Beyond the Humanitarian/Political Divide

Witnessing and the Making of Humanitarian Ethics

Bibliographic Data

ID12720060
AuthorsM Givoni (0000-0002-0063-0104, Ben-Gurion University, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume10
Issue1
Pages55-75
Publication date2011-02-22
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Human Rights (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1475-4835 • E-ISSN: 1475-4843
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14754835.2011.546235
OpenAlexW2124438446
LanguageEN
Citations received17
References cited30

This essay examines how witnessing became encoded as an act of advocacy that may furnish a response to the plight of distant victims, and how it has impacted upon contemporary humanitarian ethics. By following the discourses and practices of witnessing elaborated by the French section of the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) since the late 1970s, the essay argues that witnessing helped transform a well-established humanitarian sensibility into a full-fledged humanitarian responsibility, which has been thoughtfully and systematically attentive to the pitfalls of transnational aid. The essay shows that when mobilized by individual and collective actors who strove to constitute themselves as subjects of moral conduct, witnessing took on disparate forms and rationalities that amounted neither to eye-witnessing nor simply to the public use of speech. It concludes by offering a reappraisal of the contemporary politics of humanitarianism, arguing that contemporary humanitarian ethics maintains dynamic and shifting relations with the political. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Laurence Binet, Pierre Bouretz, Rony Brauman, Andrea Bussotti, Xavier Crombé, Christine Dufour, Odile Hardi, Jacques Pinel, Christine Pinto, Judith Soussan, Brigitte Vasset, and Fabrice Weissman for the help and inspiration they provided during my research at the Parisian headquarters of MSF-France in 2003–2004. The writing of this article was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the David Horowitz Research Institute on Society and Economy at Tel Aviv University. I am grateful to Yehouda Shenhav, Lin Chalozin-Dovrat, Ronen Shamir, Sigal Ozery-Roitberg, Yossi Loss, and the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Human Rights for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. The responsibility for any errors or misconceptions is entirely my own. Notes 1. In spite of recent attempts to replace it by notions such as "advocacy" or "speaking out," the term "témoignage" is maintained and used frequently across the international MSF movement and beyond its French-speaking segments. 2. Fearing a resurgence of controversies over witnessing, MSF's International Council decided to limit the public distribution of the series and to classify it as an "internal document." See http://www.msf-crash.org/en/publications/ 3. MSF is today a multinational movement that consists of 19 national sections, five of them fully operational. Throughout the international federation, one can find various conceptions of humanitarian responsibility and different operational preferences. To avoid a homogenizing view of MSF, this essay focuses on the founding French section, whose tradition of ethical reflection and position of intellectual leadership has made it especially dominant in the making of humanitarian witnessing. 4. For a discussion of the differences between humanitarianism and human rights in the French political culture, see also Ticktin (2006: 35–36). 5. The historical evolution of the sans frontières movement has been documented extensively in CitationVallaeys (2004), CitationFox (1995), and CitationBrauman and Tanguy (1998). 6. Social projects that reflect a preoccupation with what was beginning to be perceived as a manmade, evitable suffering date back to the eighteenth century. The term "humanitarian" was only coined, however, in the early nineteenth century. See CitationLaqueur (1989), CitationHaskell (1985), and Foucault (1977/1991: 195–228) for stimulating accounts of the historical origins of humanitarianism. 7. That such a reappropriation of witnessing indeed took place is evidenced by a recent study on humanitarian testimony and juridical testimony, coauthored by Françoise Bouchet-Saulnier, the legal advisor of MSF-France, and Fabien Dubuet. Formulating its aim as that of "identifying and clarifying the demarcation between humanitarian testimony and legal testimony" (CitationBouchet-Saulnier and Dubuet 2007: 5), the study warns of the potential repercussions of testimonies by relief workers in international criminal courts on humanitarian independence. The authors' claim that humanitarian witnessing may be incompatible with juridical witnessing suggests, as I will show in what follows, that unlike more familiar practices of juridical testimony, the essence of humanitarian witnessing doesn't lie in establishing the facts and promoting justice. 8. The degree to which the modes of witnessing described here influence the ways in which MSF-France and other humanitarian organizations normally depict crises is therefore not germane to my argument, which focuses on the nexus between witnessing and humanitarian ethics more broadly. Certain acts of witnessing might have been highly instrumental to the making of humanitarian morality as a practical system of concern anchored in the actions, observations, and judgments of individual witnesses without necessarily becoming common practices or dominant models of humanitarian representation. For the same reason, the historical account that will be traced here does not imply a substitution of one mode of witnessing for another but rather describes reappraisals of the basic terms of witnessing and a multiplication of its forms. 9. A detailed account of the march and the events that preceded it is available in Vallaeys (2004: 307–360). 10. Refugee camps have functioned as what Ilana Feldman called "mechanisms of visibility" (2008: 507) prior to the 1970s, as shown by the case of the Palestinian refugees. Construed as monuments of displacement, however, the visibility of the Palestinian camps mainly carried symbolic, rather than epistemic, value. 11. On the distinction between professionalism and militancy and its effect on the construction of humanitarian identities in the French humanitarian field, see CitationSiméant (2001). 12. Newspaper articles on and interviews with the humanitarian doctors published in the 1970s are replete with references to the widespread critiques of medicine and to the new medical persona cultivated by missions in the Third World. One of the most notable examples is a short article (CitationBernier 1972: 1) written by one of MSF's founders shortly after the founding of the organization. 13. The phrase "inner periphery" is drawn from an interview with Rony Brauman (Paris, June 23, 2004). 14. The text was apparently written in 1987. 15. My point is not to deny the inequality that humanitarian witnessing induces by featuring mute victims whose stories are recounted by Western observers (see CitationFassin 2007: 518) but rather to unravel the epistemic conditions that shape both representations and misrepresentation of political emergencies . 16. Rufin was a physician who served on relief missions in the Third World and would later act as board member of MSF and as the president of another French humanitarian organization, Action Contre la Faim. 17. Branches of MSF were founded in European countries already in the 1980s, but international structures of coordination and cooperation were established only toward the end of the decade. 18. For a discussion of the religious affiliations of humanitarianism without borders, see Taithe (2004). 19. In some cases this redefinition of victimhood materialized by establishing medical triage, which was regulated by the criterion of immediate danger to life, as the highest operative principle of moral action and representation, thereby counterbalancing the caprice and disproportionality of media coverage of and public emotions towards crises. For a discussion of the notion of triage in humanitarian practice see CitationRedfield (2008). 20. For an account of the distinction between the political and the humanitarian that limits itself to the realist tradition, see CitationWarner (1999). 21. For other studies that attempt, on different grounds, to revise Agamben's thesis on the "secret solidarity" between humanitarian organizations and sovereign politics, see CitationRedfield (2005), CitationAgier (2004), and CitationFassin (2007). 22. Fassin (2005: 369) accordingly mentions that the humanitarian clause in the French immigration law was introduced in response to pressures from MSF, MDM, and human rights associations. 23. The founding fathers of the ICRC presented war as a "chronic disease" and an "inevitable evil" while portraying charity as a manifestation of devotion, benevolence, and courage. See Moynier (1882: 226), Hutchinson (1996: 106), and Moynier and Appia (1867: 71–110)

Humanitarian aid · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sensibility · Sociology · Global Security and Public Health · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Migration, Refugees, and Integration

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