Humanitarian resistance: Its ethical and operational importance

Humanitarian resistance organisations merit respect and support, and the very concept of humanitarian resistance or resistance humanitarianism needs greater recognition. Conventional international humanitarian agencies often struggle to respond sufficiently to suffering and injustice. Their neutral operations require the consent of reluctant authoritarian regimes who typically suspect their liberal values and their Western backers. Agency bureaucracies and their myriad standards make them slow and expensive. Resistance humanitarians are already on the ground, close to people in need and more courageous in their humanitarian action. Their two-pronged struggle for justice and humanity is firmly grounded in ethics and law, making them just as legitimate as conventional humanitarians and often much more so in the eyes of their suffering populations.

International humanitarians and the governments that fund them should embrace locally led humanitarian resistance as we have seen it most recently in Syria, Myanmar, Ukraine and Tigray. But the idea of humanitarian resistance can send a shiver down the spine of some so-called ‘principled humanitarians’, who insist that humanitarian action must always be quintessentially neutral and led largely by internationally recognised organisations like the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, UN agencies or international NGOs. Formally recognising humanitarian resistance, or resistance humanitarianism, might be politically dangerous for their neutral humanitarian project. Sharing the humanitarian label with resistance organisations may taint orthodox humanitarianism and put neutral and independent staff at risk of confusion with partisan humanitarians.

This paper makes the case for humanitarian resistance as an essential, ethical and legal form of organised humanitarianism. I argue that the phrase is not an oxymoron. Politically committed humanitarian action makes good moral sense and is lawful under international human rights law (IHRL) and international humanitarian law (IHL). Like partisan fighters under the laws of war, partisan humanitarians should be more formally acknowledged in policy and law to protect the life-saving contribution they make. If not, international humanitarians are at risk of operating a double standard in the silence they keep about the value of resistance humanitarianism, and the noise they make about their own importance. In Ukraine, for example, internationals have struggled to match the reach and relevance of resistance humanitarianism, and have sought to colonise it rather than enable it. Humanitarian Outcomes, Enabling the Local Response: Emerging Humanitarian Priorities in Ukraine March-May 2002, Humanitarian Outcomes and UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub, London.

The paper starts with some recent examples of humanitarian resistance in action. This emphasises the significant contribution that humanitarian resistance makes in protecting and respecting human life during war, dictatorship and injustice today, as it always has done. I then show how humanitarian resistance fits within the wider politics and practice of civil resistance. Having identified humanitarian resistance as a specific practice, I then explore it ethically as the duty to resist and repair, and justify it legally by showing that neutral humanitarianism is not a requirement of human rights or humanitarian law. Finally, I look at two potential problems arising from labelling partisan relief as humanitarian resistance. First is the risk of pollution that may follow from confusion between resistance humanitarianism and neutral humanitarianism. Second, I look at humanitarian resistance as part of unjust resistance movements. Here, I note that life-saving by people supporting an unjust cause is still worthy of a humanitarian epithet if its core values of humanity and impartiality are held, but not when those same organisations are complicit with deliberate inhumanity.