For decades, the Western aid industry became ever more powerful in Sudan, even as it grew quieter about the reasons for underdevelopment. Rather than combat the root causes of poverty, NGOs served only to alleviate the number of deaths.
During the second half of the 1980s, Oxfam ran an extensive food aid program among Beja nomads in Sudan’s arid Red Sea Hills. The Beja had lost around half of their cattle and sheep during the severe drought of 1984. Based on extensive household and nutritional surveillance, Oxfam operated what was claimed to be a humanitarian “food for recovery” program. Using targeted food assistance, it promised, future stress sales of livestock could be prevented, thus helping the Beja to recover their herds.
Sometime in 1987, as Oxfam’s country representative for Sudan, I was in the wrap-up session of a periodic visit to its Port Sudan office. The humid sea air did nothing to reduce the oppressive afternoon heat. Having gone through day-to-day organizational issues with the team, the closing conversation took an unscripted turn.
Doubtless informed by growing knowledge of conditions in the Red Sea Hills and the regional government’s attitude, the question of what Oxfam was “actually doing” speculatively bubbled to the surface. While the “food for recovery” idea made a strong public case for donor support, there was a suspicion that there was more to it than that.
The government had done little to nothing to help the Beja. There were no rural services, appropriate provision, or even meaningful concern. The Beja were a neglected, second-class citizenry and there was no sign that this would improve soon. Previously unarticulated, at least collectively, the team formed the opinion that Oxfam was not only replacing an absent government but going further. While satisfying external sponsors, the claim to be supporting herd recovery also served to downplay legitimate Beja concerns, while also moving the government out of the spotlight. Unwittingly, Oxfam was helping keep a political lid on things; its slick humanitarian sales pitch concealing a real-world pacificatory role.
The unscripted end of the program review had a sobering effect. A meeting of minds had taken place and a seemingly illicit insight had been shared. It would remain unvoiced, however: a private, insider opinion. People moved on and, eventually, Oxfam’s Red Sea operation would be abandoned, the touted “food for recovery” having never materialized.
Western humanitarianism has, to be sure, a long history. Used here, however, the term is a container for a new and distinct set of contingent social, political, and technical practices that emerged between the 1970s and 1990s. Rather than saving lives or livelihoods, these practices are better understood as functioning to regulate the level of excess death in the neocolonial world.
The world-historic transformation in the global economy during the decades in question provided the material basis for the changes in humanitarianism described here. The United States, UK, and other Western economies de-industrialized and financialized, bringing to a willed end the West’s long manufacturing dominance. Put simply, a new defining division of the world occurred between interconnected Western consumer economies and Asian producer economies. Together with the rise of neoliberalism, this new, if partial, international division of labor was celebrated as the “no alternative” era of “globalization.”
Disturbing this teleological “triumph of the market” narrative, however, a different but necessary Africa–West Asia axis took form during the same phase of finance-led imperialism. This development forcefully denotes capitalism’s continued reliance on primitive accumulation: rather than unequal exchange per se, the physical resources, social capital, and labor of this spatial axis were slated for external plunder and ecological extractivism through war, legalized theft, and violent dispossession. Compared to what existed before, the measurable effects of the ensuing decades of violence and displacement have been aptly summed up by Ali Kadri as “de-development.”
It is no accident that the Africa–West Asia axis of dispossession was Western humanitarianism’s main site for trial runs of its new “life-saving” regulatory practices. On every measure — careers, expenditure, growth, and influence — NGOs benefitted from the wages of imperialism. Breaking with liberal humanitarianism’s earlier traditions of autonomy from (if not antipathy to) Western foreign policy, Western humanitarianism, by and large, became pro-US and anti-communist. Deeply implicated in the neocolonial recapture of independent former colonies, by the 1980s Western humanitarianism was advocating a postmodern, complexity-based worldview.
Western humanitarianism would be eclipsed after the devastating US-led “war on terror” in the early 2000s. Yet excavating the regulatory practices that arose in the preceding decades offers striking examples of the need for self-criticism in the cause of liberation and a sustainable world.
