Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which is still, more than half a century later,
officially dealing with an “emergency”.^9 Fourthly, humanitarian action can just be
incompetently, corruptly or counterproductively executed. All these represent
abuses of power. At the heart of David Kennedy’s critique of humanitarianism is the
charge that professional humanitarians have sought power without acknowledging,
or accepting responsibility for it.^10 Coupled with the moral authority that
professional humanitarians jealously and understandably guard, this can be
especially damaging. We are all well aware of the damage that can be wrought by
an abuse of power or an act of betrayal by a trusted source of moral authority.^11 It is
also not coincidental that the rise in concern over unaccountability has taken place
during the same period that humanitarian institutions have become more powerful
and better funded.
There are a number of possible internal responses to the institutionalisation
of humanitarianism’s capacity to cause harm. One is simply to throw up one’s hands
and characterise the constant possibility of tragedy inherent in humanitarian action
as inevitable, as definitive of its very nature, and of the human condition in general.
Another is to redescribe anything harmful as not being “humanitarian”. The most
prominent example of this is the tendency among some professional humanitarians
to acknowledge the occasional need for military intervention in response to a crisis,
but refuse to allow action they see as morally necessary to be included within the
ambit of humanitarian action. Or one can place one’s faith in the ability of technical
knowledge and solutions to solve every problem. Most radically, one could read
harm as evidence that humanitarianism as a concept, and as a project, is really
always about subjugating the “other”, and abandon the project. Previous chapters
have already implicitly rejected these approaches as an overarching response.
The route professional humanitarians have largely, and plausibly, chosen is
to attempt to institutionalise “accountability” as a defining characteristic of
9
10 Calhoun, "The Imperative to Reduce Suffering", 83.^
David Kennedy, The Dark Sides of Virtue: Reassessing International Humanitarianism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 11
The current crisis over widespread child abuse in the Catholic Church is an obvious
example of this.