmense moral implications, since it presumes that the species is so homogeneous that

7 E. g. Griaule and Dieterlen (1960); Geertz et al. (1979); Spradley/McCurdy (1970); Keesing (1981).8 Radcliffe-Brown (1952); Goodenough (1970); Keesing (1981).9 Levi-Strauss (1962; 1963); Gellner (1969). The debate within the discipline includes more than 50

definitions, all of them focusing on the different phenomena under investigation (Keesing (1981), p. 70).10 Wilson, M. (1979), pp. 54-58; Shack/Skinner (1979), pp. 8-14.11 Ortner (1978).12 Centlivers and Centlivers-Dumont (1988); el Madmad, (1993).13 Delors, (1992), p. 5.14 Nichols (1987). Both the inspiration and implementation of assistance relied on organised religion. The

earliest forms of “foreign aid” to “cultures in need” coincides with the activities of 16th centurymissionary evangelism (Smith, B. (1990), pp. 27-40). Through the rapid colonial expansion in thenineteenth century the variety of social and humanitarian functions undertaken by different churchorganisations were enlarged. A broad network of social services (modern education, medicine) wasestablished in Latin America, Africa and Asia operating under the auspices of a philanthropic regime,often in collaboration with the “civilising missions” of the colonial governments (Asad (1970)).


each individual is to be treated like every other.15 The elimination of other salient char-acteristics (e. g. skin colour, language, origins) as morally irrelevant was an importantstep in the direction of the entrenchment of the “humanitarian imperative”.16

III. The Humanitarian Regime

The establishment of an international institutional framework to address large scale hu-man suffering coincides with the events at the end of World War I. Responding to theneed for a co-ordinated international reaction to the vast numbers of people who did notbelong within the new European state-boundaries, the League of Nations, and later theUnited Nations,17 labelled these populations “refugees”,18 and introduced humanitarianlaw, intended to ensure the protection of their rights. Refugees have become the focus –particularly since the late 1970s – for the development of a vast and complex network ofinstitutionalised assistance, the “humanitarian regime”.19

IV. Humanitarianism as a Moral and Political Principle

The concept of “humanitarianism” includes both the moral imperative and the institu-tional setting. As a normative principle, “humanitarianism” is based on egalitarianism; itentails the recognition of the symmetry between one’s claims to humanity and the equal-ity of others as members of the same species. On the other hand, the establishment of thepostulate of “non-discrimination”, as codified in the post World War II Universal Decla-ration of Human Rights, is meant to legitimise this principle on the level of politicalpractice. Yet, the translation of the so-called “humanitarian imperative” in the context ofstate-sponsored humanitarianism, which evolved in the institutional framework of inter-national assistance, allows for a wide margin of interpretation and conflicting agendas toco-exist alongside the same ostensible end of saving human lives. The controversies sur-rounding US assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras intimate the moral dilemmas thatarise in the context of translating what is morally right to what is politically expedientand vice versa.20

15 Leach (1982), p. 57. There are a number of classic cases of pre-enlightenment institutionalised

discriminatory practices that would lead one to appreciate more fully the recognition of this basic “moralfact”. For instance, during Spanish colonisation, courts in Spain spent a century trying to decide ifIndians of the New World were human or not.

16 Knudsen (1993).17 Skran (1988; 1989).18 Zetter (1991).19 Loescher/Monahan, (1989). This regime comprises host governments, the office of the UN High

Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other UN organisations, and non-governmental organisationswhich are assigned or assume responsibility to deal with refugees’ material needs. After decolonisation,the numbers of displaced populations in need of protection and assistance increased exponentially(UNHCR (1993). The Mandate of UNHCR has been extended to “returnees” and although still debated,it has been assisting internally displaced in Croatia and elsewhere.

20 Harrell-Bond (1985); Nichols (1987); Nichols/Loescher (1989).


V. Humanitarianism in Action

“Humanitarianism demands that there be a focus on the needs of the victims; that those needs bemet in a non-discriminatory fashion; and that the entire operation be politically impartial andremain ideologically neutral”.21

These four formal criteria are meant to be both necessary and jointly sufficient to accountfor the practice of humanitarianism. Yet, they remain equally open-ended to allow for

“the concept of humanitarian aid to be stretched out of all recognition by practitioners more in-terested in its political usefulness than in the relief of human suffering”.22

The heart of the problem concerns the principles of objectivity and impartiality in thedistribution of aid to war and disaster victims. Taking the concept of needs as self-evi-dent, Nichols proceeds to challenge the form of humanitarian interventions; he challengesthe principles of fairness and impartial distribution in order to show the degree to whichboth principles are in fact ideologically laden. Both the content and the form are open tointerpretation in implementing assistance. The following may be seen as an operationalscheme to account for the variations.

VI. True Needs? Bogus vs. Basic Needs

Needs/resource assessment techniques form a prerequisite in assistance programmes(Annex 5). Few, however, are sensitive to the principles of the social organisation of theaffected populations. Rapid needs assessment procedures tend to focus on standardisedneeds such as water, food, health and temporary shelter,23 instead of education, religion,mental health and employment.24 Participatory research, which incorporates people in theprocedure to capture what people want, seeks to accommodate both latent and manifestneeds in a situation of increased vulnerability. The introduction of the concept of“vulnerability”, understood as the inability to “cope with risk, shocks and stress” 25 shifts theemphasis from needs to available resources. The salutary results of this methodologicalmove can be established on different grounds:

1. It pays heed to the fact that people are differentially affected by an emergency. In anemergency, people bring different assets which could be used to maintain their eco-nomic independence, rather than being forced to accept relief.26

2. Conceptually, the introduction of “vulnerability” as a criterion of allocating aid allowsfor more appropriate humanitarian responses by addressing directly the issues of

21 Nichols (1987), p. 194.22 Ibid, p. 191.23 Tollet et al. (1988), p. 19.24 Harrell-Bond (1986).25 Chambers (1989), p. 1.26 Harrell-Bond (1986), p. 251.


fairness of distribution among differentially afflicted populations. Thus, it humanisesaid without begging the question of fairness of distribution.27

B. Cross-Cultural Justice and the Distribution of Assistance

The problem, however, with the application of humanitarianism as fairness (as equalityof treatment) in situations of international assistance is not merely one of cultural relativ-ism28 or preference (e. g. “our” criteria or “theirs”); it is one of the appropriateness of aidas a response to the relevant needs of the population and the effectiveness in meetingthose requirements on the ground.

Taking fairness of distribution as a criterion for allocating aid gives rise to four pos-sible situations:

1. Equal treatment of equal cases. Because emergencies affect people differentially, thispossibility is not a realistic option because there are no “equal cases”.

2. Unequal treatment of equal cases. Even if one could establish some type of equivalencebetween needs and resources for all (so as to have an egalitarian base) the distribu-tion of unequal amounts to each would create inequality overall.

3. Equal treatment of unequal cases. Most food given on the basis of ration cards assumesan equal number per card holder (family), and a global mean estimate of a “familyunit”.29 Though the equality of the ration is meant to satisfy the non-discriminationprinciple, it does not reflect the actual kin relations of any particular population,normally established on the basis of sex ratios, nor does it accommodate the late arri-val of individuals or new-born into the original equation.30 Consequently, originalinequalities are increased.

4. Unequal treatment of unequal cases (fairness of results). This is the optimal case. Giving tothe poor and the sick more than to the healthy and able, meets “fairness” in terms ofequality of results. It is also the optimal case since it respects the relevant criteria of“worth” and “norms of reciprocity” of those assisted;31 e. g. according to localTikopian criteria, even in a famine situation, the chief, “who must be the last to die”,should get more than anyone else.32

Thus, with respect to the two criteria of interpreting justice in the context of aid, appro-priateness and effectiveness, reason, morality, and experience suggest that giving the

27 Chambers (1989), p. 1; Winchester (1992), p. 45.28 A literal interpretation of fairness that focuses on equality of treatment among unequal cases does not

even coincide with western practices. Affirmative action, reverse discrimination, quota systems and thewhole principle of equality of opportunity are all embedded in an understanding of the differentialdistribution of power and resources in society [Rawls (1971; 1993)].

29 Harrell-Bond et. al. (1992), pp. 215-217.30 Palmer (1982); Waldron (1987).31 Harrell-Bond et al. (1992)/9.32 Firth (1959), pp. 75-76.


same food ration to everyone could undermine delicate structures of authority and re-sponsibility within the community.33

Within the European Union, ways of perceiving the importance of social issues inthe preparation of humanitarian aid vary considerably according to national traditions. Itis a fact that officials and participants in the field do not perceive these differences, whichnevertheless determine their conduct. Consequently, before questioning themselves re-garding the recipients of aid, anthropologists raise a number of questions regardingthose who give it, and the results can be surprising. In an article ironically entitled“Without Frontiers”, a British anthropologist34 notes in this respect:

“French gasconnade, British empiricism and Swiss discretion – these are clichés regularly con-tradicted by the behaviour of individuals, but they have some pertinence and they lend colourand variety to the work of NGO”.

These differences are expressed in very different attitudes to anthropological contribu-tions. These are of limited interest at a time of actions taken in extreme emergency, de-vised above all in order to respond rapidly to immediate vital needs. They become neces-sary as the emergency gives way to the continuance, when the task of international aid isno longer to fill a vacuum but to strengthen the local capacity to resist future emergen-cies. Thus continues the same author:

“Whereas British agencies routinely take advantage of anthropological advice, anthropologistsand ‘French doctors’ seem as yet far apart. From Dr. Kouchner’s comments it seems that he mayhave an out of date picture himself of current thinking amongst anthropologists”.35

This is a fair statement. The author does not, however, take the comparison far enough.In fact this is one of the main differences between the French and British traditions re-garding anthropology’s position in relation to the authorities. It is well known that therewas a close link between the British colonial government and anthropologists, who pro-vided it with information on the social and political organisation of the colonised peoples,thus enabling an indirect government to be established.

In contrast, the French government, which more often than not carried out a di-rect form of colonial control, took very little interest in learning anything from anthro-pologists. As a result, the latter have had a particular tendency to oppose the govern-ment, to take an anti-establishment, even anti-colonialist stand. The same differences arefound in relationships with humanitarian aid and with applied anthropology in generaland are in line with occurrences during the colonial era. Certainly there are some criticalBritish and some French applying the work of anthropologists, but the inherited ten-dency from the colonial era remains.

These differences in commitment are themselves related to differences in intellec-tual tradition. Even though applied anthropology has a place in French ethnology, it of-ten finds itself positioned as a second-rate discipline, which does not belong within thepredominant intellectual tradition. Social anthropology itself does not hold the signifi-

33 James (1991).34 Benthall (1991), p. 2.35 Ibid., p. 3.


cant position which it holds in current British thought, and studies relating to percep-tions and thought systems are often received more favourably in France than those whichare devoted to the structures of society, the changes in these or the effects of de-velopment operations upon them. However, new trends in French anthropology havepermitted a partial merger of these two traditions. The current studies, within the an-thropology of contemporaneity, on cultural contacts and the homogenisation of cultures,are expanding the fields of French anthropology. They enable renewed thinking on so-cial changes, crisis and social movements. These thought processes are also applicable inthe fields of development or humanitarian assistance. One of the objectives in this man-ual is to explain both approaches and to indicate to what extent they are not only rele-vant but also complementary. To discuss the same phenomena from different points ofview can only improve its understanding.

Although brief, this outline of the different attitudes taken by national anthropo-logical schools of thought is an incentive, at the start of reflection on a European level, todraw attention to the need for a certain relativism. Even our ways of understanding andexplaining science, our scientific traditions are impregnated by distinctive cultural andhistorical features and anthropology can heighten our awareness of this. This culturalrelativism can, however, place those who work in humanitarian aid in difficult positions.It is impossible for them to accept values (in relation to the rights of man, the situation ofchildren and women, torture, etc.) which are in total contradiction to the values whichare motivating their aid. They can then find themselves, as a matter of necessity, havingto deviate from the normal rules.


CHAPTER 2CHAPTER 2 ANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TOANTHROPOLOGICAL APPROACHES TO

CRISES, CONFLICTS AND VIOLENTCRISES, CONFLICTS AND VIOLENTCHANGECHANGE

A. Reconceptualisation of Violent Change: The Sociology ofDisaster

Social scientists refer to disasters as “social crisis periods”.36 The degree to which crises af-fect the different levels of the existing social order will also influence “the community’s ca-pacity to absorb and recover from extreme phenomena”.37

Conventional explanations of disasters have focused on climatic and geologicalstructures (e. g. cyclone, flood, earthquake prone areas) as the main causes of suddenelemental change.38 In contrast, man-made “deliberate” violent changes resulting fromwars and civil strife have been seen as distinct and qualitatively different types of crises.Two assumptions underlie this view:

1. There is a fundamental gap between natural and human causes, each entailing dif-ferent types of responsibility for the results of a disaster; e. g. natural calamities falloutside the field of human responsibility while human causes are always open tomoral evaluation;39

2. There is an opposition between everyday life (normal and secure) versus post-disastercrisis life (painful, abnormal, and insecure).

Both assumptions have recently been questioned. In the field of environmental studies,the so-called “alternative view”,40 focuses on a definition of disaster from the standpoint ofthe social relations of production. The new approach involves a reconceptualisation ofdisaster from an event to a process, involving an interaction between the political economyand the physical environment, and a redefinition of disaster mitigation through building

36 Dynes et al. (1987); Britton (1987); Winchester (1992).37 Westgate and O’Keefe (1976), p. 65.38 Winchester (1992), pp. 40-42; Annex 2.39 Cf. Turton (1993).40 Winchester (1981; 1992).


the relevant socio-economic infrastructure.41 Equally crucial to this new approach is therelation between crisis and everyday life. As Winchester’s research on cyclone-prone areasshows, “[...] disasters are not out there in nature, savage and intensive, ready to pounce, but exist insociety in our social organization of knowledge and production”.42

A similar challenge to the validity of the traditional view of disasters as “extra-ordi-nary” circumstances has come from what Davis43 has called the “anthropology of suffering”.Davis’ programmatic proposal aims at integrating the two established kinds of anthropol-ogy: the “anthropology of maintenance” (the study of social structure) and the “anthropologyof repair” (the study of social change), by placing the varieties of human suffering at thecore of anthropological concerns. This unified type of anthropology focuses on humansuffering as part of the existing social order rather than as an aberration or temporarydeviation from it; it examines the causes of suffering as essential features of all societiesrather than pathological phenomena per se. “Pain is normal” in the way people experi-ence, understand and react to it; it is also “real” in the sense that it has to be dealt with ineveryday life. An “ethnography of suffering” would thus document the similarities anddifferences in the ways individuals and groups respond to crises and make sense of themwithin their social worlds rather than as “apocalyptic” events outside the limits of theircontrol (Annex 6).

B. Alternative: Anthropology of Contemporaneity

We are currently observing world-wide a “transfiguration”, a change in societies. All overthe globe, the social fabric and the sociability of many societies are becoming increasinglyfragile and many of their institutions and ideological productions are becoming ex-hausted. The progressive dissolution of human structures is linked to interference ofsigns, features, codes and values. The contemporary man finds himself partly out of hiselement in a world where the notions of “order”, “unity” and “meaning” seem more andmore obscure. Different contemporary French schools of thought underline these phe-nomena. The concept of “post-modernity”, though quite ambiguous, provides us withthe best insight into the current state of society (Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard).Some authors have put forward the idea of an era fading and disappearing, or the notionof the ends of time. Others prefer to describe it as an era of ephemeral or emptiness.Aside from these minor differences of thought, it is clear that there is a recurrent theme:this is the state of crisis. Consequences are known and sometimes distressing: anxiety,worriness, [...], and also its derivations: indifference, contempt and violence.

In such a context, the way of looking at objects is more important than the objectbeing looked at. Every society proposes and sometimes imposes, a certain image of menand women (and children). This detour through imagination and representation is in-scribed in the social dynamic. The efficiency (because it is efficient) of this way of lookingat reality, is even more perceptible because it follows several cases in the media. The lat-

41 E. g. Baker (1981), p. 1; Cuny (1984); Winchester (1992); Turton (1993).42 Winchester (1981), p. 42.43 Davis (1992).


ter essentially diffuses stereotypes or emblematic images of social realities. Humanitarianassistance is extremely relevant to this change of society because it takes place in the civilsociety and on a world-wide scale. It has to resolve global crises, daily global armed con-flicts, natural disasters or exclusion.

Approaching reality through the study of perception, imaginary or representationis not, as such, a typical way to study the context in which humanitarian assistance istaking place. But the themes and premises elaborated by these trends in anthropologycreate an interesting framework that will help the comprehension of contemporary phe-nomena.

It is difficult at this stage to demonstrate the common threads in the approaches ofauthors such as Gerard Althabe, Marc Augé, Pierre Sansot, Michel Maffessoli or others. Allthese anthropologists, though working in different areas and different periods, havereached a common stage in their reflection and have come to the same type of conclu-sions. Perhaps, in addition, they are recognising the common origin of their approachesin the work of the French anthropologist Georges Balandier. They all have a common in-terest in contemporary issues, everyday life and the “social imaginary”. Over the lastyears, excellent anthropological monographies of daily practices have taken place.44

Those monographies have been a first attempt to systematise new schemes of analysis,new trends of reflection, in some cases relatively removed from the most central andsometimes hegemonic trends in anthropology (especially functionalism and structural-ism). Our attempt in this manual will be to stress some conclusions of these schools ofthought and to apply them to the humanitarian issue. We will focus on the substitution ofa culture of emotion and feelings to the rational ideal; the notion of altérité (alterity), etc.

This other reading of reality is specific in that it links the “observer” with the“observed”, that is to say that the actors start knowing and recognising each other. Thishypothesis is quite helpful for humanitarian assistance as in this context different actorscoming from different horizons start interacting, and thereby create, through their socio-cultural contact, a totally new type of context. The phenomena of humanitarian assis-tance has to be understood as a dynamic process and a global social fact.

In terms of the anthropology of “contemporaneity”, the presence of the observer isan integral part of the field data. The starting point comes from the observation of cul-tural contacts and the homogenisation of cultures. It becomes difficult for anthropolo-gists to distinguish between “remoteness” and “closeness”; each individual being situatedat the crossroads of several cultures. Spaces of communication become the most impor-tant object in anthropology. Each interlocutor is building its own identity vis-à-vis othersbut still preserves the autonomy of each of these spaces of communication. This imposesan elaboration of new methodologies based upon studies of small groups and not onlymicro-systems. Long individual or collective talks (a type of non-directive spontaneousinterview) have to be added to participative observation. The “social” is perceived as awhole without isolating communications, rituals and symbols from the social practices inwhich it takes its roots. Studies of symbolic matters are to be savoured as they unify in thesame perspective all types of fields. Communication is also a central topic of this anthro-

44 Petonnet, (1979); Zonabend, (1980); Verdier, (1979).


pological theory. It leads to a central goal: the understanding of comprehension. Inother words, it replaces the readability of representations in their context and social uses.

This form of anthropology is based on the way social actors are commending the“réel” through imaginary. The social fabric is made sense of by transposition, the pro-duction of images, the manipulation of symbols and their organisation in a ceremonialcodification. This anthropological detour also puts an emphasis on tribalisation of certainsocial elements and creates a powerful detour towards orality and iconicity in a culturewhich is increasingly immediate and ephemeral. At the first glimpse, this theoretical ap-proach seems to take us far away from our centre of interest, but a deeper look will openthe field to its application in the humanitarian context: the anthropology of contempo-raneity can be a clue i. e. to understand the metamorphosis of man-made disasters(particularly conflicts). Current affairs is full of events that can be read this way.

Nothing escapes the influence of an era’s general atmosphere. The end of the ColdWar and East-West antagonism has marked the very nature of the armed conflicts beforethe beginning of the 21st century. This fact has created a kind of vacuum in the polarisa-tion of alliance. This constatation has affected humanitarian assistance, sometimes evenhindering it, in some circumstances making it inefficient.

Recently, some researchers have attempted to establish a cartography of conflictsover the world. From Algeria to Sri Lanka, Sudan to the Chiapas in Mexico, from EastTimor to Sierra Leone; secessionist or fundamentalist wars have been taking place. Inthese conflicts, ethnic claims, religious effervescence or nationalist statement have pre-vailed. These wars are mostly domestic. This intra-state characteristic as well as the de-struction of political institutions and civil society make the position of international or-ganisations difficult to maintain; such institutions have lost their references.

Intuition, emotion and sensibility have become integral in the context of the con-flicts. Politics only represents itself. Followers are no longer implicated by adhesion butby emotion. Political power has to negotiate with current uncertainties and anxieties.Situations escape their control. Most of the leaders follow beliefs, promising a renovatedorder or want to bring the crisis to its paroxysm without avoiding any type of violent ex-cess. The Somalian case is one of the best examples of this.

This political and ideological vacuum is increasing by a plethora of images invadingthe humanitarian “stage” in a destructuring and anarchist way. The images given by themedia start being omniscient: destroyed buildings, fires, bloodied faces, crying survivors,[...]. More than being a simple illustration or the witnessing of a disaster, such images arerepresentations of the imaginary creating a very collective emotion, a public hic et nunccompassion. Consequently, effects are considered without trying to find causes. Emotioncomes first. Such on-the-spot reactions can totally change in a moment. The emotionprovoked by a Somalian child whose face is covered by flies can be suddenly replaced byyoung Somalian men dragging naked corpses of American soldiers in the streets ofMogadiscio. All of a sudden, Somalians go from victims to executioners. One emotionreplaces another without taking into account the huge range of situations and differentcontexts. The deciphering of styles, communication and perceptions has started to be-come a major issue in the understanding of humanitarian assistance.


C. The Global Scope of Disasters: Morbidity Profiles of aDisaster Scene

A statistical survey of world disasters from 1900 to 1988 estimates that about 420 millionpeople have been affected by floods, earthquakes, typhoons, cyclones and hurricanes(Annex 1; 3). On a global scale, disaster induced deaths are three to four times higher indeveloping countries. Equally, disasters affect 40 times more survivors in these countriesthan in the developed world.45 In all these cases, deaths, “homelessness” and monetaryloss are the immediate results differentially affecting sections of the population.46 Esti-mates indicate that unaccompanied children, unprotected women open to harassment,the sick and elderly are the more vulnerable groups in any disaster situation, includingwars and famines.47

This common-sense construal of vulnerability as a personal incapacity places theindividual as the unit of analysis and construes vulnerability in relation to an individual’sresilience to withstand and overcome shocks and losses. As such, it does not address thestructural causes of differential vulnerability to disasters and the way one can interferewith their consequences. Most recent research focuses on the concept of vulnerability interms of the social, economic and political conditions which differentially affect individu-als and groups as well as the overall capacity of the community to absorb shock and re-cover.48 In this respect, poverty and vulnerability become inextricably linked in the wayin which socio-economic status (poverty) determines both the experience of shock andloss as well as the high risk of non-survival among economically or socially deprived andmarginalised groups. This shift of emphasis from the individual to the structural causesof vulnerability also affects our understanding of social responsibility in particular emer-gencies.49 Namely, the deeper causes of disasters do not lie in the stars (as the etymologyof the term “disaster” denotes) but in the economic and institutional organisation of thesocieties which suffer them most.50 Unfortunately, this new conceptualisation of disasterhas not filtered down to the level of practice and humanitarian interventions.51

45 UNDRO (1984); Berg (1989).46 Harrell-Bond (1986), pp. 256-258; Annex 2.47 E. g. Williamson/Moser (1987); Cola (1993).48 E. g. Westgate/O’Keefe (1976); Winchester (1992).49 The pioneering work of Amartya Sen (1981) has brought the discussion of famine relief within the debate

concerning welfare economics. Famine is to be understood as a failure in entitlements rather than merelylack of food; i. e. the poor starve because they have no means to acquire food which is locally available. Asa result, according to Sen, the aim of aid programmes to deal with hunger should be to restoreentitlements (the distribution of cash or food stamps), rather than rushing in emergency shipments ofsupplies. [For an application of this idea in meeting the nutritional needs of refugees, see Wilson (1992)].

50 Turton (1993), p. 64.51 It is interesting to speculate why there is this gap between theory and practice. Is it because of the

compartmentalisation of knowledge? Is it because of the economics and investment in the already existingpractices (e. g. too many relief practices already exist in “storage”)? Or is there an inherent inability ofcommunication between researchers and practitioners which prevents theory from informing practice?(Colson (1989); Guggenheim/Cernea (1993), p. 14-20).


I. Reactions to Violent Change

Unlike adaptation, connoting some type of transition or adjustment, reactions to radicalsocial disruptions involve equally violent counter-changes on different levels of the socialorder. Furthermore, unlike responses to crises which presuppose some form of inter-vention (to be considered in Chapter 3), social reactions to disasters are meant to addressthe general pattern of immediate impact that crises have on the social order; i. e. how dogroups react to violent change? Do they divide or do they unite? Do they progress or re-gress? Cross-cultural research seeks to answer these questions. In this sense, crises be-come the context for understanding social structure which may be analytically distin-guished on three levels: economic, social practice, and ideology.52

II. Social Consequences of Crises

The most common social reaction to a crisis is flight. Flight entails separation and frag-mentation of communities. It also involves the breaking up of the domestic unit and itchallenges the values and basic structures of authority within the family and the commu-nity as a whole (Annex 9). How and under what conditions do people flee? Who decidesto leave? Under what constraints of time do people flee? How permanent is the dis-placement in fact and in the perceptions of the affected populations? Most literature onforced migration53 distinguishes between three stages in the experience of dislocation:the pre-displacement period, the nature and experience of displacement, and post-dis-placement or adaptation to the new environment. This tripartite schema encapsulates thelogic of social integration as the main challenge to displacement on the psychological,socio-cultural and economic levels as will be explored in the following chapters.

When people flee from a “natural” disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, theassumption is that displacement is temporary. Famine, perceived as a natural disaster,also leads to migration. Vaughan’s54 comparative research on African famines shows thateven when “wandering” is the consequence, people still expect to return home(Annex 9). Some disasters are planned, e. g. the building of dams which result in floodingthe homelands of thousands of people.55 The different five-year development plans inthe former Soviet Union entailed population transfers affecting millions of people. Theforced sedentarisation of nomads in Central Asia alone caused 1.5 million deaths in theprocess.56 The ideology of development justified the forcible uprootment of hundreds ofvillages “without prospects” ( íå ïåðñïåê ò è â í ûå, neperspectivnye).57 Despite its “develop-ment-induced” rationale, such forcible uprootment has deep social consequences in

52 E. g. Levi-Strauss (1949; 1962; 1963); Bourdieu (1972; 1992).53 Colson (1972; 1975; 1982); Scudder (1975); Loizos (1981); Harrell-Bond (1986); Hirshon (1989); Malkki

(1989); Voutira (1991); Ager (1994).54 Vaughan (1987).55 Colson (1982; 1989); Benthall (1993).56 Olcott (1987); Voutira (1993).57 Humphrey (1983; 1989); Lebedeva (1993).


terms of the fragmentation of communities, loss of means of livelihood, and profoundpsychological implications because of the permanence of the displacement.58

Flight in response to war usually leaves little time to prepare, seldom has a cleardestination, or a sense of the permanence of the displacement (Annex 8). This type ofambiguity generates a complex matrix of social reactions.

When flight includes crossing an international boundary, “refugees” are placed in a“liminal” state.59 In anthropological terms, refugees are people who have undergone aviolent “rite” of separation and unless or until they are “incorporated” as citizens intotheir host state (or return to their state of origin) they find themselves in transition, in astate of “liminality”. This “betwixt and between” 60 status may not only be legal and psycho-logical, but social and economic as well.61 Moreover, encoded in the label “refugee” arethe images of dependency, helplessness, and misery.