The NGO Invasion
International NGOs expanded rapidly along the Africa–West Asia axis during the 1980s. Given the relative speed of this event, we could rightly call them an “invasion.” It was a time of de-industrialization in the West, and of the Left’s drift to the Right as the Soviet Union collapsed. Many disillusioned comrades sought solace by joining the NGO expeditionary force. Reflecting the neoliberal Zeitgeist, especially the privatization of public services, the invasion was paid for by the transfer of Western aid funding away from states to an expanding private NGO sector.
The NGO invasion can also be seen to resonate with aspects of the “new” imperialism that emerged a century earlier. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the landmass of the colonized world grew rapidly, its administration reaching new heights of barbarity, as reflected in a series of what Mike Davis termed “late-Victorian holocausts.” Paradoxically, a central moral justification that spurred new imperialism was “anti-slavery.”
During the “Scramble for Africa,” imperialists would equate unfettered black sovereignty with the tyranny of slavery, despotism, and, by implication, humanitarian disaster. When Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, given the prevalence of domestic slavery, this racial equation between slavery and despotism was used to define Egyptians as unfit to govern. As explored by Adom Getachew, during the 1920s, the same fears were at play as Liberia and Abyssinia — both slave-owning societies — were incorporated and managed within the League of Nations as “unequal sovereigns.”
Several decades later, a similar sense of impending disaster also informed the rearguard action of Sudan’s colonial Political Service to forestall that country’s independence in 1956. Western humanitarianism has not lost this fear of black sovereignty but simply reworked its parameters.
The rapid appearance of NGOs along the Africa–West Asia axis during the 1980s announced Western humanitarianism’s neocolonial phase. NGOs were the practical means of community-level recapture within the proxy structure of US-led imperialism. Rather than anti-slavery, the driving force of Western humanitarianism was now, as the irreverent outbursts of the band Band Aid’s Bob Geldof epitomized, an “anti-authoritarianism” directed, in particular, at the bureaucracy of African states. To paraphrase one aspect of Hannah Arendt’s somewhat controversial appreciation of Britain’s contribution to the new imperialism: the NGO invasion, with its antiauthoritarian critique, attracted the idealistic best among Western youth.
The invasion was also symptomatic of the political rupture among the metropolitan left regarding its earlier anti-imperial agitation. The spirit of the era was captured in Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 declaration that the time for grand narratives was over. The following year, the Iron Lady herself, Margaret Thatcher, complemented the French theorist with her notorious pronouncement that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism.
Western Humanitarianism
Among NGOs, the rejection of grand narratives was largely aimed against Marxism, especially the Marx-inspired structural accounts of underdevelopment that were popular at the time. In 1985, the French chapter of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) publicly declared its break with the Third Worldism that had hitherto defined left-wing internationalism. Adopting an openly pro-US, pro-Israel, and anti-communist position, it dissociated capitalism from the violent dispossession then strengthening its grip along the Africa–West Asia axis. Attempts to draw such connections were derided as “ideology.” Having declared the world politically fit for purpose, MSF would henceforth devote itself to humanitarianism 101 — that is, “saving lives.”
But why, if capitalism was benign, did lives need saving? It is here that the racial connection between the anti-slavery of new imperialism and the antiauthoritarianism of modern NGOs emerges. In an update of the liberal worldview that equated emancipated black sovereignty with humanitarian disaster, for MSF the culprit wasn’t imperialism, it was the emergence of disaster-producing, independent totalitarian African states. Henceforth, moreover, MSF would have no hesitation in calling them out. Especially if they claimed a left-wing or independent agenda.
If MSF secured the neocolonial bridgehead, it was British academics, such as Randolph Kent and David Booth, and NGOs, like Oxfam and Save the Children, that explained how to understand a world where “capitalism” and “imperialism” had been magicked away. Causal narratives were deemed invalid because of the chaotic “complexity” of the interactions between people, things, and nature. General laws or determining relations were impossible.
What was, essentially, a celebratory rationalization of ignorance, served to render the outside world unknowable beyond immediate experience. Problems were tied to specific times and places, allowing no general historical connections to be drawn. If French political revanchism reached out to neoliberalism, British empiricism linked Western humanitarianism to quantification, cybernetics, and machine-learning.
