The politics of emergency and the demise of the developing state: problems for humanitarian advocacy

Abstract

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Between Aid and Politics: diagnosing the challenge of humanitarian advocacy in politically complex environments—the case of Darfur, Sudan

“…As Vanessa Pupavac points out, 'advocacy can allow one to claim the moral high groundwithout the stresses and responsibilities of implementing assistance programs on the ground'. 22 According to Pupavac, advocacy on humanitarian crises is a way of addressing the gaping vacuum in Western politics that has been left since the death of grand narratives and the dissolution of cold war frameworks. For a postmodern generation with few if any absolutes, advocacy on moral certainties such as genocide can provide one of the few means for disenchanted individuals to 'vent [their] existential anxieties'.…”

Humanitarianism, Securitization and Humanitarian Communication

“…Present day humanitarian advocacy has been read in connection with the rightsbased approach of new humanitarianism. There are opposed views, either seen as a positive development (Booth 1991b) or as something intrinsically problematic (Chandler 2002;Pugh 1998;Pupavac 2006). For its advocates, such 'moral advocacy' is a sign of the development of a global social movement based on moral and ethical human rights discourse.…”

“…For its critics, the increasing focus that humanitarian organizations have put on advocacy has contributed to the erosion of a more principled humanitarianism and consequently subordinated people's needs to strategic human rights objectives (Pugh 1998). Moreover, as Pupavac (2006) has argued, for most NGOs the calls to intervention to protect people since the 1990s have been accompanied not only by aspirations to promote social change but also by openly challenging the sovereignty of the developing state in question when state actors were considered as responsible or complicit in violence. With this logic, humanitarian advocacy has tended "to reinforce international inequalities rather than overturning them, by casting conditions in the developing world as moral rather than political and material issues, with dubious results for those in whose name the advocacy is conducted."…”

Race, Culture and Civil Society: Peacebuilding Discourse and the Understanding of Difference

“…The discursive framing of development in terms of empowerment and capacity-building centres on the individual responsibility of the post-colonial or post-conflict subject, and has rightly been critiqued for its emphasis on 'non-material development', which has tended to reinforce global inequalities of wealth (Duffield, 2007: 101-105), and as marking 'the demise of the developing state' (Pupavac, 2007), as the poor are increasingly seen to be the agents of change and poverty reduction, bearing policy responsibility rather than external actors. Vanessa Pupavac, for example, highlights that, as development has come to the forefront of international policy agendas for peacebuilding and conflict prevention, there has been a distancing of Western powers and international institutions from taking responsibility for development, with a consensus that the poor need 'to find their own solutions to the problems they face' (Pupavac, 2007: 96).…”