1 Introduction

To unpack the role that transnational humanitarian NGOs play in contemporary systems of governance and highlight how they contribute, through their visual production, to the securitization of the refugee issue, it is important to introduce the notions of humanitarianism, global governance, and securitization. Also, since NGOs do not operate in a vacuum but within a highly competitive media environment, it is equally important to reflect on the ways in which humanitarian ideals are translated into their communication strategies and how these fit within the larger communication landscape. This chapter presents the literature and the theoretical framework on which this book is based.

It starts by briefly presenting the concept of humanitarianism, its origins and characteristics, by also addressing the ‘elephant in the room’, the ambiguous relationship that humanitarianism entertains with politics. Since the beginning of humanitarian assistance its relationship with politics has been subject to debate. If it is true that the notion of humanitarianism is based on concepts and principles that mostly have to do with the realm of ethics and also very often defined in opposition to the political dimension, its relationship with politics has always been very complex. A brief overview of the debate around this interplay is essential as the need to understand this complex relation is an assumption underlying the whole study.

Going beyond the intense debate on the interconnections between humanitarianism and politics, this book focuses on the role that NGOs perform in global governance. The second section of the chapter lays out the literature that has highlighted the position of civil society in influencing the supra-national political arena and the key role that transnational organizations play in it. For an exploration of the specific ways through which contemporary transnational humanitarian NGOs engage in global politics and global governance, it is also necessary to present the features of present-day humanitarianism (sometimes referred to as ‘new humanitarianism’). Academic work has investigated the various mechanisms through which relief agencies seek to affect policy changes in the various national and international contexts in which they intervene. This study builds on this strand of work to explore how the different organizations’ origins, missions, policies, and approaches to humanitarianism indicate different dynamics of participation in global governance.

Among the different sectors in which NGOs can play a role in today’s global governance (such as on issues around economy, environment, and health) this study is particularly interested in the security dimension. This is mainly because the refugee issue has been consistently linked with security discourses by various political and media accounts. In apparent contrast, the work of humanitarian NGOs has been commonly associated with an ethical and moral dimension. The third section hence outlines the securitization theory developed by the Copenhagen School. Its theoretical approach is all the more valuable as it has explained how security can be intended as something objective, but that it also has a very important discursive dimension. The concept of securitization is particularly relevant insofar as it enables us to grasp different dimensions of the securitization process. We thus see not only the framing of refugees in terms of threat, but also their framing as terms of referent objects of a threat with the notion of human security. Inspired by the International Security Study literature, I build on the body of scholarship that has focused on the interconnections between securitization and humanitarianism to empirically show how NGOs have contributed to the securitization of the refugee issue.

To do so it is also important to look at transnational humanitarian organizations’ communication policies and visual material. Humanitarian communication is the object of the last section of this chapter. In order to fully grasp its impact on the constitution of humanitarian discourse(s), it is crucial to understand that NGOs do not operate in a vacuum. Rather, relief organizations contend, in a highly competitive environment, for funds, public support, and media attention. Moreover, communication strategies, representational styles and approaches need also to be contextualized culturally and historically. Clearly, they assume different meanings in different cultures, and over the years have undergone substantial modification. The chapter concludes with the presentation of how refugees have been visually represented in humanitarian communication throughout history.

2 Humanitarianism and Its Complicated Relationship with Politics

Humanitarianism, as a form of compassion and charity, has been present throughout history. Since its origin, the practice of humanitarianism has had different forms depending on the various cultural, religious or secular, philosophical and philanthropic inspirations of the concept. Although the idea of saving lives and alleviating suffering has been present in different cultural and religious backgrounds, “modern humanitarianism’s origins are located in Western history and Christian thought” (Barnett and Weiss 2008, 7). The concept – in the sense it is used today – finds its origin in the early nineteenth century and became, acknowledged and, in some ways, institutionalized, by the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1863 (Barnett 2011).

Barnett and Weiss’ (2008) understanding of humanitarianism helps us seems adept in grasp the socially constructed and historically contingent meaning of the term. The notion is based on the way practitioners have conceptualized the humanitarian sphere since its early usages. “Many within the humanitarian sector tend to conceive the ideal humanitarian act as motivated by an altruistic desire to provide life-saving relief; to honour the principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence; and to do more good than harm” (Barnett and Weiss 2008, 10–11). More formally, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) defines humanitarian assistance as “aid that seeks, to save lives and alleviate suffering of a crisis affected population” (OCHA 2003, 13).

Despite the fact that the concept of humanitarian action is a rather complex notion, defined in different ways by different humanitarian actors (Collinson and Elhawary 2012), there is a general consensus considering neutrality, impartiality and independence as the fundamental principles of humanitarian actions (Leader 2000; OCHA 2003).Footnote 1 Today the majority of humanitarian actors have embraced the same humanitarian principles in their official documents (Hilhorst and Jansen 2010). Consequently, according to OCHA, the humanitarian space is a “conducive humanitarian operating environment” in which agencies can work in compliance with the principles of neutrality and impartiality and their intervention can be independent from military and political action (OCHA 2003, 32).

Within the humanitarian space there are a multiplicity of actors operating in different capacities, including Governments’ aid structures – like for example the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) or the former British Department for International Development (DfID) (renamed in 2020 as the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office) – International Organizations (IOs) – such as the United Nations (UN) agencies and the EU Agency for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO) – organizations with hybrid status – i.e. the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and NGOs. Among this assorted group of agencies, this study focuses on the NGOs which, that as Stoddard has noticed, “have evolved into a crucial pillar of the international humanitarian architecture.” (Stoddard 2003, 1). What substantially differentiates NGOs from all other humanitarian actors is summarized in the first part of their acronym: non-governmental. In this sense, NGOs constitute themselves as actors completely independent from State politics and interests and often, in contraposition to these, as actors willing and able to take action when States seem negligent, absent or, worse, the perpetrator of the wrongdoing which need to be addressed.

The qualifier ‘non-governmental’, combined with the adherence to humanitarian principles, are the two elements that situate humanitarian NGOs in a humanitarian space, in theory unrelated with politics and power but actually, on the contrary, constituting fundamental features of governments’ interests. Despite the aspiration of humanitarianism to neutrality and independence (Hilhorst and Jansen 2010), a wide range of scholarship has highlighted how humanitarian agencies, including NGOs, have a much more complex relationship with politics (among others Weiss 1999; Duffield 2001; Slim 2003; Rieff 2003; Donini et al. 2004; Barnett and Snyder 2008). A better understanding of the multifaceted and heterogeneous relationships that NGOs have with politics and power could help us to make sense of the complex role that humanitarian organizations play in current global governance and security.

Humanitarianism has been defined as situated in the realm of ethics (Barnett 2013); a substitute for politics (Higgins 1993); the essence of politics (Cutts 1998; Weiss 1999) or the politics of life (Fassin 2007). Debate on the implications of the interconnections between humanitarianism and politics is far from over.Footnote 2 Within the wide range of perspectives, the two scholarly positions at the extremities of the spectrum are worth mentioning. In his seminal A Bed for the Night, David Rieff (Rieff 2003) argues that traditional humanitarian action has been ruined by politicization. Rieff’s claim for a politically independent humanitarianism is based on the opinion that any connection with politics and long-term goals such as the promotion of human rights and good governance have basically reduced and hindered the humanitarian space at the expense of the victims. On the contrary, argues Slim, not only “humanitarianism is always politicized somehow. It is a political project in a political world. Its mission is a political one – to restrain and ameliorate the use of organised violence in human relations and to engage with power in order to do so” (Slim 2003, 1). For the author, the politicization of humanitarianism does not pose a problem in itself. Rather, it is a matter of choosing the ‘good’ politics of humanitarianism.

