ABSTRACT
In recent years, there has been an intense debate on the future of humanitarian action. Attacks on the legitimacy of the international humanitarian regime have come from many and disparate corners. They range from proponents of the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to vehement critics of the same; from post-colonial intellectuals in the South to liberal interventionists in the North. This debate goes on in the context of ever more extreme attacks on the idea of humanitarianism, such as the targeted killing of humanitarian workers in war zones. Concerns over whether the humanitarian regime as we know it will survive this many-pronged challenge have spurred humanitarian organisations themselves to embark on processes of soul-searching and innovation, recently through the United Nation’s (UN’s) World Humanitarian Summit, a global programme of regional consultations, online interactions and expert reports building up to a summit meeting in Istanbul in 2016. Among the challengers to the international humanitarian regime is a set of ‘emerging’
state actors from the global South. During the past decade, countries such as India,
Brazil, China and several Gulf States have become significant donors in the fields of international development and humanitarian aid. In 1991-92, before India embarked on two decades of substantial economic growth, India’s overseas aid budget stood at INR 1 billion (Quadir, 2013, p. 322). This increased to INR 34.71 billion in 2011-12 and INR 94.34 billion in 2014-15 (Indian Development Cooperation Research, IDCR, 2015b, p. 1). These figures cover development and emergency assistance, including loans and grants, provided by India to other countries, disbursed through its Ministry of External Affairs (MEA). The overall aid figure is higher, because the MEA figures do not cover assistance to refugees on India’s own soil, or aid provided by India’s federal states, e.g. aid from Tamil Nadu to the Tamil areas of Sri Lanka. Because of the explosive growth in its aid budget, and owing to its more active and
vocal role in development and humanitarian politics-and in global politics more generally-India has acquired the label of ‘emerging’ humanitarian actor. As we shall see, India has a long history of humanitarian efforts, so this label is only correct inasmuch as it denotes India’s higher public profile in international humanitarian forums. India’s ‘emergence’ has taken place just as humanitarian politics has become more contested than ever. Many Indian policy-makers and analysts suggest this is not a coincidence. They argue that the arrival of India and other states in the South as important humanitarian actors and donors constitutes a fundamental challenge to the workings of the current UN-led international humanitarian regime. This regime is skewed, they argue, towards the values and interests of the 20 or so traditional donors who provide the vast majority of the funds bankrolling the main UN and non-governmental humanitarian organisations and their work. For instance, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which is one of the world’s largest humanitarian actors, has since its inception been mainly funded by the same group of North American and Western European states. The three top donors to UNHCR’s 2013 budget were the US (36%), Japan (9%) and the European Union (7%), with Kuwait the only non-Western country (apart from Japan) making it to the list of donors that contribute more than 1% of the US$3 billion received by the refugee agency that year (UNHCR, 2014, p. 109). This article investigates how the government of an increasingly powerful and influen-
tial Commonwealth country from the South interacts with an international regime created in Europe. Somewhat simplified, the premise of the critique by sceptical Indian policy-makers, as well as many Indian analysts, is that the humanitarian regime, despite its universal credentials, is yet another sphere of international politics in which rich, established powers of the global North act on the South-another aspect of an expansionist and ultimately self-serving agenda (see, e.g. Chanana, 2009). This is not a new claim. In 1997, Alex de Waal (1997) coined the term ‘the disaster relief industry’, and in 2012 Teju Cole (2012) satirised the ‘White-saviour industrial complex’. But it is an important critique. India has a potentially powerful voice in shaping the future of the international humanitarian regime. It is a stable and democratic southern power with a growing aid budget and a long history of development cooperation and emergency assistance (despite its ‘emerging’ label). It is therefore valuable to examine how India perceives, and interacts with, the international humanitarian regime. Its public position as a newly influential humanitarian actor is to make it clear that it is not prepared to fit meekly into pre-established rules and norms, set by traditional donors in the European Union (EU) and North America, through the UN.
