The Logic of Relief: Humanitarian NGOs and Global Power

Humanitarian relief NGOs like Doctors without Borders, CARE or Oxfam play a materially and symbolically important role in the global order. Since the end of the cold war high hopes have been associated with these NGOs as providing the path to a more democratic and more effective approach to solving social problems on a global scale. Based on interviews with desk officers in 16 of the largest western-based humanitarian relief NGOs, this paper argue that these agencies form an institutional space of shared practice that mediates between values, outside problems, and outside interests on the one hand and outcomes on the other. Relief agencies have one primary product, ‘the project’. The pursuit of the good project shapes the allocation of resources and the kind of activities we see, and it does so relatively independently of beneficiaries’ preferences and needs. While most critical approaches to global governance emphasize the coherence of global power and assume a form of direct domination exercised on oppressed subjects through states and NGOs, I find that humanitarian relief has a logic of its own. The poorest of the world are made to compete against each other as part of potential projects. Some of them receive some relief some of the time; in exchange they lend authority to aid agencies and donor governments under circumstances over which they have very little control.