The centrality of the problematic relationship of humanitarianism with politics, intended mainly as government politics at the national and inter-governmental level, is reflected in different scholarly attempts to categorize NGOs. Even though extremely heterogenous in the definition of variables, all typologies hitherto proposed in the literature have considered the level of interrelations with politics (in its various forms) as a central part of the equation. In 1999, Weiss classified NGOs along two axes. On one side, he considered the strengths of the relationship of the organization’ humanitarian action with politics, and, on the other, the NGOs’ attitude toward “traditional operating principles” such as neutrality, impartiality and non-discriminatory provision of aid. According to Weiss (1999), ICRC represents the perfect example of ‘classicist’ organization and its humanitarian action as completely separated from politics, with no engagement with political authorities. At the other end of the spectrum Weiss situates MSF, an agency which for the author, embodies the “solidarist” organization, an NGO that considers abandoning neutrality to pick sides in disputes to be part of its organizational mandate.

In reviewing their trends and challenges Stoddard (2003) categorizes NGOs by their Dunantist or Wilsonian traditions. Dunantist is derived from Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross and winner of the first Nobel Peace Prize, and refers to the importance given to the principle of independence. The Wilsonian approach, named after the American President Woodrow Wilson, refers to its hope to “to project US values and influence as a force for good in the world” (Stoddard 2003, 2). The author, considering NGOs’ attitudes more or less dependent on and cooperative with governments, classifies CARE, Save the Children US and IRC as Wilsonian and Oxfam, Save the Children UK and MSF as Dunantist.

Dijkzeul and Moke (2005) have created a typology based on two axes. On the horizontal, the authors consider the principles according to which aid is delivered: “impartial” if the organization provides non-discriminatory and need-based assistance and based on “solidarity” if the agency contemplates siding with one of the parties to the conflict and/or their political cause. On the vertical axis, NGOs are classified according to the relationship that they entertain with States and particularly through their level of dependence on institutional donors in the country where their headquarters are situated, in the case of major UK NGOs the former DfID and for US NGOs with USAID. According to the typology developed by Dijkzeul and Moke, MSF and ICRC are organizations with the highest degree of impartiality and independence, followed by Oxfam and Save the Children UK who appear slightly below but within the same matrix’s quadrant. CARE, at the bottom of the left quadrant, is classified as an organization with a moderate level of impartiality but strongly dependent on State funding.

In another classification effort, Hansen (2007) mapped humanitarian organizations working in Iraq according to criteria that included the “degree of cooperation with/distance from political and military actors, degree of visible acceptance/refusal of security from combatants or security contractors, and acceptance/refusal of funding from parties to the conflict” (Hansen 2007, 68). Save the Children UK, Oxfam GB and MSF have been classified in the Dunantist/Contractors quadrant, while CARE appeared on the right border of the same quadrant, leaning toward the Wilsonian/Pragmatist end of the axis.

Barnett and Snyder (2008) have highlighted how, with the exception of ICRC and MSF,- almost all of the other NGOs “have accepted the challenge of attempting to transform societies and have become comfortable with their political intentions” (Barnett and Snyder 2008, 158). In a subsequent and longer publication Barnett (2009) proposes a more detailed map of the organizational responses based on the different relationships of the humanitarian agencies with politics, identifying two main approaches. On one hand, there are “emergency” organizations such as MSF that are primarily concerned with relief assistance and are generally more independent. On the other hand, NGOs such as CARE International can be defined “alchemic” because of their transformative aspiration to social change while addressing the root causes of suffering which are generally more dependent on States. Even though alchemic organizations could be accused of being more implicated with politics, they usually disagree and instead present their political interventions in technical terms. Chapter 4 will explore this dynamic in detail.

Far from offering a homogeneous indication about the different NGOs position vis-à-vis politics and levels of (in)dependence from governments, what all these different classifications suggest is that idea of the humanitarian space as an environment completely unrelated with politics and power needs to be problematized. So does the idea of the purist compliance with humanitarian principles since all these studies have highlighted that, in one way or another, NGOs need to accommodate and negotiate those principles in order to achieve their strategic objectives and fulfill their specific mandates. Although it would be extremely interesting to directly engage with the intense scholarly debate on the interrelations between humanitarianism and politics, this is outside the scope of this study. What I believe it is important to retain here is an understanding of humanitarian action as strictly and, in various ways, interrelated with power and state politics at different levels. In fact, not only do NGOs do work in a highly politicized context (especially during conflicts) but also they carry out work that has, and very often is intended to have, important political implications. As Duffield has effectively summarized, the politics of humanitarian action: “in the sense that humanitarian action is ‘political’, would appear to hinge on two factors. First, it circumscribes all the decisions, actions, compromises, and so on, that humanitarian actors make during the course of their work. Second, these decisions and actions are political in that they are seen as making a difference and capable of altering outcomes” (Duffield 2001, 96). In the following sections I will attempt to define more clearly how exactly relief agencies interact with politics and power specifically through the lenses of their role within global governance and security.

3 NGOs and Global Governance

3.1 NGOs and Global Governance: A General Overview

Scholars have long acknowledged that transnational NGOs have today become one of the key non-state actors of global governance (see, for example, Weiss and Gordenker 1996; Duffield 2001, 2007; Chandler 2004). As Weiss (2000) has noticed, the scholarly use of the term global governance is mostly based on the observation that although non-state actors are not something new in the international system, their proliferation, combined with their increasing relevance and power, has become a distinguishing character of present-day international affairs. Rosenau’s understanding of global governance, intended as “systems of rule at all levels of human activity—from the family to the international organization—in which the pursuit of goals through the exercise of control has transnational repercussions” (Rosenau 1995, 13) is particularly useful. For it allows us to consider social practices as able to affect the economic, social and environmental spheres even in the absence of formal institutions authorized to take action (Oran Young cited in Weiss 2000).

In discussing global governance – and the role of transnational humanitarian NGOs within it – I draw on the work of Barnett and Duvall on power in global governance (Barnett and Duvall 2004). The two authors point out that the two terms are indeed strictly linked as governance encompasses the norms, structures and organizations that rule and control social life. In their understanding, power refers to the creation of effects that, through social relations, affect the ability of actors to shape their state and prospects. Among the four different expressions of power that they identify in Power in Global Governance – compulsory, institutional, structural and productive – the notion of productive power is particularly relevant for this book. “Productive power is the socially diffuse production of subjectivity in systems of meaning and signification” (Barnett and Duvall 2004, 3). In Barnett and Duvall’s taxonomy of forms of power productive power is diffuse – it works through connections at a certain ‘distance’ or that are mediated –and works through social relations of constitution – social relations that determine who the actors are and what capacities they have, their ‘power to’. Productive power is therefore about “discourse, the social processes and the systems of knowledge through which meaning is produced, fixed, lived, experienced, and transformed” (Barnett and Duvall 2004, 20). Discourses are here intended in Foucauldian terms as sites of social relations of power that produce social identities and capacities. Barnett and Duval’s conceptualization is particularly relevant here as it allows analysis of the discursive production – including contested ones – of subjects and the determination of meanings in global governance. In particular, it allows us to investigate how the ‘other’ is defined and how the fixing of meaning is connected with determined practices and policies (Barnett and Duvall 2004).

