The International Relief System: A Critical Review

by Larry Minear

Parallel National Intelligence Estimate on Global Humanitarian Emergencies

Meridian International Center, Washington, D.C.

September 22, 1994

Overview

This paper assesses the adequacy of the existing international relief system in the light of five criteria. With respect to each, it defines policy objectives, evaluates current performance, and frames a challenge. The paper includes a Table showing the comparative strengths and weaknesses of four major international humanitarian actors: the UN system, donor governments, NGOs, and the ICRC. Other papers at the meeting will address reforms needed in the system.

Introduction

It is hard to find analysts today who believe that the international relief system is functioning adequately. Significant differences of opinion do exist, however, about how adequacy should be defined and effectiveness measured. Weighing the relative importance of short-term success against longer-term difficulties is a matter of particular dispute. It is therefore useful to establish certain indicators of what may reasonably be expected regarding the provision of humanitarian assistance and protection worldwide.

The humanitarian need which is the subject of this review is situated in situations of armed conflict, largely within existing (or disputed) national borders. Many analysts consider "complex emergencies" -- situations in which a mix of political and military factors complicate the task of assistance and protection -- the major current humanitarian challenge testing international resourcefulness, resources, and resolve. Certainly the level of difficulty of generic humanitarian tasks is heightened when conflict is present.¹

The observations which follow reflect policy research carried out under the Humanitarianism and War Project since 1990 in a variety of armed conflict settings. Funded by some thirty UN organizations, governments, NGOs, and foundations, the Project has conducted interviews with more than one thousand practitioners in the Sudan, the Persian Gulf, Cambodia, the Horn of Africa, Central America, and Yugoslavia. The Project has published a handbook for practitioners and provided training for them. An overview of the Project and a bibliography of publications is attached.

A critique of the current system

The current international relief system is a set of largely informal arrangements among a diverse group of organizations engaged in humanitarian assistance and protection. Unlike comparable international undertakings ~ for example, in nuclear non-proliferation, technology transfer, or trade–current arrangements do not constitute what political scientists call a regime.²

Unlike other regimes, the international humanitarian relief system is not framed by a body of law, principles, and norms; implemented by an institutional apparatus; and enforced by sanctions to assure accountability. As humanitarian action becomes a more major international preoccupation in the post-Cold War era, a shift from the current welter of humanitarian activities to a more established regime is necessary and desirable. The major weaknesses to be addressed in the process are identified below; the reforms recommended are the subject of other papers.

The adequacy of the existing system merits review according to stated criteria, whether as the prelude to regime formation or to less ambitious modifications in current arrangements. Five such criteria are suggested here: coverage, coherence, cost-effectiveness, connectedness, and accountability. In each instance, the policy objectives, the current situation, and the challenge are examined.

1. Coverage

Policy objectives:

To reach major population groups facing life-threatening suffering wherever they are, providing them with assistance and protection proportionate to their need and devoid of extraneous political agendas.

Current situation:

The system falls short of the necessary global reach. Responses to need both among

and within countries evidence great unevenness, with political considerations

playing a distorting role. Triage is already alive and well, with major need in some

locations virtually ignored.

In terms of the world’s response to crises in different countries, the current system fails to assure that major humanitarian emergencies are dealt with on their individual merits. Such imbalances were particularly true of the aid activities of the superpowers during the Cold War, when the strategic importance of certain countries exercised a determining influence over the levels of assistance received. At that time, politicized allocations among countries undermined the integrity of aid through multilateral and NGO channels as well.

Within individual countries, the imbalances have also been pronounced. In the civil strife in Ethiopia in the 1980s, more than 90 percent of international relief went to government-controlled areas, penalizing persons in portions of Tigray and Eritrea controlled by insurgent movements. In a variety of other situations as well, the UN has demonstrated a structural bias toward the government side in civil wars, with donor governments and NGOs doing little to correct the imbalance. Current humanitarian arrangements benefit from no "invisible hand" which would ensure that the sum total of aid activities by the myriad institutions described in the following section result in well-proportioned responses to life-threatening human need.

Coverage skewed by Cold War politics has not been replaced by a more needs-based division of international resources. One complicating factor has been developments in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe. The U.S. government has estimated that the geographical area within which USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance should be prepared to respond has grown by some 21 percent since the end of the Cold War, with an additional 1.2 people now in potential need of humanitarian assistance.

