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What’s There to Mourn? Decolonial Reflections on (the End of) Liberal Humanitarianism

January 2019
Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 1(1):65-67

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This paper questions the extent to which the (arguable) end of the liberal humanitarian order is something to be mourned. Suggesting that current laments for the decline of humanitarianism reflect a Eurocentric worldview, it calls for a fundamental revision of the assumptions informing humanitarian scholarship. Decoloniality and anti-colonialism should be taken seriously so as to not reproduce the same by a different name after the end of the liberal order.

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Op-ed

What’s There to Mourn? Decolonial

Reflections on (the End of) Liberal

Humanitarianism

Olivia Umurerwa Rutazibwa

Senior Lecturer in European and International (Development) Studies, University of Portsmouth; olivia.rutazibwa@port.ac.uk

Abstract

This paper questions the extent to which the (arguable) end of the liberal humanitarian order is something to be

mourned. Suggesting that current laments for the decline of humanitarianism reflect a Eurocentric worldview,

it calls for a fundamental revision of the assumptions informing humanitarian scholarship. Decoloniality and anti-

colonialism should be taken seriously so as to not reproduce the same by a different name after the end of the

liberal order.

Keywords: aid, (de)coloniality, development, epistemology, Eurocentrism, liberal humanitarianism

All over the globe, fascism, racism and xenophobic

nationalism are resurfacing in what we once thought

of as ‘respectable’democracies. Following a particularly

bleak weekend at the end of October 2018 (the election

of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, reports of worsening famine

in Yemen, Israeli bombardment of Gaza and the murder

of eleven worshippers at a refugee-harbouring synagogue

in Pittsburgh), my colleague Dr Sara Salem of the London

School of Economics tweeted: ‘It’s difficult watching

political scientists scrambling to understand what’s

happening around the world today as if there haven’t

been people…theorising racism, nationalism, empire

and gender for a century and warning of exactly what

we see now.’

Moulded by Eurocentric knowledge systems, most of

us react to such developments with utter shock. We –an

imagined citizenry of respectable democracies –are

horrified and appalled at how far we have been dragged

from our liberal, more-or-less progressive self-image.

And we are invited to consider whether we might be

witnessing the end of the liberal humanitarian order.

Eurocentrism has taught us to see the potential end

of an era in every relative change in Western power.

Thinking about the role of humanitarianism today

requires that we don’t reproduce or unwittingly cel-

ebrate Western-led order by mourning the end of a

history thatnever actually existed. Given past and present

non-Western experiences of liberal order, we might ask:

what’s there to mourn?

My personal experiences of research and knowledge

production regarding humanitarianism have reinforced

in me an anti-colonial ethos –an intellectual opposition

to coloniality, even in the most ‘benign’of research and

policy areas, like international aid and humanitarianism.

Coloniality can be understood as the perpetuation of

colonial systems and technologies of domination into

the present. As discussed by scholars such as Quijano,

Grosfoguel, Dussel and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, the concept of

decoloniality encourages systemic and historical analysis

of the organised (re)production of injustice and mass

human suffering.

Formal colonialism (which arguably existed from 1492

to the 1960s) and transatlantic enslavement are but two

means through which Europeans made themselves the

protagonists of global history. Europeans then rewrote

their history, erasing the mass human suffering they

had caused, promoting instead tales of white European

innocence (Wekker, 2016), superiority and exceptionalism.

In its destruction of life, coloniality might be considered

anti-humanitarian, and yet it is characteristic of the liberal

humanitarianism whose end we now (prematurely) are

invited to mourn.

For over two decades, I have been struggling to

make sense of humanitarian interventions. The topic

was thrust upon me by events in Rwanda in 1994.

As a teenage, second-generation Rwandan immigrant

in Belgium, I was more personally affected than fellow

classmates by the hypocrisy of the international

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community: the preaching of respect for human rights,

followed by their omission during one hundred days of

mass murder before the eyes of the world. It felt like

there was more to the story than ‘good intentions versus

regrettable outcomes’.

Ever since, I have worried about the content and

purpose of (Western) humanitarian research agendas. I

became cognisant of the limited efforts to understand

how good intentions coexist with a system of inter-

national aid and intervention that seems harmful not

for the few but for the many. The silence of too many

researchers simultaneously masks and normalises the

harmful consequences of the aid system.

