Josep Zapater

Introduction

Poor management is often at the heart of mental health problems among humanitarian workers. If in doubt, listen to this on-the-spot podcast by Imogen Wall.

This being said – how are front-line field offices affected? Factors such as salaries and staff rights do not often depend entirely on field managers. Is there anything they can do? Below is the experience we had at the UNHCR Suboffice in the Bekaa valley, in Lebanon, back in 2018.

The importance of management in humanitarian field offices

Humanitarian front-lines pose particular risks for the mental health and welfare of humanitarian workers. Workload and pressure piles up. Security is, at best, spotty. Families may be far away, and meaningful social life can be poor or non-existent. Staff witness or listen to countless horrors. They can also be victims themselves, in particular national staff. Front-line staff have to take responsibility, in front of affected populations, of poor decisions or simply the difficulty of having any meaningful impact.

Particular ills often plague the management of small field offices in humanitarian front-lines. It is not uncommon that young, unprepared expatriates are put at the helm of field offices or teams in extremely difficult situations. A number of important distortions can then arise. Oftentimes, professional insecurity leads to abuse of authority. This can be amplified by the relative isolation and lack of awareness of staff rights and redress mechanisms by field staff, in particular national ones.

Conversely, lack of communication or tensions may also arise when national staff are more prepared to take decisions than expatriate managers. All this can be compounded by the relative neglect, in some humanitarian circles, of hard, specific managerial skills. These include internal management skills, such as planning, budgeting, delegation and team design. They include analytical ones, in particular as regards the political and social environment. Crucially, they encompass also  functional skills such as advocacy and humanitarian negotiation.

Finally, in some cases field managers may themselves be victims of poor management up the hierarchical line. Bad management and abuse of authority has an uncanny similarity to child abuse: abusers have often been victims themselves. At the end of the day, one of the most difficult things to do is to draw the right lessons from the wrong experiences.

What can humanitarian managers do at the front-lines? Below is the experience we had in the UNHCR Bekaa Sub-Office back in 2018 where we decided to prepare a local staff welfare plan.

How did it all start?

Managers need to dedicate time to their staff on a regular basis. Unfortunately, I wasn’t always able to find the necessary time in the Bekaa. Massive rains would flood refugee camps. Militants would stage suicide attacks in high-tension areas. Armed conflict involving the Army, Hezbollah and Daesh would necessitate contingency planning for mass displacement.

During one of the lulls between crises, we decided to organize small, informal meetings between all units and management to talk about anything and all. This included managerial practices. Conversations were not always easy. However, in one of them, magic just happened without warning. One of the staff, who had been staring at me silently during the meeting, all of a sudden asked me: listen, what is it you do? Well, I’m the Head of Sub-office. Yeah, I know that. But what is it you do on a day-to-day basis?

I remember that quick reflexes from my side saved the situation at the time. However, my answer, a series of platitudes which I have mercifully forgotten, wasn’t very intelligent or accurate. The question, precise as a scalpel, had penetrated my defenses and opened a series of questions in my mind to which I did not have the right answers. Among them:

• What are the actual responsibilities of a field humanitarian manager? How are the different angles (diplomatic, operational, managerial) to be articulated among themselves?
• How best to articulate management and staff responsibilities, in such a way so as to maximize mutual support and convergence?
• How can a manager improve communication about her role and activities? Can transparency and communication about managerial roles be of help in improving staff welfare and mental health?

After that fateful meeting, the reflection narrowed its focus to staff welfare, and then of course widened again to try to encompass all important aspects of staff welfare under the direct responsibility of a field office, besides of communication. A consultative process opened, including an anonymous staff review, consultations with national staff welfare officer and management, and extensive consultations with the local staff association. By May 2018, the Staff Welfare Plan had been approved by the staff association and all staff.

A dilemma had been at the basis of the process: where shall initiative and accountability lie? A management-led process may not be consultative enough. Conversely, a staff-led process may not gain sufficient management buy-in. After some thought and consultation I decided to lead the process, so as to enhance management accountability and buy-in, while making all possible efforts towards a consultative process.

The 2018 Bekaa Suboffice staff welfare plan

We decided to work on six priority aspects:

• Staff welfare services and counselling,
• Staff development,
• Stress management,
• Staffing, staff rights and accountability,
• Infrastructure and services,
• Communication, consultation and transparency.

