The humanitarian frame of war: how security and violence are allocated in contemporary aid delivery

Abstract

This article analyses the reasons behind local aid workers’ asymmetrical exposure to violence in contemporary humanitarian action. Taking Judith Butler’s theorisation of ‘interpretive frames’ as its analytical starting point, the article traces the process by which the humanitarian system distinguishes between lives that are to be protected and those that are dispensable. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Syrian aid workers and other experts, the article shows how the humanitarian frame makes it difficult to correctly recognise local actors’ security needs and vulnerabilities. Moreover, the normative and temporal limits of the humanitarian security project exclude certain types of threats from the view and make it difficult for local aid actors to articulate their need for protection. To address these issues, the article calls for more critical reflection regarding the marginalising and silencing effects of the existing security framework.

Keywords:

• Humanitarian aid
• security
• risk management
• localisation
• Judith Butler
• Syria

Acknowledgements

I thank Pauli Kettunen, Noora Kotilainen, Agneta Kallström and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript. I am also grateful to all of those interviewees who shared their knowledge and experiences with me and thus made the writing of this paper possible.

Declaration of interest statement

No potential conflict of interest is reported by the author.

Notes

1 The figure is based on a global average of incidents recorded over the period of 2011–2020 Stoddard et al. 2021

2 Of the 283 fatalities, 276 were national and seven international staff members. Humanitarian Outcomes, Aid Worker Security Database (2022), available at: https://aidworkersecurity.org (accessed 15 March 2022).

3 IHS Markit, “ICRC Declares Existence of Internal Armed Conflict in Syria” (2012), available at: https://ihsmarkit.com/country-industry-forecasting.html?ID=1065969566 (accessed 1 December 2021).

4 Humanitarian Outcomes, “About the Data” (2022), available at: https://aidworkersecurity.org/about (accessed 15 March 2022).

5 Gall, C., “Aid Workers Staying in Taliban-Ruled Afghanistan Tread a Tricky Path”, The New York Times, 8 September 8, 2021, available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/world/asia/afghanistan-aid-workers-taliban.html (accessed 2 December 2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work has been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation under Grants 00221009 and 00211068; and the Emil Aaltonen Foundation under Grant 200227.

Notes on contributors

Iida-Maria Tammi

Iida-Maria Tammi (MSc) is a doctoral student at the Department of Political and Economic Studies at the University of Helsinki. In her research, she focuses on humanitarian action, armed conflict and the Middle East. She holds a master’s degree in international development studies from the University of Amsterdam and has previously worked on foreign and security policy-related issues at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland and the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) field office in Peru. She is a member of the editorial board of the Finnish Political Studies Association (FPSA)’s webjournal.