A review of allocations would establish whether persons in need in the Newly Independent States have been inserted at the head of the AID or UN queue. In any event, critical issues involve not only the dollar amounts allocated but the criteria for establishing the relative importance of competing claims. Allocations of humanitarian aid according to factors other than the severity of need and the availability of assistance locally call into question the integrity of such aid -- where it is as well as where it is not provided.

The historic lack of proportionality within the humanitarian community is exacerbated when the world’s highest political body gets into the act. In the fall of 1990, Security Council preoccupation with the crisis in the Persian Gulf preempted consideration of the deteriorating situation in Liberia, brought to its attention by humanitarian organizations. Last year, the US blocked a UN peacekeeping operation proposed for Burundi, arguing that the UN was already overextended.

Within individual countries, there are also problems of coverage of all affected population groups there are also problems. Existing arrangements favor persons who have crossed international borders over those in refugee-like situations within their own countries. In places such as Cambodia and Afghanistan, this preference has exacerbated existing tensions and slowed the necessary processes of reconstruction and reconciliation.

Within individual relief operations as well, existing arrangements are also marred by overlaps and gaps. UNICEF has responsibility for women and children, UNHCR for refugees, including women and children. WFP has responsibility and expertise in food matters, although in actual program operations UNICEF and WHO may also be involved. In most situations, each agency arranges local transport for its own supplies, often bidding up prices in the process. The waste of time, energy, and resources resulting from such operational confusion is well documented.

Challenge:

To design and implement a needs-based allocations process for the division of available international resources among crises; and, toward that end, to establish objective indicators triggering review of deteriorating situations by senior UN officials and by the Security Council itself.

2. Coherence

Policy objective:

To ensure that the activities of the international community are carried out with an

effective division of labor among actors, maximizing the comparative advantages of

each.

Current situation:

Multiple actors create confusion and dysfunction.

Last year’s National Intelligence Council document, "Global Humanitarian Emergencies, 1994," contains an overview of the international relief network. In identifying the main players as UN bodies and "more than 16,000 NGOs," it vastly oversimplifies the universe. It omits donor governments and their organizations (such as the European Community’s Humanitarian Office) and military forces, whether of the UN or member governments, who in recent years have become major humanitarian actors. It also takes a textbook approach to emergencies. "When disasters occur," we are told, "UN agencies, NGOs, and representatives of donor countries meet to plan relief efforts."

As Table I indicates, the actors are far more numerous and the interactions far more dynamic and less structured.³ That reality is conveyed in our own country case studies noted earlier. In situation after situation, the multiplicity of actors is both a resource and a problem. Faced with the apparently random activity, the natural instinct of policy makers is to move as quickly as possible to assure coordination.

Faced with myriad NGOs, for example, the typical response of governments and the UN, for example, is to harness and direct their activities.⁴ In the Sudan, the UN looked to NGOs as delivery mechanisms for UN programs under Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), and indeed NGOs were indispensable in meeting OLS’ tonnage targets. At the same time, the Khartoum authorities, unhappy with NGO cross-border operations from Kenya into the southern Sudan, pressured the UN to rein NGOs in.

TABLE ONE

The Current International Relief System

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TABLE ONE

The Current International Relief System

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Meanwhile, donor governments kept their options open, funding the UN at some points and NGOs at others. More effective coordination by the UN did not necessarily mean greater outreach.

Many recent relief programs have been characterized by a lack of coherence, both among UN agencies and among NGOs. In Syria during the Gulf crisis, the need to increase sugar rations from 10 to 15 grams per day for a group of chilled refugees in the desert remained unmet, a casualty of wrangling at and between UNDRO, UNHCR, and WFP headquarters. Meanwhile the prevailing picture of NGOs responding to the Gulf crisis, we reported, was "one of energy and determination, mixed with confusion and disarray."⁵ It is now typical for lead UN agencies or UN humanitarian coordinators to be appointed and special coordinating arrangements among NGOs to be set up. However, these take time to put into place and often encounter problems of their own.