Some of the measures taken were:

• Clear rules on communications. Staff would make reasonable efforts to be reachable during emergencies. Conversely, management would never contact staff (including through email) outside of working hours unless during an emergency.
• Establish our own budget for external training, prioritizing national staff. The staff would pay the training fee and the office would cover travel and other expenses.
• Training sessions on career management.
• Efforts not to reduce staff, and transparent and timely communications on staffing planning and decisions.
• Staff Association members would have at least one hour per week, out of office work, to dedicate to the Staff Association.
• Staff Association participates in all regular important meetings, including weekly meeting. Head of Sub-office communicates his own quarterly action plan, as well as progress against it, to all staff.

The entire plan can be consulted here. It’s a relatively simple two page document.

A few conclusions

Did it work? I guess partially, as most things. Some measures weren’t implemented, others took hold as a habit. Staff Association gained confidence in raising grievances to me, for which I’ll always be grateful. We were quite disciplined in communicating workplans (including from management) to all staff, on Staff Association participation, on budgeting for training and on infrastructure. On the contrary, cross-fertilization across units proved difficult, due to workload. Beirut management was supportive, and as a part of organization-wide staff welfare policies we had a Beirut-based Staff Welfare Office visiting every region on a monthly basis and being available to all staff, which was very useful.

Later on, and on a slightly different issue, we raised the issue of salaries of office security staff during the Lebanon financial crises. National management intervened with a good measure of success. By the way, this is an oft-neglected issue also in need of answers: what about the welfare of national personnel working in subcontracted companies for humanitarian organizations, for instance on cleaning or security? That counts, too.

At my level, upon leaving the Suboffice I undertook a 360-Degree-Review, which was one of the toughest but most revealing experiences of my professional life. Since then, I keep an updated personal development plan (for which UNHCR has an excellent tool, by the way) which always includes management training.

I still remember, of course, the moment that staff fixed his piercing green eyes on me and asked: what is it you do? It took guts to do that, and it proved eventful that he did. I guess one final lesson is: lead your team in a way that everyone, guts or no guts, feels she or he can raise difficult questions.

Part I

This is part I of a two-part article. The second part will be published on the 25th of April.

Introduction

The humanitarian industry is currently dominated by Western, educated knowledge workers. We share cultural traits and values, reaffirmed and amplified by the constant friction among ourselves – be it in fora in Western capitals, in coordination meetings, in social media or in international hotels in conflict-affected countries. The values we project (leadership, self-care, mindfulness, attention to vulnerability, resilience) share an uncanny familiarity with those promoted by the culture of late capitalism – in particular its more liberal recesses.

The industry has moved away from the epic humanitarianism of yore towards professionalisation. This has, in some aspects, strengthened transparency and effectiveness. It has also contributed to managerialism and bureaucratization. Entire humanitarian positions and even organizations are dedicated to serve the the industry itself, rather than directly delivering aid or protection. It is common to hear humanitarian professionals complaining that “we spend more time in meetings or behind desks than in dialogue with affected populations”.

Thus, the penetration of a very specific culture, the consequent lack of cultural diversity and the growth of bureaucracy are creating an invisible barrier with the people we serve. A lot of effort has been done over the last ten years to build accountability to affected populations (AAP). This is, currently, the choice mechanism to overcome this barrier. Yet current AAP models, following the private sector, focus on accountability to individuals for the delivery of services. Opportunities for social accountability, i.e. initiatives by organized communities holding us to account, are not given the same attention. The same can be said for structured participation in decision-making by civil society representing affected communities.

Localisation and decolonisation of aid is an obvious part of the solution. Yet it is doubtful that it will come to full fruition. Even if it did, barriers of bureaucracy, power, class and culture will remain between the industry and those we serve. To help overcome these barriers, I advocate in this article for the adoption of an ethics of exposure. This means that, for its own good, the industry must open itself to direct influence by the people we work for. This entails, among other, the systematic localisation of knowledge management. It demands also the consideration of civil society within affected populations as a key element of AAP. It calls for the breaking up of the current taboo about establishing social relations, or social capital, with affected populations. A culture of exposure also entails the valorisation of real dialogue to balance  the industrialized and disembodied collection of information currently prevalent in the industry.

A few caveats are of the essence here. First, increasing funding gaps have led humanitarian agencies to rely more on the private sector and innovative finance. Notably, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has seen an increase in the proportion of private funding, and within it that of foundations, companies and corporations[1]. There is also increased interest in financing mechanisms with a for-profit component for private donors[2]. Humanitarian organisations have adapted their fundraising strategies accordingly. This might well be at the root of the permeability of the industry to the trends of late capitalism and its imperviousness to other modes of thinking. However, I am less interested here in describing its causes than in identifying its effects and how to overcome the most pernicious of them.