The range of such phenomena is indeed daunting. Some estimate that as many as140 million people have been forcibly uprooted in this century. In 1993 there was said tobe more than 18 million refugees and 24 million more people in the world who are dis-placed within their own countries. In addition, 8-15 million people are estimated to havebeen displaced by development projects and policies, and a further 10 million for pri-marily environment-related reasons; others estimate that a further 150-300 million peo-ple will be displaced by environmental degradation by the year 2050.62 These numbersdo not include people who have been forcibly sedentarised. According to one estimate,one in every 135 persons alive has been forcibly displaced.63

D. Socio-Economic Aspects of Disasters

Any disaster involving loss of property and means of livelihood necessarily brings aboutchanges in the modes of subsistence and the social organisation that regulates them.Looking at the famine in Tikopia in 1952 as a “social fact”,64 Firth65 identified a series of is-sues to be empirically investigated under the particular conditions of scarcity: e. g. werethe cultural norms about food (what is edible/inedible) observed or waived in the face ofthe crisis? Were the patterns of social relations and systems of obligation towards kin,neighbours or guests redefined under the particular conditions of famine? Were theftand violence to become acceptable types of behaviour?66

Comparative research on these issues67 points to a variety of cultural variations: inTikopia, where male labour migration had exacerbated the scarcity of resources, no food

58 Colson (1972); Scudder (1993); Cernea/Guggenheim (1993).59 Van Gennep (1909); Turner (1967); Malkki (1990).60 Turner (1967).61 Malkki (1992).62 Tickell (1990).63 Childers (1991); Leopold and Harrell-Bond (1994); Annex 7.64 Mauss (1924); Levi-Strauss (1949), p. 52.65 Firth (1959).66 Firth (1959), pp. 77-79.67 E. g. Rangasami (1986); Vaughan (1987); De Waal (1989); Rahmato (1988); Ornas (1990).


taboos were broken despite the severity of the famine; people resorted to alternativenutritional strategies, e. g. processing inedible bark, and to the re-allocation of scarce re-sources, such as cooking in communal ovens on rotation. Yet, taboos and other forms ofsocial control on gender roles were waived as women not only entered the canoes nor-mally prohibited to them, but took over the role of men in catching fish and acting as theheads of family.68

In most documented cases of drought and famine, particularly in Africa, it is theimposition of an “external” system of regulations that undermines the delicate balancebetween means of livelihood and the pressures of an environment of scarcity.69 Lappe andCollins’70 research on the 1970s drought and famine in the Sahel region suggests a seriesof factors leading to the particular crisis:

1. It was the colonial administrative boundaries that restricted the Tuareg nomads from“shifting their herds in response to the short and long term cycles of nature”;

2. the imposition of a monetary tax (in French francs) that upset the antecedent net-works of barter economy and forced the nomads to over-graze the land in order toraise more livestock for cash in the 1920s; and

3. the massive “development” projects in the 1960s that shifted agriculture to mono-cropping of cotton and other export crops which intensified the process of environ-mental destruction and undermined the diverse traditional means of local adaptationto scarce resources.

E. Ideological Aspects of Violent Change

There are at least two dimensions of observable changes in the attitudes and values ofgroups of people who have been forced to flee by war or decree. One relates to theirwillingness to take risks in relation to the future (i. e. the degree to which they “invest” intheir new environment), and the other to their beliefs as manifested in political activities.Both may be characterised by the opposing descriptors “conservative” and “progressive”.The use of these terms, as introduced by Colson’s71 and Scudder’s72 pioneering work on thesocial consequences of forced resettlement, is meant to capture the broad range of differ-ent attitudes emerging as reactions to violent change. Evidently, the particular ways inwhich people understand the reasons for their flight, their understanding of their past,will influence their behaviour and overall attitude. As Loizos puts it in his analysis of the1974 Greek-Cypriot refugee flight,

“[a] major political upheaval must be accompanied by some reconsideration of the past, even ifin the end people are merely confirmed in their old prejudices”.73

68 Firth (1959), p. 79; Annex 4.69 Black/Robinson (1993).70 Lappe/Collins (1978).71 Colson (1971).72 Scudder (1975).73 Loizos (1981), p. 141.


With respect to risk-taking, Colson found that the Gwembe’s immediate reactions to mas-sive uprooting were essentially “conservative”. They clung to tradition and kin as themain sources of security in the midst of insecurity. They were unwilling to experimentwith new technical possibilities or to take risks by committing resources to “untried inno-vations”.74 Loizos’ comparative analysis of Colson75 and Kiste76 with his own research amongthe Greek Cypriots from Argaki suggests that the degree to which people acknowledgethe possibility of their uprootment and its permanence influences the ease of their ad-aptation to their new environment and their willingness to invest in it. Comparing theGwembe77 with the Bikinians,78 it becomes evident that although some five years lapsed,the Gwembe finally accepted their new environment as “home” and began to adopt newtechnologies and economic opportunities. The Bikinians, on the other hand, “never settleddown anywhere, always found fault with their several new locations, and never accepted their loss ofBikini as final”.79 Loizos’ analysis offers aid workers a useful framework for understandingbehaviour which practitioners tend to describe as the “dependency syndrome”.80

“Whenever they moved they tried to get the government to build their dwellings for them, and, ifthis was refused, demanded to be paid to do it for themselves. They became increasingly articu-late, and continuously between 1946 and 1969 demanded both a return to Bikini and compen-sations, which started with very small sums but by 1969 had become a claim for one hundredthousand US dollars. They changed from a passive, easily cowed population to a self-consciousand highly manipulative political inter-group [...]. Their numbers increased three-fold, and, aswith the Palestinians, the number of claimants to the ‘lost lands’ (or to compensation) in-creased”.81

Concerning manifestations of “progressive” attitudes, there are countless exampleswhere people who have been forcibly uprooted organise and arm themselves to fight fortheir right to return.82 Commitment to an ideology which is “anti-traditional” may justifyrisk-taking on an individual level as well. As one converted Christian put it,

“[t]he strictness and importance attached to traditions in most aspects in my society are simplygrinding stones tied around their necks. It makes me wonder the more when I see how determinedthey are to continue to carry this load despite its unfairness to humanity”.83

On the level of political affiliations, we can also find great differences. Some immigrantgroups in the US display extremes of political conservatism.84 On the other hand, ontheir arrival in 1922, the majority of Asia Minor refugees in Greece sided with progres-sive forces of their new society by supporting the Democratic Party against the Royalist

74 Colson (1971), p. 2.75 Colson (1971).76 Kiste (1974).77 Colson (1971).78 Kiste (1974).79 Loizos (1981), p. 206.80 Waldron (1987); Kibreab (1991).81 Loizos (1981).82 Zolberg et al. (1989); Wilson/Nunes (1992).83 Harrell-Bond (1986), p. 298.84 E. g. Epstein (1978); Portes/Bach (1985).


Conservative Party.85 Such considerations support different types of immigration poli-cies86 and social engineering programmes particularly as regards policies of repatriation,e. g. concerning the “return” of ex-Soviet citizens such as ethnic Germans, ethnic Greeksor Jews to their respective homelands.87

F. The Sociology of War and Disasters

Conflict is a constituent part of social activity, and a significant portion of institutions areaimed at settling conflicts between people or between small groups in such a way that so-ciety as a whole exercises control over the progress and resolution of its internal disputes.This is essentially the province of law, whose forms and methods of expression varywidely from one society to another. It is here that a large part of anthropology tends tobe focused, particularly the anthropology of law which conducts comparative studies ofthe rules and institutions created by societies for the purpose of resolving conflicts be-tween their members.

Whenever conflicts arise between whole societies, however, the issue takes on adifferent complexion and violence occurs in a manner that might seem to elude thenormal mechanisms of social control: war breaks out, in any number of forms. In thisparticular area, anthropological studies can provide a unique contribution. Thanks totheir comparative nature, they allow us to take account of facts which lie far beyond thenormal range of experience of modern states. What is more, by adopting a holistic ap-proach to problems, anthropologists can help us to link up various levels (psychological,cultural, ecological, economic, political) which are too often compartmentalised. Theanthropology of war is thus as much concerned with war in “traditional” societies as withwar in nation states. This latter area tends to be the least explored. The difference ofscale in relation to what anthropologists are used to observing is not the only reason forthis. In a major conflict, it is difficult to be a passive observer and the holistic methodwhich is the hallmark of the anthropologist tends to be ill-suited to such situations.

There are, however, a good many lessons to be drawn from the anthropology ofwar. The theoretical approaches to the subject are manifold, and depend on one’s chosenviewpoint. The findings enable us to understand the links between the former socialsituation and that which prevails at the time of the conflict; they provide access to the un-spoken laws whereby a particular society distinguishes between acceptable forms of vio-lence and those which remain taboo, even in the throes of war. Anthropologists have alsostudied the psychological, and even biological conditions of conflicts. They have observedwars in relation to the way people appropriate and manage the environment, in relationto trade networks, kinship, religion and territorial set-ups. They have highlighted thedifferences between the importance of war in “primitive” societies and the ways in whichkinship is organised. They have shown how, in the case of states, specific military groups

85 Mavrogordatos (1983).86 Tucker et al. (1990).87 Cohen (1990; 1991); Kokkinos (1991); Voutira (1991); Heller and Hoffman (1992); Bade (1993); Hirshberg

(1993).


emerged, and how war gradually became separated from the other aspects of social ac-tivity, which brings us to the issue of major global conflicts.

Naturally we cannot hope to cover the full picture here, but it is essential whengetting involved in a humanitarian operation, to be able to look beyond the immediatefacts of the situation in which one is immersed in order to grasp its context and appreci-ate the pressures placed on those one is endeavouring to assist. What meaning do theyassign to the acts of war being committed, and how do these acts tie in with their socialactivity as a whole? Because although they are extreme phenomena, wars are also part ofthe long history of society, and in Third World conflicts, the forms of war are closely in-termingled.

In “traditional” societies, wars can break out when negotiations between neighbouringgroups reach an impasse. When this happens, wars can – temporarily – take the place oflong-standing traditions of co-operation and trade between communities, as well asmutual commercial, family and ritual links. The conflict may be short and sharp andcome to a halt when some symbolic rather than material gesture establishes one side asthe winner. Such wars may well flare up again from time to time. It is even quite com-mon, indeed, for such conflicts to form an integral part of the overall pattern of society.These “traditional” wars are normally governed by sufficiently strict rules to avoid caus-ing destruction or massacres on a scale that would threaten the social or economic bal-ance of one or other side. In these conflicts, the violence is kept within mutually agreedlimits. This is generally true of local wars between non-state social structures, such asthose observed among American Indians or in Africa.

Although however, modern methods often give rise to more serious consequencesthan would have been deemed acceptable in the 19th century, local conflicts, rooted inage-old relations between political entities are by no means merely a relic of the past.Although the pressures involved in such conflicts are of greater geopolitical significance,very often their main point of reference is an essentially local one. It is a fragile balance,however, and the emergence of states and empires leads to wars which are far less“controlled”.

In many cases, colonisation has changed the picture completely. The colonial warssaw clashes between people from cultures which were very far removed from each other,so much so that, even in the midst of war, stark contrasts emerged in terms of systems ofvalues. One example, which finds ready parallels in the colonial history of all of the con-tinents, is that of the “intercultural” relations forged during the struggles between theEuropean colonists and the American Indians in the eastern part of North America. Eachside had its own code of honour. Both tortured their prisoners and committed violentacts against people and property. But they had certain absolute and contradictory taboos.The Europeans had no compunction about committing rape, which was completelyunacceptable to the Indians. The latter for their part, practised cannibalism, which wasinconceivable for the Europeans. Thus each side believed that its own particular mannerof waging war was the “correct” one, whereas the enemy was a barbarian.88

Initially, the colonisers exploited local conflicts to their own ends; in some casesthey misled those they were invading into thinking that the new enemy obeyed the same

88 Abler (1992).


code of honour as they practised with their neighbours: the conquerors forged allianceswhich appeared to ensure the supremacy of one particular warring faction over another.In actual fact, however, both ended up submitting to the colonial order. The post-colo-nial period offers other examples of this type of dual-détente conflict, where geopoliticstake over local conflicts. The period that followed the “colonial peace” however, hadother unexpected repercussions. In effect, “armed violence acquires a different complexionwhen it is closely associated with the formation, maintenance and development of the state”.89 Somuch so that war becomes “a dynamic system for maintaining society as a whole, to such an ex-tent that the colonial peace succeeded in bringing about the erosion of the latter”. Anxious to pre-vent violence, the colonisers broke down the powers and trade networks which localisedwars had served to sustain. With the advent of independence, re-adjusting can be diffi-cult and the conflicts assume a different order of magnitude, although without manag-ing, in most cases, to recover their former functions.

In modern wars, humanitarian operations whose prime concern is the welfare of thevictims, can find themselves becoming caught up in the conflict, despite their best inten-tions. Whether they want to or not, they become a party to the conflict. In disrupting thebalance within which the conflict is situated, they can help to change its nature: in theeyes of some of those involved in the war, they appear to be assisting the enemy. Thehostile reactions which are then unleashed stem not so much from the explicit aim ofthese activities – namely, to help the victims – as from their side effects: hampering theprogress of the conflict and jeopardising the outcome in the eyes of those who believethey have been robbed of victory. The aid workers who are primarily concerned with thevictims, lay themselves open to this kind of criticism wherever the survival of these vic-tims is in itself a sore point for their enemies.

Another anthropological development in these wars stems from a profound changein the set-up of societies whose structures have been eroded by the development of thestate, without the latter being able to act as a satisfactory substitute. The war in Somaliadoubtless provides the starkest example of this type of change, which one observer terms“the criminalisation of politics, that is to say the centrifugal and violent tendencies which are cur-rently operating in a number of African states”.90 Just recently, Rwanda has furnished anotherexample of this. Humanitarian aid in such cases becomes bogged down in a state of chaoswhich it has no means of controlling other than through the use of force. In Somalia, thecountry’s ancient social and cultural patterns have conspired with topical internal socialproblems to produce seemingly senseless acts of violence: the serious crisis among Somaliyouth echoes other crises elsewhere, images of which are relayed by the internationalmedia, but it also springs from an age-old “culture of pillage” where war is an acceptedmeans of appropriation. Against this background, social groups emerge for whom thecity is the “territory” and international aid – a golden opportunity for plunder. Muchremains to be discovered about the social and cultural implications of these new tenden-cies, and about the way international aid agencies should allow for them.

Doubtless the chief merit of the anthropology of war is that it makes us aware of theexistence of the culture at the centre of the conflict, and the need for aid agencies to pay

89 Balandier (1986).90 Marchal (1993), p. 297.


close attention to that culture. Otherwise how can we account for the fact that a conflictas bitter as the Lebanese conflict, which has developed in a society whose attitudestowards women derive from the Mediterranean code of honour, has hardly ever beenaccompanied by rapes, whereas the acts of vengeance perpetrated were cast in the mouldof the vendetta? And were not the suicide attacks carried out by the Shiites directlybound up with the particular myths of this community and hardly ever practised else-where? Social and cultural realities are often instrumental in shaping people’s behaviourin a way that humanitarian aid is in danger of overlooking if the agencies concerned donot pay attention, which could in turn put them in a very precarious position.

Social structures and culture can also help to explain the subsequent effects whichconflicts have on the way the societies concerned are organised. A close look at whathappens in small “traditional” societies reveals that wars there tend not to be sudden,uncontrolled explosions. Rather, they play a part in the life of society, as ways of ex-pressing and settling conflicts. They are thus one of the mechanisms for changing socie-ties and indicators of social transformation.


CHAPTER 3CHAPTER 3 RESPONSES AND STRATEGIES FORRESPONSES AND STRATEGIES FOR

COPING WITH CRISESCOPING WITH CRISES

A. Choices and Constraints: Decisions about Displacement

In Chapter 2 it was noted that the most common reaction to a disaster is flight.91 Con-struing flight as not merely a reflex action, but flight as a coping strategy, an outcome ofdeliberation and decision-making, helps to emphasise the fact that people in most situa-tions of crisis have and do make choices. People make choices, even in the most violent, in-secure and destitute conditions. To the extent that flight is the result of deliberation andfollows the logic of a strategic move to survive, such decisions are not simply based oncalculating the danger – its intensity, its magnitude, and the resources available to move.Calculations also include a consideration of memories of past displacements, the where-abouts of relatives and friends (i. e. the possibility of mobilising social networks), and theparticular socio-political conditions which may make flight a higher risk than staying. Infact, decisions which lead to flight cannot be anticipated, we can only make sense of themex post facto.92

I. Societal Models and Flight Responses

Cross-cultural research provides two overarching models of human adaptation93 whichhave particular relevance to flight behaviour in crises. The more familiar is that ofrooted, sedentarised cultures which are thought to develop over time in one particularterritory, e. g. Greek or Roman civilisations. For such people, a flight response threatensthe foundations of the society. Commenting on the European experience of uprooted-ness during World War II, Weil94 encapsulates these assumptions in her statement: “To berooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul”.95

91 This is not to say that in every disaster displacement necessarily follows. In Chapter 5 we will consider

humanitarian interventions that entail only localised displacement.92 Voutira (1991).93 E. g. Sahlins (1975); White (1959); Malkki (1992).94 Weil (1987), p. 41.95 As quoted by Malkki (1992).


On the other hand, there is the amply-documented model of nomad, pastoral ad-aptation, which defines groups in terms of some form of lineage continuity rather thanspecific locality; for members of such societies the important question is not “Where areyou from?” (place), but “Who do you belong to?” (descent group). The primacy of thefirst model over the second is graphically expressed by Deleuze and Guattari:

“History is always written from a sedentary point of view and in the name of a unitary State ap-paratus, at least a possible one, even when the topic is nomads. What is lacking is a Nomadol-ogy, the oppositive of a history”.96

Decisions about flight by people whose adaptation falls within either of these two ideal-type models will differ accordingly. These differences represent the framework withinwhich cultures absorb shock.97 At the same time, we should remember that human mi-gration is a constant rather than an aberration throughout history.98 In fact, even formany sedentary groups, migration of individuals has been a major mode of economicadaptation. For example, for centuries, Southern Europeans have engaged in labour mi-gration and remittances have played a significant role in the household economy.99

Studies on urbanisation and rural-urban migration show how patterns of movement fol-low the same logic, aiming at increasing the competitive advantages of the householdunit as a whole by dividing its members. In fact, within the Soviet model, where move-ment was restricted, Dragadze100 found that the main type of household economic adap-tation in rural Georgia involved the division of the family unit between village and city.The village provides foodstuffs which are always in scarce supply in the city; employmentin the city provides cash for other needs.101 Decisions concerning such movement of la-bour are taken under varying degrees of economic coercion that divides the community,usually on the basis of gender between home and the distant place work.102

All such decisions to migrate presuppose efforts to maximise economic security, butthey also entail the separation of the labourer from his social roots. Finally, although thehistory of international migration demonstrates that people are willing, and many “like”to move, the particular conditions of coercion that lead to forced migration entail severesocial, economic and psychological costs.103 Nevertheless, in the social world of the mi-grant, displacement in and of itself is not the predicament. What is the predicament isdislocation which is forced.

On the global level, one can distinguish different types of coercive forces leading todisplacement and mass migration. These include ecologically induced displacement, de-velopment induced displacement (such as large agricultural projects or dams which al-

96 As quoted by Malkki (1992).97 Davies (1993).98 Tomasi (1992), p. 233; Richmond (1993).99 E. g. Angelopoulos (1967); Davis (1978); Papamiltiades-Czeher (1988); Mousourou (1992).100 Dragadze (1988).101 Cf. Voutira (1993).102 Marx (1987; 1990).103 Epidemiological studies after World War II showed that when compared with voluntary migrants,

involuntary migrants were more vulnerable to mental ill-health and that their vulnerability did notdecrease over time (Ager (1993)).


ienate land), the absence of peace and security, and violation of human rights(persecution).104

B. Strategies of Coping

Unlike migration, which is described above as an adaptive strategy to recurring crises ofscarcity, coping strategies are responses to unexpected and inexperienced crises whichrequire the rapid invention of radically novel means to survive. By definition, then, survi-vors are not “helpless victims” though they may become so in the process of beingsaved.105

Faced with a disaster which threatens survival, people have the choice of staying orgoing. Kunz106 talks about anticipatory refugees, those with the foresight and ability toread the signs of the impending crisis and who leave long before disaster strikes. What isless understood is what leads to the decision to stay. Where the survival of the domesticunit is endangered, people are faced with a number of moral dilemmas. For most people,the conception of the “good life” includes persons, things, family, friends and materialpossessions (land, house, moveable and immovable property). When these arethreatened, people may be forced to decide on priorities, hastily invented.

Research on the victims of the holocaust found that people refused to acknowledgethe signs of threat around them.107 Similarly, the residents of Argaki village refused to ac-cept the evidence of an imminent Turkish invasion.108 Zur found that those who did notflee violence in Guatemala derived solace from their belief that moral behaviour and theancestors would protect them.

I. Patterns of Flight

There are three qualifiers that determine the different patterns of flight as a copingstrategy. These are: who decides (individual, domestic unit, or the community), whetherthe flight is radical or “piecemeal”, i. e. whether all or some flee, and, finally, how per-manent the flight is perceived to be, short term versus long term. To the extent thatflight is considered as a survival strategy by the domestic unit, the most common out-come is the division of the family. If family property is considered a priority, one mem-ber (often the most elderly) may protect tenure by staying. For example, during the 1993evacuations from Sohumi in Abkhazia, two-thirds of the evacuated families left onemember behind.109 If the survival of the most valuable members is considered the prior-ity, they will be sent away. In several recent disaster situations, unaccompanied children

104 Onishi (1994).105 De Waal (1989).106 Kunz (1973; 1981).107 Bettleheim (1970); Hocking (1981).108 Loizos (1981).109 Voutira (1994).


made up 3.5% of the total population.110 So many children, as individuals or little groupsof siblings, arrive at European airports that Germany has had to install a creche in whichto receive them.111

When the disaster is so intense that flight is the exclusive choice, an entire commu-nity may decide to flee.112 Even then, the evidence shows that people usually attempt tostay as near to home as possible. It is this factor of proximity to home that usually makesthe difference between being “internally displaced”, or a refugee, having crossed an in-ternational boundary. For example, most Afghans in Pakistan came from only a fewkilometres from the border, others found safety around large cities inside Afghanistan.113

Other factors influence destination, e. g. having the financial and social resources toboard a plane, being able to mobilise social networks in the diaspora, and often just goodluck.114 Such happy accidents as an Oromo refugee, a teenager living in Djibouti, just re-leased from three days in prison where he had been badly tortured (beaten and hung byhis arms), who happens to meet a sympathetic English couple in the market who arrangefor his resettlement in the UK, can only be explained in terms of fortune.

II. Coping in Exile

Exile may be construed as the situation where people have crossed an internationalboundary and are therefore “refugees” or those who have been forced to move outsidethe boundaries of their community, “internally displaced”. Disasters may cause displace-ment within the state territory, for example, earthquakes, cyclones, floods, drought,famine and civil war. With the exception of those displaced by civil war and famine, theextent to which one may identify these different phenomena as discreet causes of dis-placement, the displacement itself is likely to be temporary and assistance focuses on re-lief, recovery and rehabilitation. Surviving long-term displacement requires dramatic re-sponses to radically new social and economic environments. Refugees represent the mostdramatic case of coping in exile.

The establishment of international boundaries and states in most parts of the worldentailed the division of related kin groups living on each side of the border. But whetheror not refugees have the advantage of historical affinal ties, their first encounter is withthe host population with whom they must negotiate, as newcomers, their social, economicand political space.115 Since the establishment of the international humanitarian regime,refugees also encounter another challenge to their adaptation, a relief programme,established for their benefit. The typical strategy for delivering assistance in the South,where the majority of the world’s refugees (political, economic or ecological), findthemselves, is to set up camps or settlements into which refugees may be encouraged or

110 See Williamson/Moser (1987).111 Ibid.112 The opposite may also be the case where a community under siege is barred from escape.113 Centlives (1994); Harrell-Bond (1986), p. 31-63.114 Leach (1961).115 Harrell-Bond (1986), p. 31-63, 118-152.


coerced to move.116 However much force is used to persuade refugees to accept the con-straints of the assistance programme, evidence shows that the majority take the decisionto remain outside the camps.117 In most situations in the world, this means taking the de-cision to reject material assistance in favour of “autonomy”.118

C. The Challenge of Adaptation and Survival Tactics

Coping in exile as unassisted refugees, often in remote, rural and underdeveloped envi-ronments, forces people to face the challenges of accommodation and adaptation to a so-cial, economic and political context in which they are “handicapped outsiders”, who areoften destitute. Adaptation involves the challenge of communication. Successful commu-nication does not only involve fluency in the language of the host, it requires under-standing of the cultural signs.119 The degree of “distance” between them and the normsand values of the host society and local attitudes are major variables affecting their suc-cess. The process of “translation” may be more or less taxing. In Southern Sudan, for ex-ample, the displaced population was not legally allowed to consume game unless theyparticipated in the complicated ritual hunt. The ritual had to be learned and the hostswilling to allow the “strangers” to be fictively incorporated into their kinship systems.Rituals of incorporation of strangers are infinitely variable and may include rites of puri-fication. For example, when Ethiopian Jews arrived in Israel, some rabbis insisted theyundergo ritual circumcision.120 Economic survival may require acquiring usufruct rightsto land according to local practices or engaging in piece work labour in the fields of thehost in exchange for food. It may also entail a further splitting of the family, with indi-vidual members migrating elsewhere in search of employment. All these and other chal-lenges of survival and adaptation are usually undertaken under conditions of extremepoverty and insecurity which, as was discussed in Chapter 1, vary according to degrees ofvulnerability. Spring’s research among the Angolan refugees in Zambia points to gender-specific strategies of adaptation which are common. In Zambia, women could marry intohost families, an option not easily available to men because of the high costs of the mar-riage payments (bridewealth) that could be demanded by the hosts, and because in Zam-bia, only women acquire residency status through marriage. Often this would require thedisplaced families agreeing to a divorce, so that one of their women could improve herposition by marrying into a host family.121

In situations of extreme deprivation and scarcity, people may resort to more“deviant” tactics. For example, it is common for women to resort to prostitution(Annex 10). It may be less common, but nevertheless it does happen, that the wholehousehold will agree to this as a strategy:

116 Harrell-Bond et al. (1992).117 Kibreab (1991).118 Hansen (1979; 1982).119 Geertz (1973).120 Ben-Ezir (1990); cf. Shack and Skinner (1979); Ranger (1992).121 Spring (1982), p. 41.


“It was high time for girls and women to go for prostitution which helped a lot in feeding us (ofcourse those who had sisters [...]). We very well knew it was wrong, but it was beyond humancontrol”.122

Other survival tactics may include impersonations, forgery and theft, which are em-ployed against one’s moral judgement. One person reported how he was first driven tosteal in the market, then, needing both a place to sleep and food, he

“[...] went to one of the watchmen of the hospital. When I reached to him I was hungry again. Iintroduced myself to him in such a polite way and well-disciplined. One of the easiest trickswhich I spoke out to him was, I introduced myself as the son of a famous man. As he was an oldman, he simply accepted my word. After which I was given a great deal of food to eat”.123

The adaptation of unassisted refugees who have chosen to reject the aid programme isfurther complicated by the threat of its “capturing” them. Host governments, recognisingthat international aid depends on numbers and visibility, join with the humanitarianregime in attempting to recruit as many as possible of the refugees to the camps.124 Veryoften this involves the use of military force. Those who are determined to escape such“recruitment” must adopt additional strategies to disguise their refugee identity. Thismay be achieved by adopting local dress, which may, in itself, involve personal costs. Forexample, taking off the veil would be more difficult than putting one on. In some cases, itis necessary to find the money to acquire false documents such as ID cards or, as hap-pened in Southern Sudan, paying taxes so that a receipt could be presented as evidenceof belonging. However such outward signs of “assimilation” are achieved, security willalways depend on the protection of local people and is always precarious. There aresituations where refugees are an asset to local leaders, where their power depends onnumbers, but the interests of most patronage networks are marginal to those of centralgovernments and so providing sanctuary may put such local elites at risk.

On the other hand, manipulating the international humanitarian aid regime mayin itself become part of the coping strategy of unassisted refugees. Refugees may chooseto divide the household in order to maximise economic and social opportunities. Becauseof the availability of food rations, such social services as clinics and schools for children,camps tend to be populated by the most vulnerable groups: women-headed households,unaccompanied minors, the elderly and the sick. Often food aid, tools and seeds whichare handed out in the camps are passed on to those outside as a form of “remittance”, ormay be traded or sold in the local markets. Such an investment based on the principle ofreciprocal exchange pays off. In Southern Sudan, from 1983 onwards, when rations tocamps were reduced or cut off completely, food flowed from the self-settled areas back tothe camps.125

122 Harrell-Bond (1986), p. 328.123 Ibid.124 Harrell-Bond et al. (1992).125 Harrell-Bond (1986); Daley (1991); McGregor (1985).


I. Household Adaptation in Exile: Age and Gender Responses

Displacement not only requires the invention of strategies to cope with the exigencies ofdaily survival, food, shelter, and physical security, in a context which is always in a stateof fluidity and change, it also entails changes in values, norms, and behaviour. In hisanalysis of the Greek Cypriot experience of displacement, Loizos draws attention to theinvisible social relationships which are created by the ideas in people’s minds that extendin all directions, even when not actually broken.126

Successful adaptation requires learning new skills and adapting or discarding oldones. It should be noted that adaptation is not a state, it is a process and not necessarilyunilinear. For example, elderly refugees who have spent decades in exile often revert totheir own language and lose whatever facility they had acquired in the language of theirhost. More importantly, the familiar third-generation phenomenon of “returning toone’s roots” has seriously challenged the “melting pot” model of immigrant adaptationwhich wrongly assumed a progressive assimilation into the dominant culture of the hostsociety.127

Successful adaptation is a function of age and temperament; the willingness tolearn and adapt is also a function of expectations concerning the future, i. e. whether ex-ile is perceived to be permanent or temporary. Children, for example, learn new lan-guages and adapt to new situations more rapidly. When they begin to adopt the valuesand behaviour of their new peers, conflict may be created within the household withparents who expect their children to continue to maintain their own cultural norms.128

The role of the elderly in exile normally entails loss of status and authority as mostsocieties tend to value most those they need the most, i. e. the able-bodied workers. Eco-nomic circumstances in exile normally find the roles of women also radically altered. Inmany situations, women can easily find employment as domestic servants, while many ofthe skills men bring with them are unemployable without further training. In this con-text, men become economically dependent, deskilled, “declassed” and, finally, marginal-ised, even within the family.