From a management viewpoint, the current system has too many moving parts, even though many have specific areas of comparative advantage. Greater collaboration among the agencies would be helpful, limiting random activity, overlap, and duplication. Yet the impulse to situate all agencies under a single umbrella is unrealistic and even, in a sense, undesirable. The assumption that the UN is the most likely candidate for the job is also flawed, as recent experience suggests.

Improved coordination may involve significant opportunity costs, impede quick action, centralize functions that are better left decentralized, and, particularly in civil war situations, politicize aid. Moreover, there is no guarantee that improved coordination will result in greater effectiveness or cost-effectiveness. As James 0. Ingram, veteran of many coordination wars as former WFP Executive Director, has observed, "The appearance of improved coordination at the center is not necessarily a factor in more effective and timely interventions in the field."⁶ In short, coordination is the hobby horse of politicians and theoreticians; the real issue is effectiveness.

With humanitarian crises burgeoning and more effective use of limited resources imperative, humanitarian agencies need a clearer institutional division of labor, common rules and procedures, and greater accountability. A reconfigured system -- better yet, a new regime -- would build on the various factors identified in Table I. Even with such changes, however, policy-makers should not expect to have the entire humanitarian apparatus at their disposition. The essential elements of the coordinating task and all potential coordinating vehicles require careful review.

Challenge: To achieve greater coherence in international relief programs, building upon the respective comparative advantages of the various actors but allowing each the necessary humanitarian space to achieve its full potential.

3. Cost-effectiveness

Policy objective:

To assure maximum return on international investments in humanitarian wellbeing, broadly understood.

Current situation:

Little data is available for assessing comparative cost-effectiveness either between humanitarian agencies or between investments in emergency response and those in prevention, conflict resolution, and development.

In carrying out our case study in 1990 on Operation Lifeline Sudan, we were struck by the absence of solid UN data on cost and cost-effectiveness issues. We were given compelling reasons why saving lives in the southern Sudan was expensive. Those interviewed were not able, however, to suggest a dividing line between the expensive and the excessive. Transport costs for moving a ton of cargo between two points varied from $110 by river to $850 by air. UN, NGO, and ICRC costs for comparable tasks varied widely. Equally sketchy cost data for other major relief efforts running simultaneously -- for example, in Mozambique and Somalia -undercut useful comparisons. A mechanism for taking into account differential levels of difficulty among humanitarian challenges in respective countries was even more out of the question.⁷

We thus recommended developing a method for evaluating the comparative cost-effectiveness of humanitarian aid deliveries. Since this would require interagency agreement on a common methodology for reporting, we suggested convening an interagency task force, perhaps under the auspices of UNDRO, as a first step.

Four years and many even more expensive humanitarian initiatives later, UNDRO has been folded into the new DHA, tasked with precisely such matters. Through the InterAgency Standing Committee, DHA has instituted UN system-wide appeals. Yet the current system remains woefully inadequate for reporting on the expenditure of resources raised, as well as on qualitative aspects of the activities funded. Our 1993 review of the UN response to the crisis in the former Yugoslavia found that system-wide expenditure data was available neither from DHA, the UN coordinating agency, nor from UNHCR, the system’s lead agency in that particular crisis.

Our case studies of the Sudan and other crises note a further weakness: the absence of attention to the greater cost-effectiveness of investments in prevention and early warning, conflict resolution and development. With the connections described in the following section between humanitarian crises and these other areas now better understood, the problem is not conceptual but institutional. The humanitarian apparatus, and the political and popular constituency supporting it, is heavily weighted toward mop-up operations. Establishing a better balance, an important challenge in its own right, is the subject of other papers prepared for this meeting.

Introducing greater cost-effectiveness into the world’s humanitarian responses is a major priority not only for aid agencies themselves but also for governments. At their request, DHA has introduced greater coherence into the process of international resource mobilization -- yet governments have yet to respond accordingly. In April 1994 DHA reported contributions to eleven consolidated interagency appeals covering only one quarter of the requests. Only 1.9 percent of the amounts requested for Liberia, on the low end, and 48.6 percent for the former Yugoslavia, on the high, had been provided. Governments appear to be creating hoops for the UN to jump through with little or no relevance to the allocations choices they as donors make.⁸

Challenge: To devise a mechanism for identifying and funding the most cost-effective programs among emergency response options and for making investments in the areas of prevention and development which minimize the chance of recurring emergencies.