Second, it goes without saying that the humanitarian world is as complex and varied as society itself. Less visible elements of it, such as small volunteer organizations and self-help mechanisms among affected populations, are often the quickest and most effective. In this article, however, I refer specifically to the humanitarian industry. By this, I refer to a particular ecosystem of donors and large global organizations, mostly based in the Global North, with a good capacity for self-organization. This ecosystem purports to shape how aid globally functions. It is also particularly exposed to global cultural trends, including those originating in late capitalism.

Third, the ability of this system to influence how aid actually functions, down to the delivery point, has of course its limitations. Systems are slow to absorb changes, in particular when these have to go through several layers of implementation. Individual organizations need to adapt its own cultures, and may have of course varying levels of interest and willingness to do so. Frontline workers may misunderstand or oppose a new working culture. It is unclear how much organizational culture can shape operations in response to global trends. However, the recent emphasis of humanitarian organizations in organizational culture and change management, paralleling that of the private sector, strongly suggests that it can.

Finally, there is less judgement of value than it might appear in this article. There is a lot about the culture of late capitalism which is, in itself, pernicious. Suffice it to mention the responsibilization of humanitarian workers and communities for their own well-being which is inherent in the current abuse of mindfulness and resilience. However, I am here less concerned about these trends in themselves. They do, actually, contain a lot of good, in particular when cleansed from the patina of global corporate culture. Our concern is how their uncritical acceptance contribute to an epistemic bubble where the search for cultural credibility trumps listening, dialogue, critical thinking, attention to context, empiricism, local knowledge and the use of natural language. The same goes for AAP. It is obviously positive that affected persons can have channels for individualized requests and complaints. It is, however, less positive that the role of grassroots movements, civil society and external accountability is given short shrift in current AAP doctrine.

I. The rise of WEIRD knowledge workers

In 2020, evolutionary biologist Joseph Heinrich quite brilliantly (and polemically) described a category for the WEIRDest people on Earth: those raised in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies[3]. According to Heinrich, we WEIRD people are individualistic, controlling, analytical, and self-focused. We tend to stick to impartial rules. We condemn those who break them in the name of context, flexibility or the interests of family or friends. We understand phenomena by simplifying and classifying them into pre-conceived categories. The more educated and urbanized non-WEIRD people become, the more they are likely to share their cultural traits.

When looking at Western-educated urban professionals, WEIRD people are best understood alongside the category of symbolic-analytic workers, developed by economist Robert Reich in 1992. Reich gave in 1992 an account of employment categories which seems to be even more directly applicable to the humanitarian industry[4]. Reich divided US employees into third layers:

• Routine production, including blue-collar workers as well as routine information processing, such as data entry clerks,
• In-person services, such as nurses and childcare workers,
• Symbolic-analytic services, including high-level problem-solving and strategic-brokering activities. This layer includes, among other, public relations executives, lawyers, management information specialists, strategic planners and organization development specialists.

Symbolic-analytic workers, or knowledge workers as they are currently known, are highly educated generalists who evolve in an international marketplace. They are, mostly, white male university graduates, with a rising proportion of women and minorities. Their proportion of the global workforce has risen significantly since 1950. They share the following characteristics:

• Their education level is higher than the average,
• Their services are traded worldwide,
• Networking and collaboration with teammates and peers is highly valued,
• They have a generalist, adaptable profile adept at carrying out abstract tasks,
• Most of their time is spent at working behind computers, in meetings or at the telephone,
• They tend to cluster in specific geographic areas, creating new markets for new in-person services,
• They tend to sacrifice critical imagination to career advancement,
• They constitute a well-connected group, with a strong sense of community and identity, but are economically and socially seceding from the rest of society,
• They are rarely in direct contact with the ultimate beneficiaries of their work.

Reich and Heinrich have not, to our knowledge, applied their attention to the humanitarian industry. This has been the task of anthropology. At least since the 90s, anthropologists have focused  on the political economy of knowledge production at development agencies. Rosalind Eyben has pointed out at the general lack of exposure of development experts to local societies[5]. She has also underlined how the strong sense of community of development workers is part of the glue cementing common policy positions. Ian Harper, from his side, has noted the inherent parochialism of aid workers as opposed to the day-to-day cosmopolitanism of many locals[6].