The added value of this approach is that it enables a study that not only looks at how a specific actor regulates the world, but also at how the actors constitute it. In order to explore the role played by transnational humanitarian NGOs in global governance, it can be useful to situate the discussion within the broader conceptual framework of the role of transnational civil society in global governance. The syncretic definition of civil society provided by Edwards (2009) seems to be particularly apt to acknowledge the concept as a “contested territory” (Edwards 2009, vii), and conveys the complexity of the term. In his definition, the concept of civil society merges three theoretical models that see civil society respectively as the associational/non-profit sector, a normative model of ‘good’ society, and as an arena for public debate and action. Even though the origins of the concept of civil society are to be found in the Greek philosophical tradition, the modern notion of civil society separated from the State was articulated by Hegel in the nineteenth century to be then defined further as the public space of political, ideological and cultural debate in the twentieth century (Kaldor 2003). Present-day civil society does still share a “common core of meanings” (Kaldor 2003, 585) with previous definitions. Its contemporary feature is that of having transcended national borders to become transnational (Florini 2012; Kaldor 1999) or even global (Anheier et al. 2001; Kaldor 2003). The actors of transnational civil society are heterogeneous and include social movements and advocacy networks (Davies 2014), coalitions and various kinds of associations (Florini 2012), grass-root groups (Anheier et al. 2001), and, incontestably, non-governmental organizations (Anheier et al. 2001; Chandler 2004; Davies 2014; Florini 2012; Kaldor 1999, 2003).

3.2 Humanitarian NGOs Role in Global Governance

While the key role that NGOs plays in global governance has been widely acknowledged, it is important to consider how relief organizations specifically perform this role, and what are the distinctive aspects of present-day humanitarianism that define them as actors in global governance. The next three sections intend to highlight the characteristics of contemporary humanitarianism by shedding light on the different ways each influences and attempts to transform the supra-national political arena.

3.2.1 The Features of Contemporary Humanitarianism or ‘New Humanitarianism’

Present day humanitarianism has often been referred to as “new humanitarianism” (see among others Tirman 2003; Fox 2001; Chandler 2001; Duffield 2001; Macrae 2002). Duffield et al. (2001) places its origin in the 1990s, at a time when it was being realised that traditional humanitarian action was often perversely having unintended negative consequences. This realisation led to the emergence from a coalition of NGOs of the Do no Harm (DNH) principle which has subsequently become enshrined in the guiding principles of most humanitarian agencies.

There is no universally accepted definition of the concept of ‘new humanitarianism’Footnote 3 but its characteristics can be traced in the humanitarian sector’s self-acknowledgement of the complex relation of their actions with politics (and often the explicit decision to directly engage with this reality as part of the organization’s mandate). A second feature has to do with the increasingly common merging of development intervention into humanitarian action. The last distinctive character of the new humanitarianism is the widespread (although not always accepted, as I shall show below), shift from a needs-based approach to humanitarian assistance to a rights-based approach.

With regards to the first feature – the increasingly explicit interrelation of humanitarianism and politics – in the 1990s there was a shift of perspective from the traditional focus of humanitarian action on ‘only’ saving lives and alleviating suffering. As Macrae and Leader explained “during the 1990s a consensus emerged within the international humanitarian system that there was a need to enhance the ‘coherence’ between humanitarian and political responses to complex political emergencies. Closer integration between aid and political responses was seen to be necessary in order to address the root causes of conflict-induced crises, and to ensure that aid did not exacerbate political tensions” (Macrae and Leader 2001, 290). Duffield has pointed out how “the new humanitarianism, therefore, implies a drive for coherence where humanitarian action becomes part of a comprehensive political strategy” (Duffield et al. 2001, 271). Academic perspectives regarding the coherence approach are far from homogenous. Scholars are divided between those who have welcomed the approach, all things considered, as a positive development (Abiew 2003; Charny 2004; Harmer 2008; Slim 2003; Weiss 1999 among others) and those who have underlined its challenges and remain extremely critic (see for example Donini et al. 2008; Macrae and Leader 2001; Metcalfe et al. 2012; Pandolfi 2003). Leaving aside this interesting debate, the importance of this relatively new distinctive feature is that not only is humanitarian action conceptualized and implemented as part of international political endeavors, but, most importantly, relief agencies become key actors when it comes to response to (Macrae and Leader 2001) or management of (Dillon and Reid 2000) contemporary complex emergencies.

The second distinctive character of new humanitarianism is the integration of long-term objectives into the relief intervention (Duffield 2001), in other words, the merging of humanitarian action with development. To understand what this means, it is probably important to briefly go back to the definitions of the two terms. While humanitarian action is mostly intended to address the immediate need of an emergency situation, such as providing urgent health care, food and water, and emergency shelter, development work has a long-term time frame, usually applied in non-emergency settings and aiming at addressing conditions of under-development. Development includes a much larger set of reforming interventions that can include infrastructure, vocational training, female empowerment, rule-of-law promotion, judicial reform or agriculture and education support. The decision to integrate both humanitarian and development objectives into a sort of holistic approach to a crisis situation is therefore a move with important implications for the kind of impact humanitarian actors have within the societies in which they operate. Although, as I have discussed earlier, humanitarianism does not exist in a realm extraneous to politics and power, the link between development, power and politics seems even more explicit. Seminal academic contributions have clearly highlighted how development policies have worked as systems of control. Their extensive and pervasive effects in the countries of their operations are similar to the mechanisms of colonialism (Escobar 2011). As a neo-colonial Western project, it has often hidden the root causes of underdevelopment amidst its obsession with economic growth (Rist 2014). As Duffield et al. (2001) has argued, the new humanitarianism has become development-oriented with an aspiration to transform society and to avoid conflict which is seen as among the effects of underdevelopment. Development discourse, traditionally seen as depoliticized and technocratic, reveals its politicization exactly through its intentions of radical social change. The new or politicized humanitarianism “complements the radicalisation of development which now sees the role of aid as altering the balance of power between social groups in the interests of peace and stability. From saving lives, the shift in humanitarian policy has been towards analysing consequences and supporting social processes” (Duffield 2001, 80). Consequently, decisions regarding the extent of organizational mandates, whether to stick to a purely humanitarian concern to relieve suffering or one or which combines relief with development, have practical political implications for the way an organization perceives its role in global governance. The different NGOs’ choices in this regard and their implications are discussed in Chap. 3.

The last major feature of the new humanitarianism lies in its approach to humanitarian assistance. While early humanitarianism has been traditionally based on a needs-based approach, intended to save lives and alleviate people’s suffering according to their practical’ needs, over the last decades there has been a shift toward a new paradigm: the right-based approach. Contemporary humanitarian aid not only targets people’s needs, but it also focuses on protecting people’s rights. New humanitarianism is more concerned with the outcomes of the assistance, rather than the assistance per se (Duffield 2001). The shift toward this new paradigm has not been accepted by practitioners and scholars without controversy. The critique has included post-colonial (Chandler 2001; Žižek 2005) and feminist (Brems 1997; Coomaraswamy 1994) critiques the human rights regime tout-court, adding to an intense debate on the ethics, effectiveness and righteousness of the rights-based, as opposed to the needs-based, approach (Brown 2014; DuBois 2007; Duffield 2014; Fox 2001; Rieff 2003; Slim 2003). Chandler has pointed out “the transformation of humanitarianism from the margins to the center of the international policy agenda has been achieved through the redefinition of humanitarian policy and practice and its integration within the fast-growing agenda of human rights. The new international discourse of human rights activism no longer separates the spheres of strategic state and international aid from humanitarianism but attempts to integrate the two under the rubric of “ethical” or “moral” foreign policy” (Chandler 2001, 678).