Where women are the sole wage earners, a change in the balance of power withinthe household is the likely outcome, and this breeds resentment in both men andwomen. Even where both men and women are equally dependent on relief, men’sauthority and self-esteem deriving from their role as bread-winners are likely to be un-dermined. One of the consequences of these radical changes in values, role reversals,differential roles of adaptation among the members, and challenges to the family hierar-chy, is an increase in family violence.129 Not surprisingly, exile communities experiencehigh rates of divorce where this institution is available.130 On the other hand, where theculture of the family was oppressive, often patriarchal, aimed at protecting the collective

126 Loizos (1981).127 E. g. Epstein (1978); Mandel (1992).128 E. g. Bottomley (1992).129 Kinzie (1986).130 Spring (1982).


interests of the group as a unit over that of individual members, life in exile may providethe venue for the improvement of the rights of individual members.131

II. Communities in Exile

Previous sections of this chapter demonstrated that responses to crises include the dis-persal of resources and fragmentation of the household unit as strategies of survival.How do communities respond to exile? One of the most moving anthropological accountsof the separation and reintegration of a community undergoing the dislocation experi-ence is given by Peter Loizos in his chronicle of the Cypriot war survivors from the 1974Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Loizos constructs his narrative on the basis of what was nor-mal village life before the war, a chronicle of the two month war, and the first “bearings”of “refugee” identity during the subsequent year in the refugee settlements in the southof Cyprus. In his discussion he draws a comparison between refugees and “disaster vic-tims”, mainly of floods and earthquakes, but also of aerial bombing and famine.132 In allthese cases he identifies similar experiences of shock due to the rapid and violent dis-ruption to normal life, bereavement, as well as possible survivor guilt133 emanating from arecognition of one’s failure to save friends and relatives, seeing one’s kin dying or beingunable to intervene in order to save them.

In the Cypriot case, the community did not divide, but the material interests whichmaintained the network of social relationships in the old setting had been destroyed.

“Parents had nothing to give their children [dowries]; former neighbours had no longer tasks toshare, or fences in common; farmers had no need of labourers; butchers, tailors and builders hadlost their customers.” 134

The fact that these refugees, as others in Africa or Southeast Asia, were fed and sheltereddid not alter their position of relative deprivation;

“Certain key elements in their lives – home, marriage, property, independence, village, neigh-bours – had been damaged”.135

Like European Jews in London’s East End, Cypriots from the Argaki village recruitedpeople from surrounding villages in the host environment in Nicosia on the basis of theirshared experience of uprootedness. Loizos’ account suggests that the mental maps ofrefugee relations in exile distort reality in order to incorporate people with similar expe-riences into the wider circumference of regional refugee identity. As in the case of Jewishrefugees in London, people from different places, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, “[...] stillspoke of Warsaw, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, as if they were neighbouring suburbs”.136 In both casesthe choice of friends and people with whom to interact was not determined by mere

131 E. g. Jad (1992).132 Loizos (1981); Barton (1969).133 Lipton and Olson (1976).134 Loizos (1981), p. 200.135 Loizos (1981), p. 201.136 Litvinoff (1972; 1976), as quoted in Loizos (1982), p. 202.


contact; the relationships refugees pursued were with people who would understandwhat their pre-war life was about and share the same meanings.137

III. Communities Dividing in Exile: Camps versus Towns

A different outcome has been recorded by Malkki in her comparison of Hutu refugees inTanzania who opted for life in settlements and those who migrated to towns. Daily socialinteractions in the camps created the conditions for the emergence of a particular kind ofHutu refugee collective consciousness or identity.138 Her analysis focuses on the processesby which this collective consciousness emerges, based on the invention of a highly politi-cised myth of origin which serves to defend the Hutu’s claim of primordial rights to theland and to legitimise an ideology of return. In this mythology, the Tutsi are portrayedas strangers (originating from Somalia), who have abused Hutu hospitality by stealing the“nation”.

“What have they stolen from us? First of all our country [...]. Then they stole what exists in acountry – the livestock, cows, chickens, domestic animals [...] even the birds, the fish, the trees,and the banana fields [...]. All the wealth of the country [...] was ours. Because we were the na-tives of the country”.139

Not only can such mythology provide a sense of belonging and identity, in order to mo-bilise political and military action, it also functions as a buffer against assimilation into thehost society. In anthropological terms, the myth functions to maintain the refugees in the“betwixt and between” state of liminality,140 for example they refused Tanzanian citizenshipwhen offered it. Two types of arguments were used to explain themselves. One was re-lated to the appropriation of a Tanzanian identity. The Tanzanians

“[...] invite us to nationalize ourselves. We refuse! Yes! [...] Did we not have our own country?The best that we have now, it is that we are still in the hand of [...] [the] UN [...]. But once weaccept the nationality of here, we will be like what?” 141

The other argument refers to their long-term social and economic integration into thehost society:

“We cultivate, we are taxed like immigrants. They get a lot of benefit and money from us. Yet,they want us to be ‘integrated’ because we are beneficial to them. But this is only on the economiclevel [...]. We do not want citizenship. And neither do want to be immigrants [...]. As refugeeswe have at least some rights. We will wait and then we will return to our home country”.142

According to the camp Hutus, refugees in towns have shamed themselves by hiding theirHutu identity and by denying that they were either Hutus or refugees. Camp refugeesaccused the “town refugees” of having lost their “purity” through stealing, prostitution, 137 Loizos (1982), p. 203.138 Malkki (1990).139 Ibid.140 Douglas (1966).141 Malkki (1990).142 Ibid.; cf. Zetter (1991).


laziness, avoidance of hard work in the fields, and more seriously, smuggling ivory toBurundi (the enemy). Most dangerously of all, they were accused of acting as spies andcollaborating with the Tutsi-ruled Burundi government.143

One of the main strategies adopted by the town refugees was inter-marriage withlocals. Despite their ethnic “invisibility” as regards physical appearance and linguisticcompetence in the local language, they still viewed their situation as precarious. Theyexpressed their constant fear that “they, too, might one day be transported into a camp and sub-jected to its rigours and isolation”.144 They saw camps as

“an ever-present spectre of the loss of freedom and mobility [...]. The camps signal undesirableforms of control, not only from the camp authorities but also from the camp refugees who areseen [...] as somewhat native and moralistic [...]”.145

For while “detesting” the label of “refugee”, and rejecting the ethnic ascription (Hutu),the marker of the camp myth, they chose to refer to their group identity in nationalterms: “we the Burundians”.

D. Coping with New Perceptions

A humanitarian crisis, particularly exodus, also has repercussions on perceptions such asconceptions of space, time and their consequences on identities. Space and time are twoessential notions in anthropology, particularly in the anthropology of contemporaneity.

I. The Symbolisation of Space and Time

The aim of the symbolisation of space is to clarify for those who share the same location acertain number of organising schemes, ideological and intellectual references in order toorganise the social fabric. This symbolisation plays a role at different scales. It can be ap-plied to a house, the rules of residence, the divisions in a village, to territories, toboundaries, to the separation of accultured places and natural environments etc. Thesymbolisation of space helps the definition of the internal and the external, the “self” andthe “other”, identity and alterity.

Controlling space is a necessity for the comprehension and the organisation of one-self or of a community. This can be applied to public life, to territorial politics but also toeveryday life. In every society, even those far from one another, historically or geo-graphically, there is the same necessity of “constructing” internal spaces and opening upto the outside, to symbolise the hearth, the doorstep, to represent self and others, to cre-ate relationships.

143 The accusation that people who break social norms or exhibit other behaviour which transgresses cultural

codes are collaborators is a dominant feature of life in Gaza and the West Bank. Since the beginning ofthe Intifada in 1989, it is said that more Palestinians have been killed by Palestinians because of allegedcollaboration than by Israeli military.

144 Malkki (1990).145 Ibid.


With all the imposed displacement due to conflicts, demography, the world econ-omy or ecology, forced migrants are condemned to rebuilt socialised spaces in areas freefrom any significance and from which they are excluded. Due to massive urbanisationand the settlement in camps, Kurds and Palestinians can’t find a place between the offi-cial boundaries of the world diplomacy. Others such as Afghans, Somalians or Hutus arewaiting for the return of peace or of democracy. They expect the possibility of reinscrip-tion in their home land. For all these migrants, the loss of their land has been correlatedto the loss of social links.

The main metamorphosis of the refugee life consists of changes in the spatialstructure such as the urbanisation of their settlements. The camps are now mostly con-centrated at the outskirts of the main cities. This has resulted in basic changes in socialand mental structures of the population. The main modification has been that the spacehas become heterogeneous, regrouping different kinships, different ethnicities and per-sons from different backgrounds. This created major adjustments in their cultural rela-tionships. The American anthropologist, G. Bateson146 noticed three main possible reac-tions in the case of such cultural contact. Groups can fuse together, groups can be elimi-nated and it is also possible that the society becomes more complex as all groups surviveand learn to live together in a dynamic process.

II. Space and Time in the Identification Process

We can question why the contemporary man places so much importance on space as oneof the factors of self-identification. One of the answers can be found in the fact that“space” is no longer a “monolithic” element but represents something moving, often de-structured, always plural. Space is always linked to the notion of time by the use of theconcept of memory. The memory is multiple. Contributions of the past are treated, filed,programmable according to circumstances. French anthropologists often use the conceptof “lieux de mémoire” (places of memory) as a constitutive element of the identificationprocess. The articulation between space-perceptions-identities is particularly dialectical.

To evoke this kind of cultural recognition, we have to start by a short but necessarytheoretical detour through the concept of “collective memory”. To have a “collectivememory”, sharing same beliefs is not enough, common souvenirs are also needed. Thehistorical authenticity of those souvenirs does not really matter. The most fundamentalneed is the internalisation of references as well as a constituent imagination that has builtup a collective “fabulation”, a myth, from a “territory”, a “moment” or an event. But amyth is not only a product of imagination, this myth has to be nourished by having livedthrough situations. The collective memory not only draws a link between individualityand collectivity but also between past and present, dead and alive, explicit and implicit, inand out, moving and still. Souvenirs are needed, they are also not enough. Certainreferences are also essential such as places, objects used to clarify such recollections. Instable situations, those points of reference survive and a collectivity can inscribe itself in asustainable way in a living space. Those links between spatiality and collective memory do

146 Bateson, Vers une écologie de l’esprit, Paris 1977.


not deny the very importance of space but introduce a dynamic vision in which spaceshapes the group but is also shaped by it. The representations of space and especially ofspatial boundaries partly define the identity of a group and help it to differentiate itself.

Political power often has to reinforce its legitimacy by a reification of its own cultureand its boundaries basing itself on an official history which is largely fabricated. Thisincongruence between collective memory and official history can create tension andstigmatise certain people. It can in fact provoke the exodus of the weakest populationswho cannot defend their rights (political, social, economic or cultural) and even provokethe worst forms of genocide. It can also mobilise such people to create social movements.The arbitrary imposition of representations of history and mental representations ofspace are the result of former “rapports de force” (power relations) in the struggle for de-limitation of territories. For those populations either displaced or threatened, the afore-mentioned space becomes multiple and the feeling of belonging starts to be polysemic.

In the most extreme cases, claims of space of reference become a search for an“imaginary” to tie together the collective existence of a group, to give a meaning, a rea-son to live together and become a “community of destiny”, that is to say, a group of per-sons brought together by external circumstances and forced to socialise together. Re-gionalism or neo-nationalism causes the conservation or the transformation of symbolic“rapports de force” (imposition of references or transformations of stigma in emblems – i. e.the Jewish Yellow Star, the Afghan Pakhol, the Palestinian Kefieh). The purpose of suchmovements is to define vested interests according to one’s “vision du Monde” (world vi-sion) and the appropriation of a legitimate identity, that is to say, an identity that can bevoiced publicly and recognised officially.

III. The Emotional Bond

In the case of displaced populations, the imaginary space is not only the one that hasbeen developed but the one of exile. Although displacement does not exclude reappro-priation of spaces, of places, of landscapes, images linked to the homeland by provokingintimate connivance create a sort of emotional bond.

In this case, the situation of children refugees is particularly relevant. These chil-dren are living between two spaces. One only exists in tales and their imagination, al-though it is their homeland. The other one exists in everyday reality in the form of acountry which is not theirs. In the case of Afghan refugees, more than thirty percent ofthe children are under fourteen. They are born on Pakistani soil and know only whattheir parents have told them about Afghanistan: description of a mythified paradise onearth or stories of battles and warfare. Children feel obliged to have strong attachment totheir unknown homeland and feel guilty if they are indifferent or if they feel closer totheir host land. Symbols, expressions or stereotypes are used to express this paradox.“There are only stones in Pakistan and no grass”, a childish way to express the ambiguous po-sition of Afghan children.

These children visualise their situation as refugees through different means. Butmost of the elements of their identity do not come from their inner feelings but fromsymbols given by others. The notion of being a refugee is not something that exists


within them but instead comes from others. Most of them, although born in the campsfeel like travellers and are not happy in Pakistan because they know that their situation istemporary and that they will begin “their real life only when they are able to settle in a definiteplace”.

This “imaginary” is retrospective. There is a return to the fulfilled past where liveswere full of social meanings. There is an effort to construct a mental image of a pastwhich is meaningless and a present which has no future. However such relations to thepast are most probably the ones that make individuals more easily able to perceive theirlinks with the collectivity and with history.

This mythification of the past creates an image of pre-revolutionary Afghanistan asa lost paradise (“where rivers of honey flow smoothly”). Often, Afghans, and especially Afghanwomen, describe their life in Afghanistan as idealistic. Symbols or examples are oftentaken from domestic work to illustrate these words. This, for example, is the case with thesewing machine which has become a fetish, an obsession. Women focus on the possessionof a sewing machine to define their prospects for the future. In Afghanistan, sewing andembroidery were two collective occupations. Most of the work gave women opportunitiesto meet, to discuss social issues (weddings, domestic problems...). The possession of asewing machine (usually as part of the dowry) was also proof that the family waseconomically quite well-off. In the camps, women, (mostly observing purdah, the tra-ditional seclusion) have hardly any activities and no opportunity to meet each other.They also do not have the economic means to buy sewing material. NGOs have tried toestablish sewing programmes. In a Western way, they organised workshops where themachines were lying one behind another to avoid loss of time in discussion and to im-prove efficiency. They have given an economic individual function (the handicrafts madewere sold in Western joint ventures) to a collective social activity. Those workshops metwith no success. The symbolic aspect of the demand had not been taken into account, northe way to link the past to the future.

IV. Interference of References

Interferences of temporal or spatial criteria contribute to a sort of “bricolage” in the con-stitution of identities and the constitution of interpersonal relationships. This creates afeeling of constant migration throughout time, the present being cut off from the pastand nothing is perceived as a heritage any longer. Ancestors fade away.

Education can be a source of interference. For the Afghan children of the camps,schools are considered as a sanctuary. They are isolated from their traumatic environ-ment, can learn through short stories or lively illustrated manuals and hear about apeaceful life. These children do not have a lot of connections with their background.They are confronted with new or foreign values, sometimes opposed to the traditionalones they were used to in their family compound (families are represented in a Westernway, i. e. the nuclear family with a father, a mother, two children, a boy and a girl sittinground the dinner table).

Often, the traditional method of learning through repetition and memorisation ofclassical texts is criticised and abandoned. Consequently, children are cut off from their


past and their own cultural heritage, as the folk culture is mostly oral. New methods ofpositive self-teaching and interactive or expressive methods are introduced creating agap between the expectations of the school and the family duties. These schools of NGOscontrast with the ones organised by the mujahidîn (freedom fighters) parties. For some ofthe pupils who get their education in these party-schools, weapons are everywhere. Theylearn how to count with drawings of bullets or Kalashnikovs, and to read with examplesof sentences concerning the jihad. In some schools, students even received militarytraining instead of physical education. Some others in practical activities make wood-carved Kalashnikovs (that would be used later during the so-called “sports” classes).These “militarised” children know nothing but the story of the jihad and are willing tojoin the fighters, the Taliban or the army even if a peace process finds its way in the Af-ghan political imbroglio.

These children consider themselves as mujahidîn. They have been bred by theirparents in the atmosphere of the jihad, resistance and revenge. Some of them even carrythe first name of “General”. In some schools, greetings are military salutation. The fight-ers are exalted, the new heroes are the commanders of mujahidîn, especially if they areshahîd (martyrs). Kinship has become secondary in importance. The stories of ancestorsare sometimes forgotten or at least not taught. Most of the education of these childrenoccurs beyond the family circle. The school has become the main place of socialisation

Such interference can result in people refusing the present situation in the first pe-riod of exile. They held on to their past, dreaming of their future “seen as a continuationof the past” but ignoring the present. They consider themselves not only in a no-man’sland but in a “no-man’s time”.

In the first years of exile, numerous families had decided not to give birth to anychildren. To have a child in those conditions was considered as disrespectful of the re-ligious duties and as a way to convince themselves that their situation was temporary. Astime went by, the “son-producing ethos” prevailed again. This change of attitude towardsbirth was legitimised religiously by giving the first new-born baby in the camps the nameof Muhajir or Muhajira, in reference to those who left Makkah with the Prophet. Butbecause of the low level of hygiene, malnutrition, a much higher number of new-bornchildren died than previously in Afghanistan. Consequently, a lot of women consideredthemselves violated as they were deprived of their most precious role: motherhood. Thiscreated feelings of guilt, distress and failure. Now, the birth rate in the RTVs (RefugeeTent Villages, the official way to call the camps) is very high because both men andwomen express an intense psychological need to replace the fallen heroes of the jihad.Marriage conditions have also been modified. Weddings planned previously in Af-ghanistan before the war were delayed or cancelled. The loss or the missing of a youngfiancé, made some girls unmarriageable in respect for the memory of the late Shahîd andalso because it was really difficult to find another man to marry in the same male kinshipgroup due to the loss of mujahidîn. Remarriages were not planned as corpses of mujahidînwere lost and their deaths could not be testified. That created a large number of widowswho had nobody to take care of them anymore and to protect their honour.


V. Return to Traditions as a Coping Method

Reintroducing traditions is a coping method used to try to rebuild a link between a per-son’s place of origin and his host country and between the past and the present. Fourtypes of traditionalism can be classified.

1. Fundamental traditionalism which aims to safeguard values and models.2. Formal traditionalism which aims to maintain institutions, socio-cultural frameworks

and a formalised history. The practices of religious rituals or commemoration can beplaced in this category.

3. The traditionalism of resistance which is an instrument of denial. For example, thedowry has been officially reduced to a small amount by the Communist regime ofKabul and the veil has been forbidden. Chadors appeared longer and darker thanever and the size of the dowry amounted sometimes to several years income.

4. Pseudo-traditionalism which self-made traditional frameworks are created to imposesense in a muddled reality. These are used to control a crisis by imposing a known orreassuring aspect.

Education for girls in the Afghan refugee camps can be classified under pseudo-tradi-tionalism. Most of the young girls allowed to attend schools are usually from rather well-off families. Usually, the father is educated and the girl is not needed to carry outhousework. But in most other cases, it is common for the girl to be taken out of theschool after the third grade. This is because some families consider that at this age(around 9) the girls have to begin the observance of purdah (reclusion), although nothingin the tradition stipulates anything about it. The main reason for this withdrawal of girlsfrom school is based on their fathers’ concern about being considered good Muslims byforeigners. According to a council of Rish-e-Safid (made up of men with grey or whitebeards or the elders of the tribe) from Paktia, the Shariat allows education for women butonly to a certain extent. Normally, it is considered that madrassas (religious schools)should be enough for the girls, they should know the Koran, learn some fiqh (IslamicLaw) and the daily practices of Islam. At 14 or 15, they cannot go out anymore as theyhave reached the age of marriage.

This kind of argument creates a lot of frustration among the young girls, as oncethey have begun their education, they usually enjoy it and then have to leave it withouthaving been given a choice. However, they fear going back to Afghanistan where thereare no more school facilities.

VI. Consequences of the Identification Process

The consequences of being put in contact with other cultures and rival groups can haveambiguous consequences for the mobilisation of identities.

For example, in terms of the younger generation, children born in camps or thosearriving in Pakistan when they are young, consider Afghanistan as only a myth or adream. They are not conscious of the previous tribal antagonism. They are growing upas Afghans in camps where different groups, ethnicities or tribes live together. Other


children spend time with young Hazaras, Tajiks, Pashtuns or sometimes Pakistanis, but forthem these companionships are not based on nationalistic grounds. Above all, they arechildren. In their case, the ethnic differences have lost their meaning. Even if there iscurrently a struggle for leadership in their country, it does not have relevance for thesechildren.

Islam has also been a major binding factor for Afghans, which they as a nation, lookupon as a sanctuary. In the name of Islam, they have conducted their jihad. For them, itwas a kind of national Islam, even a nationalist one. Although, the notion of Ummah(Islamic community) was still very important like the solidarity shown by different Mus-lim countries, Islam has been used, in an opposite way, for the reconquest of a very spe-cific territory. It is also in the name of a so-called Islam (pseudo-traditionalism) that theTaliban have conducted the reconquest of Afghanistan from the former mujahidîn.

In the case of Afghanistan, there has been a continuously growing co-operationamongst refugees at grass-root level. Sometimes this is between different groups of theresistance, regardless of their ethnicities or their tribal background. Some inter-ethnicweddings have been taking place. Madrassas (religious schools) and other facilities havebeen built up by the refugees themselves to meet the needs of the whole population ofthe camp and not only for the group they fled with. Also they express their willingnessnot only to go back to their particular villages, but to Afghanistan. The majority of theAfghans, irrespective of their background, interrogate themselves on national issues andclaim a share in the national power.

As the area of Peshawar is predominantly Pathan (Pakistani name for the Pashtun),and as majority of refugees are also Pashtun, it would be possible to say that culturally,most of the Afghans have adopted some Pashtun cultural habits. For example, the purdahor the jirgah are now practised by both Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns. This has particularimpact for women. Surrounded by strangers in a foreign country, they practice purdah ina more radical way. Even women who never wore even a simple veil before the war, nowfeel the need to respect the seclusion and the diminution of their living space. The livingconditions in the camps have strengthened the configuration of the traditional Afghansociety. In contrast to what is generally said, family links are not less important than be-fore. Those links have inherited new meanings as other reference groups have beenjuxtaposed to the former predominant kinship authority. Different relationships of soli-darity between specific groups of tribes or ethnicities now exist at grass-root level. Thishas created for the first time, not only a feeling of belonging to a state (in terms of exter-nal or legal aspects), but also to a nation (in terms of internal or legitimate aspects). Theexile is more often than not justified by emotional reactions than by a rational grounds.“We loved our country, we were not able to live there anymore as good Muslims or good Afghans”.The willingness to go back to their motherland is also argued through an affective frameof mind. “We like our life in Pakistan, but, we will always be musaffar (traveller)”.

Since Afghans of different ethnicities have an awareness of belonging to the samenation, they all strive to have a share of the national power, but within the borders of thecountry. New cleavages have been added to the old ones. Most of these new groups arepolitically diverse. They come from different origins, they identify with different politicalparties and have occupied different position during the jihad, either refugee or fighter.Even among refugees, some trends exist to differentiate between those who left the


country at the very beginning of the war and those who left it a few years after the be-ginning of the war. The former reproach the latter for their collaboration with the Kabulregime, the latter reproach the former for having given the country up to the enemy.

The constitution of an Afghan nation can presently be described as a community ofdestiny. Essentially this means that the elaboration of national feelings is the result ofparticular unplanned events, at least a voluntary process. Destiny can be used here in thetwo meanings of the word, first as “providence”, as it is without any expectation or pur-poseful intent that these feelings have grown up. It can also be used as “fate” as thisprocess will have an influence on the future of the country and on the social, political andcultural movements that might be generated from this situation.

The Saur revolution began in a particular political context. From the reign ofHamid Rehman Khan to the first communist Coup d’Etat, the Kabul regime was limited tocities and roads. Local rulers were the effective leaders and the tribal fighters were usu-ally opposed to the central government. The resistance and the constitution of nation-state have developed under these conditions. The actual situation is the result of this.The political process determines state-building. The war has started a procedure of na-tion-building. But various sectors of life have been polarised as we have seen, adding newcleavages to the old ones. Also the political culture has been dismantled. An abstractscheme (institutions instead of people) has replaced very political practices based oncultural principles such as clientelism, the personalisation of power, closeness and theavailability of leaders whenever required. From a cultural point of view, war and exilehave strengthened family structures and have made some of the internal social linksmore solid. This is also valid for the kinship framework although all this sectorisation hasbeen mixed up together, creating a very complex society. This counter-thesis shows howfragile the new Afghan society is as so many different logics are ruling the social link.

Usually, a look at the geo-strategical situation of Afghanistan and the discourses ofthe political elites would cause the assumption that Afghanistan is about to collapse dueto ethnic rivalries or religious polarisation. Looking at the same situation through theeyes of the masses makes us understand that the situation is much too complex tospeculate on the future of the country. Thinking back to the theories of Gregory Batesonevoked previously, we can conclude that the three possible reactions are present in thesituation of Afghanistan. The “pashtunisation” of the way of life can be interpreted as anelimination of some particular cultural grounds. But mainly the third reaction of thejuxtaposition and diversities of polarisations can be applied to the Afghan context. Dif-ferent bases for an identification process now exist. The clashes witnessed between dif-ferent factions of the population might also have the purpose of integrating all groups ina society previously dominated by only the Pashtuns, as now everybody is claiming theirshare of the national power. A dynamic process can rarely take a peaceful path. The ac-tual developments in Afghanistan cause the anticipation of increasing violence. It seems,actually, that the civil society is not taking part in this game. Therefore, at this grass-rootlevel, a solution may be found.


E. Patterns of Belonging: The Social Organisation of Identitiesin Exile

Despite the claims of nationalism as an ideology concerning the ethnic origins of nations,the case of the Hutu refugees in Tanzania points to the opposition between identitiesbased on ethnicity and nationality.147 In fact, nationality is an overarching identity notnecessarily congruent or compatible with ethnicity.148 Neither ethnic nor national identityneed have an actual relationship with a territory, although all nationalist mythologies in-clude a claim to a privileged relationship of the group with a territory.149

The Tibetan experience is a case in point, demonstrating nation-building in exile.Prior to their mass exodus in 1958-1962 into India and other neighbouring states, theylived in scattered hamlets not even speaking the same language. From the beginning,Tibetans were encouraged to anticipate a long period of life in exile.150 Today, the Tibet-ans have established their identity as a nation in exile. They have a written constitution, alegitimate leadership, diplomatic representation in several countries, and citizenshiprights which are also extended to members of the Tibetan diaspora; membership entailspaying of taxes. They have been generally considered to be a “model refugee community”.151

Within India, where the majority of the population is located, Tibetans form an in-dependent enclave. Norbu sums up this mode of cultural adaptation as depending on twoparticular policies which were accepted by the host state and humanitarian organisations.Firstly, there was a distinct policy of non-assimilation, entailing provision for the re-crea-tion of Tibetan society in a foreign setting, and the delegation of authority over Tibetansettlements to the Dalai Lama.152 Secondly, from the standpoint of the refugee popula-tions, it was the establishment of the government in exile which played the most criticalrole. The Dalai Lama represented their interests both in negotiation with the host gov-ernment and with the humanitarian regime. Unlike the Hutu camps in Tanzania, Ti-betan camps and settlements were self-ruled by representatives of their own government,democratically elected from within the population.153

I. Adaptation without Assimilation: Nation-Building in Exile

The Tibetan case also provides a model of adaptation without assimilation. While main-taining a distinct cultural identity, they were able to integrate into the host economy. Themodel that was adopted in India and Nepal is of particular relevance to humanitarian aidpolicy. Responsibility for the co-ordination of aid was assumed by Dharamasal, the seat ofTibetan government. This authority was recognised by humanitarian agencies.

147 E. g. Smith, A. (1986; 1991; 1992); Armstrong (1982; 1992).148 Voutira (1991; 1993).149 E. g. Anderson (1983); Gellner (1983); Hobsbawn (1992).150 See De Voe (1981; 1987); Goldstein (1978); Nowak (1978; 1979; 1984); Norbu (1994).151 Haimendorf (1990) as quoted by Norbu (1994).152 Norbu (1994).153 Goldstein (1978), as quoted by Norbu, ibid.