The above-mentioned research underlines the strong cultural and even class traits of a quite particular group of people often seeing themselves as embodying cosmopolitanism. This can only increase the misunderstandings and distance towards populations, often seeing clearly through this paradox. Thus, these traits inevitably act as a powerful, if unseen, wall between WEIRD humanitarians and “local”, non-Western societies[7]. Let us now focus on how increasing managerialism and bureaucracy are compounding this trend.

II. The managerial revolution

Industry’s observers have long been mentioning a perception of increasing bureaucratization of humanitarian work. The report to the Secretary-General of the High-Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing mentioned concerns about efficiency and an existing perception of the humanitarian industry as a “self-serving bureaucracy”[8]. Rather pointedly, also in 2020 the annual meeting of the Grand Bargain signatories reflected on the need to downsize the bureaucracy created by this very process. Later in 2020, analyst Hugo Slim wrote about the evolution from charisma to bureaucracy in the humanitarian industry[9]. More recently, the Independent Review of the Implementation of the IASC Protection Policy noted the complexity and fragmentation of protection coordination structures, as well as their excessive attention to process.

Why does bureaucracy grow? Max Weber has long provided the orthodox explanation. Weber postulated that the increasing complexity and professionalization of companies and the State creates, in itself, the need for a managerial class to ensure the organization of work[10]. Also in a famous 1955 essay, Peter Drucker noted that the larger an organization becomes, the more resources need to be devoted to internal tasks such as coordination and circulation of information[11].

Contemporary to Drucker, a more cynical explanation of the growth of bureaucracy is given in Parkinson’s law, noting officials’ tendency to multiply subordinates and to create work for each other, such as in commenting and contributing to each others’ work[12].

The late anthropologist David Graeber gave in 2013 an alternative, rather unorthodox explanation. In a 2013 article on “bullshit jobs”[13], later expanded into a book[14], he said:

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Graeber postulated that managerial feudalism, the  need of persons in power to expand their base of  subordinates, explains these “bullshit jobs”. He also pointed to fear of educated people with time in their hands, and a culture of work and self-exploitation as a value in itself. Graeber noted that jobs retaining a sense of purpose and status, such as doctors, designers and managers, are monopolized by a liberal, educated elite. This has fed growing resentment between this elite and productive workers, which as fed in turn the growth of populism.

As it was to be expected, Graeber’s work has triggered all kind of reactions. The Economist opposed the classical, weberian explanation of bureaucracy to Graeber’s claims[15]. Others have conducted empirical testing partially contradicting his thesis[16]. Yet even critics admitted that “Graeber’s work resonates with so many people who can relate to the accounts he gives”[17].

No empirical data exist, to our view, on humanitarians’ feelings on the usefulness and impact of their work. It is worth, however, looking at existing data as well as anechdotal evidence. Bioforce’s 2022 report on Humanitarian Professions noted that:

• Humanitarians spend more time responding to compliance requests from donors,
• Humanitarians work more closely with colleagues from other humanitarian profession areas,
• They use remote management more and more,
• They spend less time working on direct implementation and more time on coordination and capacity building with other organizations.

More anechdotally, it is revealing to look at the gentle “tug of war” between two Facebook groups popular among WEIRD humanitarians: 50 Shades of Aid and Humanitarian Clusterposting. The first one adopts overtly liberal values and serves as a discussion group for the concerns of humanitarian workers, including many Western expatriates, focusing often on labour conditions and mental health. The second one serves somehow as a black humour counterpoint. It posts memes about overwork, self-exploitation, bureaucratization, the paradox of combining virtue-signalling with distance from local societies and affected populations, and feelings of meaninglessness of work of humanitarian expatriates. It is difficult not to perceive here an uneasy cohabitation, among WEIRD humanitarians, of a growing class consciousness with the “spiritual damage” associated with performing very abstract yet well remunerated tasks.

Let us now look at a comparatively less studied phenomenon: the exponential growth of a services sector within the humanitarian industry. Akin to bureaucratization, this is contributing to an increased number of person-hours by humanitarian workers spent servicing the industry, rather than directly in delivering aid or protection.