The scholarship and advice I was exposed to as my

early academic career developed prompted me to explore

the contradictory logic of international aid empirically:

I set out to make a database of the EU’s‘ethical’

behaviour (sanctions, funding, declarations and military

and humanitarian interventions, in relation to human

rights and democracy) between 1999 and 2007 towards

the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. I did not find any

patterns that could fully explain the EU’s action or

inaction: not a country’s size, nor its former colonial

masters, its natural resources, the Member State presid-

ing over the EU, nor even the African target country’s

human rights or humanitarian situation. After a stint at

the European Commission’s Directorate General of

External Affairs, I also came to reject simplistic accounts

about the absence of good intentions of the people

devising and implementing aid policies.

IrealisedthatI–and mainstream IR with me –had

operated on an assumption that external involvement in

the affairs of the ‘developing world’, if well intentioned

and effective, was desirable, indispensable even. Letting go

of this assumption opens up a world of possibilities for the

study of intervention. Doing so, I reconsidered the

conventional narrative that attributes the genocide against

the Tutsi in Rwanda to non-intervention, and came to see

that the (post)colonial run-up to genocide was a story of

too much intervention, even in the name of democracy.

During my doctoral research, I rediscovered the case

of Somaliland. A self-declared independent republic

in the north-western corner of Somalia, Somaliland

had declined US and UN interventions at the beginning

of the 1990s, apart from specific assistance (the clean-up

of landmines, for example). Instead, it took care of its

peace-building process internally and with its diaspora.

Over the years, even thoughthe international community

had found its way to the capital, Hargeisa, Somaliland had

arguably become the most stable democracy in the

region, even as it awaited international recognition of

its independence. It seemed to me, therefore, that the

most salient question was not how intervention could be

more effective and efficient, but whether it was necessary

in the first place. Was Western presence itself constitutive

of the problems facing ‘host’countries?

In her recent book Decolonising Intervention: Inter-

national Statebuilding in Mozambique (2017), Meera

Sabaratnam offers a compelling feminist decolonial

analysis of international statebuilding in the postcolony.

She foregrounds in-country critiques of foreign presence

via the concept of protagonismo; and she reflects on

disposability (of the ‘beneficiaries’), dependency (on the

interveners) and entitlement (of the interveners) as

constitutive of interventions and not just technical

glitches. If only I had had access to this work when I

began my inquiry into humanitarianism.

I now include Sabaratnam’s book as a core text for

final-year undergraduate students reading International

Development Studies and International Relations at

the University of Portsmouth. My module on ‘Rethink-

ing Aid and Development’explores the implications

of decolonial engagement with ideas and practices of

international solidarity. Students have said: ‘We should

be assigned readings like this from year one.’So I ask the

question here: ‘What if we were to start our humani-

tarian conversation with Sabaratnam?’

Of course, other works have questioned the value

of international intervention. But it is necessary to

reflect on the consequence of their marginality in the

canon. Privileged research agendas shape academic

career paths; and, increasingly, careers in ‘the real world’

shape academic disciplines. In this context, the margin-

alisation of critical decolonial perspectives in research

and in practice becomes mutually reinforcing.

A decolonial approach to humanitarianism challenges

Eurocentric analyses, foregrounding the experiences and

knowledges of the intended targets of humanitarian aid.

It poses questions not so much about the political will,

operational implementation and technical capabilities of

humanitarians as about the perpetuation of colonial

power relations in seemingly benevolent activities.

Decoloniality asks: where do we start the story? Who

has the microphone and who usually doesn’t? What do

we consider expertise? What are the implications of

Eurocentric bias in knowledge production? Do our

practices and knowledge systems contribute to the

struggle against colonial power relations?

As we reflect on the potential end of liberal order,

decoloniality questions what we mourn. With humani-

tarianism itself being redefined, decolonial perspectives

can contribute to an understanding of the relevance of

the good intentions of humanitarians to the aspirations

of their intended ‘beneficiaries’. They can provide an

antidote to the ‘colonial amnesia’of liberal humanitar-

ians and, therefore, provide a basis for the critical

interrogation of, and contribution to, humanitarian

endeavours in the service of life and dignity and not

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merely of survival. They can challenge not only the

ideological character of a given order but also the power

relations essential to it –something that the ‘local turn’in

humanitarian thinking has not done, despite discussion

of ‘shifting power’.

Without these perspectives informing research and

policy agendas, whatever comes next is unlikely to be

very different for those previously robbed of power and

voice. Mourning the end of an order responsible for mass

human suffering, while that suffering continues, then

becomes an indulgent act of self-delusion.

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