3.2.2 Advocacy

Following the end of the Cold War NGOs started to use public advocacy as part of their strategies to accomplish their humanitarian mandate. Although the role of advocacy in the history of humanitarianism is not completely new, it has progressively gained momentum. Today, the importance of influencing, campaigning or advocating for something – according to the different organizations’ definitions – in relief organizations’ work has increased to such a point that many NGOs, in their programmatic documents, mention advocacy on the same level as their ‘hands-on’ humanitarian and development interventions. The increasing attention NGOs pay to advocacy has been also complemented by moves towards greater cohesion and the coordinated networks such as the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) or the Voluntary Organizations in Cooperation in Emergencies (VOICE). Through them aid agencies can more effectively influence national and international policies, (Duffield 2001). This influence, as Hudson has specified, seeks policy change “to favour the poor and marginalized Southern communities whose interests NGOs aim to promote” (Hudson 2001, 33). Advocacy is, therefore, one of the practical tools through which NGOs participate in global governance by explicitly trying to influence policy-making at different local, national and global levels. Transnational NGOs advocacy networks lobby on a wide range of topics including international debt reduction, child labor, landmines, and the arms trade (Hudson 2001). Particularly, humanitarian advocacy has been interested in drawing attention to forgotten humanitarian crises and complex political emergencies and progressively introduced long-term development objectives (such as fighting poverty or empowering women) so as to address the root causes of underdevelopment.

Present day humanitarian advocacy has been read in connection with the rights-based approach of new humanitarianism. There are opposed views, either seen as a positive development (Booth 1991b) or as something intrinsically problematic (Chandler 2002; Pugh 1998; Pupavac 2006). For its advocates, such ‘moral advocacy’ is a sign of the development of a global social movement based on moral and ethical human rights discourse. As Booth has argued “Universal human rights are solidly embedded in multiple networks of cross-cutting universal ethical communities. The fundamental weakness of the critics of universality is that they take too territorial a view of the idea of human community, human political solidarity and human social affinity. Their perspective is conservative, overdisciplined by constructed notions of states and cultures” (Booth 1991b, 61).

For its critics, the increasing focus that humanitarian organizations have put on advocacy has contributed to the erosion of a more principled humanitarianism and consequently subordinated people’s needs to strategic human rights objectives (Pugh 1998). Moreover, as Pupavac (2006) has argued, for most NGOs the calls to intervention to protect people since the 1990s have been accompanied not only by aspirations to promote social change but also by openly challenging the sovereignty of the developing state in question when state actors were considered as responsible or complicit in violence. With this logic, humanitarian advocacy has tended “to reinforce international inequalities rather than overturning them, by casting conditions in the developing world as moral rather than political and material issues, with dubious results for those in whose name the advocacy is conducted.”(Pupavac 2006, 268). There are opposed scholarly views on the appropriateness and righteousness of contemporary humanitarian advocacy. In this debate what I believe is extremely relevant is acknowledgement of the importance that relief organizations’ advocacy work perform into global governance. How this happens in practice will be explored in Chaps. 4, 5, 6 and 7.

3.2.3 Humanitarian Governance

The key role played by humanitarian actors in the global arena over the last decades has led one of the most famous scholars of humanitarian studies to coin the term ‘humanitarian governance’ (Barnett 2013). Drawing on the work of Michael Foucault and Didier Fassin, Barnett has defined the modern international humanitarian order in terms of ‘humanitarian governance’: a global system of governance of humanity aimed at the protection of lives, the alleviation of suffering and the general improvement of individuals’ well-being. The notion encompasses a wide range of activities pertaining to the humanitarian sphere, including relief, security, nutrition, development and medical assistance. Inspired by a critical theoretic tradition, and including power in his study of governance, Barnett has suggested ways to reorient the exploration of humanitarian governance in different important ways (Barnett 2013; Barnett and Duvall 2004). First, he suggested addressing attention to the effects of an humanitarian enterprise, rather than the study of its effectiveness. He further rejects the assumption that humanitarianism is inherently good, acknowledging that it can serve to promote both emancipation and domination. He has advocated for incorporation of the study of power into the study of humanitarian governance. Additionally, he has sought to shift focus from the normative characteristics of the system to questions about its construction. Finally, he highlights the importance of studying the “underlying discourses of humanitarianism themselves” (Barnett 2013, 382) as constitutive humanitarian actors. All of these points have inspired this book, for they allow us to unpack the role that transnational humanitarian NGOs, and their underlying discourses, play in global governance.

As Barnett has noted, academic study of the different aspects of governance has often been treated in terms of governmentality (Dean 2009 and Neumann & Sending 2006 cited in Barnett 2013). This was defined by Foucault as the “ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power”(Foucault 1991, 102). That is also why it is all the more important to take into consideration power in general and Barnett and Duval’s notion of productive power in particular. In this perspective, non-state actors are no longer considered in opposition to state power, but rather a “most central feature of how power operates in late modern society” (Sending and Neumann 2006, 652). The literature on humanitarian governance has identified several ways through which humanitarian actors influence governance. These include rationalization processes that present political and power dynamics as bureaucratic and knowledge-based systems (Ferguson 1990); bureaucratization (Barnett and Duvall 2004); psychosocial support (Pupavac 2001b); gender equality (Olivius 2014); biopolitics (Reid 2010; Rozakou 2012; Vaughan-Williams 2015); the international refugee regime (Barnett 2002) as agents of stability in areas of instability (Duffield et al. 2001), and as key actors in the management of complex emergencies (Dillon and Reid 2000). Within this extremely interesting strand of studies, I am particularly interested in those which have focused on the way relief agencies participate in global governance in connection with international security, and securitization in particular. In order to speak about security, a key concept of international relations, and a crucial part of today’s debate not only on global governance, but also on humanitarianism, development, and migration it is important to take the time to introduce it theoretically. The next section is dedicated to the definition of the concept and the relatively more recent innovative conceptualization of securitization.

4 Securitization and Humanitarianism

4.1 Security, Securitization and the Copenhagen School

From a theoretical perspective, this book builds upon the International Security Studies (ISS) literature that has broadened the concept of security and elaborated the notion of securitization. In their ground-breaking Security: A New Framework for Analysis, Buzan et al. (1998) criticized the realist ontological and epistemological approach to security that considered the State the (only) unit of analysis within the international security system. The call for widening the study of security beyond the traditional focus on States, already introduced by Krause and Williams (1996), has allowed for analysis of other subjects as referent objects of security and the consideration of security threats other than military force. The second crucial contribution of New Framework has been the elaboration of a concept able to broaden the notion of security without an invalidating “conceptual stretching” (Sartori 1970): the concept of securitization. This fundamental notion refers to the framing of an issue in terms of security. It is a discursive construction in which “a securitizing actor uses a rhetoric of existential threat and thereby takes an issue out of what under those conditions is ‘normal politics’” (Buzan et al. 1998, 24–25).

Wæver (1995) has conceptualized securitization as a rhetorical structure by virtue of which the actor asserts the urgency of the situation and the consequential need for exceptional measures. According to its theorists, in order to have a case of securitization, there must be the acceptance of a determined discourse. Without it, we can only talk of a ‘securitizing move’. However, the acceptance does not refer in any way to the implementation of the security measures implied in the specific issue’s framing. Rather, it is about the level of resonance that a securitization discourse is able to attain in legitimizing emergency measures. Therefore, as Buzan and Wæver have argued, the role of the researcher is to investigate the “process of constructing a shared understanding of what is to be considered and collectively responded to as a threat” (Buzan et al. 1998, 26). In its first conceptualization, securitization has been defined as a speech act, “the utterance itself that is the act. By saying the words, something is done”(Buzan et al. 1998, 26). Although in the New Framework the authors in the book specifically referred to language theory, the possibility and the necessity of attention to other utterance dimensions, with particular emphasis on the visual realm, but not only it, has been widely discussed (Hansen 2011; Heck and Schlag 2013; McDonald 2008; Williams 2003). I will go back to the visual approach in the next chapter. Here, I would like to focus on the fundamental value that this theoretical framework offers for this book.

