Humanitarian aid, colonialism and coloniality

Abstract

This chapter provides a succinct overview of the historical links between colonialism and humanitarian action and how coloniality—patterns of thought and knowing infused by colonial understandings of the world and the place of people within it—affects humanitarian activities in the present. To illustrate the common history of colonialism and humanitarianism, the chapter relies on a series of historical examples: settler colonial ‘protection’ of aboriginal populations, the ‘amelioration’ of slavery, British colonial anti-famine policies, the restricted original scope of protected persons in the 1951 Refugee Convention, and the evolution of international humanitarian law and its (non-)applicability to colonial liberation wars after 1949. It also discusses the complex relationship that humanitarian movements had to colonialism, drawing on the Aborigines’ Protection Society, missionary activities, and the 20th-century examples of Save the Children, the ICRC, and the British, French, and Algerian Red Cross/Crescent. The chapter then turns to how this history reverberates into the present. It draws on a growing literature that, using the lens of coloniality, analyzes inter alia: interactions between humanitarian personnel and ‘beneficiaries’ of humanitarian assistance; the internal workings of humanitarian organizations; the structurally unequal relationship between ‘local’ humanitarian organizations and their international counterparts; donors and INGOs definitions of ‘capacity’; differential public attention to national and international agencies during humanitarian crises; and the downplaying of humanitarian traditions of non-Western states. The chapter also touches upon how neutrality in humanitarian action has been reinterpreted from a de-colonial lens.