As is common elsewhere, in both Nepal and India, Tibetan settlements were estab-lished in remote areas which had suffered neglect by the central government and wereunderdeveloped. Although the new settlement alienated land from peasants, problemswere circumvented by the fact that international assistance was used to build an infra-structure of schools, hospitals, tubewells, irrigation schemes, all of which were equallybeneficial to the host population. Although initially Tibetan survival depended on em-ployment provided by the Indian government, very shortly, in both India and Nepal,Tibetan industry expanded employment opportunities to their hosts. Today, for exam-ple, Tibetan carpet-making in Nepal employs more Nepalese than Tibetans and the ex-port of carpets accounts for the country’s major source of foreign exchange.154

The case of Tibetans has been singled out as an ideal example because it also pro-vides an opportunity to compare the role of humanitarian aid in influencing relation-ships between refugees and host populations (a topic which will be further explored inChapter 5). For example, in Croatia, where aid is earmarked for “refugees”, workers areforced to distinguish between refugees (Bosnians) and the internally displaced(Croatians). Displaced Croatians complain that they have become second-class citizens intheir own country. One cited his experience of waiting in a queue in which Bosnianswere all asked to step to the front of the line because the aid was only for Bosnians.

II. Adaptation and the Politicisation of Ethnicity

For anthropologists, the issue of identity is intricately tied to the criteria of group mem-bership. In this sense, to be someone is to be a member of the clan, the tribe, the ethnicgroup or nationality. For instance, membership in an affinal network kinship system ismeant to supply the first manifestations of the concept of identification and attachmentswhich are later sustained by references that develop from social and political discoursesof allegiance.155

Each one of these key concepts as the locus of identity – clan, tribe, ethnicity, na-tionalism – has had different theoretical legitimations. For example, among Soviet eth-nologists, each one of these terms represented a different stage in the evolution of soci-ety.156

Among Western anthropologists, the debate has been polarised between“primordialism” and “modernism”, each defending a different answer to whether eth-nicity is a “given” or a fluid social construction.157 The primordialist view considers iden-tity as an immutable structure that uniquely characterises individuals and groups overtime.158 Ethnic membership, according to this view, carries the same uniqueness andgenuiness for group membership as an individual’s fingerprint or genetic configurationcarries for a particular person.159

154 Harrell-Bond (1992).155 Epstein (1978); Latour (1982).156 Bromlei (1973; 1989); Dragadze (1980); Skalnik (1986; 1988); Tishkov (1992).157 E. g. Tonkin et al. (1989).158 Geertz (1973); cf. Eriksen (1992).159 Gordon (1978); Van der Berge (1988).


Modernism defines particular identities in terms of contexts, as features of the so-cial order,160 or as cultural constructions invented or developed in particular situations,most notably those which challenge the survival of the group.161 The most influentialformulation of this position is that of Fredrik Barth,162 who defines group distinctiveness asan ongoing process of social and political change within regional systems, thereby un-dermining the “closed world” view of cultural identity. Membership is a relational ratherthan an absolute term that presupposes an opposition between “we” and “them”.

“To the extent that actors use ethnic identities to categorize themselves and others for the purposesof interaction, they form ethnic groups in this organizational sense [...]. The critical point of in-vestigation from this point of view becomes the ethnic boundary of the group, not the culturalstuff that it encloses”.163

The relevance of Barth’s model in the explanation of social group interaction in exile isevident when we reflect on the Hutu case discussed previously. The process of their in-vention of tradition164 allows for an inter-group boundary to be drawn between them-selves and the host population, while, on the other hand, it establishes an intra-groupboundary that segments and distinguishes between those who are in the camp and thoseoutside in terms of their interests. It also reveals the processes of ethnic formation as anadaptive strategy and demystifies the assumptions evident in everyday social and politicaldiscourse which construe ethnic and national allegiances as clearly definable and histori-cally fixed units.165 Indeed, neither ethnic groups nor national groups are essential orfixed. Both types of identity must be understood as a process.166 As Anderson167 has shown,nations are imagined communities which are remembered and forgotten.168 The mainte-nance of this form of social memory is inculcated through a centralised educational sys-tem and reinforced through public rituals and symbols celebrating the nation.169

The construction of ethnic identity in exile provides a basis for group membership,loyalty and mutual support. For example, ethnicity, in organisational terms, is mani-fested in the establishment of voluntary associations. Outside (or in the absence of) thefamily, these ethnic or cultural associations are the primary units of organisation ofcommunal life in exile. They become critical in cultivating the group’s sense of distinct-iveness and reinforcing its identity vis-à-vis the host society: “Participation in suchassociations can create increased self-esteem, political involvement, and less alienation”.170

Voluntary associations in exile serve three important functions for the newcomers.They provide the network of assistance, contacts and information about the host society.

160 Gellner (1983).161 Cohen (1971).162 Fredrik Barth (1969).163 Barth (1969), p. 14-15.164 Hobsbawn and Ranger (1978).165 Bringa (1993).166 Barth (1969); Schein (1975); Eriksen (1993).167 Anderson (1983).168 Gellner (1983); Hobsbawn (1992); Connerton (1989).169 E. g. Kitromilides (1989); Connerton (1989); Smith (1991).170 Sorenson (1990), p. 313; cf. Fallers (1967).


The degree of their effectiveness in facilitating the adaptation of the newcomer is directlyrelated to the policy of the host government towards minorities, multiculturalism and therole of civil society. For example, in the Sudan, the government formally recognised thehumanitarian organisations established by the Eritreans and Tigrayans. The secondfunction such associations play is to provide an institutional base for preserving the cul-ture of origin, e. g. supporting schools and places for religious practice. These institu-tions may also concentrate their efforts on education for adaptation by offering classes inthe language of the host. Finally, these ethnic associations may become the platform forpolitical and economic mobilisation in relation to the host society by representing the in-terests of the group (lobbying).

Perhaps the more significant of their political activities are those in relation to thecountry of origin which are aimed to make repatriation possible. Through campaigningand lobbying, they may successfully mobilise international support for their cause, e. g.the African National Congress, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Ethnic associa-tions may find divisions among the membership concerning what is the ultimate good forthe community as a whole. For example, among the various ethnic minorities in theformer Soviet Union, there is a rift between those who want to reclaim their nationalidentity and “return” to their European “homeland”, e. g. ethnic Germans, ethnicGreeks, ethnic Poles and ethnic Hungarians, and others, who formulate the politicalagenda as “self-determination”, that is, secession and independent governments withinthe former Soviet Union. Others are only interested in mobilising their ethnic links withtheir Western “homeland” for economic advantage, most commonly demonstratedthrough burgeoning “joint ventures”.

Ethnic associations may also be the basis for organising militarily to fight for theirgroup’s right to return, e. g. the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF), Polisario, thePalestinian Liberation Organization, the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front.171 Whensuch associations become explicitly political, with the aim of repatriation, these ethniccommunities usually divide. These divisions have a number of consequences for life inexile. Since achieving positions of leadership in the imagined new government, groupsoften split into opposing military factions, e. g. Eritreans had the choice of supportingthe EPLF, the “ELF”, the “ELFPLF”, and so on.

Such factionalism may seriously affect the security of the civilian population amongwhom such military organisations recruit. For example, in the Sudan, although manyEritreans supported the cause of the EPLF, even paying 10% of their income to supportthe war against Ethiopia, not all were willing to be conscripted to fight. As a consequence,to escape such political pressure or even the threat of forcible recruitment, many appliedfor resettlement to the West. Success in the resettlement queue usually required an indi-vidual to possess high educational qualifications. This means of avoiding forcible con-scription (draft dodging) resulted in the loss of some of the most needed skills among therefugee community in the Sudan.

Another example of the political and humanitarian functions of ethnic associationsformed among the historical diasporas is that they may also become the main means ofmobilising resources, both economic and human, to assist the cause when there is trouble

171 Cf. Turton (1994).


in the homeland, or to articulate their own agendas for the future of the homeland. Thistype of “diaspora nationalism” has been historically highly significant in the crafting ofnew states after World Wars I and II.172 The relevance of this phenomenon of “long-dis-tance” diaspora nationalism to understanding such crises as Ireland and the FormerYugoslavia is self-evident.173 For example, through their lobbying activities and directparticipation in both combat and mobilising humanitarian aid, these groups have playeda major role and must take responsibility for how the conflict has developed.174 In his ex-planation of the Irish and Yugoslavian crises, Anderson notes:

“What these instances show is not all that nationalism is obsolete. Rather, the vast migrationsproduced over the past 150 years by the market, as well as war and political oppression, haveprofoundly disrupted a once seemingly ‘natural’ coincidence of national sentiment with lifelongresidence in fatherland or motherland. In this process ‘ethnicities’ have been engendered whichfollow nationalisms in historical order, but which are today also linked to such nationalisms incomplex and often explosive ways. This is why some of the most strongly ‘Irish nationalist’ sup-porters of the IRA live out their lives as ‘ethnic Irish’ in the United States. The same goes formany Ukrainians settled in Toronto, Tamils in Melbourne, Jamaicans in London, Croats inSydney, Jews in New York, Vietnamese in Los Angeles, and Turks in Berlin. [...] [this] ‘long-distance nationalist’ [...] is technically a citizen of the state in which he comfortably lives, but towhich he may feel little attachment, he finds it tempting to play identity politics by participating(via propaganda, money, weapons, any way but voting) in the conflicts of his imagined Heimat– now only fax-time away. But this citizenshipless participation is inevitably non-responsible –our hero will not have to answer for, or pay the price of, the long-distance politics he undertakes.He is also easy prey for shrewd political manipulators in his Heimat”.175

172 Gellner (1983).173 Anderson (1992).174 Ibid.175 Ibid.


CHAPTER 4CHAPTER 4 THE LOGIC OF INTERVENTIONSTHE LOGIC OF INTERVENTIONS

The previous chapters introduced an anthropological framework for understandinghumanitarian interventions in disasters. We have discussed the cultural origins as a nor-mative principle that legitimises humanitarian aid in practice. We have considered thedifferent types of disruption of the social order, and suggested some ways groups andindividuals respond, cope and adapt to crises and violent change. In Chapter 3, we ad-dressed some of the psychological costs of violence and trauma, including the loss ofculture at the individual and group level. In the Psycholgy Volume, readers are alertedto the possible dangers of applying models of therapy devised in Western societies toother cultures, especially here reference to “mental health” involves the stigma of“madness”.176

What constitutes a humanitarian intervention? The common understanding is thatit refers to a set of actions aimed at saving innocent lives and alleviating human sufferingexacerbated by famines, floods, earthquakes and displacements. When addressing the is-sue of interventions in this chapter, we will again focus on crises which are of such mag-nitude, in terms of numbers of people affected, or so critical for international peace andsecurity that, as a consequence, the humanitarian regime is mobilised. However, eventhese criteria do not explain how it happens that international humanitarian efforts aremobilised for one crisis and not for another.

A. The Social Context of Interventions

I. Criteria which Mobilise International Humanitarian Interventions

The primary sources of information about disasters are disseminated through the massmedia. News coverage is thus essential in the determination of which disaster will com-mand such international attention. The so-called “media regime” largely determinesboth the character (images) and the agendas of intervention.177 Although networks ofjournalists and television crews are stationed around the world, the more remote placeswhere a number of crises take place are less regularly covered. Consequently, efforts to

176 Qouta et al. (1993).177 Benthall (1993).


assist are doubly complicated by the fact that information itself is often too little, too late,or not available at all.

Factors which determine the availability of information as a mobilising resource areprimarily of a geo-political nature. This is evident when one looks at the large numbersof people who have been displaced as a result of violent change but whose uprootmentwas described as being in the interests of development. Although they are victims of mas-sive human rights abuses, there is no special international organisation established to ad-dress their problems, and they do not figure in the literature on disasters. Maybe part ofthe reason such phenomena do not command international humanitarian attention isbecause they are described as “involuntary resettlement” rather than forced uprootment.178

Governments and other agencies on the ground always have information, but it isoften not disclosed. For example, we now have access to information about the 1950s’nuclear waste accident in the Urals that resulted in the loss of many lives and the forcedresettlement of many communities. National pride as well as reluctance to compromisesovereignty were no doubt both factors accounting for the government’s long delay indeclaring a famine in the Sudan in 1985.179 Information may also be judged to be unreli-able. For example, although the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission released a reporton Ethiopia’s famine to all major humanitarian organisations in 1982, it was not untiltelevision cameras projected the scenes of starvation and death that an international re-sponse was triggered in 1985. Again, the media was responsible for the response to theSomalia crisis, which even attracted military intervention, but this came long after thefamine was over. At the same time, civil war and famine, on a much larger scale, has beenoccurring in southern Sudan. Everyone knows about it, but there is no equivalent re-sponse.

In his analysis of the role of the media in emergencies, Benthall identifies two mainvariables which determine the “journalistic calculus” that governs public concern for vic-tims of disasters: quantity of victims and geographical, ethnic, and economic proximity. Forexample, he notes, a disaster in the North attracts more news coverage per head thanone in the South.180 Yet, in fact, the decisive factor among competing stories seems to beneither the quantity nor their proximity, rather it seems to be the ability of a journalist tosensationalise the crisis. In this respect, crises are competing with each other for headlinestatus. Thus we might say that mass rapes were good news for Bosnia when competingwith starvation in Somalia.181 One of the consequences of such a tabloid approach to dis-asters, is to generate “fashions” in aid and to determine the allocation of funds concern-ing particular interventions: victims of rape represent one such new interest. The point isnot that there is no need for such programmes, the problem is that as vogues, they at-tract funds away from other urgent needs. In Croatia, a European NGO offered Sun-cokret, a local agency, their special programme for rape victims. Although the pro-gramme itself would not fulfil any need on the ground, it did include some money to

178 Cernea/Guggenheim (1993).179 Benthall (1993).180 Benthall (1993), p. 8.181 Ibid.; Annex 3.


purchase knitting wool. What the women really needed were the means to enable themto earn money for their households.182

II. Varieties of Interventions

The basic distinction in international interventions is between those aimed at respondingto crises that involve civilians and those that are directed against the actions of states. Theformer are humanitarian and the latter, military. This distinction, however, cannot bemaintained. We have already noted that most disasters involve displacement, but it is thenature of the disaster that has a bearing on the distance and duration of this displace-ment. Displacement is thus a factor determining the type of intervention: to the extentthat a disaster is localised and the displacement is minimal, the humanitarian responserequires immediate relief to keep people alive and depending, on the kind of disaster(e. g. flood, earthquake, hurricane, volcanic eruption), the repair and reconstruction ofinfrastructure in order to permit people to resume their normal lives as quickly as possi-ble. For example, when a hurricane hit Florida, people were moved away from the site oftheir homes to facilitate the distribution of food, medicine, water, fuel and so on. Itwould have been less expensive and more acceptable to the victims to have been assistedin situ. All normal services such as postal delivery could have been maintained.183

The extent to which disasters spill over international boundaries, for example, nu-clear accidents and some epidemics, determines whether they transcend the locality andtherefore extend the number of interested parties. In these situations, given the sharedconcern to deal with the causes and consequences of the disaster, inter-governmental co-operation is more likely to be the response. On the other hand, when the problem thatspills over the border is people, then the possibility for inter-state co-operation and miti-gation is minimised. In these situations, humanitarian interventions have to be imple-mented in the context of the host country to work on behalf of an alien people in asituation where attitudes towards the affected population may be at best ambivalent.

III. Humanitarian Interventions in Complex Emergencies

All humanitarian crises which result in the mobilisation of international organisationsand assistance are, by definition, complex. However, the contexts in which such opera-tions are carried out may increase the degree of complexity in responding effectively.Contemporary situations involving internal displacement and military conflict introducefurther complexities and challenges for humanitarian interventions. These include issuesof sovereignty, security for personnel, and the challenge of defining the “deserving”beneficiary.

“In the Sudan and Ethiopia, in Angola, Afghanistan and elsewhere [Rwanda] – both throughthe nature of the conflicts and sometimes because of the conscious policies of the combatants – the

182 Nina Pecnik, Personal Communication, January 1994.183 Eric LaMont-Gregory, personal communication.


lives of civilians have been sacrificed for military and political objectives [...] 90% of the casu-alties in the Third World wars have been civilians”.184

As we have seen, even the nature of war has changed, whereby the distinction betweenmilitary and civilian becomes obsolete.

The introduction of concepts such as “safe havens” and “preventative protection”,invented by those governments which aim to prevent asylum seekers entering their bor-ders, has introduced a new set of complexities for humanitarian interventions, and moraldilemmas for humanitarian workers.185 For example, to assist people to escape war inBosnia and seek safety elsewhere has been interpreted by some major agencies as“collaborating with the enemy” in the process of “ethnic cleansing”. The lack of consen-sus on what constitutes humanitarian practice in such circumstances is illustrated by thefact that for others, saving lives is the priority and they continue to organise convoys torescue Bosnians. It is this lack of agreement on what constitutes a fair, non-discrimina-tory humanitarian response (discussed in Chapter 1) that is encapsulated in the new term“complex emergencies”. In other words, complexity does not refer to the intensity of thedisaster per se, but the inability to produce a consensual, coherent internationalhumanitarian response.186

In such situations of so-called “complex emergencies”, the use of UN-sponsoredmilitary interventions to carry out humanitarian work has become the norm (e. g. Kurd-istan, Somalia, Bosnia). This new practice of intervening, which requires the collabora-tion of military forces and humanitarian workers, has seriously undermined the familiardistinction between military and humanitarian interventions. This phenomenon is muchmore controversial than earlier practices of recruiting military personnel simply to assisttemporarily in delivering relief, or to provide temporary security to people, or to protectproperty on a short-term basis in a disaster.

IV. Models of Interventions: Relief or Reconstruction

The approach to assistance, styles of intervention and the degree of co-operation with thehost government will differ fundamentally according to the attitude of agencies towardsthe affected populations and expectations concerning their future. The conventionalapproach to interventions is relief. The relief model addresses crises as extra-ordinarydeviations from the normal order, since it is based on the traditional understanding ofdisasters, as discussed in Chapter 2. Embedded in the concept of relief is the notion thatboth the crisis and the cure are temporary departures from normal life. This view, thattakes disasters as events, as temporary crises, cannot incorporate the socio-culturaldimension of disaster as a process of disruption of the social order. As such, it activelyprevents the reconstruction of social life.

Given that the main interveners are the foreign agencies, who have their own in-terests in fund-raising at stake, a series of other misunderstandings develop. One of these

184 Lake et al. (1990), p. 4.185 Jaeger (1993).186 Cf. DHA (1992), pp. 4-6.


is the notion of “who helps the most”. It is a common misconception that humanitarianaid is only supported from international sources. This leads to a “totally wrong impression ofthe country, its people, and their powers of resilience”, not to mention their resources, or thefact “that in most disasters 95% of the aid required is raised locally”.187 In his critical evaluationof the assistance programmes for victims of the Nicaraguan and Guatemalan earthquakes(1972 and 1976), Norton reports that after reflection, and two years after the earthquake,a group of agencies actually wrote to the President of Guatemala, admitting to five basicmistakes that had been made:

“Too much aid given away; too many of the houses constructed were merely an emergency type;some organizations used large numbers of foreign volunteers; too much was done under pressureand without proper consultation, so that the victims became mere spectators of the work carriedout, rather than participants; a lot of reconstruction work was undertaken without first consult-ing the Government’s Reconstruction Committee [...]”.188

This assessment of mistakes made in the 1970s summarises what is wrong with the reliefapproach in humanitarian interventions. Nevertheless, this model continues to guidehumanitarian practice today. From the standpoint of the affected population, what iswrong with the relief model?

1. By presuming individual victims’ needs to be uniform, the relief model fails the mostneedy, and creates greater social differentiation. (It also wastes resources and need-lessly drives up costs.)

2. It ignores the resources, individual skills and institutional strengths of the host soci-ety, thus weakening them.

3. By failing to recognise the resources which people already have, it fails to mobilisethem for the benefit of both individual interests and the local economy.

4. By ignoring the needs of, and its own impact on, the surrounding population, therelief model is essentially socially divisive.

5. Relief programmes inhibit the institutionalising of efficient systems of accountabilityand thus create opportunities for corruption, both individually and institutionally.

Most contemporary research argues for a developmental approach to humanitarian in-terventions.189 We know from anthropology that such concepts as development and un-derdevelopment are value-laden and ill-defined.190 We assume that development is aboutpeople, and thus argue for an approach to interventions in humanitarian crises whichutilises the resources of the people, through their culture, in order that they may be em-powered not only to cope with the immediate exigencies of social disruption, but also totransform themselves for successful adaptation to their future.191

187 Norton (1980); Annexes 5; 6.188 Norton (1980).189 Anderson/Woodrow (1989).190 Frank (1973); Verhelst (1990).191 Winchester (1992); Turton (1993).


V. Interventions at “Home” and “Abroad”

The archetypical approach to any population requiring humanitarian aid is to set up en-claves of assistance, feeding camps or settlements. An anthropological understanding ofthe functions of these artificial enclaves is vital to understanding how to intervene in anydisaster by focusing on cultures and the transformations which occur within them.

In the South, these enclaves are set up to serve what are perceived as the immedi-ate survival needs of the population. In the case of reception centres in the Europeancontext, these enclaves are meant to provide a temporary sanctuary for the newcomers.They also function as the place for “asylum screening” the deserving, and preparingthose accepted for their life in the new country. Where there is no agreement on the fu-ture for the affected populations (Are they to be “integrated” into the host society? orWill they go home very soon when the war is over?), these enclaves become more or lessthe permanent homes for the people who have been assigned to them. Humanitarian re-sponses on behalf of refugees in Europe become the responsibility of the host state andthose voluntary agencies and ethnic associations which organise to assist them.

If policy has determined that these people will not remain permanently in the hostsociety, but return “as soon as possible”, the “logic” of an intervention would be to focuson providing psycho-social support and to encourage them to maintain a “bridge ofmemory” with the homeland.192 Where policy aims at “integration”, the local interventionis to provide services which will prepare them for their lives in the new country. Theseinterventions include language training, cultural orientation, retraining of professionalsto enable them to use their skills in the new work environment, and psycho-social sup-port.193 In the European context, provisions for refugees include access to the socialservices available to citizens, including welfare programmes for the unemployed. As such,the degree to which specialised agencies for refugees are needed to assist refugees isgreatly reduced. “Integration” is another value-laden term. As a process it refers todifferent aspects of interaction within the host society: economy, society and culture.Ideally, as regards culture, integration refers to the processes by which both host andnewcomers adapt to each other. Integration may be limited to the economy, while so-cially and culturally marginalising distinct ethnic groups. The variations of relationshipsbetween hosts and minorities and their psychological outcomes are discussed by JohnBerry in Annex 13. What is of concern here is that, whether explicit or not, the policies ofmost resettlement governments are aimed towards “assimilating” the newcomers, whichentails a loss of culture, in favour of the norms of the dominant culture, and the denial ofone’s past. This “disempowering process” is best summed up in the following case, whichidealises the process of loss of cultural markers as experienced by a Ugandan Asian inNorway.

“Tall, slim and attractive, the young man was the object of friendly attention from his school-mates [...]. The public also found him interesting, and he was often interviewed and photo-graphed by journalists. Then came the day when he announced that it was time for him toabandon his turban and to cut off the lock of hair which his religion demanded. He realized

192 Hirschon (1989), pp. 15-30.193 Gold (1987; 1992); Ledgerwood (1990).


that he must follow the narrow and difficult path of integration, at the end of which he would nolonger be an exotic creature to be admired and pitied, but a man like the others”.194

VI. The Social Context of Giving

As noted, most disasters require the provision of relief and the usual structure for itsdistribution is a camp.195 The camp is a unique social enclave in which the affectedpopulations interact and are forced to come to terms with the humanitarian aid re-gime196.

The usual picture of the camp organisation identifies all forms of inter-group be-haviour in terms of a simple polarity between “us” and “them”; the former identifiedwith the aid regime, the “helpers”, and the latter with the “needy”. In fact, the situationinvolves a tripartite relationship, since the government and its population are also in-volved. Furthermore, it involves the presence of kin or other compatriots who have notopted for camp life.197

It will be useful to construct the elementary structure of a camp (an “ideal” type) inorder to map the variety of actors, their activities and the cultural complexities that existon all levels. In an ideal type camp situation, we can identify the following hierarchy ofauthority and division of labour as regards the relevant responsibilities for law and orderand the administration of aid. Starting from the top down, it is administered by the offi-cials assigned by the host government, whose power is enforced by the presence ofarmed police or para-military personnel. Although rarely benefiting from access to thehost government’s legal system, most camps have a place for the extrajudicial detentionof those who have committed some act deemed by the camp authorities to be an offence.

The management and distribution of material assistance is carried out by interna-tional humanitarian agencies. Usually different agencies are assigned responsibilities fordifferent sectors, e. g. food, health, education, agriculture, “vulnerable groups” and soon. All are identifiable through distinct insignia. Adding to the cultural complexity, an-other set of parameters includes the national origins of the aid workers, differences inmotivations for having volunteered, and differences in resources to give away.

Anthropologists, since Mauss’ work on the gift, have understood that the exchangeof goods is not merely mechanical, but a moral transaction which defines status andpower relations between the giver and the recipient; receiving places the recipient in aposition of obligation until the gift has been reciprocated. Indeed, as Mauss put it, the gift“not yet repaid debases the man who accepted it”.198 This type of relationship, as Mauss de-scribed, created by the very meaning of humanitarian intervention, places the victims at astructural disadvantage with respect to their helpers. The challenge is how to redress thisbalance. 194 Zarjevski (1988), emphasis added.195 Tollet et al. (1988).196 Although the camps were set up with the expectation that tenure would be temporary, as Siddiq (1994)

documents, the Palestinian people perceive their cultural predicament as being a “refugee nation incamps”.

197 See Chapter 3.198 Mauss (1970).


“[...] the reason why it is too often difficult to assist [...] is that they are not recognised as havingany responsibility for their affairs at the beginning – and this affects the whole subsequent pro-gramme and will last as long as the refugees remain where they are. [They] must not be settled,they must settle themselves”.199

VII. Interventions: “Our” Priorities and “Theirs”

Unlike reception centres in the European context, which become venues for integrationor expulsion, and as noted above, the typical “enclaves” established for the implementa-tion of humanitarian assistance for the world’s dispossessed are feeding camps or settle-ments (Annex 9). Given the scale of destitution, the priority for those who are assistingthem is to concentrate on the sometimes overwhelming task of saving lives by distributingfood, providing medical care, shelter, clothing, fuel, sanitation facilities and clean water.These are activities which take place in an artificially constructed environment; thechallenge is how to accommodate the cultural needs of a population in ways that wouldfacilitate the reconstruction of their communities.

The significance of addressing such social priorities is evident from a statement byone person who said that one of the basic needs of a refugee is for a commodity calledhope.

“Yes, we are hungry, but we find something. What bothers us most is the lack of education. Andeducation is so important. It makes us feel part of the human race. Only giving food and medi-cal services makes us feel just beggars and dehumanized, totally lost. You find young ones com-mitting suicide. Giving education from the start gives a sense of hope. I think hope is one of thegreatest gifts”.200

VIII. Identifying the Needs and Resources

Focusing on the peoples’ daily practices, observing what they do, listening to what they sayis the key to unravelling their priorities and cultural resources. When observing victimsof disasters, it is common to see that when the make-shift shelters have been constructed,one of the first activities people engage in is the building of schools and places of relig-ious worship. Unfortunately, as far the “relief kit” is concerned, education, even for pri-mary children, is the very last on the list and, because of their non-sectarian mandates,few agencies support the establishment of religious centres. Yet these institutions arecritical in the reconstruction of community life and giving a sense of continuity betweenthe past and future.

One of the most critical areas where this continuity can be observed is in the prac-tice of rituals; it is through the re-enactment of rituals, that society celebrates itself.201

Since death is so all-encompassing in a disaster situation, it is perhaps useful to begin by“dealing with dying”. Although death is normal, it acquires extra-ordinary significance.This is due to the fact that it takes place away from home, and that because of its height-

199 Harrell-Bond (1986), p. 300.200 Adapted from Harrell-Bond/Karadawi (1984).201 Durkheim (1912).


ened frequency in an emergency, it leads to fears of cultural or real genocide. The fear ofdeath may be so pervasive that it affects peoples’ behaviour, for example, women areunlikely to be receptive to the idea of limiting their fertility. It is therefore important forassistance programmes to make it easier for people to deal with death.202

The normal way that death is discussed in handbooks is to concentrate on the dis-posal of bodies and the importance of retrieving ration cards from the families of thedead.203 Not surprisingly, this leads to a situation in which people tend to conceal deathrather than to acknowledge their need for assistance to fulfil their obligations to the deadaccording to their cultural norms. Loizos also reminds us of what gets lost at themacrolevel as a result of the preoccupation with counting.