4. Connectedness

Policy objective:

To assure that activities of a short-term emergency nature are carried out in a

context which takes longer term and interconnected problems into account.

Current situation:

The emergency ethos and the crisis orientation of humanitarian institutions are being confronted by deep-seated and long-term problems. Developing appropriate responses and fashioning effective links with political and military resources is proving difficult.

Without denigrating the importance of urgent humanitarian needs, dramatic emergencies are frequently the canaries in the international coal mine. Recurrent natural disasters often highlight the failure of longer term development programs to reduce the vulnerabilities of poor and disempowered populations. Complex emergencies, which generally have an even higher element of human causality or complicity, are themselves the indicators of deeply rooted historical factors and of failed national policies and international development strategies.

The ethnic conflicts which have come into prominence of late affront humanity in their assault on cherished international principles. Yet however blatant the violations, the violence has deeper roots than may at first be apparent. While killings along ethnic lines came to dominate the civil strife in Burundi in 1993 and Rwanda in 1994, "The present conflicts," observes one analyst, "are largely the result of a competition between elites for the benefits of public power, in which politicians and military, often with foreign acquiescence if not backing, use ethnicity and violence to manipulate the peasant masses and further their interests."⁹

Responding to the assaults on humanity, too, may take more careful strategizing. Many of today’s conflicts involve political-military strategies with a large element of personal or group self-aggrandizement. These include the lucrative trade in timber and gems involving the Khmer Rouge and their Thai military and business collaborators; the aggrandizement which has sustained the conflict in Somalia and led to the creation of new factions in Liberia; and the war- and blockade-profiteering among Serbs and Bosnian Serbs. Where commercial considerations dominate, customary appeals for respect of civilian populations may easily be ignored. Humanitarians must also beware lest infusions of relief keep conflicts alive or tip the balance in favor of one side or another.

Confronting the disrespect for humanitarian principle and the abrogation of international humanitarian law, aid agencies are hard-pressed to chart effective courses of action. US NGOs in particular, who have prided themselves on what they consider their non-political approaches, have often not examined the extent to which their programs have played into the hands of one protagonist or another or sharpened or perpetuated a given conflict. Remaining apolitical requires considerable political astuteness. As actors in conflicts in which relief, along with those for whom it is intended and those who provide it, are targets, humanitarians need to review the impacts of their interventions.

Such complexities notwithstanding, the attention of the media and the public -- and even of policy-makers and program managers -- is riveted on day-to-day crisis management. Priority is given to providing artificial respiration to the canary rather than to addressing the fumes which are its undoing. Obscured in the process are the underlying problems which surface in a given emergency and need to be taken into account if short-term interventions are to have longer term positive results.

To their credit, humanitarian organizations are frequently among the active proponents of greater attention to the underlying problems. Some have noted that the costs of international military presence in Somalia have dwarfed total investments in a generation of development activities there. Yet massive investments of food aid in Haiti by major US NGOs over more than a generation have done little to alleviate -- and may well have worsened -- that nation’s grinding poverty. Ironically, major investments in assistance to the Rwandan poor, by some accounts far more successful than those in Haiti, were themselves inundated by the carnage.

Prominent among the eight Providence Principles which have emerged from our country research, this concern for situating emergency action in relation to other problems and responses is called "contextualization." The boxed statement from the Overseas Development Council on the 1995 World Summit on Social Development does precisely that.

Notwithstanding the undisputed cost-effectiveness of investments in prevention and the pleas of humanitarian organizations, available resources and professional capacities, like the immediate interest of governments and the public, respond to emergencies rather than working to prevent them. Commenting on the Rwanda crisis, James Kunder of Save the Children US recently noted that "An ounce of prevention is worth 25,000 tons of food aid."

Effective humanitarian action is thus now understood to require a more multifaceted and nuanced approach. Such an approach involves coming to terms with the complex connections between humanitarian action on the one hand and economic sanctions and military force on the other. Recent applications of economic and military pressure have exacerbated the hardship of civilians and complicated the task of humanitarian organizations. Tensions have also emerged between the need for aggressive prosecution of human rights abuses and the reality that doing so may delay political settlements to conflicts and postpone reconciliation between embittered ethnic groups.