III. The explosion of the services sector

The tertiary sector in the humanitarian industry

The increasing share of the services sector in advanced economies is a well-described phenomenon. Developing countries produce goods, whereas Western economies focus on services, both to individuals and to businesses. The growth of the services sector in market economies is characterized by the ceaseless identification and exploitation of market niches. Thus, tasks previously integrated in the same person or organization are split up to create separate professions or even organizations. The best example in market economies is the growth of big consultancies to help businesses manage change[18].

To our knowledge, no similar comparative data exists for the humanitarian industry[19]. However, it is noticeable the exponential increase, at least since the late 90s, in person-hours, jobs and standalone organizations servicing the industry itself, rather than directly delivering aid or protection. This phenomenon includes a growing percentage of time by humanitarian workers spent in reporting, coordination or managing change, such as the different workstreams arising from the Grand Bargain. It includes new professions wholly inspired by the private sector, such as risk management  or compliance, and driven by an increasing exigence for accountability from donors. The ever increasing number of think tanks and consultancies analysing the effectiveness of the industry itself and producing annual reports is also part of this phenomenon.

Humanitarians as a niche market

The burgeoning expatriate humanitarian workforce is itself becoming a small but growing niche market for the services economy within the humanitarian industry. What is noteworthy is that this market is often serviced by consultants originating within the very workforce. I am referring here to the growing niche industry of leadership, coaching and mental health services for humanitarian workers. This industry encompasses a wide variety of subjects, with varying degrees of professional and scientific legitimacy. We will here focus on leadership training and mindfulness coaching, two of the fields whose links to the culture of late capitalism have been most commented recently.

Leadership training has been going through a profound transformation in recent years. This is driven by need for organizations to deal with long-term uncertainty, as well as the growing importance of relational skills and corporate culture. Leadership has also long been de-coupling from management skills, whereby the former points to specific attitudes which that all employees are expected to adopt. This attitudinal shift has brought leadership training closer to life coaching and even secular spirituality.

In a similar way, the humanitarian industry is paying increasing attention to the practice of mindfulness. The trend around mindfulness has been explained by the current anxiety crises prevalent in the Western world, the COVID pandemic and the long march of Buddhist doctrine and practice into a mass marketable and readily consummable product, tailored to adress the anxieties of modern life[20]. A perfect storm is created when we add the stresses prevalent in the humanitarian industry, and the current backlash against its traditional self-exploitation ethics, putting now the focus on care and compassion of self.

Thus, mindfulness training, together with related practices such as yoga, is increasingly on offer by specialized consultants within the humanitarian industry. Actually, leadership and mindfulness training, together with related fields such as professional and life-coaching, have become a career change of choice for mostly middle aged Western humanitarians, seeking to quit the strictures and frustrations of stricto-sensu humanitarian work.

The services industry as a vehicle for cultural transmission

The concepts and practice of leadership and mindfulness, at least as commonly marketed, do share, or perhaps arise from a number of values prevalent in modern Western society. They include the emphasis on personal attitude to achieve success and avoid suffering. They celebrate emotional intelligence and interpersonal skills. They foster the cultivation of social capital as a sine-qua-non condition for success and a studied avoidance of confrontation and of analysing structural causes of social problems or vulnerability. They also include the rise of an ethics of relations over an ethics of outcomes, whereas actions and attitudes are valued according to how they contribute to harmonic interpersonal relations, rather than achievement of results.

The current trends of leadership and mindfulness have been critiziced as ethical linchpins of neoliberalism. A leader combines institutional and personal authority, ability to persuade and being a role model of personal success through attitude. Thus, leaders become a useful vehicle for a culture valuing attitude, acritical respect of authority and relations over professional skill and attention to principle[21]. The concept of leader also has the advantage of sacralizing the personal authority of elites while being open to aspiration by the powerless.

Likewise, willingly or not, the current mindfulness market reinforces the prevalent medicalization of stress and responsibilization of the individual sufferer, rather than focusing on structural causes – such as exploitation, low salaries, faulty security measures or sheer bad management.  The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek as gone as far as to label mindfulness as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.

We have mentioned above the  growth of a services industry providing training to humanitarian practitioners on these concepts and practices. Thus, this industry plays an important role in reproducing the values inherent in them. The career transition mentioned above from humanitarian worker to coach or trainer is far from easy. It takes courage, as well as years of persistent networking and presence in social media to build a client base. More importantly, coaches need to be seen as a legitimate personification of the values they transmit. Thus, they offer curated storytelling  of their career change as a journey of self-discovery and resilience. Self-marketing comes with persistent pitching of particular values through personal contacts and social media. The particular economy of social media, whereby individual entrepreneurs trade recognition through the curated exhange of likes and quotations, only contributes to the reproduction of certain values as those acceptable in polite society, including that of WEIRD humanitarians.