“[...] in the rush to quantify, the quality of the refugee experience was likely to be obscured andthus there was a need to achieve understanding and insight on more personal, human and directterms. Clearly, there are conceptual problems implied in making this crude description of facts-and-figures (abstract, impersonal, superficial, alienated, ‘political’), versus intuition (empathy,sympathy, the individual’s experience, the subjective experience of loss, the concrete and actual)and the distinction raises more problems than it solves”.204

Anthropology turns our attention to rituals as features of the social order and their cohe-sive and therapeutic role in times of crisis. The practice of funeral rituals is a vehicle forreaffirming the continuity of the family and its membership in the community. Yet, fu-nerals impose enormous strains on families. They entail activities and expenses whichcannot be easily accommodated within an assistance programme, which is based upon percapita rations and does not allow freedom of movement. A first duty when someone diesis to officially inform the relatives, especially the in-laws. This requires travel, which isoften expensive if not forbidden. So compelling is this obligation that people will risktheir lives to make the journey. Death also entails receiving relatives, food and drinks,acquiring the right materials to properly bury the dead, and an appropriate burialground, all of which entail financial burdens. The inability to fulfil these and other cul-tural obligations arising from a death risks the overall security of the kin group, not onlyin secular terms, but also with respect to the sacred, e. g. supernatural punishments.Similar attention should be given to facilitating the observance of the rituals of birth, ini-tiation and marriage. As Maurice Bloch has shown, by eliminating the ritual, individualsand groups become disempowered. His analysis focuses on the role of ritual in enablingor disabling. For example, stopping one’s enemies from performing funerary rituals, onediminishes their power, symbolically and politically.205 Focusing on contemporary socie-ties, Kertzer finds the use of symbol and ritual practices have the same empowering role inthe political organization of ethnic groups.206

202 Harrell-Bond/Wilson (1990).203 E. g. Mitchel/Slim, (1990).204 Loizos (1977), p. 232.205 Bloch (1987), p. 229.206 Kertzer (1988).


IX. Food Rations and Markets

In anthropological terms, it is well known that one of the most difficult changes in cul-tural practices is to accommodate differences in eating practices. Understanding practicesconcerning food, its symbolism, its acquisition, preparation, and allocation, and itsmeaning as an identity marker through memory and taste, is a key to decoding differentdimensions of a culture such as the division of labour, production, exchange, and struc-tures of responsibility and authority.207

Looking at food rations from this point of view helps to explain behaviour whichdoes not conform with the rules concerning per capita distribution and consumption. Ra-tions, which are part of the aid package, normally comprising surplus products fromwestern donors, are usually culturally inappropriate, inadequate nutritionally, often un-palatable, repetitive or unfamiliar.208 There are many cases where the women do nothave tools to open the containers in which it is packaged, or know how to prepare what isin the “food basket”. For example, in Kenya, Somalis were given ground maize, but wereunable to use it for their traditional bread. Because of a depressed market for thiscommodity, it was simply wasted. There may also be contingent conditions which makethese donations unusable (wasted) or even dangerous if consumed. In Sarajevo, pastawas supplied to people who had neither water to cook it in, nor fuel to heat water. Simi-larly, in a war situation in the Sudan, tons of EC powdered milk arrived. If they had con-sumed it, many people would have died because only polluted water was available.

Where staples are not available for people to cook for themselves, a different kindof waste takes place. In most camps in former Yugoslavia, prepared food is provided.Where it is has to be transported, it is almost impossible to ensure its palatability on arri-val. You may ask how households could be able to cook their own meals in a situationwhere stoves, pots and pans are scarce. The heart of the matter here is not this para-phernalia, but the lack of appreciation of how fundamental food preparation and the so-cial ritual of commensality are to the restoration of communal life.

Most research on humanitarian aid209 points to a paradox whereby most peopledependent on food aid survive despite it. The issue is, how do they survive? They hunt,gather, and transform the food rations into commodities which are bartered or ex-changed in the local markets, or transformed into other products (soap, alcohol) whichcan then be sold. They also sell their labour and women frequently sell their bodies. Agreat deal has been written bemoaning how aid creates dependency, but Kibreab’s reviewof research gives quite a different picture and suggests that people’s own energies are al-ready being invested in their survival:

“[...] all available studies on refugees in camps [...] show they leave no stone unturned to earnan income either to supplement their diet, or to make up for the things not included in the aidpackage or to make material progress”.210

207 E. g. Levi-Strauss (1969; 1969a); Goody (1982).208 Keen (1992).209 E. g. Keen (1992) and Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 5, No.3/4, Special Issue.210 Kibreab (1990), p. 18.


Another misunderstanding which creates serious conflicts results from the fact that foodaid usually arrives in marked containers, with the helpers taking literally the label, “notfor sale”. This mark does not imply a legal contract with the recipient that the food mustbe consumed. It is stamped there to ensure that the food is not stolen by someone elsebefore it reaches the intended beneficiary. Instead of encouraging the use of food rationsin the most economically advantageous way, the victims of a disaster may find themselvestreated as criminals.

X. Culture and Social Change

While arguing for assisting people in observing and celebrating their culture, it should berecognised that there are situations which require radical adaptation. For example,although all societies have norms concerning the disposal of human waste, these methodsmay not be appropriate in the crowded conditions of a camp, not only because they mayoffend “our” sense of propriety, but because of the need to avoid epidemics. Thechallenge is to find ways of convincing large groups of people to modify their behaviourwith respect to sanitation. In Malawi, one agency paid the voluntary health surveillanceofficers to undertake training on how to sensitively communicate the value of latrines tohouseholders, expecting them, in turn, to persuade the people to dig the holes, erect thestructure and to use them. Researchers observing this “educational” process “in action”,found the surveillance officers ordering people to dig their latrines (without providing anytools) “within the week” or face the threat of their rations being cut off!

Another approach taken by an anthropologist may be instructive. Dwight Conquer-good211 was employed to “clean up” a camp of some 30 thousand people who were unac-customed to using toilets. Capitalising on the existing cultural institution of Hmongtheatre, his troupe invented “Mother Clean”. Not only were the actors able to get themessage communicated throughout the entire camp in time to avert a sudden crisis ofrabies, they also used theatre to dramatically improve the sanitary conditions of the campas a whole.212 What is of particular relevance to Conquergood’s experience of mobilisingtraditional institutions to clean up the camp is that the behavioural change accomplishedwas not a momentary response to a particular problem. Several years later, and long af-ter his name had been forgotten, “Mother Clean” was still there.213

A more perplexing issue which often becomes salient in situations of disaster andextreme deprivation involves the resort to traditional institutions such as sorcery, witch-craft, and traditional healing. There are cases where the practice of such culturally-ac-cepted coping mechanisms can have negative implications for globally accepted stan-dards of human rights.

Concerning healers, there is controversy with respect to their efficacy as alternativehealth resources and the role they should play in humanitarian interventions. Positionsvary according to the degree of collaboration which is allowed between traditional heal-ers and medical personnel. 211 Conquergood (1988).212 Conquergood (1988).213 Ibid.


Hiegel214 argues that the relationship between these healers and science should becomplementary. In his practice in Thailand he found the use of herbal massage particu-larly useful in relieving labour pains. Concerning other practices such as burning, whichleft scars and risked infection, Hiegel argues that it would have been more dangerous notto have allowed this practice in the hospital since patients would have consulted thesehealers anyway in secret. The main argument for this position is the psychological sup-port and psychotherapeutic relationship which becomes established between the threeparties in this transaction.215 That is, by using traditional healers as brokers, the popula-tion was prepared to accept hospital treatment. The point that needs to be stressed hereis that traditional healers are able to play such an influential role, not because of any su-pernatural capacities, but because of their secular authority as community leaders,money lenders, counsellors and legal advisors.216 It is perhaps not by chance that bothEisenbruch and Hiegel, who support the use of the traditional healers, have worked inSoutheast Asia which has a long tradition of alternative medicine, e. g. acupuncture, andwhich has also influenced Western practices.

Focusing on the behaviour of traditional healers among Ugandans in the Sudan,Harrell-Bond217 found that rather than acting as a link between the scarce medical re-sources and traditional healing practices, these men (and they were always men) playedon people’s insecurity for their own economic advantage. By advising people to stay awayfrom “Western” medicine because they had been “poisoned”, they played a divisive anddangerous role. No matter how cold the weather, and often despite evident symptoms ofa severe malaria attack, the treatment for “poisoning” involved public bathing of thepatient and rubbing a mixture of oil and herbs over the skin, which produces a foam,“evidence” of the poison coming out. Not surprisingly, the “cured” often died. Anotherdisruptive consequence of the diagnosis was that it necessitated the identification of thepoisoner, often with lethal consequences for the accused.218

Some of these traditional healers borrowed Western practices to convince their pa-tients of the efficacy of their techniques. For example, administering “African injections”by cutting small incisions with a razor blade. One Malawi medical officer, working in asimilar situation, called a meeting of over 150 of these healers to inform them of thedangers of transmitting AIDS through such “injections”. They agreed to ask their pa-tients to bring their own blades, which is another form of cultural adjustment.

Looking at these examples, the significant factor in determining the compatibilitybetween traditional healing and modern medical practices, is the degree to which thepractitioners are willing to enter into dialogue, and to negotiate their respective roles. Inthe Thai case, Hiegel establishes a relationship of complementarity by accommodatingboth healing and the multiple social roles in the medical milieu. In the Ugandan case, therelationship between modern medicine and traditional healing was one of conflict ofinterest over economic gain and social influence. In the Malawi case, although not ap-

214 Hiegel (1990); Annex 14.215 Cf. Levi-Strauss (1963).216 Eisenbruch (1993).217 Harrell-Bond (1986).218 Ibid., p. 319-332.


proving of the practices of traditional healers, an attempt was made to provide informa-tion which would moderate the most dangerous aspect of their treatment. In short, themedical officer was prepared to meet with them as a fellow professional and to share hisknowledge. Perhaps this example suggests that both attitude and information exchangeare critical factors in attempts to interfere with culture and affect change.

B. Intercultural Communication

Taking account of cultural realities with a view to communicating more effectively withthe community concerned seems an obvious thing to do when preparing and conductingany humanitarian action, particularly if the time-frame involved is a fairly long one. Un-fortunately however, this is often not the case, despite warnings from those with firsthandexperience of the situation. From the multitude of possible examples, we will confineourselves to one of the most topical and no doubt most caricatural, that of Somalia. Thelatter was recently the subject of some interesting remarks by an anthropologist ofconsiderable experience, Ioan Lewis.219

One initial level of communication is that which involves presenting the Somaliproblem to the Western public. Lewis notes that an

“extremely powerful, but misleading media coverage had the positive effect of thrusting the So-mali crisis dramatically up the national and international political agenda to join Yugoslavia atthe top”.

Images of the famine made for moving footage and the media refused to focus on thereal nature of this famine, its boundaries, the social inequalities of access to food, or evenits magnitude. There was even less effort to understand the much more fundamentalconflicts which represented a far greater threat to the population.

Once the initiative has been decided however, another level of communication be-comes very important, namely establishing contact with the community concerned. De-spite certain efforts verging on propaganda, what happened in Somalia failed because ofan erroneous and entirely ethnocentric conception of the possible modes of communica-tion. Underlining “the extraordinary failure to appreciate that Somali culture is primarily oraland the most effective and influential medium is radio”, Lewis shows how the Americanscompletely overlooked this basic reality. They distributed pamphlets “couched innonsensical pidgeon [sic] Somali” which served as “a remarkable testimony to cultural andpolitical obtuseness as well as deafness to advice”. Therein indeed lies the most seriousproblem: the knowledge is there, but the all-important communication between thosewith firsthand experience of the situation and the decision-makers fails to materialise.Those in charge of humanitarian aid devote their attention to the material factors(climate, means of transport, local resources) or health factors. Yet when it comes totackling other less tangible and even more potentially obstructive factors such as socialstructures and cultural values, many of them seem to develop a blind spot. Lack ofsensitivity in this area, lack of training in how to take account of these realities, ignorance

219 Lewis (1993).


about anthropological and psycho-sociological studies and methods of observation giverise to behaviour of which the Somali case is but one example.

What is needed is a full-scale effort to raise awareness of cultural realities and therelevant research findings. Training programmes for aid workers, and more generally,anyone intending to spend time abroad as part of a humanitarian aid programme, musttherefore go much further than merely preparing them for the technical aspects. Be-cause over and above the specific elements to which their work explicitly relates, theiractivities invariably have a direct impact on whole societies and cultures, and not juststricken individuals who can be helped much as one would a victim of a road accident.

Not only will the trauma engendered by the disaster have destroyed the habitatand led to sickness and hunger, it will also have broken up families, removed the malemembers of the community, seriously disrupted social structures, everyday activities andthe overall relationship with time and space which in any society, gives individuals theirbearings. Knowing what these bearings are, managing to avoid predefined ethnocentricinterpretations and achieving genuine communication requires that those offering theassistance be able to perceive the other person’s culture.

Aid workers, after all, also operate at this level, even if they do not always realise it.What goes on at this level, however, is not as readily accessible as immediate realities suchas injuries, destroyed buildings or hunger. The positivist approach, which is very oftenthe one practised by administrative organisations, is ill-equipped to cope with thisdimension. Intercultural communication after all, does not rely on explicit messages;when it is done badly, its primary effect is to induce misunderstandings in the most basiceveryday relations. It is important, in order to try to minimise this lack of understanding,that everyone who goes to work in another culture be aware of how the basic valueswhich any aid worker takes for granted, are to a large extent culturally determined. Somuch so that in an intercultural dialogue, what is obvious to one person may well be in-conceivable to another.

The same applies to dietary choices and patterns, to assessing the causes of illnessesand the precautionary measures which ought to be taken to prevent or cure them, to theway adults behave towards children, to the division of labour between the sexes and dif-ferent age groups, and to non-verbal means of communication. Many aid workers do notrealise the extent to which these features shared by members of a common culture areinstrumental in forging their identity. The meeting between those providing the aid andthe communities concerned is very much, despite the extreme circumstances, a meetingof cultures. A meeting which can quite easily turn into an act of aggression for those whoare receiving the aid. Forced into a passive or barely defensive attitude, in the face ofthose who hold the power and resources, they are reduced to appearing to conform,even though they may later readjust their behaviour to suit their own values. Anthropol-ogy then, can serve to highlight the inefficacy, and even danger, of disrupting localstructures and behaviour patterns on the strength of predefined notions about what isdesirable, good or right, without a proper preliminary appraisal.

Faced with these misunderstandings, it is fairly common for aid workers to talkabout the “stumbling block” posed by local customs, and people’s inability to cope withaid. Judging and assessing by projection, even with the best will in the world, they slipinto an ethnocentric attitude which marginalises and discredits the particular values and


attitudes of those they are meant to assist. Communication is impaired because all toooften, the aid agencies capture the moral high ground, assuming an exclusive right todictate what needs to be done. In so doing, they shift the blame for the failures and mis-understandings on to those they are assisting. Such behaviour, which is actually a form ofdefence against the difficulty of accommodating another society’s values, widens the gulf,leading to conflicts and disappointment.

It is impossible to overemphasise the need for any aid worker to be aware of theseethnocentric tendencies. Some organisations have devised role-play exercises wherebythe aid workers are placed in a mock situation of contact where they are required to takedecisions and formulate judgements. Afterwards, these are compared with the beliefs andvalues of the “host society” cited in the exercise and the participants are asked toconsider to what extent their assumptions about that society were coloured by the valuesof their own society. The idea is not just to enable them to act in a manner more inkeeping with local realities, but also to protect them against the shock when encounteringthe latter.

These situations, after all, can have a direct impact on the individuals concernedand ethnocentrism appears, at least partially, to be a defence mechanism, a natural reac-tion by individuals threatened by a culture shock which they are ill-equipped to handle.

In effect, many of those who are involved in humanitarian aid at grass-root levelcome into close contact with the environment where they are required to operate, whichcan be an unexpectedly stressful experience. Adapting to material conditions or workpatterns is by no means the most serious problem. These were something they had an-ticipated – and generally prepared for – prior to their departure. The transplantationinto a fundamentally different cultural environment, however, the need to deal withpartners who share neither the same objectives nor the same values as the aid workers,the countless daily unforeseen factors related to the particular nature of the local culture,can sometimes have an insidiously traumatic effect. Evidence of this tremendous diffi-culty in coping with life far from one’s normal frame of reference and native culture canbe seen in the so-called phenomenon of culture shock, sometimes so bad that it leads todysfunctional behaviour, or even curtailment of the mission. This shock is essentially anidentity crisis. It affects the individual in ways which extend far beyond his immediateconsciousness, when a breakdown occurs in the code of values, behaviour and communi-cation which he implicitly regarded as “normal”, so much so that this normality shapedhis own identity.

Aid workers who are not prepared for this, or who have no previous experience ofsuch shocks, sometimes find the experience extremely distressing, to the extent that theirpsychological well-being is threatened. Some cannot get over it and have to be senthome.

In the majority of cases however, control mechanisms develop, which enable theindividual to adjust to the situation, at the expense of acquiring, not so much the newculture, as personal methods of transition which draw both on elements of the individ-ual’s previous experience and certain aspects of the new “host” culture. This“improvised” process of adjustment which enables the individual to perform the tasks as-signed, does however have a psychological price, which manifests itself in the everydaybehaviour or dreams of the person concerned, without necessarily impairing his ability to


perform his professional duties. The effects of adjustment may only become fully appar-ent later on: problems on returning from the assignment, when readapting to one’s na-tive country proves more disconcerting than expected, or when it is accompanied by asense of loss and nostalgia. Many aid workers under such circumstances experience a vi-tal need to sign up for another project, which is certainly evidence that they have ad-justed to formerly stressful situations, but also the price that has to be paid for this ad-justment, which has distanced them from the life they were used to leading in their homeenvironment.

Aid workers are not the only ones prone to culture shock. Cases of the latter havefrequently been observed in migrants, and in that particular group of migrants known asrefugees. Once again, the extent and duration of the problem can vary. The ensuingprocess of adjustment depends not just on the person himself, or his cultural origins, butalso the host society, whose administrative structures, receptiveness to cultural diversityand flexibility with regard to the new-comers largely determine the ability to adapt.220

Refugee populations from the same country who are scattered over several parts of theglobe will have widely differing individual and collective experiences depending on thehost country. The psychological distress and the risk of mental illness increase when thecultural gap in relation to the host country is wider, when the former social networks aredestroyed and when the different forms of intrafamily relationship are significantly al-tered as a result of fitting into the new society. It is important that those in charge ofhumanitarian actions should not overlook this key variable when reviewing their activi-ties.

There is another side to ethnocentrism, which tends to affect leaders and interna-tional organisations when dealing with the affairs of a good many parts of the world. Thehighly Eurocentric view of the nation-state inclines them to attach too much importanceto centralised political structures, and to underestimate the role played by the various lo-cal and traditional political units, which are the main focus for the anthropologist. Theseunits exercise their power at the level of small territories, communities, cultural entitiesor family networks. Political anthropology reveals that herein lies a powerful set of forceswhich the authorities who make decisions about aid or who administer aid either fail torecognise or underestimate. Once again, the example of Somalia is highly enlighten-ing.221 A group of researchers set up in Uppsala to advise the United Nations on formu-lating its policy in Somalia (the group consisted of ten social science experts, three ofthem anthropologists) pointed out how the potentially stabilising role of the local politicalauthorities had been woefully underestimated. Since the start of the humanitarian andmilitary intervention, attention had been quite wrongly focused on the urban command-ers, at the risk of elevating one of them to the status of a national leader. In actual facthowever,

“the local clan elders have proved much more effective in peace-making than the embryonic mod-ern government which lacks recognition and resources”.222

220 Cf. for example Sundqvist (1994).221 Lewis (1993).222 Lewis (1993).


The only problem is acknowledging these social realities, or at the very least perceivingthem. The technocratic and Eurocentric mentality of many senior officials inclines themto misread situations by projecting their own forms of social organisation onto very dif-ferent societies of which they have no knowledge. Unless one can grasp the appropriateconcepts, numerous errors of judgement are bound to ensue, because ignorance of otherpeople’s cultures and social organisation very often originates in a highly reductive brandof ethnocentrism.

C. Social Relations and Power Games

While it is hard enough for the uninitiated observer to perceive the sources and forms ofcultural differences, it is even more difficult for him to grasp the various levels of socialorganisation. This is where the anthropologist comes in. With his solid body of theoreti-cal knowledge and methodological experience of the study of social organisation, theanthropologist can provide valuable insights and shed light on social realities which areunfamiliar to the majority of senior managers and workers involved in humanitarian aid.The latter, in fact, tend to become swept up in the immediate reality of the disaster orconflict. Its dramatic consequences for a particular community demand that they renderassistance at any price. Also, political, or even geopolitical factors can tend to erode theindependence of the NGOs involved in the operation, since the latter plays a part in in-ternational relations and contacts between powers, and particularly since it sets in motiona higher level of decision-making.

It is important however, to achieve a broader understanding of the whole web ofrelations which surround the decision to intervene, and the negotiations which providethe framework for its practical implementation. Many operations tend to ride roughshodover some local social reality which is often obscured by the emergency. Yet although theimmediate needs of individuals affected by the tragedy are at the centre of the aid, get-ting through to these individuals involves rules other than those dictated by the urgencyand scale of their needs, particularly in the case of longer-term phenomena such asfamines or epidemics, and in development aid. The mechanisms of aid can often grind toa halt if the providers of that aid are not sufficiently aware of the complexity of the socialrelations on to which their activities are being grafted. When that happens, there is noreal unity of purpose between “giver” and “receiver”. Each side has not only explicit ob-jectives, but also implicit goals (power, money, political stakes, adventurism, quest forfame, etc.) which each conceals, at least partially, from the other.

Below we will examine a few areas where knowledge of social relations and powergames can clarify the task of humanitarian aid, and provide clues as to what forms of be-haviour are likely to render it more effective.

An initial example of hopelessly divergent social attitudes, and the consequences onthe effectiveness of foreign humanitarian aid, is provided by the action taken to combatfamine in the Sudan in 1984-1985.223 In a well-documented and subtly argued work, theauthor highlights the clash between the different social attitudes involved, with regard to

223 De Waal (1989).


this famine. It emerges that failure to acknowledge the specific attitudes of the commu-nity for whom the aid is intended does not merely pose an ethical problem, but alsoraises the question of operational efficiency: the aid enters a process which prevents itfrom attaining its objectives. For two reasons: one is that the aid is shunted off course as aresult of misunderstandings, while the other is that the objective is not established on thebasis of the situation on the ground, as the aid workers believe, but by the decision-mak-ers’ perception of that situation. This perception however, is based on their own experi-ences, in a context far removed from the local reality, and on their own concepts andvalues rather than on what the affected population and its leaders perceive the situationto be.

In the case of the Sudan, the local and national authorities did not remain idle inthe face of the famine. When they reacted however, they did so according to their ownrules. Yet even at this level, different sets of attitudes can be seen to emerge: the centralgovernment for example, had a different outlook from the local authorities, while withinrural society, two contrasting mentalities can be observed: the first, which can be termedthe “Sudanese” mentality, operates at local level, while the other “Islamic” mentality cov-ers a wider scale. According to the former, individuals’ status is a major factor in deter-mining whether or not they should receive assistance. A needy or sick person is only eli-gible to receive charity and care if they unquestionably “belong” to the social unit,whereas if because of their origins, former activities, or any other stigma, they do not“belong” to the group, they are more or less ignored. Such is the case with foreigners,refugees and immigrants. In actual fact, every society has its own sorting system whichenables it to distinguish with absolute certainty between legitimate cases and social out-casts, including our own societies. The international humanitarian ideal comes face toface with these discriminatory practices in its activities in the field; if it plays along withthem, it compromises itself, yet if it bypasses them, it risks alienating the society con-cerned, all of which poses a difficult dilemma.

In the Sudan, the “Islamic” mentality stands in contrast to the former. Any Muslim,even a foreigner, must be helped. The positive attitude which Islam adopts towards mi-gration and pilgrimage, and the idea of hospitality and aid for the poor encouragesMuslims to render assistance to foreigners in need. While however, the local Muslim or-ganisations tend to prevent aid from being confined merely to members of the localcommunity, the majority exclude non-Muslim sections of the population (with the ex-ception of some, who are closer to the universal humanitarian principles, such as the RedCrescent).

Local aid thus flows within pre-existing social channels, where some individuals arebetter placed than others to receive this aid.

In rural society, these channels are constituted by the extended family, and to acertain extent, the village community; in some cases, the way in which the aid is distrib-uted smacks strongly of patronage, yet is totally accepted by the social unit. There is evenevidence to suggest that groups which allocate aid in the form of loans to poor depend-ants, to be repaid in the form of political allegiance, are better able to regulate the flow ofprovisions than their more egalitarian counterparts. Faced with the impact of the famine,the future stability of rural society depends first and foremost on the survival of thesemethods of mutual assistance, which act as a bridge until such time as local production


can recommence. Against this background, the arrival of international aid and its highlyspecific methods of distribution is, of course, a happy event, but it is also seen as a strangeand arbitrary occurrence, which merely serves as a supplement to the age-old copingmechanisms found in societies where famine is a regular event. Where such aid canactually be harmful, is when it destabilises the system on a medium-term basis, by luringthe farmers to camps on the outskirts of the cities, with the result that they neglect to sowthe next season’s harvest.

In the cities by contrast, it is the government which is expected to provide directsupport. There is a widespread assumption that the latter has a priority obligation to city-dwellers and more especially, civil servants. This too, is precisely what local authoritiestend to do, by selling food to city-dwellers while distributing virtually nothing in thecountryside. The international agencies have quite different principles. As they see it,civil servants and employees who have sufficient income do not qualify for aid, and pri-ority is given to helping the most needy. This leads to bitter clashes, and criticism of theauthorities on the part of the organisations concerned.

Overall then, there can be said to be four types of aid. The first two, family mutualassistance and Islamic charity, mainly operate at the level of rural society; in quantitativeterms, they have played a fairly minor role, yet they have been effective because targeteddirectly at those in need. The government, for its part, has confined its aid to the cities,for a combination of technical, political and ideological reasons. International aid, ex-plicitly geared towards the most destitute sections of the population, has often found it-self cast in the role of “piggy-in-the-middle”. It started out from the mistaken assumptionthat famine represented an immediate threat to millions of people and provided provi-sions for mass distribution. In so doing, it placed itself outside the normal social mecha-nisms designed to regulate famines.

The basic mistake, which has been replicated elsewhere, began from the outset, inthe failure to understand the notion of famine. This is because there is more than onesort of famine, and more than one way for a population to respond to it. Throughout theclimatic cycles, societies have devised a multiplicity of methods for coping with hazards,which cater, albeit insufficiently by humanitarian standards, for the diversity of localsituations. Anthropological studies of the ways in which communities respond to faminesresulting from major disruptions, such as war or drought, abound.224 Yet despite a fewattempts, such studies are hardly ever used to inform those in charge of, and actively in-volved, in humanitarian aid. In order to gain a better understanding of (and change) thisproblem, more research is needed into the different institutions, their systems of organi-sation and strategies.225 Unless they can fit into the existing structures with a view to op-timising their response to emergencies, aid tends to supersede these structures to thepoint where, by seriously weakening them, it destabilises the society itself. It appearsbeneficial in the short term, but may well prove costly in the long term, after the emer-gency has subsided. Involving local structures in the aid mechanism, which demands acautious, highly sophisticated approach, is a better guarantee of success than operationswhose substantial resources tend to make them heavy-handed.

224 Shipton (1990).225 Harrell-Bond (1986).


The example of the Sudanese famine represents a specific situation, but it serves tohighlight certain factors which can be extended to many other situations:

♦ misunderstandings about the very nature of the problems, due to a vastly oversim-plified conception, as conveyed by the media. Each famine, war and disaster has itsown highly specific and variable features, which preclude ready-made responses.

♦ the existence of local management structures, which may be unable to cope with alarge-scale emergency, and which in that case require aid, but which should not bedestroyed by that aid, since they hold the key to the future. The presence of these lo-cal players, working alongside international aid agencies, should thus extend muchfurther than the officially authorised representatives.

The contradiction between certain local types of response (inequalities, usury, patronage)and the ethics of international institutions can be a source of considerable tension be-tween aid workers and local leaders. Even if ethnocentric tendencies are studiouslyavoided, making choices can be tricky and the temptation to impose humanitarian meas-ures contrary to local social conventions can be strong, and indeed, well-founded:

♦ the failure to properly assess the impact of aid measures on the various echelons ofthe local social hierarchy, in the short and most importantly, medium term. Muchhas now been discovered about some of the perverse effects of food aid, but otherareas are still largely unexplored. Thus it is the policies pursued by many donors, asregards development aid, that have the effect of making the rich richer and the poorpoorer, and serve as a prelude to hijackings, followed by violence, with humanitarianaid agencies then being required to pick up the pieces. Horowitz226 provides a strikingexample of this in his analysis of the background to the violence between the Sene-galese and the Mauritanians, based on land disputes which arose in connection withthe harnessing of the Senegal River. Horowitz draws attention to the singular failureby those in charge of development aid and those in charge of humanitarian aid to co-ordinate their activities, even though their end goals are the same.

A brief look at a few examples will tell us more than any general treatise, starting with theconflicts in the southern part of the Sudan. These conflicts intensified when the Niloticpeoples saw their territory and way of life seriously disrupted by a vast developmentprogramme, namely the Jonglei canal. The construction of this canal, which had beendecided by high-ranking Egyptian and Sudanese officials, and which was intended tobring water from the south to the north, benefited the northern populations, while at thesame time damaging the lands of the Dinka and Nuer peoples. The latter initiallyprotested, and later joined the southern rebellion, and the renewal of the conflict in 1980led to the project being halted in 1984. Meanwhile, the project had helped to bring aboutthe social destabilisation of the region.

