Humanitarianism and the Quantification of Human Needs

Minimal Humanity

Joël Glasman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000762594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

This book provides a historical inquiry into the quantification of needs in humanitarian assistance. Needs are increasingly seen as the lowest common denominator of humanity. Standard definitions of basic needs, however, set a minimalist version of humanity – both in the sense that they are narrow in what they compare, and that they set a low bar for satisfaction. The book argues that we cannot understand humanitarian governance if we do not understand how humanitarian agencies made human suffering commensurable across borders in the first place.

The book identifies four basic elements of needs: As a concept, as a system of classification and triage, as a material apparatus, and as a set of standards. Drawing on a range of archival sources, including the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), and the Sphere Project, the book traces the concept of needs from its emergence in the 1960s right through to the present day, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's call for "evidence-based humanitarianism." Finally, the book assesses how the international governmentality of needs has played out in a recent humanitarian crisis, drawing on field research on Central African refugees in the Cameroonian borderland in 2014–2016.

This important historical inquiry into the universal nature of human suffering will be an important read for humanitarian researchers and practitioners, as well as readers with an interest in international history and development.

The Introduction, Conclusion, and Chapers 1, 4, 5, and 6 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

1

Concepts

Elements of a genealogy of needology

DOI: 10.4324/9781003006954-2

“Impartiality” is now recognized as a paramount principle of humanitarian aid – not only by NGOs, but also by UN agencies and governments.¹ The academic literature, as well as the official documentation of these organizations, traces the notion of impartiality back to its original formulation in humanitarian law in the 1864 Geneva Convention and to the work of Henri Dunant.² However, this official version misses an important shift in the definition of “impartiality.” For Dunant and the Convention, impartiality was not a rule of distribution – it was a clause of non-discrimination. It was much later that “impartiality” came to be understood as rule of mathematic distribution of good and services. It was Jean Pictet, in the 1940s, who inscribed the idea of “proportionality” in the definition of “impartiality”: Aid relief would have to be distributed “according to needs.” During the last decades of the twentieth century, the definition of impartiality became increasingly associated with the quantification of needs. As the Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs endorsed by the Steering Committee for Humanitarian Response states: “Aid priorities are calculated on the basis of need alone.”³ Any good humanitarian project, it is now argued, should start with a quantitative estimation of suffering – the famous “needs assessment.”⁴

How did needology – the global bookkeeping of suffering – become the doxa of the humanitarian field? This chapter starts with an analysis of “impartiality” within international humanitarian law and focuses on the contribution of Jean Pictet. As a Geneva-based ICRC jurist, Pictet drew on the heritage of international humanitarian law and human rights law, reinterpreting two others Genevans – Henri Dunant and Jean Jacques Rousseau. But the inflection that Jean Pictet gave to the definition of impartiality, and the subsequent formulation of the “according to needs” principle, was preceded by a general shift in the perception of suffering that occurred between the 1870s and the Second World War. During the three-quarters of a century that separated Dunant from Pictet, the perception of needs within industrialized societies changed almost totally. It was a decisive period for the conceptualization of needs – on one side, people increasingly talked about “needs”; on the other side, within a few decades, the quantification of suffering became one of the favorite activities of state bureaucracies and scientists. While Pictet worked on humanitarian principles, everyone was talking about needs and their quantification – when Dunant was working on the Geneva Convention, almost no one did.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, two fields of knowledge increasingly addressed the question of sufficiency: One was political economy. In this period, the European bourgeoisie was preoccupied with questions such as political order and social cohesion. How could states avoid social protests and maintain order? What was the minimum provision that people should receive to live and work? Those questions fueled an interest in poverty and working-class consumption. Another field of knowledge, health care, the definition of biological needs and the quantification of bodily consumption (for instance the quantification of food rations), witnessed increasing attention at the end of the nineteenth century.

Both traditions of thoughts – political economy and health – diffused a new understanding of needs as individual and quantifiable category. During the two world wars, the quantification of the needs of soldiers and civil populations became a military and strategic matter. Notions like “triage” (i.e. the classification of patients in order of priority) spread throughout military medicine and emergency relief. Questions of minimal provision and sufficiency became a matter of national interest in a global competition among capitalism, fascism, and Bolshevism. Thus, in the 1940s, everyone was talking about needs. One highly influential theory, Abraham Maslow’s famous “hierarchy of needs,” was formulated at the same moment as Pictet’s legal codification. By the end of the Second World War, the idea that needs were quantificable, hiearchizable, and prioritizable had become common sense. The very notion of “needs” had migrated from the field of expert knowledge to everyday language (in the same manner as other words such as “class,” “GDP,” “crisis,” “depression,” or “stress,” etc.).⁵

While everyone was now measuring needs, it was not about the needs of everyone. Needs could be compared and quantified, but they were not universal. The last sections of this chapter address the question of colonial differentialism and the late universalization of needs. In the colonial territories, the quantification of needs only targeted a handful of categories of persons: Soldiers, workers, settlers, etc. After the Second World War, African intellectuals, politicians, and labor unionists increasingly fought against the colonial division of needs in two distinct classes – one for Europeans, one for “native” populations. Moreover it was only in the 1970s, long after the decolonial wave of the 1960s, that international organizations made “basic needs” a key tool for the global commensuration of social distress.