Forged in the imperial struggle against Marxism and mid-twentieth-century attempts at independent worldmaking, during the 1980s a cybernetic worldview took shape within Western humanitarianism — decades before the seamless spread and lock-in of corporate machine-thinking or artificial intelligence.
Naturalizing Conflict
The mid-1980s Sudan famine was a site of competing national and international agendas. Waving the humanitarian flag, the NGO encampment that was rapidly set up marked the end of Sudan’s quarter-century experiment in self-directed development. NGOs had been few before 1984; within a couple of years, over a hundred were registered in the capital Khartoum. At the time there was no shortage of Marx-inspired structural accounts of famine. Such insights, however, were quickly swept away in the disorientating moment of neocolonial recapture.
Aside from the liberal fear of black sovereignty, as I argued in Global Governance and the New Wars, the drivers of intercommunal conflict were argued to be multiple and place-specific, taking in the social, economic, and environmental factors. For Western humanitarianism, intercommunal warfare had no generalizable or overriding cause beyond the scarcity and ignorance that afflicted those involved. The West’s publicly funded “aid industry” would interpret the coming decades of violence and instability through the ahistoric but quantifiable lens of cybernetic complexity.
On the ground, however, since the 1950s, the expansion of commercial agriculture had progressively undermined subsistence agriculture. From the end of the 1970s, US-authored structural adjustment accelerated this dissolution by reorientating Sudan’s agricultural production toward exports. Already under strain, the resulting possibilities for profit transformed the former reciprocity between herders and farmers into an exploitable relation of permanent war. The resulting periodic bouts of paramilitary resource extractivism, ecological destruction, polarizing racial violence, and forced migration eventually spiraled into Sudan’s long-anticipated state fracture of 2023.
With its unwillingness to generalize, Western humanitarianism normalized the evolution of Sudan’s violent neocolonial economy. Four decades of funding-friendly humanitarian emergencies followed, masking a brutal assault by mercantile capital on society and nature. While creating little real knowledge of Sudan — that is, knowledge that would be of practical use to those struggling against impoverishment while fighting for their rights, land, and resources — these were profitable decades of institutional growth for the aid industry.
Predicting Famine
Structural accounts of famine had scandalized its use as a weapon in the ongoing social civil war and called for economic reform and political protection. So-called “complexity” thinking instead normalized famine, transforming it into a predicable outcome of a probabilistic dataset of behavioral signals and alerts. Famine was, after all, to be expected in an “underdeveloped” country.
While its cause may be “complex,” fortuitously, NGOs developed a “technology” to predict the occurrence of famine — a dual-use technology that would also prove useful in the competition for media attention and funding. Since the 1970s, it had been known that variations in local market prices for food, livestock, or labor often prefigured atypical behavioral patterns among farmers and herders. Such changes became a proxy for the imminence of famine.
During the 1980s, Sudan was a laboratory for Famine Early Warning (FEW). The rationale was that a timely alert allows early intervention, which saves more lives. Initially, FEW relied on the labor-intensive collection of price and population-movement data from geographically dispersed markets and collection points. Centralization, hand-held calculation, and dissemination routinely took weeks. The significance of the manual nature of this early predictive technology should not be missed.
As I argued in Post-Humanitarianism, FEW was an ecology of grounded activities amounting to an established socio-technical problem-solving practice, a decade or more before the facilitation afforded by generalized computing, and three decades before its codification with the breathless arrival of remotely sensed “digital humanitarianism.”
Rather than technology being a determining external force, FEW is suggestive of a counter-history where technology is a socially determined tool at the center of capitalism’s ceaseless civil war. As a “pure” technology of prediction, FEW has never worked. Even if death is foretold, in an unequal world some lives are more valued than others. As a socially determined technology, FEW is inseparable from the historical ecology of practices, institutional agendas, and political struggles that define Western humanitarianism’s neocolonial phase of recapture and politico-cultural pacification.
Regulating Death
Famine Early Warning was especially important to the development of Western humanitarianism’s regulatory role. For a given population, prediction requires the existence of a quantifiable mortality benchmark that, once breached, allows a humanitarian emergency to be officially declared. However, any benchmark, other than one pegged to European norms, necessarily involves a process of racialized socio-cultural bargaining pursuant to a measure of excess death appropriate to “underdevelopment” while also morally acceptable to Western consumers.
