responsibility (though in practice the tendency is to simply refer to the common
vernacular of human rights). Though the intention is for aid recipients to become
rights-holders, their rights are never stronger than the discretionary charity that
underwrites, morally and financially, the structuring of humanitarian action.
Chris Brown writes that “[at] one level of generality, rights are ways to
restrain the unfettered power of rulers”.^37 But rulers have frequently played on the
granting of rights to legitimise their power. Could the attempt to internal
accountability be a way of legitimising a power that is actually inappropriate in the
context of the problems humanitarianism seeks to resolve? Do “humanitarian
rights” perhaps enshrine the rights of humanitarians, rather than create
empowered rights holders? Is accountability a way of institutionalising
humanitarianism in ongoing crises, disregarding with hubris the limited contribution
they can make? For example, famously, Alex de Waal remarked that “relief is
generally merely a footnote to the story of how people survive famine”.^38 For de
Waal, the problem is precisely the notion of humanitarian as ruler, as he sees the
institutionalisation of humanitarian power, possibly legitimised through internal
accountability mechanisms, as undermining potential local sources of accountability
that in the longer term are more realistic and reliable ways of preventing famine.
Already in 1994, de Waal, writing with Rakiya Omaar was deeply sceptical of a
humanitarian agenda driven by humanitarian relief: “At the end of the day, relief
organizations will always make charitable works their priority, which means that
human rights concerns will be fudged or jettisoned”.^39 Winters argues that affairs
can be improved through a greater emphasis on “participation”, another buzzword
of the aid industry.^40 But such efforts still largely seem to fall short of really
empowering, or at least giving political voice to the recipients.
37
38 Brown, Sovereignty, Rights and Justice , 116.
39 de Waal, Famine Crimes , 1. Also cited in Terry, Condemned to Repeat? , 233.
Their tentative answer was nevertheless to endorse a solidarity based on human rights,
which links into the next section of the argument here. de Waal and Omaar,
Humanitarianism Unbound? 40 , 36.
Though he acknowledges that it does not provide a panacea. Winters, "Accountability,
Participation and Foreign Aid Effectiveness".