Seeing humanitarian action in its broader context is a also corrective for asking emergency assistance to do too much. Humanitarian aid in the post-Cold War era may have become, as Mark Duffield has pointed out, "the North’s principal means of political crisis management in a now marginal South."¹¹ The South, while welcoming assistance in its time of peril, is understandably alarmed by the trend, and the recent attrition in levels of development assistance as well. Speaking for the South, UN Ambassador Kofi N. Awanoor of Ghana has noted that "Development is the only instrument that will remove the stigma of charity that accompanies all humanitarian relief efforts" and put developing countries on a more self-reliant footing.¹²

Mission creep-humanitarianism quickly loses both its integrity and its effectiveness. Such has been the case in the former Yugoslavia, where, as one aid worker in Sarajevo expressed it, "People look at us as if to say, ‘We know you’re feeding us to compensate for the fact that your governments won’t act.’" "We have chosen to respond to major unlawful violence, not by stopping that violence, but by trying to provide relief to the suffering," analyst Rosalyn Higgins observes. "But our choice of policy allows the suffering to continue."¹³ Writing relief efforts large contributes to the perceptions of humanitarians as bunglers, "the gang that can’t help straight" when in reality, the shortcomings are only partly on the humanitarian side.

How humanitarian action is conceived, therefore, will have a major bearing not only on its implementation but also on its success. In the context provided by the Secretary-General’s Agenda for Peace document, the United Nations is struggling to determine the appropriate conceptual and organizational relationships between peace-making, peace-keeping, and peace-enforcement and other central concerns such as humanitarian action, development, and human rights. Humanitarian professionals within and outside the United Nations are themselves divided about the extent to which humanitarian programs can and should be integrated into peacekeeping operations, or should instead be thoroughly insulated from them.¹⁴

The interconnectedness of the issues sheds a new and different light on what is widely viewed as "compassion fatigue." A more apt description might be "compassion confusion." Rather than weariness in assisting those in need, there is widespread anguish about how best to do so. "We’re supposed to be here on a humanitarian mission," remarked a U.S. Marine in Somalia, "and yet we’re getting shot at. It’s very confusing."¹⁵ That was in January 1993, well before an October 1993 ambush claimed 18 of his cohorts’ lives. Public opinion polling after the incident indicated that Americans supported the withdrawal of the Marines not because the situation was too perilous but because they were apparently not wanted.

Challenge:

To approach humanitarian challenges in their broader context, undertaking emergency action as part of a balanced package of reinforcing measures to address underlying problems. 5. Appropriateness

Policy objective:

To tailor humanitarian activities to local needs, increasing ownership, accountability, and cost-effectiveness accordingly.

Current situation:

Humanitarian activities are characterized by heavy reliance on expensive outside resources, often failing to strengthen the coping capacities of affected communities. At a time when external institutions are overstretched, it is more important than ever to utilize the special strengths of indigenous institutions.

In disaster after disaster, local institutions and people provide the first line of response to major emergencies. In August 1990, the Jordanian government and people moved quickly to get food and medicine to evacuees from Iraq and Kuwait, well in advance of the first interagency meetings in Geneva. In Serbia and Croatia, more than ninety percent of those displaced by the war were accommodated in private homes, most without respect to ethnicity.

The world’s humanitarian system as it now exists, however, relies heavily on outside resources. In disaster after disaster, the pattern of marginalizing local resources and expertise repeats itself. In Jordan, aid agencies flew in expatriate doctors, unfamiliar with the language and culture, on short-term assignments at great expense, bypassing capable Jordanian physicians unemployed at the time. The fact that the international community found reasons for not reimbursing the Jordanian government for funds advanced rankled further still. In Serbia and Croatia, international agencies, accustomed to providing food and social services to people in camps, had great difficulty in adapting programs to the needs of people in individual homes.

A standard complaint of UN and bilateral government procedures concerns difficulties in connecting with local institutions. While NGOs, as indicated in Table I, do generally better in this regard, even they have their difficulties. In Somalia, international NGOs were sharply criticized by their local counterparts for going their own way. For many outsiders, it was as if, because the Somali state had failed, indigenous civil leadership was also non-existent.