With the above, we have had a cursory look at how the humanitarian industry has follow the path of the market economy in creating jobs that have less and less to do with direct delivery of goods. The self-referential aspect of these jobs acts also as a catalyst for the transmission of particular values, peculiar to late capitalism and disconnected from other realities. We will now look at how WEIRD humanitarians tend to use culturaly charged concepts not only to see ourselves but also those we serve.

IV. Through a glass darkly: vulnerability and resilience

A very specific set of concepts and practices have found widespread acceptance within the humanitarian industry. As we have seen above, they include the exercise of leadership and mindfulness by humanitarian actors. The same can be said to the understanding of vulnerability and the fostering of resilience among affected people. Irrespective of their instrinsic value, these concepts and practices act as cultural markers, contributing to the self-identification and worldview of WEIRD humanitarians. They have become ubiquitous in documents summarizing the situation of affected populations, delimitating priority groups and establishing priorities for intervention.

I am here not trying to make a case about the impact of these concepts on day-to-day work by humanitarians. I do not have the tools for it. Also, I do not posit that a majority of WEIRD humanitarians actually believe or practice these concepts. I am merely underlining how they have become accepted in mainstream discourse in the industry, and how they may owe quite a lot to the global culture of late capitalism.

The vulnerability-resilience pair

After the “end of history” optimism of the 90s, we live now, admitedly, in a world of insecurity, fragility and risk. The financial crises, the pandemic, the uptick in armed conflict and the growing crises of climate change only confirm this trend. It is telling that, already in 1986, German sociologist Ulrich Beck anticipated it. The pair vulnerability (the problem) and resilience (the solution) has often been touted as the choice response to fragility, from fields as diverse as philosophy, social sciences and public policy.

Thinkers such as Judith Butler and Martha Fineman have celebrated the so-called vulnerability turn as a challenge to neoliberal views of individuals as a self-contained entities, equal both in rights and in capabilities. Thus, the situation and needs of individuals can only be understood if we see them as “embedded in social relationships and institutions”. By the end of the 90s, a growing body of public policy was regularly calling for specific measures for “vulnerable groups” or persons, such as women, children and migrants[22].

The term “resilience” is perhaps even more ubiquitous. Originally rooted in systems theory, resilience can best be described as the ability of a system, such as a forest or a community, to adapt and absorb external shocks. Recently, it has been adopted as a key term by the World Bank, the UN, the IMF and the US Government in strategies ranging from the fight against poverty, climate change and national security. At the same time, it is now also widely used in pop psychology, self-help literature, marketing and social media.

Current criticism

The vulnerability-resilience pair has been widely critiziced, sometimes by the same authors celebrating the vulnerability turn[23]. Fineman has carefully warned that both vulnerability and resilience are not inherent qualities of persons of groups, but must be understood in their social and institutional context[24]. At the same time, Butler has adressed three important criticisms at the use of the concept of vulnerability:

• It risks ignoring the agency of individuals and groups,
• It is often co-opted by those in power, such as when white nationalists picture themselves as  a discriminated group,
• The romanticization of vulnerability as ability to open up[25].

As regards “resilience”, Sarah Bracke has pointed as how its usage has smoothly adapted from “systems” to “individuals”. In the way, the term, according to Bracke, has become a key component of neoliberal ethics of the self, whereby responsibility to respond and adapt to external threats is shifted to the individual[26]. Thus, tolerance of shocks such as natural disasters, pandemics, war and cuts in public services is constructed as a virtue. Bracke sees the promotion of these virtues also as a cultural mechanism for the post-colonial submission of the Global South. Brad Evans and Julian Reid have also shown how resilience results from the de-politicization of resistance, whereby we no longer resist the causes of shocks such as organized violence and climate change, but limit ourselves to try and survive them[27].

The pair “vulnerability-resilience” refers, in essence, to people’s own fragility and strength. It looks away from what happened to us, and who made it happen. This is consistent with a long-term move in the humanitarian industry away from facts, causes and culprits, focusing into mitigating consequences. Humanitarian practitioners will recognize this move in two often repeated experiences. One is the persistent misunderstanding in conversations with affected people, in which they want to tell us what happened, and we only want to hear how it affected them – trying already to fit it into pre-defined sectors. The second is the frequent feeling that human rights workers and journalists have consistently better information than protection officers about what happens to civilians in a frontline.