The theory of securitization – elaborated by Buzan and Wæver and subsequently to become known as the Copenhagen School – is one of the most innovative and productive areas of research in international security studies (Huysmans 1998; Williams 2003), In many ways it is relevant to this book. First of all, by broadening the security agenda it has underlined the importance of studying the role that non-state actors play in international relations theory in general and in the field of security studies in particular. Secondly, by opening up the possibility that securitization actors are to be found beyond traditional military and other state agents, it offers a theoretical framework to investigate securitization discourses and practices of actors not formally attributable to security apparatuses such as humanitarian organizations. Indeed, in the elaboration of the concept of securitization the Copenhagen School was concerned with understanding what could be the thresholds of the notion in terms of scale and significance in order not to lose its powerful theoretical utility. Instead of trying to identify different levels of importance of the various security referent objects, it suggested the need to focus on the impact of the securitization process. Instead of asking how important is a sector to have more ‘securitization’ potential, it proposed considering “how big an impact does the securitizing move have on wider patterns of relations? A securitizing move can easily upset orders of mutual accommodation among units” (Buzan et al. 1998, 26).

Williams (2003) has pointed out that while broadening the range of securitizing actors, the Copenhagen School has delineated its borders by identifying the specific structure of the securitization process. It can, in principle, come from ‘any’ actor that can in turn frame any issue and any referent object in terms of security. At the same time, the securitizing claim has different levels of efficacy that depend on the “external, contextual and social” (Buzan et al. 1998, 32) and the position of the actor vis-à-vis the issue and the audience. In this sense, the analysis of humanitarian NGOs securitizing potential is particularly interesting exactly because of the role they play in humanitarian discourses, a domain seemingly antithetical to security utterances. As Barnett and Weiss (2008) have shown, aid agencies derive power primarily from their alleged expert and moral authority.Footnote 4 Borrowing form Dahl’s definition of power as “effects” (Barnett and Weiss 2008, 40) that determine the ability of other actors to impact circumstances, the authors highlighted how humanitarian organizations have power in the sense that they affect regulatory and constitutive effects. On the one hand, humanitarian actors seek to govern other’s actions through both normative and symbolic practices. On the other, constitutive effect sheds light on the reality as social construction and determines the boundaries of normality, desirability, and best solutions. In this sense, the exploration of humanitarian NGOs discourses and their securitization potential is even more interesting if we take into account their supposed expert and moral authority.

4.2 Securitization, Societal Security and Human Security

In broadening the agenda of critical security studies, the Copenhagen School has identified five security sectors, each one with specific threat and referent objects: the military, environmental, economic, societal and the political (Buzan et al. 1998). Within this framework, the concept of societal security elaborated by Wæver is particularly relevant for this book. It refers to the security of the society in terms of identity and as opposed to State security. For him “society is about identity, the self-conception of communities, and those individuals who identify themselves as members of a particular community. “Society” should basically be conceived of as both Gemeinshaft and Geselshaft, but thereby, to some degree, necessarily more than the sum of the parts (that is, not reducible to individuals)” (Wæver 1995, 66).

In its original conceptualization, societal security referred mainly to European societies that securitizing processes framed as referent object of threats. However, the notion is applicable to any society. This was and is crucial because for the first time it included the individual in the picture of the international security system as traditionally conceived. Successively, in a book on the evolution of International Security Studies, Buzan and Hansen (2009) discussed the widening and deepening of the security agenda. The authors presented the different approaches calling for the need to expanding the concept of referent object of security beyond the Western State and suggested including human security as referent object and development as security sector. They argued that ‘UNDP’s [United Nations Development Programme] conceptualization of conceptualization of Human Security is probably the most encompassing expansion of the concept since Galtung launched structural violence and, like Marxist Peace Research, it sought to bring development and North–South issues into ISS.’ (Buzan and Hansen 2009, 203).

Given the importance that the concept of human securityFootnote 5 has in discourses about the protection of people’s lives, and its conceptual origin – historically situated in the dramatic genocides of Rwanda and former Yugoslavia in the 1990s – approaching it through the lenses of securitization theory brings into discussion the question of ethics, particularly the ethics of securitization. While other perspectives on securitization have seen human security as potentially emancipatory (see in this regards the position of what has come to be known as the Welsh School and particularly the work of its most prominent advocates Booth 1991a; Wyn Jones 1999), the Copenhagen School has not attributed to the securitization process any intrinsic positive acceptation.

According to the Welsh School, the concept of human security, by placing the individual at the heart of the international security system, implies an emancipatory promise. In a prophetic speech delivered at the British International Studies Association in 1991, right at the end of the Cold War, Booth argued that in the new world order security meant the absence of threat. In his words, “emancipation is the freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do. War and the threat of war is one of those constraints, together with poverty, poor education, political oppression and so on. Security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin.” (Booth 1991a, 319). For Booth, human security is of crucial importance because of its pivotal role in a State-based international security system. For threats to human beings and their rights create instability at the national level that could easily have global spill-over effects. In this conceptualization, security would encompass both security concerns based on domestic interests and those based on the need to fight oppression and underdevelopment. Although given attention mainly for its functional role in a traditional security framework, human security is already linked with the concept of emancipation at the point where for Booth, at the theoretical level, emancipation means security.

In further development of this critical security studies approach, the Welsh School has conceptualized the two concepts so intertwined that in the words of Wyn Jones “security in the sense of the absence of the threat of (involuntary) pain, fear, hunger, and poverty is an essential element in the struggle for emancipation” (Wyn Jones 1999, 126). Since then, scholars have infused human security with claims of tremendous emancipatory power in different sectors. These include the potential to challenge economic, social and political contexts that produce human insecurity (Newman 2001), questioning existing power relations (Grayson 2004); the claim that human security tends to, and is produced through, individual empowerment (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007) to the potential for human security to give voice to the voiceless and powerless (MacFarlane 2004; Suhrke 1999). The goal, common to many humanitarian NGOs is as we will see, to place people at the center of attention by representing them as threatened victims of human insecurity and to make peoples¨ voices heard. Thus, it falls within this logic.

However, as many authors have argued over the last two decades, the emancipatory power of security (or securitization) is far from unproblematic. In this sense, to understand the implications of the human security framework, I find the Copenhagen School’s perspective more useful. As Williams has pointed out, “in most cases, securitization is something to be avoided. While casting an issue as one of “security” may help elevate its position on the political agenda, it also risks placing that issue within the logic of threat and decision, and potentially within the contrast of friend and enemy. Security, accordingly, is something to be invoked with great care and, in general, minimized rather than expanded – a movement that should be sought in the name of stability, tolerance, and political negotiation, not in opposition to it” (2003, 523). Subsequently Browning and McDonald (2011) have shown how this approach not only neglects the potential negative consequences of depicting an issue within the logic of security, but, that by framing security into an emancipatory process it also fails to explore whether emancipation would be better served by other languages (such as justice and economics).