Recent experience in Somalia also suggests that programs which mobilize local participation may enjoy greater security than their more alien counterparts. Somali NGOs are reported to have experienced less harassment than did their foreign counterparts. In a more general sense, "Increased local management... is likely to enhance protection of relief operations, and also to have a positive effect on the belligerents vying for the hearts and minds of civilians," notes Gayle E. Smith. "A local community is more likely to condemn a military unit that destroys its own grinding mills than one that attacks the headquarters of an international relief organization."¹⁶

Utilization of local resources also minimizes the foreignness of international activities. While all cultures and religions have humanitarian elements and many their own humanitarian institutions as well, the international relief system is primarily western and Judeo-Christian in orientation. A minor problem, perhaps, in the days immediately following World War II when humanitarian crises of note were primarily in Europe, the situation has now radically changed. As Fred Cuny has pointed out, the Muslim component of the world’s refugee population has grown from 12% in 1950 to 50% in 1970 to 75% in 1990, with the turn of the century share projected at 90 %.¹⁷

Enlisting indigenous resources not only bridges cultural gaps; it also strengthens local leaders and institutions. If imbalances of power and lack of protection for minorities are often implicated in generating suffering, the power and influence associated with humanitarian activities can work to redress such imbalances. "Devolving disaster management to the local level also empowers communities in their struggle against the forces competing for power," observes Gayle Smith. "Civilians are transformed from victims into participants."¹⁸

To be sure, there are limits to the extent to which local resources can be pressed into service and local mores accommodated in aid programs. Using expatriate convoy drivers in Bosnia was necessary given the violence to which local Muslim drivers were subjected. Relying on male-dominated institutions for food distribution to a population comprised largely of women and children would cater to a favoritism out of step with international norms. Safeguards are also needed so that in politicized situations, locals employed by international organizations receive adequate protection, even after relief operations have been concluded.

Compared with the other four criteria for an effective international humanitarian system discussed above, the element of appropriateness, at first blush rather theoretical in nature, may turn out to be the element at once the most seriously lacking -- and the most able to be remedied. The world can no longer afford high-cost major relief interventions recurring in the same area time and time again. If a lack of appropriateness in itself would not force changes in an externally driven aid system, the cost savings represented by a more locally oriented approach might do so. Such a reform however, would still have to overcome deeply entrenched patterns of technical assistance and procurement.

Challenge:

To revamp the prevailing character of the world’s humanitarian system, drawing on and strengthening local resources, promoting savings in operating costs, and producing more effective and sustainable results.

Concluding Reflections

This review of the effectiveness of the international relief system may seem unduly harsh. Certainly what is said here is not intended to minimize the energetic and determined performance of institutions and individuals which make up the current system, many of them functioning with a high degree of professionalism in situations of extraordinary difficulty and peril.

In my judgment, however, the primary obstacle to a more effective humanitarian system is not a lack of resources but a lack of resourcefulness. What the system lacks is not energy but vision, not good will but discipline. It is a time for tough-mindedness rather than warm-heartedness, for soul-searching rather than hand-wringing. Once difficult conceptual issues are confronted, better policy mixes, improved actor mixes, and more effective humanitarian operations will emerge. Creating a more formal regime will not be easy or painless but it will serve humanitarian interests well.

Given long-established traditions of humanitarian concern and leadership, the U.S. government and the American people can be a force for change -- or a brake on it. Our picture of ourselves as a caring people, relieving suffering around the world through public and private channels, is borne out by the record, though also laced with delusions of grandeur and now somewhat overtaken by events. Japan’s ODA now exceeds that of the U.S. and per capita Nordic contributions to international development cooperation have long exceeded ours.

In addition to improving the health and welfare of people around the world, Americans have shaped the institutions which, for better or worse, now constitute the world’s relief system. The U.S. has played a preeminent role in creating -- and compromising -- humanitarian organizations. The quality of leadership contributed over the years to the UN’s humanitarian work has been outstanding, even though that, too, has suffered of late and the U.S. "lock" on certain senior positions is no longer intact. U.S. bilateral assistance policies, too, are at a crossroads.