The counter-history of Western humanitarianism tells not of saving lives but of the technology-driven attempt to regulate excess death along the Africa–West Asia axis of neocolonial predation and violence.
Since the 1970s, there has been a secular rise in the level of malnutrition deemed to constitute a humanitarian emergency. Levels that justified the mid-1980s NGO invasion of Sudan had, by the 1990s, become “normal” for Africa. This trend was brought to summation in 2004 with the creation of the UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). As a set of benchmarks, the IPC scale has been widely celebrated as the “gold standard” of humanitarian practice. Until recently, at least, it was credited with helping the aid industry control the scourge of famine.
However, in an indication of the experiential chasm now dividing Western consumer societies from the majority world, few have posed the obvious question: What would an IPC-declared emergency look like if transposed to Europe? A shocking truth lurks within this question. In the British case, during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, the excess death rate, from all causes, was around 60,000 per year. This barely registers on the IPC disaster scale. On a per capita basis, for a full-blown UN humanitarian emergency to be declared in the UK there would have to be well over four million excess deaths per year! These figures give some impression of the appalling levels of excess death that neocolonialism has normalized in the majority world.
For Western consumer societies, imperialism and colonialism are “history”: legacy issues that, at most, require some reparational amends. To suggest that the ongoing, indeed intensifying neocolonial phase of US-proxy wars is just as violent as colonialism, perhaps even more so, is to risk derision. For many countries on the Africa–West Asia axis, however, including Sudan, the UN’s high bar for excess deaths suggests otherwise. When we consider the toll of four decades of permanent war — the dispossession, immiseration, and displacement; the destruction of livelihoods, public infrastructure, and the biosphere; the austerity, urbicidal decimation, and the scattering to the wind of professional classes — a different picture is waiting to be drawn.
Western Humanitarianism in Crisis
Western humanitarianism, as outlined above, entered a period of crisis with the launch of the US-led war on terror. With its polarizing “with or against us” ethos, large areas of Africa and West Asia effectively became a free-fire zones. As international backing for humanitarian access and an associated concern for “human rights” disappeared, the aid industry defensively bunkered itself. The insularity of aid workers has since increased, together with a dependence on machine-driven remote management. Helped by budget cuts and increased managerial oversight, the aid industry’s regulatory role came adrift in the mounting violence and impunity of recent decades.
What did Western humanitarianism leave to the world, in the stead of the structuralism and political radicalism that it displaced? Here we are confronted with the “humanitarian paradox.”
At the heart of this paradox is that despite having been in Sudan for fifty years, for example, NGOs have little real knowledge of that country. As an agent of neocolonial recapture and pacification, the aid industry is incapable of creating useful knowledge for those struggling against neocolonialism and the violence, dispossession, and impoverishment it has unleashed. While dedicated to “saving lives” and supporting “rights,” the aid industry cannot furnish a peoples’ history, so to speak. By way of concealing this paradox, we find in Western humanitarian discourse several countervailing reflexes.
Regarding the Horn of Africa, the last few years have seen recurrent, self-serving predictions of the “famine to come,” each seeking to attract the attention of otherwise busily militarizing Western states. Many hope that the banner of “climate change,” backed by the objectivity of science and its ability to obfuscate decades of institutional complicity while renewing a security-driven urge to intervene, will keep Western humanitarianism marching on.
The liberal call to rally against climate change draws a convenient line under decades of aggravated intervention and development failure. But even when liberals do address the reality of escalating neocolonial violence, we find yet more iterations of liberalism’s long-standing racial fear of unfettered black sovereignty: that is, the threat posed by independent “totalitarian” African states, their corrupt incumbents, and rapacious non-state wannabes. Important here is the fashionable academic embrace of the transactional politics of the neoliberal “political marketplace” where everything has a price. Dedicated research programs are now busy “mapping” this unregulated space where, devoid of imperial designs, African tyrants and regional hegemons regularly sell each other down the river, so to speak.
The paradox of Western humanitarianism lies in its inability to constitute a peoples’ history of resistance and struggle against neocolonial oppression. The only history that Western humanitarianism is capable of producing is celebratory or egotistical accounts of its own technologies of intervention, surveillance, and digitalization.