Reflecting on the link between security and emancipation, Aradau (2004a) has explained how the logic is eventually counterproductive since it reproduces the same dynamics of inclusion/exclusion and passivity that was initially challenged. Even acknowledging the important mobilization effect of securitization for emancipation implies a logic of exceptionalism that is at odds with the democratic project. In fact, the equation of emancipation with security, legitimizes the security strategy and “endorse(s) the exclusionary logic of security and the politics that is instituted by doing security” (Aradau 2004a, 398). Moreover, her observation that NGOs, by representing a specific group (in Aradau’s case study, trafficked women) as threatened victims, accomplish their scope at the expenses of those whose voices remain silent and excluded (i.e. prostitutes and asylum seekers in Aradau’s example) it is quite relevant when one reflects over humanitarian communication. NGOs, along with their efforts to ensure that the (innocent) humanitarian subjects’ voices are heard, are at the same time at risk of reproducing and reinforcing an exclusionary logic of security toward the dangerous ‘other’. Emancipation thus can only be achieved overcoming an inclusion/exclusion logic. According to Aradau, there is a dual problem. On the one side, drawing on Balibar’s writings, she notices how nobody could be emancipated by an external actor. On the other, the power of emancipation is only available for those who are considered to be members of the community and refugees and migrants are not recognized as such. Specifically, addressing the limits of human security with regards to its emancipatory potential, McCormack (2008) has pointed out how this framework not only fails to disrupt the existing power inequalities but, on the contrary, actually reproduces them. She has pointed out how the contradiction of the empowering and emancipatory promise of human security lies in its relocation of sovereignty in international community’s institutions and powerful states instead of citizenship. Indeed, “there is no ‘golden age’ of human security policy in which the ‘voiceless’ and most vulnerable set international and national security policy priorities. Even before the ‘war on terror’, the human security agenda was set according to Western priorities—albeit in the name of the poor and disempowered.” (McCormack 2008, 120). In this context, she argues that the external actors who intervene to protect human security do not have any obligation of accountability. Instead of empowering individuals, the human security framework endows international institutions and NGOs with agency.

4.3 Securitization and Humanitarianism

After having outlined the notion of humanitarianism and the concept of securitization – as we have seen intertwined with that of human security – it is now possible to look at the interconnections of these two dimensions. Despite humanitarianism’ aspirations for neutral, impartial and independent action,Footnote 6 a large swathe of scholarship has already shown the interplay of humanitarianism with military action and security (De Lauri 2018; Donini et al. 2004, 2008; Duffield 2001; Macrae 2002; Tirman 2003). This growing literature has been mainly concerned with the increasingly blurred lines between humanitarian operations and military and security interventions, and their crucial political implications. Emerging scholarship has put the emphasis on a different interplay: that between humanitarianism and securitization. In her compelling analysis of trafficked women identified as illegal migrants and victims, Claudia Aradau (2004b) has brilliantly shown how humanitarianism and securitization discourses are not mutually exclusive but, rather, reciprocally constitutive. As she points out, it is not just a question of human rights framed within the ‘new’ concept of human security, but, rather, how two seemingly conflicting “discursive regimes are entwined and feed upon each other” (Aradau 2004b, 252). In her view, the two articulations should be considered as two interconnected systems of Foucauldian governmentality. Her perspective allows us to go beyond a dichotomic understanding of humanitarianism and securitization that, in trying to unpack how such supposedly antithetical realm could interact, misses the point of how inherently similar their premises are. In this sense, Aradau’s conclusion provides a fundamental assumption underpinning this book.

Focusing on the study on the case of Syrian refugee crisis, I build on the scholarship that has shed light on the relationship between humanitarianism, security and governance in the context of refugee crises. There are a variety of studies that have investigated how humanitarian practices interrelate with security and securitization discourses. For example, Pupavac (2001a, 2005) has explored the convergence of humanitarian aid with global therapeutic governance goals. Reid (Reid 2010) has analysed the biopoliticization of humanitarianism – through practices of interventions that, instead of saving bare lives, secure them by constituting biohuman life in a political way. Rozakou (2012) has explored “the biopolitical connotations of the production of the asylum seeker– refugee as a guest” (Rozakou 2012, 563). Vaughan-Williams (2015) has investigated the zoopolitical space of humanitarian border security. Andersson (2014) has shown how the securitarian and humanitarian dimensions are part of a complex dynamic of threat and vulnerability that enables a security-humanitarian response. More recently, Gabiam (2016) has highlighted how humanitarian focus on resilience, sustainability and self-reliance to tackle the “adverse socio-economic effects”Footnote 7 of the Syria refugee crisis have been linked with global security concerns. With reference to the recent Syrian displacement to Europe, Chouliaraki (2017) has argued how security and humanitarian responses collaborate in a new moral order that she defines of hospitability, whereby the border is reaffirmed as a space of power and exclusion but simultaneously enables ‘micro-connections of solidarity’ that reinforce it and challenge it at the same time. Focusing on SAR operations in the Mediterranean, Cuttitta has argued that “the humanitarianization of migration and border management converges with its securitization” (Cuttitta 2017, 5).

These theories are crucial to understanding the process and practices through which humanitarian work contributes to the shaping of a security discourse and how securitization and humanitarianism interact in multiple ways. However, none of these studies has focused on visual representation, rather than humanitarian practices. This book intends to fill this gap. By drawing on this literature, it intends to push forward this approach to investigate the role of transnational humanitarian NGOs in global governance through the lenses of securitization theory by studying relief organizations’ visual production.

Before proceeding to the next section that will theoretically introduce the NGOs communication space and the humanitarian representation of refugees, an important consideration on the ‘acceptance’ of the humanitarian securitization process is in order. As mentioned above, the Copenhagen School outlines a substantial difference between a securitization move and a securitization process and the difference between the two mechanisms lies precisely in the question of acceptance. Basically, in order to be able to speak of a securitization process, it is necessary that an actor’s utterance in terms of security is accepted by the public. Without the acceptance, we can only speak of a securitization move. Some scholars have criticized the Copenhagen School for having overlooked the question of audience and having left the concept underdeveloped. Indeed, for some authors, the role of the audience would be so important that they have not only argued for paying more attention to the concept, but they have also proposed a refinement of the notion. For Balzacq for instance, the audience is a core element of securitization. In order to achieve its perlocutionary effect – to convince the public – the actor has in fact to “tune his/her language to the audience’s experience” (Balzacq 2005, 184). In this sense, according to the author, the context, as well as the psycho-social disposition of the audience, would be crucial for the securitizing process.

Moreover, Balzacq and other scholars have pointed out that the audience should be understood as multiple audiences following distinct logics of persuasion (Balzacq 2005; Salter 2008; Vuori 2008). Another issue lies in the intended intersubjective character of the securitization process and what this would entail for the role of audience. Côté has pointed out that the audience should be understood as an active subject, “capable of having an independent effect on securitization outcomes” (Côté 2016, 543).

From all this it is quite evident that the question of audience is anything but a small detail when talking about humanitarian securitization. Indeed, this book will show that transnational humanitarian NGOs can be considered securitizing actors exactly because their discourse has been accepted. There is, therefore, a crucial node to disentangle here. On one hand, as will be discussed in the next chapter, this book will mainly focus on two ‘sites’ of the imagesFootnote 8: production and image per se. It will mostly overlook the site of audience to which the literature (mainly in communication studies, sociology and psychology) has dedicated a great deal of attention. From an IR perspective, this book, rather than focusing on the individuals’ perception and reception images, is more interested in unpacking the various meanings that are made possible by the polysemic value of visual artefacts and, most importantly, their impact on the role that relief organizations play in global governance. In this sense, a certain degree of acceptance in a humanitarian securitized discourse is taken for granted not only for the “expert authority” for which they are recognized (Barnett and Duvall 2004, 171), but also implied in the role that humanitarian actors are granted – by public opinion but also state-based politics – in the management of human suffering and displacement. In other words, the fact that relief organizations are commonly considered legitimate actors to address human insecurity entails a certain degree of acceptance of their discourse. I will leave the discussion regarding the different forms that the humanitarian securitization process can take for the analytical Chaps. 4, 5 and 7. Here, I would like to conclude by acknowledging lessons derived from the literature outlined above. It has highlighted the importance of context and the existence of multiple audiences. These two crucial points will be discussed in detail in the chapter dedicated to the visual approach.

