ABSTRACT
Despite the massive growth of the humanitarian aid system over the past 30 years, relief agencies deplore an increasing inability to assist victims of conflicts and natural disasters. Instrumentalized by governments and insurgents, humanitarian organizations are said to lose the trust of local societies and belligerents and thus their ability to negotiate safe access to disasters. Challenging the idea that humanitarian actors can be shielded from politics by the virtue of their principles, this chapter argues that the politicization of humanitarian aid is actually the primary condition for its deployment. Aid actors can operate if they maintain an equilibrium between their interest and the interests of those in power. This raises a crucial ethical question: at what point do they cross the blurred but very real line beyond which aid becomes more useful to the military or political powers than to the victims? Unpacking the relationship of power and interests that interconnect aid actors, states, insurgents, and various authorities, this chapter describes how humanitarian institutions have sought, since the end of the Cold War, to answer the ethical dilemmas arising from their inevitable involvement in global and local politics.