This, then, is not a time to rest on our humanitarian laurels, to assume that we are assured a permanent place in the humanitarian vanguard, to respond to proliferating crises simply by expanding existing efforts, to throw ourselves at complex problems only by redoubling our enthusiasm. Addressing structural problems of coverage, coherence, cost-effectiveness, connectedness, and appropriateness would constitute a humanitarian contribution of the first order. Failing to do so will close a long and proud chapter in this country’s history and affect the quality of life around the globe.

The author is co-director and principal researcher of the Humanitarianism and War Project, an initiative by the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies of Brown University. The project’s other co-director, Thomas G. Weiss, also contributed to this essay.

Notes

1 For a discussion of the heightened complexity of relief in civil war situations as contrasted with natural disasters, cf. Francis M. Deng and Larry Minear, The Challenges of Famine Relief: Emergency Operations in the Sudan (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1992).

2 An international regime is defined as "principles, norms, rules, and decisionmaking procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area." Cf. Stephen D. Krasner, ea., International Regimes (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 1.

3 Table I adapts a similar chart prepared by the author for the May 1993 Paris Colloquium, sponsored by the Development Centre of the OECD, on "Development within Conflict: The Challenge of Man-Made Disasters." The earlier Table and accompanying discussion will be published in The Challenge of Development in Conflict (Paris: OECD Development Centre, 1994).

4 The interaction is elaborated in a paper by the author prepared for an earlier Meridian International Center conference, "NGOs on the Front Lines," in Office of Research, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, US Department of State, "Multilateral Responses to Humanitarian Crises," October 20, 1993, pp. 33-38.

5 Larry Minear et al., United Nations Coordination of the International Humanitarian Response to the Gulf Crisis. 1990-1992 (Providence, RI: Watson Institute Occasional Paper #13, 1992), pp. 9, 35.

6 James. O Ingram, "The Future Architecture for International Humanitarian Assistance," in Thomas G. Weiss and Larry Minear, eds., Humanitarianism across Borders (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), p. 181.

7 For a more extended discussion, cf. Larry Minear et al, Humanitarianism under Siege: A Critical Review of Operation Lifeline Sudan (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1991), pp. 51-56.

8 UN Department of Humanitarian Affairs, "Consolidated Inter-Agency Humanitarian Assistance Appeals: Summary of Requirements and Contributions" (Geneva: DHA, April 20, 1994).

9 Peter Uvin, "Don’t Blame Tribal Hatred for Conflict in Burundi and Rwanda," The George St. Journal, Brown University, August 12, 1994, Vol. 18, No. 43, p. 4.

10 Overseas Development Council, "A New Agenda for Social Development: Recommendations for the 1995 World Summit on Social Development," (Washington, D.C.: Overseas Development Council, 1994), p. 1

11 Mark Duffield, "Complex Emergencies and the Crisis of Developmentalism," in IDS Bulletin. Linking Relief and Development’ Vol. 25, No. 3, October 1994 (forthcoming).

12 Kofi N. Awoonor, "The Concerns of Recipient Nations," in Kevin M. Cahill, ea., A Framework for Survival: Health Human Rights. and Humanitarian Assistance in Conflicts and Disasters (Council on Foreign Relations and Basic Books: New York, 1993), p. 69.

13 The aid worker and Dr. Higgins are quoted in Larry Minear et al., Humanitarian Action in the Former Yugoslavia: The U.N.’s Role 1991-1993 (Providence, RI: Watson Institute Occasional Paper #18, 1994), pp. 6-7. Cf. also Rosalyn Higgins, "The New United Nations and Former Yugoslavia," International Affairs, 69,3 [1993], p. 469.

14 For a discussion of the issues and options, cf. Larry Minear, "The Evolving Humanitarian Enterprise," in Thomas G. Weiss, ea., The United Nations and Civil Wars (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995 forthcoming).

15 Quoted in Larry Minear and Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian Action in Times of War: A Handbook for Practitioners (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), p.53.

16 Gayle E. Smith, "Relief Operations and Military Strategy," in Weiss and Minear, op.cit., p. 110.

17 Frederick C. Cuny, "Humanitarian Assistance in the Post-Cold War Era," in Weiss and Minear, op. cit., p. 154.

18 Smith, op. cit., p. 110.