Marketing values

The celebration of resilience has fed a relatively recent trend in marketing techniques by large humanitarian agencies. With very few exceptions, long gone is the exclusive focus on conveying suffering and eliciting compassion, often depicting racialized children. Communication now often focuses on the equivalent of rags-to-riches stories: storytelling about personal journeys from refugee camps to higher echelons of society, often in the Global North, involving personal effort, sacrifice and self-motivation.

The move away from what has been dubbed as “poverty porn” is, of course, a welcome phenomenon. A few important things have, however, been lost on the way. Humanitarian marketing often focuses less on collective than on personal success, defined as rejoining the economic and social order as unquestionably accepted. It rarely involves successful stories of leadership or collective grassroots action to claim rights – which, quite paradoxically, often involve social leaders overcoming fear and suffering over long periods of time. Perverting Hannah Arendt’s dichotomy between refugees as “upstarts” and “conscious pariahs”, it is as the image we are selling is that of “conscious upstarts”. Victim-hood is still valid as an identity-building element. However, it functions now as a building block of the resilient label, rather than as a catalyst of collective identity and activism.

The concepts and practices mentioned above may well have a lot of good in themselves. There is nothing wrong in combining leadership with adequate managerial skills and ethical principles. At the same time, self-care, along with organizational responsibility, is a necessary component of humanitarian workers’ mental health. What is problematic, besides of the negative values they may also vehiculate, is the level of acritical acceptance within the humanitarian industry, amounting to cultural phenomenon. Culture is necessary as a cohesive element of industries and organizations, and also as a tool to understand the world in confused times. However, when not combined with reflection and respect for empirical reality, culture becomes a curse. This curse may well be contributing to the difficulties that WEIRD humanitarians experience to understand, relate and be accountable to those we serve.

Accountability to affected populations (AAP) has rightly been touted as a key concept and practice to improve in this field. Let us now see whether, in its current state, it suffices for these purposes.

[1] See Development Initiatives, Global Humanitarian Assistance report, available at https://devinit.org/resources/global-humanitarian-assistance-report-2022/donors-of-humanitarian-and-wider-crisis-financing/

[2] See notably Humanitarian investing – mobilizing capital to overcome fragility, World Economic Forum White Paper, available at https://www.weforum.org/whitepapers/humanitarian-investing-mobilizing-capital-to-overcome-fragility/.

[3] See Joseph Heinrich, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

[4] See Robert Reich, The Work of Nations, Vintage Books, 1992.

[5] See Rosalind Eyben, The Sociality of International Aid and Policy Convergence, as well as Ian Harper, World Health and Nepal: Producing Internationals, Healthy Citizenship and the Cosmopolitan, both at David Mosse (Ed.), Adventures in Aidland, Begahn Books, 2011. A couple of examples are useful here. One is how aid workers were mostly oblivious in Lebanon at transnational ties of Syrian refugees – be it pre-existing ties with Lebanese host communities, or with Syrian refugee communities in Istambul, Paris or Berlin. Quite similarly, few aid workers in Eastern Cameroon were familiar with transnational grassroots organizations working for the human rights of Mbororo people since well before the 2008 and the 2014 wars in the CAR. They became quite an important resource in understanding Mbororo society and the social hurdles of return to the CAR for Mbororo refugees.

[6] It is also worth noting how the so-called refugee crises in Europe has sparked renewed interest in the decolonization of knowledge production as regards forced migration. A good example is the Southern Responses to Displacement initiative. See https://southernresponses.org/.

[7] Contemporary ethicist Owen Flanagan has argued that the global cultural dominance of WEIRD people has contributed both to the dominance of their own traits, and their blindness to the ethical diversity of humanity. See Owen Flanagan, The Geography of Morals, Oxford University Press, 2017. Quite a lot of current and late XX century research in ethics and moral psychology is a reaction to the focus on male Western college sophomores in psychological research.

[8] See High-Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing Report to the Secretary-General, Too important to fail—addressing the humanitarian financing gap, January 2016, https://reliefweb.int/report/world/high-level-panel-humanitarian-financing-report-secretary-general-too-important-fail.

[9] Hugo Slim, Reflections of a humanitarian bureaucrat, https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2020/01/09/reflections-humanitarian-bureaucrat/.

