Médecins Sans Frontières won the Nobel Peace Prize, and in accepting it on behalf
of the organisation, its president James Orbinski delivered one of the most powerful
humanitarian credos.^26 But 1999 was also the year of NATO’s intervention in
Kosovo, which would later be judged legitimate, but not legal by an independent
commission, and divided the professional humanitarian community.^27 For some, it
represented the triumph of pragmatic engagement with international politics, for
others the corruption and co-option of humanitarianism by politics. This brought
into focus debates on humanitarianism and its relationship to humanitarian
intervention that had been brewing since a series of crises in Somalia, Bosnia and
Rwanda in the first half of the 1990s. A paper written in the aftermath of these
crises by Alex de Waal and Rakiya Omaar, criticising the failures of relief-led
approaches to humanitarianism to resolve the problems they dealt with, is widely
identified, including by Weiss, as the starting point of the literature of
humanitarianism in crisis.^28
A decade on from Weiss’ seminal intervention, there has been no sign of
resolution in the humanitarian identity crisis, not least because the aftermath of
9/11 and the Bush administration’s War on Terror significantly upped the stakes of
the 1990s debates. During this period, a rich literature has developed, which now
affords us the luxury of being able to set out an empirically-grounded account of the
debates without requiring a vast quantity of new fieldwork. In other words, we do
not need to go and ask humanitarians what they think, as they have, in many cases,
already told us. Furthermore, they have told us in terms particularly suited to the
kind of normative analysis characteristic of an international political theory
26
The speech is analysed in detail in Chapters 2 and 6. James Orbinski, "Nobel Lecture" (
December 1999). Available at
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1999/msf-lecture.html; accessed on
15 November 2008. 27
Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report: Conflict,
International Response, Lessons Learned 28 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Alex de Waal and Rakiya Omaar, Humanitarianism Unbound? Current Dilemmas Facing
Multi-Mandate Relief Operations in Political Emergencies , Discussion Paper No. 5 (London:
African Rights, 1994). Available at
http://repository.forcedmigration.org/show_metadata.jsp?pid=fmo:5303; accessed on 15
July 2010.