Emergency Relief's Intellectual and Moral Challenge

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published April 05, 2009 @ 10:41AM PT

As I've gotten more involved in the social entrepreneurship world, I've become increasingly appreciative of the time I spent studying humanitarian aid as an undergraduate. For a while, the plan was to do emergency relief. This took me to work with refugees in Cairo and internally displaced people in northern Uganda, and resulted in writing a thesis about American involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra civil war.

The thing that I appreciate about this looking back is that it is extraordinarily hard to reduce the moral dilemmas about humanitarian aid to accidentally over-simplistic conversations about economics or effectiveness. Decisions by definition have to be made quickly - both on the level of intervention as a whole and the myriad of day-to-day decisions which force aid workers into moral gray areas. Often the choice is between two uncomfortable alternatives.

When I try to help my students at Northwestern complicate their perspective on global aid and development, we often talk about Rwanda. As the Paul Kagame-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RFP) swept across the country, huge numbers of Hutu fled across the Congolese border. It was one of the largest, fastest movements of people in modern history. More than a million ended up in squalor-filled refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Aid organizations knew the potential problems if they went in. They knew that the Hutu militia had not all been disarmed, that many of the people they would be serving were complicit in the genocide. But they also knew, particularly as cholera began to run rampant, that to do nothing was a guaranteed death sentence for tens of thousands. They intervened, and saved thousands, but in the process, almost certainly helped - if passively and unintentionally - the genocidaires regroup, the ripple effects of which included helping ignite further strive and war.

What should the aid organization's have done? Whatever their answers, students are rarely convinced of what they think. And that's precisely the point. That social problems are messy, confusing, and rarely possible to fit into comfortable models. The dialog between Genocide blogger Michelle and Humanitarian Relief blogger Michael about the ICC indictment of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir is an incredible example of exactly this. It's essential that we have respect for that messiness no matter how we answer the question of how best to improve the world.

To that end, here are some recent links to recent books, reviews, and interviews dealing with some of these exact questions:

Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa A barnburner of a new aid critique that has garnered lots of attention, at least in part because the author is originally from Zambia. At this point, the critical consensus is that whatever validity there is in the larger argument, author Dambiso Moyo doesn't do a great job arguing it. Fast Company interviewed Moyo a few days ago, and he best review (and critique) I've seen is by Columbia University's John McArthur: Everywhere a Hammer on a Nail.

AFRICA'S WORLD WAR: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe: Historiajournalist Gerard Prunier writes (in exhaustive detail) about the Congo war. The reviews seem generally positive, if offering the occaisional question about style.