[10] See Max Weber, The Nature, Conditions, and Development of Bureaucratic Herrschaft, https://www.academia.edu/31803869/_Bureaucracy_by_Max_Weber_Translated_and_Edited_by_Tony_Waters_and_Dagmar_Waters.

[11] See Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive, Harper, 2017.

[12] See Parkinson’s law, The Economist, https://www.economist.com/news/1955/11/19/parkinsons-law.

[13] David Graeber, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, 2013, https://www.atlasofplaces.com/essays/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs/

[14] David Graeber, Bullshit jobs: The rise of Pointless Work and what we can do about it, Penguin Books, 2018.

[15] The Economist, On bullshit jobs: understanding seemingly meaningless work, https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2013/08/21/on-bullshit-jobs.

[16] Magdalena Soffia, Alex Wood and Brendan Burchell, Alienation is not ‘bullshit’: an empirical critique of Graeber’s theory of BS Jobs, Work, Employment and Society, June 2021, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015067.

[17] Soffia, Wood and Burchell (2021).

[18] See, for instance, Daniel Markovits, How McKinsey destroyed the Middle Class, The Atlantic, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/how-mckinsey-destroyed-middle-class/605878/.

[19] The New Humanitarian has recently analysed the phenomenon of H2H (Humanitarian to Humanitarian) organizations. See Backroom aid: the groups helping behind the scenes, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/feature/2022/10/11/H2H-NGOs-innovation-assistance.

[20] The beginnings of this process are traced by Erik Braun in his ground-breaking book The birth of insight: Meditation, modern Buddhism and the Burmese monk Ledi Sayadaw, The University of Chicago Press, 2013. A critical view of the linkages between the mindfulness trend and late capitalism can be consulted in Ronald Purser, The mindfulness conspiracy, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/14/the-mindfulness-conspiracy-capitalist-spirituality.

[21] See Mark Learmonth and Kevin Morrel, Leadership as a project: Neoliberalism and the proliferation of leaders, Organization Theory, 2021,

[22] A good overview of the vulnerability turn is given in Fina Birulés, Observaciones sobre la vulnerabilidad, La Maleta de Portbou, https://lamaletadeportbou.com/articulos/observaciones-sobre-la-vulnerabilidad/.

[23] It has been stated that a distinction is to be made between proper and popular or manipulative uses of terms such as resilience and vulnerability. See, for instance, Clare Flanagan-Smith, and Shayne Annet,  Resilience: it’s not a fad. However, it can also be argued that, following the principle that meaning is use, the massive co-optation for ideological purposes of an otherwise serious concept incurably contaminates its meaning.

[24] See Martha Fineman, Understanding vulnerability theory, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/vulnerability/2019/08/26/understanding-vulnerability-theory/.

[25] See Judith Butler, Rethinking vulnerability and resistance, in Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay (eds.), Vulnerability in resistance, Duke University Press, 2016.

[26] See Sarah Bracke, Vulnerability and resistance in times of resilience, in Butler (2016).

[27] Brad Evans, Julian Reid, Dangerously exposed: the life and death of the resilient subject, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21693293.2013.770703.

Introduction

We propose in this blog to analyze CSOs protecting or assisting forcibly displaced persons through a simple analytical framework composed of three parameters. It is to note that in we use here a fairly wide conception of CSO. It includes also community-based organizations (CBOs), refugee-led organizations and even small groupings of IDPs or refugees engaging in organized mutual help.

The last decade has seen a massive increase in doctrinal work on the issue of accountability of humanitarian actors to affected populations, coming from the IASC, the workstreams of the Grand Bargain, or individual humanitarian agencies. Pressure from donors continues to increase, and important progress is also registered in some operations. Yet, as signalled by a recent report  by the Humanitarian Policy Group, “these efforts are all important, but they fall far short of a system-wide shift to ensuring that humanitarian responses are more demand-driven”[1].  

A deep financial and economic crisis

Lebanon, host to some 1,3 million Syrian refugees, has been for a few months in the grip of a very deep financial and economic crises. The Lebanese lira, officially pegged to the dollar, has lost nearly 30% of its value since August 2019 in the informal exchange rate. Scarcity of hard currency is hitting hard key imports, vital in an import-dependent economy. The economic recession is estimated to be at 7% for 2019. Local economists estimate at 20 billion dollars the package needed to rescue the economy, while according to the new finance minister, 4 to billion dollars are urgently needed for imports of wheat, fuel and medicine.