Similar situations can be observed in other countries, where the failure by rulers ordevelopers to take account of anthropological factors means that certain programmesturn into full-scale acts of aggression which in turn lead to violence: forced migrations, 226 Horowitz (1989).


mass influxes of foreigners into the community, violation of property rights, in otherwords, sudden changes which spark fear, followed by revolt. In Sri Lanka, observers havenoted the harmful effects of the immense and technically remarkable national andinternational Mahaweli irrigation programme, in the central-eastern part of the island,designed to render large tracts of land cultivable.227 Despite the initial promises, the eth-nic mix which existed in the region prior to the operation, was not respected when itcame to introducing new populations. On the contrary, the land developed by the damsbecame a magnet, under pressure from the government, for thousands of BuddhistSinghalese peasants, who ended up acting as a wedge between Tamil groups in the northand south. Regarded by the Tamils as a politically motivated invasion, this vast develop-ment project culminated in large-scale massacres by the Tamils and served to amplify lo-cal conflicts.

Power games are thus situated “upstream” from humanitarian aid. They have al-ready developed by the time the emergency occurs which triggers this aid, yet they lingeron, even though the emergency and dramatic events may well deflect attention fromthem. Isolating the emergency from the situation which caused it is thus, not only ablinkered, but also a fundamentally erroneous approach, since any action taken will bedoomed to fail from the outset. Excessively broad visions and sweeping evaluations,however, are by no means always the best way of interpreting situations. Better by far isan analysis of what is happening at local level, and a willingness to take account of socialand cultural relations which form part of an age-old pattern.

D. Anthropological Limits of Humanitarian Assistance

Between different human groups there are differences in attitudes, behaviours and per-ceptions. This should obviously not be ignored even if in some contexts a consciousawareness of these differences can generate fears or aberration.

Signs (and everything can constitute a sign) can always be ambivalent and ambigu-ous. Interpretation of such signs has to be understood as the translation of events be-longing to a particular register to another register. Illness, for example, can be inter-preted either as a physiological problems or the sign of an attack against someone. Beinghealthy can be seen in some cultures as the sign of peaceful relationships with neighboursor as an incredible skill to suck blood of others (symbolically of course).

Anthropology can be a key for the interpretation of social signs or behaviour in thecontext of humanitarian assistance. The consequences of disasters or humanitarian as-sistance can be totally different to that which is expected. The role of female Afghanrefugees in the public life of the camp is an example.

Women within the camps, in addition to their usual occupations in the privatesector of life, have had to undertake some public activities traditionally carried out bymen, for example, most of the administrative tasks. When possible, the eldest son or anold woman was delegated to carry out these tasks. If no such solution could be workedout, especially in the case of widows, young women had to put their burqah (veil) on and

227 Shastri (1990).


go out. This situation gave some women an opportunity to take initiative and sometimesgave them opportunities for leadership. But the achievement of penetrating the publicsphere didn’t give women a bigger influence over political decisions. In fact, the oppositeis closer to the truth. In Afghanistan, before the Saur Revolution, custom required a manwho was participating in Jirgah (traditional decision-making assembly) to consult previ-ously either his mother or his sister (never of course his wife as she still belonged to thekinship of her father and was consulted either by her brother or by her son).

Every morning, the women went together to the goder (bank of a river), to fetchwater. Far away from the men’s eyes, they were able to discuss issues of the village andways to organise a common strategy to influence men when they came to consult them.Only young boys yet to be circumcised were allowed to go with their mothers to the goderand at the same time were also allowed to go with their father to the Jirgah. They could,therefore, play the role of an “informer” for the women about the resolutions taken bymen and tell how far their opinions were taken into account. In Pakistan, women haveno place to get together, and therefore cannot discuss issues together anymore. In addi-tion, their brothers or their sons are not always there to be consulted – they might havemigrated to another camp, stayed in Afghanistan, gone back to the battle field or alsothey might be dead. Very few of them are allowed to give their opinion directly to theJirgah, and most of them have lost all their previous influential power. Some of thewomen, mainly those living close to the main cities (Peshawar or Quetta) or those incontact with humanitarian programs, have been able to adapt certain places to reproducethe social conditions of the goder. There is, for example, the case of the waiting rooms insome female hospitals. To be able to go there as often as possible, Afghan womenpretend to suffer from the mal partout (this French term for a state of general weaknesswas created by the French doctors and has now become an accepted general term). Thissickness is found in most of the consultations. The illness might have come frompathological reasons: lack of a balanced diet, anaemia; from psychological reasons: stress,anxiety, distress that provokes a psychosomatic feeling of weakness. As described they gothere also for social reasons as male and female waiting rooms are strictly separated, thusit is a way for women to get together. Finally, they also go there to get medicine that canbe sold in the bazaar as a source of income.

Interpretations of medical actions are also good examples of the side-effects of hu-manitarian programmes and of “cultural contacts”. It has to be said that in Afghanistan,the Western type of medical science was not present in the countryside. For the Afghans,this type of medicine existed only in relation to the state. Even today, it is difficult for anAfghan to dissociate medicine from politics. One of the explanations is the way in whichmedicines are considered. In Afghanistan, medicines are considered as simple goods.Their values are evaluated by particular criteria. They are graded according to their col-ours – pills with bright colours have more value than white ones – or on their consistency– a syrup is superior to a pill; an injection to a syrup. The more valuable the medicine anAfghan gets, the more important he thinks he is considered by the doctors. Sometimesconflicts arise between tribal rivals because one had received more “consideration” by theWestern doctor than the other one.

The position of aid workers can also be ambiguous. This is particularly the case forWestern female aid workers. Western women have an ambiguous and hybrid status; they


are neither women nor men, because Western women are the only ones allowed to bewith both men and women. This has enlarged their network of relationships but thoserelationships are not as deep as if the gender distinction was more marked. Mixed teamsrespecting the interpretations of the refugees are then the most efficient. It is necessaryto accept sometimes a certain form of symbolic violence.


CHAPTER 5CHAPTER 5 SOME CRITICAL ISSUES INSOME CRITICAL ISSUES IN

INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIANINTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIANASSISTANCEASSISTANCE

A. Introduction

This chapter will discuss three fundamental issues in the anthropology of humanitarianemergencies that have come to occupy the thinking of international aid workers at theend of the twentieth century: gender, repatriation and ethics. For each, there has been ma-jor political and intellectual developments which have brought them to the fore. In thecase of gender, the Cairo (1978) and Beijing (1995) Conferences promoted gender sen-sitivity as a major priority among governments and non-governmental organisations(NGOs). For agencies dealing with humanitarian assistance, redressing the gender bal-ance has become a major preoccupation, both as part of their recruitment policy and al-tering personnel ratios, as well as a criterion for planning and assessing aid interventionson the ground.

Secondly, largely as a result of the progressive restrictionism among host states, theblurring of the distinction between immigration and asylum policies, the perception ofrefugees as a burden, and “donor fatigue”, repatriation of forcibly uprooted people,rather than integration and resettlement, is now promoted as the best “durable solution”to refugee situations. At the same time, the term is being ambiguously applied to otherprivileged types of ethnic migrations which may ultimately serve nationalistic interests.For example, the migration of ethnic Germans from Poland, Romania, and the formerSoviet Union to Germany are understood as a “return” to a historical homeland.

Finally, in the field of ethics new considerations concerning the normative princi-ples of humanitarian action have emerged as a result of the changing nature of both warsand humanitarian aid; so-called “complex” emergencies have created new ethical di-lemmas. As has become evident in the case of Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, agencyworkers find themselves confronted with the necessity of collaborating and conceding tothe demands of warring parties in order to deliver assistance to civilians, therebyundermining the previously sacrosanct principles of impartiality and neutrality that haddefined “humanitarianism” and humanitarian action. In this respect, the need to rethink


the role and limits of humanitarianism has become a major concern among aid workersand policy makers.

B. Gender

Over the last ten years, there has been an increasing tendency for humanitarian agenciesto target women as the recipients of aid in emergencies. This shift in focus is part of abroader development, underpinned by feminism, which began in the social sciences inthe 1970s, and lends greater “analytic visibility” to gender issues.228 It has helped to re-habilitate more traditional perceptions of women as “muted groups”,229 by giving them “avoice”.230 In the field of humanitarian assistance, the defence of incorporating gender is-sues as a priority in designing, planning, and implementing projects is still controversialand is far from being “mainstreamed”.231

I. The Meaning of Gender

Whether under the banner of feminism or development, gender issues have failed to be-come integrated in sustainable ways into UN policies or as a criterion in evaluating hu-manitarian interventions. One of the major obstacles to change in the area of gendersensitivity in humanitarian assistance is the misunderstanding of what constitutes“gender”: in most agency literature “gender” is co-extensive with promoting “women’sinterests”. This misconception draws support from the rhetoric of the feminist movementthat sought to give women a special role in correcting social injustices by identifying themas “victims” of male exploitation.

In anthropology, the concept of gender refers to the societal roles assigned to menand women. Thus, gender is the result of socialisation, while sex is determined by biol-ogy. Gender is a relational term which refers to the relation between men and women.The character of this relation is determined in terms of the social norms and roles appli-cable in each socio-economic context.232 The particular norms and roles assigned to menand women in different societies represent the structure of the distribution of power.

Within anthropology there have been two main positions, each having an impacton how aid programmes must be revised in order to become “gender sensitive”. On theone side, there are feminist anthropologists who argue in favour of prioritising the needsof women in order to impact on the structure of social relations and affect the power re-lations between the sexes.233 The more traditional anthropological position focuses exclu-sively on women as a category, a view formally articulated at the First InternationalConference on Women in Nairobi in 1975. According to this view, the key problem fac-

228 Indra (1993).229 Ardener (1972).230 Tannen (1992).231 El-Solh (1995).232 Ardener (1975); Moser (1989); Whitehead (1992); El-Solh (1995).233 E. g. Moore (1988); Callaway (1986).


ing women, particularly in the South, is the lack of opportunity to participate in“development”. The main strategy promoted for improving the position of women is toincrease their participation and improve their share in resources relative to those of men.This view has spilt over into development assistance programmes under the banner of“Women in Development”.

Women in Development (WID) is an approach which grew out of modernisationtheory in the early 1970s. Modernisation theory assumes that men and women benefitequally from development in that they face the same problems: technological and insti-tutional backwardness and poverty.234 With the advent of WID, this fundamental as-sumption was challenged and hence it was contended that the different and specificneeds of women had to be integrated into the model. Boserup235 had already noted thatthe male-biased development process actually reduced the status of women. The funda-mental premises of the WID approach were not challenged for many years either em-pirically or conceptually. Far from improving, the socio-economic situation of women,measured in terms of relative access to economic resources, income and employment, hasin fact, deteriorated considerably since the WID approach was adopted by most majordonors, as has their nutritional and educational status.

In the light of the demonstrated failings of WID-informed projects, Gender andDevelopment (GAD) analysis emerged as an alternative, more radical, approach to theamelioration of women’s conditions through the improvement of their socio-economicposition within society. According to GAD, an examination of the needs and roles of bothmen and women is required before the issue of women’s improved access to resourcesand decisions over their use vis-à-vis men can be addressed. Moving one step beyond asimple economic analysis and restituting the balance of material resources, GAD intro-duces the concept of social justice and the improvement of the quality of life for bothmen and women.

Gender-aware approaches should be concerned with the relation between men andwomen. As Moser has noted:

“[...] men and women play different roles in society, their gender differences being shaped byideological, historical, religious, ethnic, economic and cultural determinants. These roles showsimilarities and differences between classes as well as societies, and since the way they are sociallyconstructed is always temporally and spatially specific, gender divisions cannot be read offchecklists”.236

Thus, gender roles are at the core of any societal context where humanitarian interven-tion is to be implemented.

II. Some Consequences of Misconceptions of Gender in Emergencies

Placing gender sensitivity as a priority in emergency situations should not be equatedwith the unfounded belief, often reinforced by the visibility of women in fund-raising

234 Parpart (1989).235 Boserup (1970).236 Moser (1989), p. 180.


images, that most of the beneficiaries of aid are women. A commonly held belief is thatthe populations affected by emergencies are chiefly women and children, with the infer-ence that men are not affected. In emergency situations, however, the demographicstructure of a population is not normal. Instead of being comprised mainly of womenand children, these populations are usually made up of an abnormally high proportionof single men and by women, alone with their dependants.237 It is misleading to argue infund-raising efforts that women are the primary beneficiaries of aid and assistance pro-grammes based on this false inference will be fundamentally flawed. Such representa-tions run the risk of ignoring the presence of other members of the affected populations:the elderly of both sexes, men and adolescent boys, including many who are unaccom-panied.

Women-headed households are generally targeted for special assistance, beingidentified as a “vulnerable group”, which is a direct result of Western notions of familystructure and the vulnerability of single-parent families. However, in the South, wheremost humanitarian crises occur, many societies practice polygamy, the larger homesteadbeing composed of the husband, his first wife and other households headed by otherwives; and even if a widow were heading a household, she may have grown sons to sup-port it. For instance, a widow among the Dinka in Sudan is destitute not when her hus-band dies, but when she lacks access to support from her brothers-in-law. Therefore, theconcept of the female-headed household in itself tells the humanitarian assistance ad-ministrator nothing about “vulnerability” particularly in non-Western contexts where theuse of standardised categories of vulnerable women is not useful in singling out the mostdestitute in other cultures. A more appropriate method of targeting women’s vulnerabil-ity requires an understanding of social relations among affected populations through theuse of tools that allow for complete information on social organisation and norms illus-trating how these affect women’s entitlements in an emergency. Beneficiary participationin the identification of the criteria to assess vulnerability is imperative. In fact, the situa-tion is much more complicated than this. In situations of emergencies where flight is themain survival strategy, adult males tend to be more numerous than women. Where ac-cess to assistance involves confinement in camps, one of the strategies for survival is oftenthe splitting of families, which may find the so-called most vulnerable groups – womenand children – in the majority.238 If the affected population is the result of a liberationstruggle, the men may be off fighting. In any case, one cannot assume that either men orwomen exist alone, independent from the social relationships and networks to whichthey belong.

Another consequence of the misconception of gender relations is the failure to besensitive to issues of historicity and culture. Gender roles are not static, and in assumingthat they are, assistance programmes can unwittingly lead to the progressive disempow-erment of women. Prior to being uprooted, Mozambican women enjoyed a comparativedegree of control over the production and distribution of food as one of their main gen-der-related activities. As Callamard239 notes from her research among Mozambican refu-

237 Palmer (1982).238 See Chapter 3 C.239 Callamard (1993).


gees in Malawi, gender roles change – in exile – in response to broader social and eco-nomic transformations. Thus, the often contrasted and opposed categories of“productive versus reproductive” gender roles are themselves subject to change. Shefound that changes in the sexual division of labour, which

“were largely brought about by external interventions, economic hardships and social pressures,as well as by the constant insecurity, benefited men more than they did women”.240

In the case she studied in Malawi, food-related activities, which are normally consideredto belong in the women’s sphere of work were controlled by other Mozambican refugeemen. The men were the ones in charge of allocating the food; they were the ones whotraded it for cash. The functions of women with regard to the production of food in thehousehold were reduced to cooking, bartering and physically carrying it from the distri-bution point to the house.

Writing about the impact of displacement on gender relations, Daley observes thatmost of the literature construes women, like children, as ill-equipped to cope with newchallenges. She observes how the programme of assistance implemented on behalf ofBurundian refugees in western Tanzania acted as a catalyst for strengthening the pre-migration pattern of patriarchal social relations.

“Displacement [...] exacerbated rather than transformed culturally-defined gender roles. Thiscan be interpreted as the consequence of the presence of extended kin relations in exile, providingsupportive social networks and continuity in social relations. Even though women are not over-represented in refugee populations, their material condition was worsened, and had been aggra-vated by the gender ideology of the donor agencies responsible for the settlement process.” 241

Misconceptions of gender relations lead to a failure to consider the differential impact ofhumanitarian crises on men and women. For example, in a study comparing how time ina day is spent by men and women found that women’s normal activities were exagger-ated by the hardships of life in camps, but men were “in some sense” more vulnerable asthey “had lost their previous roles”.242 In addition, single men, who often form a disportion-ately large group in camps, may be particularly vulnerable when food needs cooking, notonly because they tend to lack the skills to cook, but because cooking represents a com-promise of their societal roles.243

Lack of employment for men outside the household often has far-reaching conse-quences. An analysis of mortality among the Rohingya by gender found that two-thirdsof the deaths were women, but two-thirds of those who attended the health centre weremen.244 Men’s exposure to frustrating idleness, disempowerment by refugee assistancepolicies and loss of status is a major contributor to violence in refugee camps. Thus, asFall notes,

240 Ibid., p. 249.241 Daley (1991), p. 264.242 Thirkell (1995).243 Anderson (1994).244 Walker (1994).


“while it is essential to support refugee women [...] it is [also] essential to include men’s stereotypeof women as weak and vulnerable. The most familiar image of female vulnerability is associatedwith sexual violence”.245

Social class, education and cultural differences also influence the extent of the sufferingof men. For example, in needs assessments carried out by OXFAM in a number ofcamps, young men were found to be the most violent, aggressive and disorientated. Forexample, among the pastoralist Dinka, who fled to Uganda from southern Sudan, camplife including the food given, which was too dissimilar to their previous existence andlack of adjustment to their new circumstances led to increased incidences of family vio-lence and other social problems. Makanya246 found that adult men run a particular risk ofpsychiatric disorders. This is partly due to the disempowerment men suffer, particularlyin camp situations, through their loss of status and self-esteem which contributes to fam-ily violence as a means of asserting their male roles. As Wilson puts it:

“It is a testimony to the rigour of research on refugee women that we are now much more in needof research on the experiences, problems and aspirations of refugee men than we are of furtherwork on women”.247

Cultural stereotypes may influence assessments of the differential risks men and womenare confronted with, particularly in camp situations. Thus, Urrutia248 found that, in campsettings, adult men are at risk of coming to view alcohol or drugs as a temporary meansof escape from personal anguish, uncertainty and/or boredom. Alcohol and drug abuse isnot a male privilege. As Reynell249 observes, this was also a coping strategy used by Cam-bodian refugee women. Ager warns against facile generalisations that reinforce culturalstereotypes, on the basis that there is little empirical evidence.

“Given the difficulties of not only measuring, but also interpreting (in appropriate culturalterms), the level of use of drugs and alcohol in such settings, this essentially remains an area ofsuspected rather than proven concern”.250

III. Inter and Intra-Gender Violence

Most of the recent research on the impact of emergencies that seeks to redress the“andro-centric” bias emphasises the increased security risks for women and their pro-gressive marginalisation. It is true to say that the gender insensitivity of many assistanceprogrammes may unwittingly contribute to the very circumstances in which sexual vio-lence against women may occur. For example, collecting firewood and water for thehousehold is usually a woman’s task. It is during those repeated activities, often requiringwalking long distances from the compound, that women are most at risk. Failure toprovide for these needs in a safe environment increases these risks.

245 Fall (1995), see also Walker (1994).246 Makanya (1990).247 Wilson (1992), p. 40.248 Urrutia (1987).249 Reynell (1989).250 Ager (1993), p. 22.


The challenge to promote a state known as “food security” which involves morethan the provision of food in situations of humanitarian emergencies is a complex one.The claim made by most agency literature is that men and women compete over scarceresources. It is important to address the implications of this argument in the context ofhumanitarian emergencies. If, indeed, the universal “battle of the sexes” can be de-scribed as one of competition for power over scarce resources, it is possible that inter-gender violence (violence between men and women) will be reproduced on the intra-gender level (that is, between people of the same sex). Given that emergency situationsare particularly characterised by scarcity, where women are in direct competition witheach other for resources, one should expect conflict and violence in their midst. Anyonewho has joined the long queues of women at a borehole will appreciate that intra-genderviolence is the norm, rather than the exception; there is nothing like sister-solidarity.The same may be said for “brothers”.

Current research suggests that we are in need of a more complex framework forexplaining the increased vulnerability of women to sexual violence in emergency situa-tions. Discussions of rape as an instrument of war in, for example, former Yugoslavia,only address the direct competition among warring parties as the main cause. It is possi-ble, however, that competition over resources among the “affected populations”, under-stood as including both the hosts and their displaced guests, takes more complex forms,i. e. intra-gender competition finds expression through inter-gender violence. Despitethe scarcity of fuel and water both groups experience, host wives have an advantage overthe refugee women in that they may take their complaints to their husbands. In suchsituations, host wives may use their husbands as means to win their battles against thestrangers; in this context, it is not women that are the instruments in the wars of men,but men who become the instruments in the wars between women. Rape can be the netresult in both cases.

While the attention of most researchers has been given to the results of sexual vio-lence on women, UNHCR points to the need for more awareness of the consequences ofsexual violence on boys and men. It is suspected that reported cases of sexual violenceagainst males are but a “fraction of the true number of cases”. The failure to report suchcrimes is related to cultural norms which discourage men from speaking about theiremotional experiences and the “profound humiliation” to their “virility and manhood”.Moreover, unlike women who tend to have existing social networks to provide support,“there is rarely anything comparable for male victims”.251 Evidently, a gender-sensitive ap-proach to sexual violence would need to address the risks and impact of violence on bothwomen and men.

IV. A Community Approach to Gender Sensitivity

Humanitarian assistance which focuses only on women is not gender sensitive. In fact,where the survival of communities is at stake, the singling out of special groups, even ongender grounds, is self-defeating. It undermines the purpose of humanitarian interven-

251 UNHCR (1993), p. 5.


tions, which is meant to increase the chances of survival for individuals and communitiesas a whole. Furthermore, communities are constituted by households and it is the pres-ervation of these units that improves these chances. The rationale for addressing thepivotal role of women in aid programmes is not purely a political agenda; it is based onan understanding of their function within the social fabric. As research shows, in the ab-sence of a father, the household stays together; if “the mother dies, the household usually dis-integrates”.252 As such, women are the “glue” which keep the household together andguarantee the survival of its members. Therefore targeting women is a more effectiveway of achieving this aim.

A truly gender-sensitive programme would address the differential losses of bothmen and women, and would seek to anticipate the balance of power in the interests ofcommunity survival. Failure to attend to this precarious balance in social relations islikely to lead to further unintended consequences. The fact that a “community” may notbe visible in a crisis situation should not undermine its relevance as a methodological toolin planning more effective humanitarian interventions.253

One of the caveats which must be flagged concerning the role of community-basedapproaches to humanitarian assistance relates to the very concept itself. As used by socialscientists, the word “community” has become fundamentally ambiguous, employed tocover a wide range of phenomena ranging from the romantic expression of solidarity, topatterns of interaction among people who define themselves in terms of membership of aparticular group, to those who occupy a particular geographic space. Lacking criteria fordefining community as a political, economic and social unit, there is a tendency amonghumanitarian agencies to describe their intervention activities as orientated toward“community development” and as “participatory”.

It cannot be assumed that populations affected by an emergency are able magicallyto reconstitute themselves into a community, or a coherent social and economically viableunit in the midst of the crisis, and that leadership will automatically emerge. People incamps are often strangers to each other, live together in limited space with minimal re-sources, without their accustomed source of livelihood. Neither can it be assumed, asmany do, that “the regulating mechanisms of traditional communities” will work.254 Moreover,their capacity to reconstruct social life may be confounded by aid interventions. As is of-ten observed, individuals may seek to ingratiate themselves with authorities in competi-tion with their fellows. Such conditions seriously undermine any potential for unity andsolidarity of the population as a whole, while at the same time, introducing new groundsfor social cleavages and factionalisms.255

Community participation and community management programmes are currentlypromoted among aid agencies as a result of a concern to avoid the pitfalls of the“dependency syndrome” and promote empowerment among the beneficiaries of aid,mainly women. Community participatory programmes are different from communitymanagement programmes in that the latter are normally juxtaposed to agency-managed

252 E. g. Callamard (1993); Apeadu (1993).253 Harrell-Bond (1986), pp. 2-4; Cernea (1991); Wilson (1992).254 E. g. UNHCR (1982), p. 61.255 Voutira/Harrell-Bond (1995).


programmes and, for the most part, ignore the role of the beneficiary populations.Community participation programmes, on the other hand, devolve to an extent, controlof decision making in the design management and evaluation of aid projects.

As a strategy of empowerment, it is important to note that the recruitment ofcommunity leaders in aid programmes does not necessarily entail participation, or gen-der sensitivity per se, as the line of accountability directly relates the leaders of the benefi-ciary population to the agency, rather than to the community to which they ostensiblybelong. In this sense, these people, mainly men, become (and are seen by the beneficiar-ies to be) part of the aid administrative structure imposed on them. There is no basis forthem to be morally accountable to the members of their own communities. Because oftheir identification with the structure of power, the assistance programme itself, the ten-dency is for the population to distrust such persons to speak for them. The challenge foraid workers is to determine how community participation can be encouraged, in whatform, and to what extent if a project is to be run efficiently and cost effectively.

Murungu256 identifies the following components of community participation: controlover identification of projects, their implementation and maintenance; grass rootsinvolvement; the inclusion of women; the establishment of free flow of information; andthe support of literacy, training and education.257 It is often the case that community in-volvement becomes limited to one-way information flow – from agencies to the villageleader.

Women’s involvement in participation programmes tends to be limited by threefactors – cultural tradition, age and social class – which may alter in the circumstances ofan emergency. Aid workers all too often regard the concept of tradition as immutable.However, as recent research has shown, cultural tradition is dynamic therefore culturecannot be invoked as a way of avoiding the issue of gender equality. Furthermore, it hasbeen argued that the so-called barrier of tradition is often surmountable and agenciescan take advantage of this fact.258

Thus, from the standpoint of changing priorities among humanitarian agents, itwould be important to address gender sensitivity on a par with cultural sensitivity includingrespect for local institutions wherever humanitarian assistance is provided.259

C. Repatriation

One of the major challenges with moral implications faced by people working in hu-manitarian aid situations is the internationally-defined priority in favour of repatriationof refugees. Throughout this volume it has been argued that one of the common featuresof all humanitarian emergencies is that they entail large scale forced displacement ofpopulations. Particularly in situations of armed conflict, the elimination of the originalconflicts that caused flight are seen as legitimising the return to a status quo ante. In this

256 Murungu (1995).257 Ibid., pp. 30-35.258 Morsy (1995).259 Voutira et al. (1995).


light, the return of refugee populations to their areas of origin is seen as an indication ofa return to normality, and often as the resolution of the conditions of conflict which gaverise to the exodus itself.

I. A “Durable” Solution?

Initially, the emphasis on repatriation appears strange given that the UN 1951 Conven-tion on Refugees, the main instrument of refugee protection in host states, only mentionsrepatriation by prohibiting states to refoule, that is, return refugees against their will totheir country of origin. Although the 1951 Convention provides for protection mainly inthe case of refoulement, the main document supporting the different durable solutions isthe mandate of UNHCR – the main UN agency responsible for upholding the rights ofrefugees; as such it includes provision for voluntary repatriation. In the context of theCold War period, with most refugees originating from the communist world, it wasaxiomatic that few would ever want to return. Despite the fact that refugee status was notoriginally conceived as permanent, because of asylum practices it became de facto so. TheConvention itself recommends that this status facilitates the naturalisation and“assimilation” of refugees in the host country.

It was mainly after the promulgation of the Organisation of African Unity’s (OAU)Convention on Refugees (1969) that states were encouraged to view refugee status astemporary.260 African policy makers believed that the refugee problem on their continentwould cease to exist once the colonial powers had been overturned and self-determina-tion achieved. Under these conditions, the OAU Convention provided for voluntary re-patriation. UNHCR also began to talk of “durable” solutions to the world refugee prob-lem, with voluntary repatriation being the most desirable in comparison with the otheralternatives which are local “integration” and third country resettlement. In the early1980s, UNHCR was convinced to “promote” repatriation261 with many observers criticis-ing the coercion under which these programmes were implemented.262 Nevertheless, the1990s have been declared as the “Decade of Repatriation” by the UN High Commis-sioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata.263 The introduction of legal concepts such as safecountries and “temporary protection” as used by states to minimise protection eventuallylegitimises and reinforces the practice of refoulement and repatriation under conditions ofduress.