Needs as a legal category: Impartiality, proportionality, entitlement

The principle of “impartiality” is mostly attributed to Henri Dunant and the authors of the 1864 Geneva Convention.⁶ But there is often confusion in this narrative between the idea of impartiality as it was used in the nineteenth century and the idea as it is used today. The 1864 Geneva Convention did include a clause that one could describe as an “impartiality clause,” but it did not mention a proportionality of needs. For Henri Dunant, there was no question of quantity. Dunant described suffering and aid, but he did not bother to render them equivalent. The mode of description he used made calculation obsolete. He described pains that were immeasurable: They could be seen (“The wounds, aggravated by heat and dust and lack of water and care, have become more painful”), heard (“one hears the groans, the muffled sighs full of anguish and suffering, and ragged voices that cry out for aid”), and smelled (“fetid exhalations taint the air”).⁸ Dunant talked about “serious wounds” and “sores,” he evoked “a left shoulder shattered by a cannonball,” and he describes “agonies” and “suffering” triggered by bullets and gangrene. One recognizes, in Dunant’s story, victims – on one side, “the unfortunates,” the “poor soldiers,” the “sick,” and on the other side “aid,” “French surgeons,” people “moved by compassion.” One witnesses “generous attention,” “necessary amputations,” “relief,” but nowhere in Dunant’s text is there a question of proportion. Dunant listed services and items (“wooden planks,” “straw,” “canvas to protect the injured from the sun,” “chicken broth,” “wine,” “biscuits,” “bandages,”) but nowhere did he count them. The “impartiality” clause of the 1864 Geneva Convention was merely a non-discrimination clause:⁹ “injured or sick soldiers will be retrieved and cared for, whatever nation they belong to,” Article 6 stated. That meant: Care for your friend as well as for your enemy. It did not entail much more than that.¹⁰

Figure 1.1 The use of “needs” and “suffering” in digitized printed sources (1830–2000). This image shows the use of the word “needs” and “suffering” over the last century and a half, according to Ngram Viewer. This tool is far from perfect.⁷ However, it allows a quick exploration of a large corpus. The word “needs” is used more often today than it was in the early nineteenth century. The word “suffering,” conversely, was used twice as much as “needs” in the early nineteenth century, and was used four or five times less frequently by the end of the twentieth century. All humans “suffer,” and all humans have “needs.” However, these terms imply different regimes of action. The language of suffering is fueled by emotion and compassion – the language of needs is fueled by comparison and counting. The language of suffering functions in the “regime of Agapè” described by Luc Boltanksi: a regime of action that calls for direct action but avoids the commensuration of individuals. On the top of this traditional language of compassion, a language on needs has been added, implying comparison, counting, and hierarchization.

In 1906 and 1929, international conventions extended the principle of aid impartiality to other categories of war victims – no longer only injured soldiers, but also sick civilians, the interned, the deported, evacuated persons, the homeless, the populations of occupied regions, and refugees.¹¹ The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) frequently debated the principles of humanitarian aid. In subsequent texts published by members of the Red Cross movement (1921, 1928, 1952), new “principles” were introduced, others were abandoned, but the idea of impartiality was always preserved – always in its negative acceptance of non-discrimination.¹²

Jean Pictet, a jurist at ICRC, began to work on humanitarian law during the Second World War. After the war, the then Director of General Affairs of the ICRC Pictet wrote his thesis on the “doctrine of the Red Cross.” He outlined seven fundamental principles of humanitarian aid: Humanity, equality, proportionality, impartiality, neutrality, independence, and universality. He fully reworked the principle of “impartiality” by adding to it the principle of the proportionality of aid.¹³

Why did Pictet feel the need to rewrite the Red Cross’s principles? After the war, his organization, the ICRC, was harshly criticized for its ambiguous role during the war – and its failure to protect the victims of fascism. One of the most direct attacks, however, came from within the Red Cross movement. The ICRC, together with the National Red Cros...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• Acknowledgments Page
• List of figures Page
• List of tables Page
• List of boxes Page
• List of abbreviations Page
• Introduction: Minimal humanity – the commensuration of human suffering on a global scale
• 1 Concepts: Elements of a genealogy of needology
• 2 Classifications: UNHCR and the legibility of refugees in Central Africa
• 3 Artifacts: Malnutrition, MUAC, and the materialization of anthropometry
• 4 Standards: The Sphere Project and the universalization of the vital minimum after Goma
• 5 Registration: Refugees and the emergence of the humanitarian field in Cameroon
• 6 Vulnerability: Impartial algorithms and analog malnutrition
• Conclusion: Infrastructure of commensurability
• Index