New essay: "Dictates of Conscience and the Humanitarian System"

New article about two recent books on the ethics of disaster relief work in Humanity at UPenn Press. Thrust of my argument is that however essential political neutrality seems to aid agencies it is not only illusory (already widely accepted) but that it also enables elite disinvestment and disregard of social contract. 

"From the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit emerged a formal push for a greater localization of emergency response to minimize substitution for local actors and to balance the North/South playing field of donors and receivers. This is the technocratic equivalent of the far older sentiment that aid personnel should “work themselves out of a job.” A laudable aim, and official commitments to correct the asymmetry of dependency on outsiders for relief are long overdue. But simply decreeing that a greater share of palliative care should come from recipient nations misses the chance to call out the primary driver of these crises, their root cause. Where are the public institutions and leaders with direct responsibility for citizen welfare? How can their criminal neglect escape recrimination and corrective action, year after year? These are modern nation states with UN membership, capable of sending their highest envoys to participate in the World Humanitarian Summit and the World Economic Forum.

Little wonder, then, at the widespread suspicion among populations receiving “apolitical aid” that this neutrality coincidentally serves humanitarian neediness and elite interests equally well. Blithely ignoring their social contract, national leaders guarantee humanitarians their “greater good.” This symbiosis is the status quo most legible to local communities. How can relief agencies, in good conscience, do little to address local drivers of misery, calling out failed institutions and cynical leadership? “Do No Harm” may be sacrosanct but is its consequence and corollary—”Leave No Trace”—at all defensible? Decrying aid industry inaction, a form of complicity, by figures outside the system is urgently needed for greater accountability, because internal reform efforts like that of the World Humanitarian Summit are technocratic, averse to radical revisions. Slim’s and Malkki’s works represent small but valuable contributions in this regard."

Reclaiming Adventure in the Kenai Fjords

 

New article out in Ocean Paddler #59, Britain's best glossy mag devoted to sea kayaking.

"Rising early for our put-in at Seward, I checked the forecast for 30-knot winds and 6-foot swells. Frothy whitecaps and promising winds were building. Yes, the real Alaska was on its way. But only hours later, pulling on drysuits and ferrying loaded boats to the waterline, the throbbing seas had gone flat, the wind-blasted treetops motionless. It was rejection, the rebuke of a lover, and my mind scrambled in denial. I didn’t come for this. Calm seas and postcard-perfect scenery would get boring fast. 

One pristine, clear day led to the next. Where was my Alaskan adventure? While I ruminated, moody and petulant, Kenai’s incandescent beauty surpassed itself daily. Caves, rock arches and pour-overs were common at the base of high cliffs, and riding incoming swell as it fired into narrow slots required total absorption in body, boat and blade. On open water and in rocky coves, surprise encounters with marine life were frequent. Sea lions, seals and otters, each with bright personalities reminiscent of Archie Bunker, Sanford and Son; the gambit of 70s sitcoms."

Diffa Region quietly piloting a Boko Haram amnesty policy

In mid-December 2016, in rural Diffa region on Niger’s southern border with Nigeria, fourteen men gave themselves up to authorities. The group said that they were former fighters of Boko Haram and that they had abandoned their weapons in the bush.

News of this impromptu surrender from the Islamist militant group responsible for tens of thousands of deaths and millions of displacements came as a surprise to most in the area. But not to regional authorities.

Since late last year, they had been quietly testing a tactic of asking families whose children have joined Boko Haram to spread word of an amnesty. If they surrendered, fighters were told, they would be pardoned and assisted in rejoining their communities.

Read the rest of my analysis for African Arguments. 

Cameroon's Far North: Responding to Boko Haram

“With Boko Haram, we joined your club,” mused Mdjiyawa Bakari, the governor of Cameroon’s Far North Region (Extrême-Nord), when we met at his home in Kousseri. The ‘club’ consists of liberal democracies bound by a common dilemma: defeating terrorist insurgencies at home while respecting the laws of war, including civic and human rights. From his veranda we gazed across the Logone River at the dusty skyline of N’djamena, capital of Chad. I was visiting to understand exactly how civilians were coping with the threat—forced displacement, pervasive suspicion of strangers, neighbours, even friends, and a near collapsed economy – posed by this West African affiliate of the Islamic State to this most peripheral region of Cameroon. “Asymmetric war means an invisible enemy playing by other rules,” he continued. “It’s turned our lives upside down.”

Read the rest of my analysis for Oxford Policy Group here.