The case of refugees being forced back to Rwanda in December 1996 by the Tan-zanian military is one of the most sobering examples of almost silent acceptance ofhuman rights violations by both the international community and the humanitarianagencies. A number of reports point to the fact that refugees who felt that it was unsafe toreturn were not given any options. Initially, thousands of refugees fled the camps andattempted to move further into Tanzania in the hope of fleeing into neighbouringcountries. The Tanzanian security forces reportedly intercepted with the refugees and 260 See Humanitarian Law Module.261 Coles (1985).262 Crisp (1984); Harrell-Bond (1986), Chapter 4; Cuny/Stein (1988); Allen/Morsink (1993).263 Ogata (1993).


forced them towards the Rwandese border. Recent evidence also shows that those whorefuse to go back are being arrested and detained in the north-western part of Tanzania.Similar conditions are reported in Burundi, Zaire, Kenya and Uganda.264 Therefore, de-spite the internationally recognised standards that insist that the “essentially voluntary char-acter of refugee repatriation should always be respected” and that “repatriation should only takeplace at their freely expressed wish” the evidence shows that mass return often occurs underintimidation, coercion and fear.265 In this respect, the priorities of the internationalcommunity and host governments are shifting away from human rights protection, in fa-vour of financial and political considerations embedded in the policies of restrictionism inasylum and immigration.

To date, most research on voluntary repatriation has focused on the return ofrefugees in post-conflict situations. Not surprisingly, findings represent different pointsof view and disclose different assumptions and priorities. UN organisations, governmentsand aid agencies tend to emphasise the importance of repatriation as a legal, political,and international security issue and as such, promote it.266 More recent academicresearch has challenged this optimistic view by showing that repatriation, both in theoryand practice, is not necessarily a universally applicable optimal solution to refugee cri-ses.267 This research shows that far from being an unequivocally favourable “preventive”solution to future refugee flows, “repatriation” may have the unintended consequencesof fuelling and even engendering inter-ethnic frictions and contribute to political insta-bility.

One factor that relates to the dynamics of repatriation movements involves thepatterns of adaptation of refugee populations in exile.268 A common phenomenon thathas emerged involves the prolonged exile for millions, some of whom become a specialproblem for policy makers and aid workers; these are “refugee warrior communities”which represent highly conscious refugee communities with a political leadership struc-ture and armed sections engaged in warfare for a political objective that often includesrecapturing the homeland.269 In this respect the return of “refugee warrior communities”may be destabilising to the country of origin. The 1990 “return” to Rwanda of Tutsirefugees from Uganda, if seen as a triggering factor for the subsequent “genocide”, is adramatic example of the extent to which large scale violence may be engendered byhomecoming.270 Since the 1990s, there is a greater appreciation that repatriation is notwithout problems, yet, some situations challenge its validity as a humanitarian solution atall, as is the case of the Rohingya whose return from exile in Bangladesh in 1991 led totheir second expulsion from Burma with more than 10,000 lives being lost in the processof return.271 The same may be said for the case of refugees returning from Pakistan toAfghanistan where civil war continues. These examples seriously undermine the hopes 264 Amnesty International (1997), pp. 2-7.265 Ibid.266 Coles (1985); Crisp (1987); see also Goodwin-Gill (1989).267 E. g. Harrell-Bond (1989); Rogge (1994).268 See chapter 3 C.269 Zohlberg et al. (1989), pp. 275-277.270 Harrell-Bond (1994).271 WRS (1993), p. 88.


for a voluntary return in “safety and dignity”, as called for in UN documents, for themore than 1million refugees from former Yugoslavia, under pressure to return byEuropean host states.272

II. Ambiguities in the Concept, “Repatriation”

The preceding discussion has focused on repatriation as an international humanitarianpolicy as it has been promoted in recent years and some of the weakness and problemswere identified in its implementation as a global humanitarian agenda. The concept ofrepatriation however, is much wider than the international legal and political agendas ofstates and the official motivations and formal justifications used in its support; it also re-fers to particular socio-cultural realities that ground the individual experiences, delib-erations and meanings of return in practice. From the standpoint of anthropology, weneed to address the issue of repatriation in a critical fashion in the spirit of what Marcusand Fisher273 have programmatically referred to as the “repatriation of anthropology as a cul-tural critique” aiming at the redefinition of domestic and increasingly global phenomenaby framing questions and introducing alternatives.274 To achieve this critical approach torepatriation as a complex phenomenon we need to place the varieties of return move-ments which occur within the larger context of patterns of migration. Three distinct re-turn migration movements may be identified in order to indicate the range and com-plexities involved in assessing the feasibility and expedience of “return”. These are:

1. Return labour migrants to their homelands (e. g. Indian labour migrants from theGulf War, guest workers from Germany, Australia, and the USA to Greece);

2. Voluntary repatriation of co-nationals living as national minorities in territories ofeastern Europe to their “historical homelands” (e. g. ethnic Russians, Ukrainians andother nationalities returning from different territories of the former Soviet Union(FSU) to their new states, ethnic Germans, Jews, Greeks, Poles from the FSU re-turning to their European homelands); and

3. Post-conflict refugee repatriation viewed as the most desirable outcome to the refu-gee problem (e. g. Mozambicans from the neighbouring states; Guatemalans fromMexico, and former Yugoslav refugees from within or outside the former Yugoslavborders).

The question remains why are these quite different return migrations subsumed underthe general category of “repatriation”. The moral justification in support of all threetypes of “returns” is the presumption that life in exile or abroad is an unnatural state ofbeing and therefore by implication the main impetus for “re-migration” is the eternal“desire to go home”. This view is elegantly articulated by Said:

“Exile is a fundamentally discontinuous state of being [...] exiles feel [...] an urgent need to re-constitute their broken lives, usually by choosing to see themselves as part of a triumphant ideol-

272 E. g. UNHCR (1995).273 Marcus/Fisher (1986).274 Ibid., pp. 136-137.


ogy or a restored people. Dwelling upon the margins of alien culture, they struggle to create afirm sense of self by redefining themselves in relation to the centre. Their goal is to reassemble anidentity out of the refraction and discontinuities of exile”.275

As a number of scholars have noted, in principle, the assumption of the eternal desire togo home is valid in a nationalist world that allocates particular people to specific places asa feature of the “natural order of things”. Yet, we still need to consider how our imagi-nation and concepts as well as our ideas of policy-making become both influenced andlimited by these powerful constructions of nationhood.276 Far from denying then thepower of nationalist morality, there is a need to identify the limitations of the nationalorder of things, particularly vis-à-vis the re-organisation of identities in a post forced-mi-gration context.

From a humanitarian policy perspective it is important to distinguish among thedifferent accounts of repatriation which focus on the implementation of international le-gal principles,277 the political motivations and logistics of repatriation as an exercise,278 itscost-effectiveness as a policy of development assistance279 and the actual experiences andlonger term consequences of “return” among refugees who go home. In this sense, to theextent that repatriation is an international political agenda promoted by states“burdened” by refugees in concert with humanitarian agencies unable to maintainfunding for emergency assistance in more immediate sites of intervention, the concept ofrefugee/exile return has a different meaning which must be distinguished from the indi-vidual experiences of emigration, flight and return.

With respect to the above three broad categories of returnees there are three mainissues we need to address in order to shed light on the concept of “voluntary repatria-tion”. The first relates to the meaning of “voluntary” and the extent to which the decisionto return involves people who are both willing and able to do so. The second issue is themeaning of “return” and is related to the pre-flight experiences and conditions that leadto exile to understand where and to what people wish to go “back” to. The third issuegoes to the nub of the problem: What is the foundation of this desire to “go home”?

III. Patterns of Belonging: The Logic of Going “Home”

In Chapter 3, we identified different patterns of belonging in the discussion of the socialorganisation of identities in exile. As also noted in Chapter 3, cross-cultural anthropo-logical research provides two overarching models of adaptation: sedentary andmigrant/nomadic cultures. In the case of repatriation, understood as the return to one’splace of origin, the right to return presupposes the dominance of a sedentary model ofadaptation. In this context, it is precisely because people have a place, and come from aplace, that the right to return acquires currency.

275 Said (1990).276 Warner (1994), p. 168; Stepputat (1994), p. 175.277 Chimni (1993).278 UNHCR (1993).279 Gorman/Kibreab (1995).


Anthropologists, such as Malkki280 have gone a long way toward excavating thecomplex “botanical metaphors” through which anthropological and nationalist discoursehave rooted people in “soils” of national and ethnic territories thereby reaffirming the“natural connections between people and the places they inhabit”.281 Such realisations are usefulin making us understand both the power and the limits of such labels as “repatriate” or“returnee” which are based on the antecedent logic of return to the homeland. But theyshed little light on the varieties of different meanings of “home” and their affective refer-ence for the people on the move, and on the motivations of the sending/receiving coun-tries.

On the level of policy, the introduction of repatriation, in the post Cold War era, asa generalised term to cover these disparate phenomena of return migration has differentjustifications. In the case of labour migrant return, the underlying assumption behindthe use of “repatriation” to describe the migration pattern often involves an immigrationpolicy in disguise. For countries like Greece, Italy and Spain, whose bulk of “invisible”funds have been the receipt of remittances from abroad, repatriation involves a majorcapital investment which labour migrants bring with them in the process of resettling forgood in order to spend their old age and die in the homeland.282 In this context, labourmigrant repatriation, much in the sense of their original emigration, is viewed from thestandpoint of the homeland as a blessing, these old-age returnees act as resources for thenational economy without competing with the local labour markets.283 Yet, on the socio-cultural level, their arrival to the homeland also entails serious re-integration challengesnot unlike those these people had to face as immigrants living abroad. Once they have“returned”, although formally Greek, they are seen by the locals as the “American”, the“Belgian”, the “Australian”, thereby conspicuously being identified as foreigners becauseof their emigrant past. In Greek the term used is literally, “local foreigners” (íôüðéïò îÝíïò,ntopios xenos).

Unlike labour return migration, the repatriation of co-nationals from easternEurope is a phenomenon identified with the reshuffling of ethnicities across the old ColdWar divide. What distinguishes this phenomenon of ethnic return from previous histori-cal migration patterns is that both the unit of reference and the institutional contextwithin which such phenomena are understood have changed. Before the growth andconsolidation of nation-states the movement of peoples across state boundaries seldomappeared as a problem to be contained. The Treaty of Versailles that followed WorldWar I and the redrawing of the European political map in nation-state terms defined therights and obligations of states vis-à-vis their minorities in national terms. Cross-borderethnic population movements in inter-war Europe were initiated by the provisions ofdifferent peace-making treaties, which included the provision of people staying or goingaccording to the way individuals defined their national allegiances and chose where theywanted to live; nationality and national identity was the main unit of protection.284 At the

280 Malkki (1990; 1992).281 Ibid.282 Lazarides (1996); Sapelli (1995); Mousourou (1994).283 Papamiltiades-Czeher (1988).284 Marrus (1985), p. 69; Hobsbawm (1990), p. 134.


end of the Cold War, the unit of protection and membership was been transformed toethnic affiliation and as such the rights of minorities have been redefined as a people’sright to live and belong to their ethnic core. This shift in conceptualisation of member-ship was precipitated by the radical changes taking place in eastern Europe and theevents that lead to the rapprochement between East and West. One such case was the majorreforms introduced in the Soviet Union after 1985. One immediate effect of these far-reaching changes was the relative liberalisation of borders and the waiving of restrictionson emigration, a term not officially recognised by the Soviet regime, given the direct im-plications it bore for issues of defection. The immediate response to the liberalisationpolicies was the direct application for up to half a million emigration passports for theWest. Over the next five years, the number of emigration requests reached 2.1 million.285

The vast majority of requests came from Soviet citizens with “foreign nationalities”,e. g. Jews, Poles, Germans, and Greeks.286 In view of the general international policy of“thaw” in the relations between East and West, such movements were construed as in-stances of “repatriation”. This entailed the right of people to emigrate to their putativehomelands. The choice of term was politically significant since it was seen as a sufficientlyinnocuous one after a long period of considering anyone leaving the communist coun-tries as a legitimate refugee in need of asylum.287

For countries like Germany, Poland, Israel, and Greece, where membership of thenation is defined almost solely in genealogical lines, ius sanguinis, access to citizenship is,in principle, determined upon proof of descent. This allowed for the creation of a newcategory of “privileged” East/West ethnic migration. In practice, however, descent is nota sufficient condition for membership in a Western state and the acquisition of citizen-ship; other conditions must prevail, not least, the political will and interest to allow peo-ple to repatriate as a group rather than as individuals. For instance, ethnic Germansfrom Latin America (e. g. Brazil and Columbia), do not qualify for repatriate status; theterm Aussiedler used to denote membership to the German diaspora and the right to re-turn to the homeland exclusively refers to those living in East European countries. In thecase of Greece, kinship with a person who has declared Macedonian citizenship prevailsas a criterion against repatriation, even against internationally recognised family reuniongrounds.

The third category of repatriates denoting post-conflict refugees going home is, asnoted above, politically more charged in that both the right to return and the necessity ofrefugees going home may be challenged in theory and practice. In theory, the right toreturn is based on it being exercised voluntarily but we lack to date adequate criteria fordemarcating both on the conceptual and the empirical levels the degree to which suchdecisions and their realisation are under coercion. In practice, repatriation as a solutionis problematic because more often than not, the wish to return is mitigated by the factthat there is no home to return to. This is the case with a large number of Bosnian refu-gees who find themselves unable to return, not only because their “home” has been de-stroyed, but also because the war-time patterns of displacement – now commonly seen as

285 Shevstova (1992); Loescher (1992).286 Korcelli (1992); Brubacker (1992); Voutira (1991).287 Vincent (1989); Dacyl (1990); Kokkinos (1991).


part of “ethnic cleansing” – have redefined the social space beyond anyone’s recognition.This is dramatically portrayed by anthropologist Tone Bringa in her Disappearing Worldseries documentary film, “We Are All Neighbours” and her monograph “Being Muslim,the Bosnian Way”.288 Part of the tragedy of the experience of conflict and its impact onpost-war Bosnia is symbolised by one of the actors, Mehmet, an internally displaced Mus-lim who holds in his hand the key to a house that is no longer there and cannot be re-constructed.289 A number of these expelled populations and those who fled their places oforigin had supra-national identities and lived in multi-ethnic environments. As a result ofthe conflict and multiple displacements, these people are now seen and view themselvesas Serbs, Croats or Bosniacs (Bosnian Muslims). As such, they are faced with the pre-dicament of being unable to return to their antecedent areas of origin which are oftenfound under enemy control in territories that have become ethnically divided andfraught with inter-communal violence.290

Thus, despite the rhetoric of the repatriation plans to return refugees back on thebasis of the absorption capacity of the new state of Bosnia-Herzegovina, there is agreementamong analysts that this would be counter-productive. Part of the difficulty in this caserelates to the meaning of absorption capacity and the unit of reference which, followingthe international norm, requires accepting the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a sin-gle state. As such, the absorption capacity would be 100 per cent, however, in reality thecurrent situation shows that we have a state divided by three authorities on the level ofmunicipalities (Bosniac, Croat, Serb) and two on the level of central government author-ity. Thus, the absorption capacity on the ground also has to be divided by three. The en-tire territory of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina covers 51,197 square kilometres. Ac-cording to the current division, the Federal territory encompasses 51% of the area bycomparison to the 49% of the Serbian territory. One of the most serious problems facingboth returnees and stayees in the region is the fact that unless “ethnic cleansing” is re-versed through the return of expelled populations, the Serbian territory will becomeeven more sparsely populated and prone to uneven development and regional tensions.The same holds for the region of the Federation because although the “absorption ca-pacity” of the pre-war territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina is significant, the post-war pictureof a divided territory segregated into an underpopulated and an overpopulated region,is economically, socially and culturally unsustainable. It would be difficult for both terri-tories to survive when for instance, iron deposits lie in the Serbian territory and themeans of processing iron are within the Federation, or when food production is underthe Serbian authority and the majority of the consumers are in the Federation.291

Although all the above three categories of repatriation are predicated on the puta-tive right to “belong” to one’s “homeland”, it is the third category that has become themost controversial both as a policy decision within the refugee regime and in the courseof its implementation in particular post conflict situations. Thus, unlike the case of vol-untary return among labour migrants and historical Diasporas that are seen in principle

288 Tone Bringa (1995).289 Bringa (1995), p. xix.290 Sorabji (1993).291 Mitiljeviæ (1996).


as assets to the national economies, the case of refugees going home involves ab initio theview that refugees are “a problem” addressed as such by aid agencies and host govern-ments in innumerable memoranda. This view leads to a monolithic construction of“voluntary repatriation” as a solution to the crisis that generated refugees in the firstplace. Furthermore, it entails a deceptive oversimplification of the historical complexities.As Ranger observes with respect to Africa, one can identify these distinct categories ofreturnees: There are

“labour migrant returnees who became refugees in the crisis of return; returning displaced per-sons; returning dispersed persons; exploited villagers who are refugees in situ and whose desiredreturn is to the restoration of ‘normality’ and constantly oscillating refugees/returnees”.292

None of these categories of “repatriates” can readily be accommodated into the postconflict idea of return to normality and “home”.

We have already noted some of the extreme cases where a repatriation was thecatalyst for violence and large scale conflict. Less dramatic types of intra-group conflictmay be sparked by the return of refugees. For example, in Uganda in 1986, those whohad never crossed a border referred to themselves as “stayees” and resented the repatri-ates (who had been driven home by the war in southern Sudan) whom they believed had“enjoyed” the privileges of exile while they had remained to “starve and dodge the bul-lets”. In different ways, refugee repatriation becomes destabilising to their country oforigin.

Even in the more clear cases of the voluntary return of refugees, the challenge ofbelonging remains part of the returnees

“ability to re-integrate into a new society rather than the one left. Many Chilean and South Af-rican refugees who returned to their homelands have found it impossible to settle and have re-turned to their former places of exile”.293

Similar paradoxes may be identified by looking at the trajectories of the privileged ethnicreturnees from eastern Europe to their historical homelands. The Soviet Jews, Germans,and Greeks are still labelled by their new co-nationals as “Russians” and many find solacein regrouping themselves with other Russian speakers, whatever their ethnicity, andthereby redefining the meaning of home independently of their putative homeland.

D. Ethics in Humanitarian Interventions

In different disciplines, ethics refers to the standards of professionalism which includeboth normative principles and sanctions for their violations. With respect to the latter,lawyers know that using illegally acquired evidence is inadmissible. For a lawyer is aboveall an officer of the court and the interest of the client is subsumed in this sense underthe judicial interest. Medical ethics prescribe that the degree to which a patient’s trustmay be compromised will lead to a malpractice suit. In both professions sexual relations

292 Ranger (1994), p. 286.293 Magodina (1995).


with the clients are deemed unethical and therefore by definition as incompatible withlegal and medical professional integrity. Yet, at the same time in both professions the re-definition of professional norms is continuously evolving. Issues such as: ought abortionbe legal? Is it ever morally right? Ought physicians have the right to take the lives ofpeople with terminal cancer who are in extreme pain? Ought the supply of legal aid andmedical care be totally surrendered to the demands of a free market economy? Suchquestions address problems of the relationship of the legal and the medical practices tothe goods of preserving human life, dignity and justice and as such they form part of thecontemporary moral debates on the normative principles of these professions.

In anthropology, different professional associations have codified the principles ofethnographic fieldwork and the mutual set of obligations anthropologists have towardsthe people they study and the members of their profession. Professionalism in anthro-pology prescribes both principles of scientific integrity and research conduct. Because ofanthropology’s traditional orientation toward “other cultures” and the use of participa-tory methods that necessitate the personal involvement of the investigator with the livesof the people under study, ethical considerations are paramount. Codes of ethics of an-thropological research therefore prescribe that the researchers communicate their datawith their subjects and respect the confidentiality and integrity of informants, as well asscientific criteria of reliability and objectivity while writing up their research.294 Such cri-teria are continuously under consideration and the introduction of new areas of anthro-pological research such as applied anthropology and advocacy research have given rise tofurther refinement and clarification of these principles.

I. The Right To Intervene

So what about the ethics of intervention in humanitarian emergencies? Does the fact thatpeople intervene to assist those in need legitimise any means to achieve the desired ends,which in the case of humanitarianism, is ultimately based on the motivation to “savelives” that are at risk? Does saving lives legitimise the use of “officially” clandestine op-erations in Afghanistan or El Salvador, where as Bernard Kouchner notes volunteer doc-tors work in “secrecy”, “without passports and visas in an effort to alleviate the on-going suffer-ing of these people”?295 As noted in Chapter 1, the moral impulse to act in order to alleviatesuffering is found in most philosophical and religious traditions. However, it is not clearhow this common moral impulse is then developed into ethical principles that wouldprovide guidelines for action in ways that would be compatible with the universal scopeinternational humanitarian action aspires to. Furthermore, even if such uncontestedmoral guidelines were to be found, the issues of how these guidelines are to be inter-preted and justified in different humanitarian contexts would remain open to dispute.

The heart of the matter for most humanitarian workers is that although they all feelthat there is a moral pressure based on common indignation and human solidarity toprotect the victims’ right not to die, they also are not certain if there is a corresponding

294 E. g. Spradley (1975); Fluehr/Loban (eds.) (1994); Homan (1991).295 Kouchner (1989), p. 56.


obligation that would allow them to do so, legitimately. Thus, despite the medically in-spired humanitarian rhetoric promoted by the work of Doctors Without Borders andDoctors of the World concerning the “right to intervene” (droit d’ingérence), often usedinterchangeably with the “duty to intervene” to save lives, this right has no formal legalstanding apart from that embedded in the commitment and personal involvement of anindividual or an organisation’s mandate. In fact, as René Fox296 has noted, the non-sec-tarian humanitarian commitment professed by such organisations that defend the prin-ciple of “sans frontierisme” as an essential component of international humanitarian assis-tance and its modus operandi, runs counter to the basic principles of international law thatis predicated on the sovereignty of states. Namely, if states are and must be free to de-termine their own destiny within their territorial boundaries then the idea of providingassistance irrespective of national-state borders becomes a serious challenge, if not athreat to the authority of states.

What is the right to intervene based on and how can it be legitimised? Evidently, itcannot be legitimised on the grounds of international law per se since, despite the contri-bution of international human rights law in favour of individuals, international lawregulates state behaviour and therefore effectively places the priorities and interests ofstates over and above those of populations whose interests often stand in opposition tothem. In terms of international law and the binding obligations among states acceptingits norms, the UN Security Council can be an arbiter of decisions to intervene. These arenormally legitimised on the grounds that certain large scale violations of human rightsconstitute “a threat to peace and security” for the world. For instance, the decision to en-gage in military intervention in Northern Iraq was taken on these grounds and the textof the resolution was couched in humanitarian terms297 which was used to legitimise themilitary intervention in the interest of oppressed populations.

More recently, in its aspirational sense, the “right to interfere in spite of frontiersand in spite of states if suffering persons need aid” has been incorporated in a number ofresolutions passed by the General Assembly of the United Nations that are largely in-spired by a “new humanitarian order” based on the recognition that there is a necessityfor free access to victims of large scale emergencies including civil wars, and support thecreation of corridors of emergency to enable aid to be transported in situ in such cases.298

Yet, there is no binding obligation entailed by such recommendations and to date theagency justifications provided for interventions in specific cases and in particular waysare either aspirational in the sense of promoting humanitarianism as a principle or, ulti-mately based on political and economic grounds.

II. The Context of Humanitarian Interventions

The issue of what constitutes ethical behaviour of humanitarian actors in emergencieshas recently come under scrutiny given the proliferation of interventions in increasingly 296 Fox (1995).297 Resolution 688.298 Resolution 43/131 of the General Assembly of the United Nations (8/12/1988); Resolution 45/100

(14/12/1990).


complex and violent environments that challenge the established criteria of humanitari-anism (e. g. universality, neutrality, impartiality). Historically, there are a number of rea-sons that have led to these challenges. First, on the macro level there is a progressive ac-knowledgement that the manner in which the North is responding to protracted politicalcrises elsewhere involves a generalised pattern of “privatisation of aid” related to thewidespread incorporation of humanitarian aid into the fabric of political violence and theerosion of standards of justice and accountability particularly among donor states. In hisanalysis of the structure, rhetoric and practice of humanitarian assistance in complexemergencies, Duffield has argued that there is little change in the ideological biases thatunderpin the aid-agencies approaches to disasters and their victims, including certain ba-sic assumptions about racism manifested most recently as the belief in “the innate and non-rational quality of cultural difference is regarded as inevitably leading to inter-ethnic conflict”.299

In an increasingly privatised world, humanitarian interventions are taking placeoutside conventional state structures that have historically regulated humanitarian inter-ventions. In this context, the locus for defining the terms of international engagement inconflict situations is shifting: it is no longer sovereign governments which determine whogets what, when and how, but a multiplicity of international and non-governmentalagencies. Thus, the challenge of allocating collective responsibility for actions and theirconsequences is becoming increasingly complex. As a number of commentators show, therecognition of the “internationalisation of responsibility” has a deep impact in the waysemergency social welfare is conceptualised and defended.300 Secondly, relief programmesare slowly becoming recognised as a political resource for both donors and the warringparties and therefore cannot be neutral. This politicisation of humanitarian aid has farreaching consequences for our understanding of the meaning of humanitarianism. DeWaal provocatively argues that,

“human rights cannot be imposed, nor can they emerge from an apolitical or humanitarian spacein society. Human rights discourse emerges from politics, and it only makes sense in the contextof that primary confrontation between those in power and those who seek to constrain that poweror take it away; that is, the social contact [...]. Humanitarianism is a form of politics. Politiciansand States pursue their own interests, which do not necessarily involve finding political solutionsto crises in faraway countries [...]. Meanwhile, regardless of whatever political motives may havespurred the humanitarian Internationale into action, it exercises its own humanitarian mode ofpower [...]. It thus becomes enmeshed in local politics in the recipient country, and by its naturemakes the search for a true political solution more difficult. This is not to say thathumanitarianism has not redeeming features – relief can save people’s lives. But the cost of thehumanitarian enterprise, is the intractability of the problems it aspires to address”.301

Thirdly, the humanitarian activities themselves are becoming politicised or used as toolsin large-scale violent conflicts. As the Bosnia crisis has made evident, part of the strategyof humanitarian aid is its use to redress imbalances regarding the relative strengths ofwarring parties or to support a particular side and the resolution of conflict rather thanthe provision of impartially delivered assistance to save lives. Finally, as a number com-plex emergencies have shown (e. g. Kurdistan, Somalia, Rwanda), external intervention

299 Duffield (1996), p. 176.300 E. g. Keen (1994); Smillie (1995); De Waal (1996).301 De Waal (1996), pp. 203, 204.


also becomes justified under the guise of protecting humanitarian aid workers ratherthan protecting the victims of violence from human rights abuses.

III. Ethical Principles Underlying Humanitarian Interventions

It has been noted in Chapter 1, humanitarianism, as developed in Western Europe andNorth America over the past century, has become identified with actions that are per-ceived to be impartial, neutral and, by extension, independent from political, religious,or other extraneous biases. As Walker noted, the whole humanitarian enterprise emergedas a trade-off between Henry Dunant and Napoleon III.

“Dunant convinced Napoleon [the victor in the battle of Solferino] of the moral correctness ofrendering assistance to the wounded where they lay on the battlefield, regardless of nationality.Napoleon turned the good will of Dunant into an issue of rights and justice by allowing assis-tance to be delivered under the protection of an official proclamation. It is from this beginningthat the Hague and Geneva Conventions stem, and in parallel the legal framework for theLeague of Nations, and then the United Nations with all its resolutions and declarations onhumanitarian issues”.302

Thus, Napoleon was free to fight the wars while Dunant was allowed to help the victims.It should be clear that relief aid is not humanitarian per se. What can be humanitarian isthe method by which relief is distributed. The grounding principles have been codifiedin the regime of the Charter of the United Nations and subsequent which establishes theobligation of inter-national co-operation in solving problems of a humanitarian charac-ter, as impartiality, neutrality and independence.303 To these primary principles manyhumanitarian agencies have added “competence”, “bearing witness” and “consent of thevictims”.304 Each one of these added principles has been introduced in recent years by thework of medical workers involved in humanitarian interventions. Bearing witness is aprinciple invented by the people known as the French Doctors during the war in Biafraat the end of the 1960s which entails a commitment to inform the international public ofhuman rights abuses in crisis situations. It is noteworthy that, as far as we know, with theexception of two European priests representing the Jesuit Refugee Service, not one NGOworker or their organisations raised a word of protest even though, reportedly, theywere witnesses to grenades, tear gas, gun fire and low flying planes which were used todrive refugees back to Rwanda in December 1996.305

In such situations humanitarian agencies are confronted with serious dilemmasover honouring the principle of truth telling and reporting of human rights abuses ver-sus “doing their work”. One such dramatic case was the behaviour of two humanitarianagencies Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and Save the Children Fund (SCF). During theEthiopian famine in the mid-1980s which also involved a largely coercive programme ofdepopulation and resettlement from famine prone regions of the North to the lesspopulated regions of the South, both agencies had relief programmes in the region. The 302 Walker (1996).303 Cf. Beyani (1996).304 Lebas (1996).305 Amnesty International (1997).


situation involved systematic human rights abuses including deaths, physical injury, ill-health, and family separation among displaced populations who were rounded up in the“famine camp” in Koren. Dividing labour, MSF ran adult health and feeding pro-grammes and SCF managed child health, child feeding, and family ration distribution tothe surrounding villages. In late 1985, MSF was one of the first witnesses to incidents offorced resettlement from Koren involving the death of people dependent upon thecamps’ humanitarian aid. This organisation decided to speak out about the human rightsabuses and gave statements to the international media. Despite warnings from theEthiopian government, such reports continued until MSF was expelled from Ethiopiaforced to abandon various emergency health programmes throughout the country intwenty-four hours. SCF remained in Koren – having not gone public – and took overmost of the responsibilities for MSF’s health programmes with the Ethiopian Ministry ofHealth. Whether or not an agency is to obey the principle of “bearing witness” or, as theparticular case shows, continue its operation in a given emergency may appear as an ex-treme situation. However, such trade-offs are not uncommon. As Tomasevsky has put it,“the silence of relief agencies about human rights violations unavoidably witnessed is explained as acondition of providing material assistance to the needy population”.306 Lawyers like Tomasevskyand human rights advocacy groups like African Rights, consider such a trade-off largelyimmoral. African Rights have chastised the silence of NGOs in Ethiopia and have con-demned the refusal to expose human rights abuses by the Ethiopian government and itsmanipulation of relief supplies for strategic military purposes.307 There is little doubt thatbearing witness, as the Ethiopian case shows, is not a principle entailing a choice betweentwo wrongs; instead, it involves a tough choice between two goods. Each NGO took adifferent course of action arguing that both were right. The choice was between doinggood by continuing to give aid or doing good by exposing human rights abuses. Doinggood therefore is an ambiguous concept, open to interpretation and often leading tomutually exclusive courses of action.

