a white savior as visual iteration of the familiar humanitarian narrative. There was also a strong gendering to the ARC’s iconography: women – and more specifically nurses – served as allegorical figures that helped to frame the ARC as an agency of caring nurturers, or embodiments of ‘The Greatest Mother in the World’ ( Irwin, 2013 : 86). Among the first pictures the ARC reproduced of Hine’s were those of the American Red Cross Child Welfare Exhibition at St. Etienne, American soldiers resting and recuperating at ARC hospitals, and warehouses professionally
in foreign countries, including some considered to have an ideology hostile to the West, humanitarian organizations strategically turned to simple narratives in their visual appeals to depoliticize the context. Typically, the child constituted a figure that was ‘ideologically neutral’ ( Cosandey, 1998 : 5). Similarly, the focus on relief operations and benevolent workers helped to shape moral responsibilities of Western viewers to act in solidarity ‘based on need and not on identity’ ( Barnett, 2011 : 84). However, humanitarian motives were not free of sectarian
came to reject simplistic accounts about the absence of good intentions of the people devising and implementing aid policies. I realised that I – 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
being a humanitarian worker has never been so complex and dangerous. Many humanitarian narratives are fuelled by the fears of organisations: they see their working space reduced under the joint pressure of states increasingly asserting their sovereignty and of more frequent security incidents due to direct targeting, all happening in the context of widespread erosion of international norms ( Shaheen, 2016 ; Bouchet-Saulnier and Whittall, 2019 ; UN Security Council
contribution is to disrupt the often repeated – and far too uncritically consumed – trope of ‘progress’ in the aid sector. Historians’ suspicion of linear narratives, insistence on context and focus on process are all useful tools for challenging the idea that things will/can/could get better. Third, and relatedly, thinking historically also means asking new questions about experiences with which we are familiar. For historians, this involves us in what Catherine Hall calls
in a single document; rather, it emerges from the accounts of different partners involved in it ( IKEA, 2017 , 2019 ; JRF, 2018a , 2018b ). Read as one text, a cumulative narrative can be grasped. The problem is that in Jordan today the livelihoods of both Syrian refugees and Jordanian women are constructed as insecure, and the way out of these insecurities is to help both communities of poor women participate in the
women’s tears – and the affective response more broadly of the global north – have historically often shaped the actions of INGOs, in humanitarian emergencies, more effectively than the testimonies and lived experience of people of colour themselves. Speaking Out and Being Silenced This topic is difficult to write about: even when investigations are conducted and reports written, organisations still seek to control the narrative and hide as many
interaction, earlier claims concerning the ‘origin of the species’ could be neatly set aside by a more objective narrative supported by empirical scientific truths. To be underdeveloped is to be closer to the unmediated condition of human survival. And once thrown back into that regressive state, people return to their unlawful barbarism in order to survive. While the shift from race to culture allowed for more subtle and y et al. together more pervasive critiques of non-European subjects that could now take aim at entire life-world systems, the displacement of class
not only from the illegal war narratives, but on the ethical narratives as well. VG: How do you see the future of advocacy in terms of strategies or challenges? Are new technologies changing anything? MG: At MSF, we think that the use of digital apps, surveillance systems, etc., can be more dangerous in the protection of the people and giving them voice. Because these tools, if not protected correctly, can be used as signals. To use these tools, you have to be extra careful with how you protect [data], how you collect it, how you use and analyse it, because
Humanitarian Narrative ’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development , 2 : 2 , 161 – 70 . Medie , P. A. and Kang , A. J. ( 2018 ), ‘ Power, Knowledge and the Politics of Gender in the Global South ’, European Journal of Politics and Gender , 1