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Abstract
How can humanitarian actors operate in a host state with significant subnational variations in willingness and capacity to meet its obligations? This is an issue of pressing importance, given the expansion of humanitarian aid to middle-income countries with growing state capacity, but with persistent infrastructural weakness in their periphery. The article illustrates the challenges and potentialities of engaging these states through the case study of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Colombia. It describes the way the NRC has located its offices in peripheral areas, and how its activities have fostered the rule of law, successfully using rights-based approaches to strengthen subnational state institutions, activate and mobilise citizen demands and bridge national and subnational administrations. The article concludes that these activities, operated by officers with extensive practical knowledge and local trust networks, can open the way for durable solutions for humanitarian crisis, but can also provoke backlash from subnational actors.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their illuminating insights and suggestions; Emilio Lehoucq for extraordinary research assistance; the staff at NRC Colombia for their warmth and collaboration; and Kristin Bergtora Sandvik and Pablo Kalmanovitz for their generous guidance with the humanitarian studies and state capacity literature, as well as for reading previous drafts of this article.
Notes
1. ALNAP, State of the Humanitarian System; Rohwerder, "Humanitarian Response."
2. On this agitated debate, see Sandvik, "The Multiple Tracks"; Fox, "New Humanitarianism"; Slim, "Not Philanthropy"; Magrath, "Global Norms."
3. Darcy, "Locating Responsibility.”
4. Defined as internal armed conflict in international humanitarian law.
5. Barnett, "Humanitarianism Transformed"; Calhoun, "Idea of Emergency"; Redfield, "Sacrifice, Triage.”
6. On the varying capacity of states and its importance for external actors, see Krasner and Risse, "External Actors"; on the limits of indexes, see Bhuta, "Governmentalizing Sovereignty.”
7. Evans, Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In.
8. Mann, "Infrastructural Power Revisited," 355; Mann, "The Autonomous Power.”
9. Mann, "Infrastructural Power Revisited," 358.
10. For lower levels of poverty and political stability see Fearon and Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War"; for better human rights records see Englehart, "State Capacity, State Failure"; for a decreased risk of civil war see Sobek, "Masters of their Domains"; for conflict contagion see Braithwaite, "Resisting Infection"; for higher success rates in peace negotiations see McBride, Milante, and Skaperdas, "Peace and War" and Sobek, "Masters of their Domains.”
11. On preventing natural disasters see Lin, “Governing Natural Disasters”; on promoting economic development see Acemoglu and Robinson, Why Nations Fail?; Besley and Persson, "Origins of State Capacity"; Fearon and Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War.”
12. Theorised for example by Migdal, Strong Societies; Gibson, "Boundary Control"; Centeno, Blood and Debt; Soifer, "Regionalism, Ethnic Diversity, and Variation"; Fearon and Laitin, "Ethnicity, Insurgency"; Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence; Soifer, "State Infrastructural Power.”
13. See Civico, “We are Illegal” for paramilitary gangs in the Medellín slums; see Arjona, Resisting Rebel Governance and Aguilera, Contrapoder y justicia guerrillera for insurgency-dominated areas.
14. O’Donnell famously colour-coded these variations, with ‘brown’ zones having the least state presence and legitimacy. See O’Donnell, On the State.
15. Soifer, State Infrastructural, highlights subnational variation as an important dimension of infrastructural power; Mann, Infrastructural Power, seems to disagree the concept is well suited to address subnational variations. I agree with Soifer.
16. IDMC, Colombia, 1.
18. For indicators on the Colombian state, see the World Bank Governance Indicators at https://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/#reports. Centeno blames weakness on the absence of external war, but for a critique see Soifer, "Regionalism, Ethnic Diversity" and McDougall, "State Power.”
19. CONPES (Colombian government national policy directive) 2924 of 1997.
20. In 1999, the IACHR’s special rapporteur on displacement described for the first time the Colombian situation as a ‘humanitarian crisis’ and UNHCR began its official presence in the country. See CIDH, Colombia Country Report 1999. In 2003, OCHA opened an office in Colombia.
21. The differential approach to displacement in Colombia can be traced back to 2003. In ruling T-602, the Constitutional Court established that ‘the attention to displaced people shall be based in affirmative actions and differential approaches sensitive to gender, generation, ethnic group, disabilities, and sexual option’. It was further reinforced by T-721 of 2003, T-025 of 2004 and Auto 218 of 2006. The Court specified its differential approach for women in Auto 092 of 2008, people with disabilities (Auto 006 of 2009), indigenous peoples (Autos 004 and 005 of 2009), Afro-Colombian people (Auto 005 of 2009) and children (Auto 251 of 2008). For a thorough explanation of the process, including the differential approach, see Rodríguez and Rodríguez, Radical Deprivation on Trial. For an account of displaced women’s efforts to access government attention, see Lemaitre and Sandvik, “Shifting Frames”.
22. See Colombia Constitutional Court Autos 177 of 2005; 218 and 266 of 2006; 052 of 2008; 007, 008 and 314 of 2009; and 383 of 2010.
23. For a history of the process of adoption of the law written by the Senator that promoted it, see Cristo, La Guerra.
24. Sikkink et al., Evaluation of Integral Reparations.
25. For more on the rise of paramilitarism in Colombia see Duncan, "Drug Trafficking.”
27. The article is based on 15 interviews of field officers focused on their description of their everyday work, both in the past and the present, and five interviews with former collaborators (two NGO officials and three community leaders) as well as visits to three field offices (Cúcuta, Santa Marta and Popayán) and observation of different activities (a planning and evaluation workshop; a routine staff meeting; a legal assistance workshop for beneficiaries). The selection of the people to be interviewed followed the internal structure of NRC Colombia, interviewing people working in all areas and in all field offices (at least one person per field office and per area).
29. However, NRC’s 2015 yearly reports say this allowed a 36% budget increase for the IDP’s assistance in 5 sampled municipalities (comparing budgets from 2014 and 2015).
30. See Ricigliano, "Networks of Effective Action"; Lederach, The Moral Imagination; Wilén and Chapaux, “Problems of Local Participation.”
31. Threats to leaders in land restitution cases have been widely covered by the press and NGO. See Amnesty International, El proceso de restitución.
32. The phrase ‘humanitarianism proper’ was articulated in one of my interviews by an NRC officer frustrated with the difficulty of bridging subnational and national state institutions and other NRC activities he considered oriented toward human rights rather than humanitarianism.
33. See Autessere, Trouble with the Congo. For a useful review of the literature on the local in peacebuilding, see Leonardsson and Rudd, “‘Local Turn’ in Peacebuilding.”