Competence is another principle which is difficult to apply since there are no defi-nitions, models, or even uncontested examples of what being a “competent” humanitar-ian would be, particularly those who bring no transferable skills or expertise. As a princi-ple, the requirement for competence in humanitarian assistance implies the existence ofan independent and autonomous system of evaluation, coupled with an effective capacityof judgement and assessment on the part of the beneficiaries of aid. But in emergencyinterventions this is rarely the case.308

The principle, the consent of the victim, is even more problematic in both inter-pretation and implementation. For instance, as a number of Rwandese officials declaredduring the 1996 Dublin Conference on Ethics in Humanitarian Emergencies, there wasno effort to gain the consent among the orphans

“that were paraded for days in fora run by psychosocial intervention experts and forced to repeattheir traumatic experiences from the genocide before being returned back to the orphanages”

306 Tomasevsky (1994).307 African Rights (1994), p. 11.308 Harding (1995), p. 576.


with no consideration for the possible harm done during those sessions. Another sourceof apprehension concerning this criterion of consent relates to the standard humanitar-ian practice that imposes aid on, rather than negotiates aid with, the victims. There is awidespread acceptance of certain priorities that are determined by donors and policymakers which have little resonance with the beneficiaries of humanitarian assistance. Oneof the most recent of such “fashions” is that of psycho-social interventions that may leadto unwarranted and culturally inappropriate types of interference such as the introduc-tion of psychoanalytic methods among disaster victims. In one reported case, the imposi-tion of this method of intervention which was to encourage the survivors to talk abouttheir experiences of the murders of their kin was in contradiction with the culture whereeven the mention of a dead person’s name entails being bewitched.

IV. The Ethical Limits of Social Engineering

Not everyone involved in humanitarian work is comfortable with the fact that they areinvolved in social engineering. Some social scientists have also shied away from the con-cept, even when the primary motivation for their research is to use knowledge to influ-ence society.

There is perhaps no more dramatic context in which the social structures of popu-lations have been more destabilised than crises which involve external assistance. Thoseintervening have an impact on the structure of social relations, the consequences ofwhich are not easily predictable. At the root of policy failure is the fact that many inter-ventions are designed by people who do not sufficiently understand the context in whichthey are working or lack an understanding and appreciation of the people with whomthey work, to design practices in concert with them that will achieve the outcomes in-tended. As most of the emerging literature on reconstructing war-torn societies empha-sises, it is not only our goals which must be open to ethical scrutiny, but the means bywhich we seek to achieve them.309

All the new buzz words in relief work and development-orientated humanitarianassistance are implicitly “engineering” terms, such as training, skills-training, and capac-ity-building. Such terminology is apparently neutral and value-free. It does not broachthe underlying assumptions which are embedded in such interventions. For instance, therecent emphasis on capacity-building as aiming to promote democratic processes is itselfvalue infested. It presupposes a model of western liberal democracy as the most appro-priate form of governance. Therefore, far from being neutral, it does, in practice, un-dermine local institutions which may have been no less “democratic” in terms of the dis-tribution of power within a community than those that are being imposed.

In the previous chapter,310 the main considerations concerning the logic and limitsof aid interventions were identified particularly with respect to sanitation and the use oftraditional institutions such as sorcery, witchcraft and traditional healing. There, it wasargued that one of the determinant factors in the attempts to interfere with culture and

309 E. g. UNRISD (1994); Kumar (1997).310 See Chapter 4 A. X.


affect change is both the attitude of aid-workers and the beneficiary population as well asthe degree of information exchange between them.

Evidently all types of intervention involve some degree of social engineering. Thelimits of intervention necessarily require an analysis of the basic assumptions on whichhumanitarian aid is grounded. In this respect it is important to distinguish between theideological position that informs an intervention, the language in which it is couched andits impact. For example, as Duffield observes, the ideology of pluralism and politicallycorrect multi-cultural interventions (community projects, support groups, racism aware-ness training and so on) in pursuit of pluralism by aid workers, “run the risk of encouragingthat which they would aim to be against: greater fragmentation and social division”.311 The factthat policy makers and aid workers are not always willing or able to examine the presup-positions of their activities, trace the implications of their beliefs and become aware of theconsequences of their actions, does not however make them any less responsible for theimpact of their interventions.

V. Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Assistance

In moral philosophy, ethics is about the good life, what it means to live well, and how thisis to be achieved. Thomas Nagel notes that

“the central problem of ethics is how the lives, interests, and welfare of others make claims on usand how these claims [...] are to be reconciled with the aim of living our own lives” 312

Historically, conceptions about the good life change over time and moral concepts evolveas social life changes precisely because conceptions of right/wrong, good/evil are embed-ded in social life. Thus, within the western tradition, MacIntyre and others have persua-sively argued that one can distinguish two broad moral traditions: the moral conceptionsof the pre-modern era, that are characterised by a diversity of views located within ashared moral universe, and the complete fragmentation of moral discourse characteristicof the liberal individualism of modernity.313 Mutatis mutandis one of the key ways anthro-pologists use to identify and map differences in the cultures and societies they study is byidentifying the differences in the moral concepts used and the manners by which peopleallocate praise and blame in variable contexts. However different the definitions may beof what constitutes the good life over the centuries and across the globe, ethical issuesremain relevant in view of the fragility of goodness. This fragility derives from the factthat despite peoples’ desire to live as they wish, think, and the way they believe theyshould live, contingently in fact, they cannot.

Tragic dilemmas capture the essence of this fragility/contingency and in this respectthey have always served as instruments of moral education and learning as well as uniquetools used among philosophers and psychologists for probing into individual moralorientations.314 Classical moral dilemmas are found in the corpus of Western literature. 311 Duffield (1996), p. 184.312 Thomas Nagel (1986), p. 64.313 MacIntyre (1967; 1981); Norman (1995).314 E. g. Kohlberg (1981; 1984); Gilligan (1982; 1988).


For instance, in one of the most famous ancient Greek tragedies, Aeschylus, Agamemnon isconfronted with the dilemma of either sacrificing his own daughter or being a goodking/leader and leading the Greek troops against the Trojans to win the war. Whatmakes Agamemnon’s dilemma a tragic one is that each one of the norms or rules of ap-propriate behaviour to love your country and to love your daughter are true and valid;both the hero and the audience have to recognise the authority of both claims. Hegelspoke of tragedy as “the conflict of right with right”; yet, from the standpoint of anyprotagonist confronted with a dilemma, what makes the situation tragic is the choicebetween wrong and wrong. In an ideal universe the two principles need not and shouldnot be in conflict. However, contingently, they are incompatible because each entailssome kind of sacrifice. It is the urgency to act at the face of contingency in an imperfectworld that generates ethical dilemmas.

VI. Conflicts of Principles

Humanitarian workers can never be adequately prepared to react morally to some of thesituations which they inevitably face. It is often the case that humanitarian workers areconfronted with dilemmas that arise out of the dissonance between the principles whichlegitimise their interventions simply identified as “saving lives at all costs” with the prin-ciples imposed by those who stand between them and those whose lives need saving. Forinstance, in Afghanistan, members of the Taliban prevented organisations from operat-ing in territories they controlled if assistance was not exclusively targeted to their ownfighting members and explicitly forbade the delivery of humanitarian assistance towomen victims of the conflict. Most NGOs were faced with the dilemma of compromisingthe principles mandated by their organisations that required assistance to be given im-partially to civilian populations or risk lives that could be saved. The term “operationalneutrality” introduced by many organisations to accommodate the decision to interveneunder the particular conditions is significant both because it illustrates how norms be-come redefined in practice and because it points ultimately to the characteristically mod-ern temptation of invoking the utilitarian principle as the justification for intervention.Utilitarianism is a position that seeks to provide a criterion for judging between rival andconflicting goods on the basis of maximising utility which is meant to be neutrally de-fined. However, in endorsing this position, an agency places the utility of saving a greaternumber of lives over and above the principle of doing so impartially thereby waving thenorms of its own mandate. In this context, the concept of utility can no more be neutralbecause it has been effectively re-defined in terms of maximising lives irrespective of howthis is to be done and at what cost.

Every humanitarian worker is likely to face the difficult choice of allocating scarceresources. Who gets the blankets when there are only 500 and the population in need ofthem numbers 5,000? How are scarce supplies of water divided and equal distributionguaranteed when there is no way to control how much those first in the queue take awayfrom the tap. WHO says that minimal water requirements are 20 litres per person perday. In Goma and Benaco, OXFAM workers confided how thankful they were when theycould pump the equivalent of 4 litres per person per day, but they had no way of


checking on how much each person drew from the tap. These comforting statistics weresimply derived from their ability to measure how much water was pumped divided bythe number of throats that required parching. The way such “economic” constraints wereresolved during the 1985 famine in the Sudan was to make a rule that only those whocould make it to the distribution points would receive food; only those well enough toreach the doctor’s tents were treated.

Such “unethical” responses to dire situations are normally the result of refusing toaddress the emerging dilemmas as ethical ones. Thus, the normative principles involvedare explained away in favour of expediency, which in most emergency situations has be-come an end in itself. Furthermore, the excessive preoccupation with the operationalisa-tion and management of humanitarian aid in crises often turn the concern for ethicalprinciples into a luxury aid workers in the field cannot afford. The problem with thismisguided rigour in favour of a humanitarian professionalism is that it involves an in-herently contradictory position which is based on the one hand on an “agent-centred”rather than a “consequence-centred” value such as altruism which aims to producebeneficial consequences for someone at the risk of one’s own life and hence admirable,and on the other, a practice that focuses on personal efficiency and self-interest in waysthat undermine the original motivational structure of altruism to the extent that it in-volves using the altruistic act as a means to the realisation of personal values such as publicrecognition and improved professional status. Although in principle self interest is notformally incompatible with altruistic behaviour, in the case where the former gets in theway of a primary focus on the plight of the other, then self-interest and altruism are in-compatible.315

The experiences in Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia and Chechnya and more recently inRwanda, have found humanitarian organisations faced with fundamental conflicts of in-terests, identified as the dilemma: “whom to protect?” Is it to be the humanitarian aidworkers who are being kidnapped, threatened and killed or the local populations in needof sanctuary? Any humanitarian organisation’s mandate involves a commitment of itsloyalties to the beneficiaries of assistance they provide; this is what ultimately constitutesits raison d’être. On the other hand, the first commitment of any organisation lies with itsstaff. One way out of this quagmire, which some humanitarian organisations are nowadopting, is to “hand-over” to local staff. For example, one European NGO working inAfrica, only sends its African doctors to work in the dangerous war-ridden SouthernSudan, while its expatriate staff remains in the relative safety of Uganda. These types ofsolutions point to the limits of facile humanitarianism that allows for endangering“other” lives rather than those seen more immediately as part of one’s “own”.316

Such ways of resolving dilemmas are particularly telling of where the agents’ pri-orities ultimately lie, but these do not make humanitarian agencies any less responsiblefor either setting the particular priorities or for not foreseeing the consequences of theiractions.

One source of our difficulties in assessing the relative worth of humanitarian activi-ties relates to the problem of assigning moral responsibility. In the field of humanitarian

315 Cf. Blum (1994), p. 124-143.316 Cf. Fox (1995).


assistance, it is often seen as self-evident that a moral impulse or “good intentions” aresufficient to legitimise interventions, which as already noted, cannot be legitimised onindependent grounds (morally or legally). When the motivation for an action is taken tobe the central criterion of its moral worth, the problem of whether that criterion is suffi-cient becomes paramount. It makes good sense but it would be misleading to considercompassion and its kindred emotions, e. g. pity and sympathy which are “altruistic”emotions in the sense of requiring us to focus our attention on the world and those whosuffer in it, are in themselves unable to legitimise humanitarian action. This is not somuch because there is anything wrong with “do-gooders” and people who are motivatedby noble spirit to help the world in distress. The problem is that compassion by itself isoften ill-informed, even stupid, vaguely directed and self-serving and egocentric (thoughpretending to be altruistic and other-serving). Furthermore, though laudable as an emo-tion and a character trait, compassion often prompts precipitous action, may make a se-rious situation even worse and, as Larry Blum points out, may also hurt its recipients byconcentrating too much on their plight.317 Indeed, there are many examples where com-passion is grounded on a superficial understanding of a situation of plight and thereforeas a result has lead to intruding where one is not welcomed, intervene where one is notcompetent, and interfere where one is not wanted.

Such considerations of the limitations of acting out of a generous momentum of theheart are not meant to undermine the relevance of compassion as a virtue or the overallvalue of compassionate actions in the humanitarian field. The point to note is that inprinciple, compassion without intelligence is not a virtue and in practice, intelligencewithout compassion would not be an effective means of saving lives. Giving, for instance,water to fatally injured persons while succumbing to their pleas is not an act of compas-sion since it would lead to certain death.

On the other side of assessing the moral worth of actions in terms of their motiva-tions stands the ethical tradition which focuses on the outcomes of actions, both intendedand unintended ones and assesses worth on the basis of those consequences. The conse-quences of one’s action are notoriously difficult to know. For example, in the late 1980s,refugees in Malawi were the victims of the largest epidemic of pellagra in the world(18,000 victims were counted) in fifty years. The cause was that they were forced to sub-sist on the rations provided by the World Food Programme (WFP). The groundnuts, theonly source of niacin available to them, were withdrawn because of shortages outsideSouth Africa. At the time, there was an embargo and the UN did not buy from South Af-rica. When the epidemic became publicised, a church-based NGO broke the embargoand purchased groundnuts. The WFP representative admitted that he did not know therefugees needed the groundnuts to survive, he only thought that “they liked eatingthem”, probably like most people like eating chocolate. This situation is not dissimilar tothe situation of the driver who kills a child under the influence of alcohol. While not in-tending to kill the child, drivers are held no less responsible for their actions becausethey are expected to know the risk of driving while drunk. Though drunken driving ismore universal, there is also a moral obligation for those involved in humanitarian aid to

317 Blum (1980).


know in order to foresee the unintended consequences of their actions, particularly sincetheir knowledge/ignorance is liable to risk a much greater number of lives.

The requirement of knowledge and keeping informed is not the criterion of expertknowledge. In the case of humanitarian workers, one assumes minimal knowledge of thefacts and responsibility for using them. For example, on several occasions during 1996,NGO policy makers questioned the presence of their relief populations in Burundi. Theyfelt that by continuing to provide relief, they were feeding the ever increasing pattern ofviolence and counter-violence in that country. In short, humanitarian aid was sustainingthat violent conflict. Similar considerations were voiced in the 1980s in Ethiopia and inthe 1990s Somalia and Bosnia. The main arguments for withdrawing humanitarian aidinvolves making a moral case for disengagement. This withdrawal is supported on thebasis of an estimate that aid does more harm than good. The possibility of establishingsuch an estimate depends on maintaining continuous information flow and establishingthe relative merits of “staying or going”.

Knowing the consequences of one’s actions either way is a difficult task; it involvesmaking sure that the violence of “non-intervention” and that the violence of just forcewould be less than the present violence caused by the exploitation of humanitarian aid.Nevertheless, the point remains that one cannot afford to take such decisions lightly andact either in ignorance or out of ignorance precisely because moral responsibility is as-signed not only to past actions but also to actions being “forward looking” and anticipa-tory. Parfit calls this particular dimension of moral reasoning “rational altruism” in thesense that it focuses both on individual and collective responsibility for perceiving andanticipating the effects of our actions.318

Common examples of mistakes in calculating harm in what Parfit calls the “moralmathematics” involve both those that arise from the belief that imperceptible effects ofour actions on others cannot be morally significant and those that arise from the beliefthat trivial effects may be morally ignored. In the first case, one can imagine the casewhere the pain inflicted by each one in a group of torturers on a set of individuals makesno one perceptibly worse off. This is so, because the act of torture per se is wrong even ifthe none of the tortured could notice any of these effects of the individual act; on thelevel of consequences, each of our actions may be very wrong because “together they makepeople much worse off”.319 The second case, entitled, the Fisherman’s dilemma, is equally seri-ous because ignorance of each individual’s actions entails a collective harm.

“There are many fishermen who earn their living by fishing separately in some lake. If each fish-erman does not restrict his catch, he will catch within the next few seasons more fish. But he willthereby lower the total catch by a much larger number. Since there are many fishermen, if eachdoes not restrict his catch, he will only trivially effect the number caught by each of the others.The fishermen believe that such trivial effects can be morally ignored. Because they believe this,because they never do what they believe to be wrong, they do not restrict their catches. Eachthereby increases his own catch, but causes a much greater lowering in the total catch. Becausethey all act in this way, the result is a disaster. After a few seasons, all catch very many fewerfish. They cannot feed themselves or their children”.320

318 Parfit (1984).319 Parfit (1984), p. 83.320 Parfit (1984), p. 84.


Evidently, if the fisherman knew the consequences of their actions and had shownenough concern for each other’s actions the disaster would have been avoided. Morally,there are two ways of explaining why the fishermen’s actions are wrong. In the case ofindividual responsibility, each fisherman knows that if he does not restrict his catch he willcatch more fish in the short term but he will reduce the total catch by a much largernumber. Therefore for a small gain, he imposes on himself and on others a greater totalloss. Thus, such actions are deemed wrong.

Alternatively, if one focuses on the collective responsibility and what fishermen do to-gether, then it is clear that each fisherman knows that if he and all others do not restricttheir catches they will together impose on themselves a greater loss overall. This type ofreasoning is particularly relevant in the case of assigning responsibility and moral worthin cases of humanitarian interventions because often part of the self deception involvedin situations of aiding disaster victims is that we tend to deliberate on the basis of thequestion “will my act harm other people?” Yet, as the above example shows even if theanswer is “No”, still it is possible for an act to be wrong because of its effects when viewednot as an individual but as collective action that may have either beneficial or harmfulconsequences. The relevant question for assigning responsibility then is whether anyparticular act belongs to a set of activities that collectively may harm others to a muchgreater degree than any action considered on its own. In this context it becomes evidentthat it is both morally preferable and socially more responsible to assign responsibilityand accountability for our actions in terms of the risks and effects the act would have ifdone collectively rather than individually. To assume this stand and engage in this prac-tice involves a redefinition of altruism from a psychologically based virtue to a rationallyjustifiable view adopted both on the basis of its moral significance and its beneficial con-sequences.

This redefinition of altruism as a rational feeling is important as it allows for a morecomprehensive and morally significant argument in favour of humanitarian interven-tions in that it points to the relevance of holding people responsible for engaging in ac-tivities that are other-regarding rather than self-regarding; its affective nature does notdetract from this fundamental fact.

VII. Humanitarianism and the Morality of Care

The proceeding sections have focused on the humanitarian principles that guide aid in-terventions. One of the common features confronting aid workers is the recognition thatthe problem with humanitarian aid is that there is an ever increasing number of people“willing to help”, a proliferation of new humanitarian agencies and a de facto duplicationof effort and activities on the ground. Recent literature and numerous field reports la-ment the fact that there is a lack of co-ordination which undermines the effectiveness ofany humanitarian aid operation.321 At the core of all debates on agency co-ordination liesthe recognition that there is widespread competition among the different humanitarianactors. While competition may be the fuel of free enterprise and therefore important in

321 E. g. ODA Southern Africa evaluation (1995); Rwanda evaluation (1996).


the business dimension of the humanitarian profession, it is important to argue that evenin business and among contemporary management research, competition is vied as nei-ther a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a company’s growth. Within a businessethics approach, co-operation rather than competition remain the fuel and basic motiva-tion for an efficient and effective organisation.

In recent years, there is progressive recognition that there is no such thing as “freeand simple” market forces; within the market there is a need for trust to improve thedistribution of goods and services. In a similar vein, in management and business ethics,it has been argued that co-operation and integrity, caring and compassion are the mainvirtues of the business profession and the main materials of success for any organisation.It should be argued with even greater emphasis that among humanitarian aid agencies,such virtues must also be promoted. In this sense, not only in the business world, butmuch more so in the humanitarian world, “ethics and excellence, community and integ-rity” must be seen as “not mere means to efficiency and effectiveness. They are the ends withoutwhich the corporation will have lost its soul”.322

322 Solomon (1992), p. 266.


CHAPTER 6CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSIONCONCLUSION

It is wrong to expect that emergency aid may restore the previous situation. Even in themost favourable cases, when the aid has been an appropriate answer to short term needs,it has different impacts on the long term situation and it is very difficult to evaluate itsimpact on future development, even more so to take account of it when defining policies.

Both crisis and aid can create post-traumatic reactions. Questions such as rehabili-tation or resettlement become clearer after the emergency response to disaster, but cul-tural contact, destructuration of the imaginary will create drastic long-lasting effects onthe social bonds of the community. These effects can be either positive (nation-buildingfor example) or negative (polarisation of the society, loss of cultural references...). Therewill be a need for the reconstruction of social logics and frameworks of communication.The crisis itself will constitute an important part of the population’s history.

The previous chapters have introduced an anthropological perspective in under-standing interventions in emergency situations which prompt international humanitarianassistance. They have emphasised the varieties of cultural responses to such crises andthe need for an approach to aid which acknowledges the complexities of the social worldof the beneficiaries. In this sense, while recognising that few aid workers will themselvesbe anthropologists, we have aimed to provide readers with some of the tools to approachother cultures and have challenged the notion of the universality of Western culture. Theknowledge and practice of anthropology is an uncontestable advantage for professionals.A medical doctor for example, no matter which society he is working in, will need toobserve and recognise clinical signs in the discourse of his patient. If he is able to decodethe demand of the patient according to his own cultural background, he will be able toimprove and enlarge the procedures of diagnosis and give a more appropriate answer topatient needs.

With respect to Western “aid cultures”, we have stressed the common misconcep-tion of the “powerless victims” by demonstrating the different responses and strategies ofsurvival. People mobilise past experiences and knowledge, they invent new means andthey actively capitalise on every opportunity proffered, even if it requires that they as-sume the role of a powerless victim. Aid does not only offer an opportunity but it createsits own conditions of success or failure. For example, as Steen’s research shows, Tamils re-sponded differently in different contexts and the important variable was the existence ofan official aid programme or the lack of it. In Denmark, where the reception programmewas designed to be comprehensive, Tamils “learned” to please the social workers by be-


having “like children”; in Britain, where only meagre welfare benefits were available,they mobilised informal means of meeting their needs by using ethnic networks as themajor resources to gain employment and housing and demonstrated such entrepreneu-rial initiative that Steen refers to them as “Thatcher boys”.323

We have also insisted on the re-conceptualisation of crises, disasters or hazards asprocesses rather than as events, implying momentary deviations of a normal order. Theseprocesses as such manifest different aspects of social and ecological malfunctioning whichhumanitarian assistance aims to mitigate by redressing losses, capacities and vulnerabili-ties. Our proposal has been to re-think aid, not as “care and maintenance” relief but asreconstruction of communities. This approach requires a different attitude towards aid.It involves the recognition that aid creates its own dynamics which propel social change.As such, policy makers and aid workers need to be attentive and accept the moral re-sponsibility for the consequences of their interventions. Some Asian scholars go evenfurther. They have started developing an alternative perspective on disasters and vul-nerability. This alternative looks at disasters and conflicts as unresolved problems of de-velopment and puts the emphasis on the understanding of the social causes and effects ofdisasters. Disasters and conflicts (as processes) are viewed as opportunities for socialtransformation and the mitigation of vulnerabilities.

Our discussion of traditional healing in Chapter 4 suggested a way of addressingthe limits of humanitarian interventions in the context of social change. The reconstruc-tion of the community depends on working in collaboration with the affected populationrather than in competition with indigenous systems of knowledge. Where there was alack of communication with the traditional healers, and no attempt was made to establisha common ground for debate, the effect of both types of health practices was divisive forthe community as a whole. On the other hand, as Hiegel’s and Eisenbruch’s work in SouthAsia has shown, it is only through collaboration that people can learn from each otherand address human suffering as a common concern. The articulation of a consensus inapproach between the affected population and the aid workers is thus a pre-condition forthe effective implementation of international aid. This leads us back to notions of culturalcontacts and homogenisation of cultures, and to the need of interpretation of perceptionslargely developed in Chapter 3.

In this respect, international aid agencies cannot afford to be short-sighted andremain uninformed with respect to the final ends of the communities they are called in toassist. The model of aid as reconstruction does not merely address the question of sur-vival but how to survive in a way which makes it possible to rebuild so as to reduce exist-ing and future vulnerabilities to calamity. Such considerations necessarily introduce thepolitical dimension contained in all types of visualising and building the means for abetter future. To accept this point illuminates another common misconception inherentin most aid programmes: that in times of crisis, people lose their ability to contemplatethe long-term ends and articulate visions of the “good life”. This is, in fact, wrong. As deWaal’s work in the Sudan has shown, people in a crisis are willing to sacrifice their shortterm relief in the interest of long-term reconstruction of their own way of life.324 Some

323 Steen, (1992).324 De Waal (1989).


other key issues of anthropology of humanitarian assistance have been developed inChapter 5: gender, repatriation and ethics. These arguments have shown the complexitywithin the context of humanitarian aid.

In our discussion concerning people’s deliberations as to whether to stay or to go asa response to a crisis, we have seen that such decisions are necessarily informed by anunderstanding of the meaning of “home” which includes more than a simple identifica-tion of a people with a particular territory to which they “naturally” belong. Long-termanthropological research in the Horn of Africa has brought such simple “sedentarisation”of identities, primarily inspired by the European political theory of nationalism, underscrutiny.325 For the “Uduk” or “the Blue Nile refugees”, a group of people whose collec-tive identity and group distinctiveness have developed in the course of repeated flights,dispersals and survival across the Sudan-Ethiopian border, “ethnic visibility” was themain strategy adopted to increase the possibility of receiving protection and aid. Theiroral history as documented by Wendy James326 shows that “retreat and careful acquies-cence” rather than a political history of the “heroic variety” have been the dominantthemes in their narratives about their past, and it is these themes that are currently beingmobilised in the Uduk attempts to meet the renewed challenges to their survival.327 Forthe Mursi, a group of herders and cultivators in south-western Ethiopia, displacementhas not only been an integral part of survival in the face of repeated challenges over thepast hundred years; it has been part of their collective understanding of their commonpast and their self ascription as “a group of people who are permanently ‘in search of a coolground’”.328 Yet, as Turton has pointed out, the unprecedented attack by the neighbouringNyangatom group, using automatic weapons, has challenged the traditional Mursi un-derstanding of political unity which included inter-group conflict as part of the order ofthings in the region. The possession of Kalashnikovs by both groups today has intro-duced new challenges to group extinction and to the Mursi search for a cool ground.329

What both of these cases show is that there is no simple way of “staying”, “going” or“returning” home as a solution to the problem of reconstructing communities in up-heaval. They also suggest that a group’s quest for survival does not refer to human lifesimpliciter, but to the particular ways of life that make them distinct and different from theothers. Safe-guarding the latter involves an anthropologically sensitive approach tointernational aid.

Though the understanding of culture is vital for the success of a humanitarian ac-tion, we have to be careful of the side-effects of excessive cultural relativism. Notions ofrespect of differences and those of a pluri-cultural society can provide an honourablediscourse, an alibi to an ideology of ghetto and exclusion. The best way to understand aculture is not to consider it as a “text” that archivists could file and rediscover from timeto time. The best way to respect a culture is to have a dialogue open with it. Thus the

325 Fukui/Markakis (1994).326 James (1979; 1988; 1994).327 James (1994).328 Turton (1993a), p. 9.329 Turton (1994).


contact between aid workers and the victim population can constitute the first step for-ward.


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CHAPTER 8CHAPTER 8 ANNEXESANNEXES

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