5 Humanitarian Communication

5.1 Humanitarian NGOs and Marketing

Present-day humanitarianism “has been affected by the forces of production; by the ascendance of a business discourse of markets, efficiency, accountability, and effectiveness; by shifting ideologies regarding the state’s role in the economy and society; and by new funding patterns” (Barnett and Weiss 2008, 28). Following this reasoning, Stephen Hopgood (2008) provocatively asked whether Wal-Mart – one of the world’s biggest multinational retail corporations – could be considered a humanitarian organization. He has highlighted the connection between contemporary humanitarian enterprise and neoliberalism, showing how the logic of business has permeated the former. It should come as no surprise, he argues, that relief organizations such as CARE, Oxfam and Save the Children have developed tight relationships with private capital, as they have to attract both public and private funding in an increasingly competitive environment. In a context in which several organizations have embraced this neoliberal logic, “humanitarian aid” has become synonymous with “aid industry”, whereby NGOs become an effective donors’ tool to transfer development funds to low-income countries or a way to privatize foreign assistance in a way that reduces accountability both to governments and beneficiaries (Polman 2010; Rieff 2002). As John Quelch and Nathalie Laidler-Kylander have very effectively explained, “mission effect is the surrogate for profits. Mission aligns the organization with its stakeholders, sets the boundaries for the organization, and provides the foundation on which trust is developed. Strong NGO brands succinctly articulate their missions in terms of what, how, and for whom; these missions are equivalent in many ways to brand-positioning statements” (Quelch and Laidler-Kylander 2005, 10).

Against this background, branding becomes an essential element to raise money in a competitive market. Since fundraising is fundamental to sustain NGOs’ operations, branding also becomes an important part of the organizations’ mission. Cottle and Nolan have highlighted how in a highly competitive environment humanitarian NGOs do not only compete for funds, but also for public attention, and have today thus assimilated a“media logic”. Their relationship with the media is “at once indispensable and inimical to NGO aims and ideas of global humanitarianism” (Cottle and Nolan 2007, 763). In order to raise awareness of forgotten crises and mobilize support, aid agencies need to successfully compete within the media environment. However, by focusing on organizational branding, designing stories in a certain way and using celebrities in order to appeal to media interests, regionalizing and personalizing the assistance via downplaying the work of local organizations, and by dedicating time and resources to protect their reputation and credibility, they end up detracting from their original goal and humanitarian principles (Cottle and Nolan 2007). “On the television, in the newspaper, in the mail—the public face of the aid industry is never far away. This is a face which is quite literally a face, that of the hungry child, helpless mother, homeless refugee. Through these faces, aid agencies sell themselves and their missions; they use marketing techniques honed over the decades by businesses and non-profits” (Kennedy 2009, 1).

5.2 Humanitarian Communication

Over the last three decades, NGOs have used communication technologies to create an international space of solidarity and activism. This is the reason a large swathe of scholarship has identified as the precursors of an emerging civil society (DeChaine 2005). In this sense, NGOs have contributed to the symbolical and material shaping of an international community able to overcome the challenges of international solidarity (e.g., political fragmentation, economic colonization, and cultural homogenization) through their humanitarian discourses. At the same time, they have contributed to the mainstream discursive process of construction of social reality and public morality of the global civil society.

Present day humanitarian communication can be best understood in terms of mediatized humanitarianism, as Vesteergards has suggested. Mediatization is intended as the: “process whereby society to an increasing degree is submitted to, or becomes dependent on, the media and their logic resulting in enduring changes to the character, function and structure of social institutions and cultural processes. Institutions to an increasing degree become dependent on resources that the media control, and will have to submit to the rules the media operate by in order to gain access to those resources” (Vestergaard 2011, 99).

However, this is only one side of the coin for at the same time another process occurs: that of “mediation” by which social and cultural transformation in turn, affect the forms in which media can be produced and perceived. In this sense, mediatization is best understood as “a thoroughly dialectic process of mutual constitution between humanitarian organizations and audiences which themselves continually undergo transformations without homogenous or isolatable causality” (Vestergaard 2011, 100). Her perspective is particularly relevant as it underlines a characteristic of humanitarian communication that is generally overlooked: the fact that over the last decades it has been increasingly influenced and transformed by the media logic, but that at the same time, social and cultural conditions have affected the way humanitarian organizations have represented themselves and their work. While investigating the role that relief organizations play in global governance and securitization, the features of humanitarian communication, are an important dimension to address for their role in consolidating and disseminating humanitarian discourse.

The literature focusing on humanitarian communication has highlighted how it has been traditionally focused on suffering. In a famous book, Boltanski (1999) has analysed the representation of distant suffering and the moral and political implication for the spectator. For the sociologist, present day humanitarianism is undergoing a “crisis of pity” that can be read as a crisis of a theatrical conception of politics, through which the call for action in the name of humanity conceals the complicity of humanitarianism with power behind an emotionally powerful representation of suffering (Chouliaraki 2013). Boltanksy was more interested in the exploration of the rhetorical “topics” available for the expression of the spectator reaction to the spectacle of suffering. This he identified in the topics of denunciation, of sentiment and the aesthetic topic. Other authors have focused on the process of production and dissemination of suffering. Kennedy (2009) has explained how humanitarian agencies use the representation of suffering as a mean to “bridge the distance (…) in relation to a wider theoretical literature on proximity and assistance that maintains that people are less likely to respond to aid victims who are far away” (Kennedy 2009, 1).

The result of this marketing strategy, he maintained, is that of commodifying suffering with ambivalent effects. While it is functional to the organization’s goal of attracting funds and raising awareness, it simultaneously contributes to the construction of the humanitarian narrative in terms of hopeless and passive victimhood.

Following this line of reasoning, but also keeping account of the changes that humanitarian communication has undergone throughout the years, Lilie Chouliaraki has introduced the useful concept of “post-humanitarianism”. Reflecting both on the mediatization process, but also on the dominant representation of suffering that distinguished emotion-based humanitarian communication at least until the 1990s, she has pointed out how present-day humanitarian rhetoric has shifted to a post-emotional style (Chouliaraki 2010). She has shown how the communication of contemporary humanitarian organizations has abandoned its claims of universal morality for styles that are based on corporate branding and that rely on aesthetic topics of contemplation to reflect upon, rather than grand emotions to inspire immediate action. Post-humanitarian communication is based on puns, extremely high aesthetic quality as well as: “low intensity emotional regimes and a technological imagination of instant gratification and no justification. While still depending on realistic imagery (of the poor, the wounded or the about-to-die), the key feature of post-humanitarianism lies precisely in loosening up this ‘necessary’ link between seeing suffering and feeling for the sufferer, and in de-coupling emotion for the sufferer from acting on the cause of suffering. Central to the post-humanitarian sensibility is the particularization of the cause, whereby the representation of suffering becomes disembedded from discourses of morality and relies on each spectator’s personal judgement of the cause for action” (Chouliaraki 2010, 119). In this new form of communication, the target of the campaign is the single individual and her/his personalized reaction of ludic engagement, rather than the universalized and collective action that was the goal of traditional rhetoric. As Chouliaraki has observed, the problem of this new style is that it tends to reproduce a political culture of Western narcissism, a kind of sensibility that makes the emotions felt by the individual the measure of the understanding of the suffering of others.

Since the end of the nineteenth century images of human misery have been used to draw attention to forgotten humanitarian crises and create a “humanitarian imaginary” of human suffering in worlds distant for the European and American public (Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015; Massari 2020b) in order to mobilize support and fundraise. Indeed, humanitarian communication has always utilized visual material and technologies have progressively and increasingly been introduced: photography, videos, web-based interfaces, and now the use of interactive media. It has been acknowledged for quite some time now the that photographic accounts of the Biafra famine in 1968 and subsequent humanitarian crises in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel were crucial in drawing the general public’s attention to places that, to an Western audience, were and felt even more distant than today (Sontag 2003). However, throughout the years, visual humanitarian communication has been criticized for various reasons. Vivid and shocking images of suffering have been denounced for reproducing a colonial perspective. This further distances the observer and the victim (Hall 2001), contributes to the humanitarian reduction of the victim (Fassin 2007), and ultimately dehumanizes the sufferer (Benthall 1993; Lissner 1977). Representations of suffering, a characteristic trait of humanitarian communication, have also been criticized for their inherent commodification of suffering (Kennedy 2009), compassion fatigue (Moeller 1999), and their role in concealing the root political causes of humanitarian disasters (Campbell 2012).

Visual humanitarian communication has also been criticized for the use of positive images that eschew accuracy and obscure the misery of suffering (Lidchi 1999). Chouliaraki (2010) has correctly traced the connection between the use of a positive imaginary with the more recent way NGOs portray agency and the dignity of people represented. During the 1990s several organizations’ communication guidelines and policy documents started to reflect the new paradigm. For example, Save the Children’s Focus on Images. The Save the Children Fund Images Guidelines (Save the Children quoted in Manzo 2008), CARE’s Brands Standards (CARE quoted in Kennedy 2009) and the European NGO Confederation for Relief and Development’s Code of Conduct on Images and Messages updated in 2006 (Concord 2006) all point toward this new direction, that of avoiding undignifying representations of passive victimhood. This new approach has proceeded hand-in-hand with new humanitarianism’s shift of paradigm from attention to people in need to depiction of people as rights holders. Over the years, humanitarian communication has tended to move away from images of starving babies to depictions of displaced children deprived by conflict of their right to education. Similarly, pictures of indistinguishable faces of people in distress have gradually given way to images portraying resilient individuals with very distinct individual features. What all these ‘new’ images, focusing on positive representations, have in common is the depiction of refugees as people needing to be protected from serious violations of their human rights. This book will argue that both positive and negative representations of humanitarian subjects end up passivizing the people represented and reducing them to an essentialized character of ‘victim.’ This occurs even more often in the representation of refugees.

5.2.1 Visual Representation of Refugees

In the field of visual humanitarian communication important scholarly work has focused on the representation of refugees. In a seminal article on the topic, Malkki (1996) pointed out how photographic accounts of displacement have consistently portrayed refugees as a “sea of humanity”. “No names, no funny faces, no distinguishing marks, no esoteric details of personal style enter, as a rule, into the frame of pictures of refugees when they are being imagined as a sea of humanity” (Malkki 1996, 388). These representations of people as universal victims contributed to the dehistoricization and depoliticization of the refugee experience in favor of the construction of the ‘universal humanitarian subject’. Depictions of this kind imply the silencing of the people finding themselves classified in a “refugee category”, while legitimizing the professional humanitarian claim of producing authoritative accounts on refugees.

Even though, as Malkki has argued, representations of raw and indistinguishable humanity dominated the media visual narrative, depictions in terms of helplessness and speechlessness have been also consistently typical in conventionalized photos of refugees: those with women and children, whose corporality was only embodying their role of universal passive victims. More recently, Bleiker et al. (2013) have confirmed this trend, studying how Australian media represents refugees. The analysis showed that images of medium or large groups of people have prevailed in the visual depiction of people on the move, while pictures of individuals with distinguishing traits – commonly considered more likely to provoke feelings of empathy and compassion (Bleiker et al. 2014) – have remained relatively absent. The effect of this dehumanizing visual framing, they argue, has been that of reinforcing an image of refugees associated with threat and security concerns, rather than a humanitarian challenge. However, even when the focus of the representation is the individual and his/her distinguishing traits, humanitarian narrative tends to depict her/him as inexorably belonging to a universal refugeeness (Nyers 1999). It is not a coincidence, Nyers argues, that in a publication titled “What is like to be a refugee?” the cover photo portrays a shirt hanging outside of a shelter with no human bodies or faces around. The object is there to represent the universal situation of the humanitarian subject and the relative feeling of loss and emptiness. This invisibility of the individual persists also when single people are portrayed to represent the experience or the loss of rights of a whole category.

The issues of speechlessness and invisibility are particularly important if considered in relation to present day NGOs’ efforts to portray people with agency and empowerment. Harrel-Bond quotes a refugee intervening in an Oxford conference on Assistance to Refugees: Alternative Viewpoints: “Why not publicize our energy and our power to help ourselves? […] We talk about UNHCR and we talk about NGOs, but we forget the refugees themselves. We forget the power they have to help themselves” (Harrell-Bond 1985, 4). According to her, this is not possible, because it would undermine the very legitimacy of humanitarian organizations work with refugees. For Harrell-Bond “humanitarian agencies are in a straitjacket with little else than human misery upon which to base their appeals” (Harrell-Bond 1985, 4). Although trenchantly expressed, this is a point that needs to be taken into account when discussing positive images and how NGOs attempt to show people with agency and empowerment. In fact, such kind of representation could have the counter effect of completely erasing the indications of need for mobilization and intervention, which is one of the primary goals of humanitarian communication. Moreover, even when the objective of humanitarian depiction is that of giving voice, individuality, and empowerment to refugees, the outcomes are often similar to those identified by Malkki in her analysis of traditional representations of refugees. As Rajaram has observed, refugees continue to be denied the possibility to produce political narratives while the account of their experience remains a prerogative of Western relief agencies, through which “refugee lives become a site where Western ways of knowing are reproduced” (Rajaram 2002, 247).

This is particularly pertinent as the ways refugees are represented, and therefore come to be known to the general public, are crucial in creating the “conditions of possibility for cultures of hospitality” (Bleiker et al. 2014, 192). Bleiker et al. have observed how Cold War images of refugees privileged portraits of Eastern bloc citizens escaping to the West where they were celebrated as heroes surviving political oppression. Very differently, according to the authors, stereotypical images of today’s refugees are dominated by overcrowded boats or portraits of passive women and children in need of external intervention. The consequence of this visual narrative is the reproduction and reinforcement of security discourses on displacement and a binary understanding of people on the move either as passive victims in need of protection or as threat to the hosting communities. Beside the influence of images of cultures of hospitality, visual representations have also been studied for their potential to affect social and political change. In this sense, shocking images such as the sadly famous one of Alan Kurdi washed ashore, have been found to produce strong feelings relating to identity, emotions and beliefs and social media engagement right after the publication of the picture (Thomas et al. 2018). However, the dramatic photo did not produce a radical change in discourses and representations of refugees (Bozdag and Smets 2017; Slovic et al. 2017), let alone changes in migration regimes (Burns 2015; The Independent 2016, 2017). On the contrary, as Achilli (2019) has observed, its long-term impact has mostly contributed to the demonization of irregular migration and shifted attention from States’ responsibility to help those in need toward the smugglers who exploit them.

6 To Be Continued…

The present chapter has outlined the conceptual framework that underpins the research. In doing so it has addressed the theoretical debate on the interconnections between humanitarianism and politics to contextualize the analysis and the assumption on which it is based. It has successively focused on the theoretical presentation of the role that civil society and NGOs in particular play in global governance to then specifically address the role of transnational humanitarian organizations in the international political arena. The third section has introduced the securitization theory, as conceptualized by the Copenhagen School, and outlined how this approach is particularly suitable for the purpose of this research. The last part has been devoted to the presentation of the humanitarian communication context and the specificities and characteristic of humanitarian communication, along with review of the relevant literature on the humanitarian representation of refugees. However, given the particular attention that this research accords to visuality, this chapter cannot be concluded without addressing the conceptual framework of a visual approach. The next chapter will focus on the visual and its theoretical implications.