Hugo Slim tillhör det västerländska humanitära etablissamanget. Han har verkat mycket länge i dessa kretsar som akademiker och praktiker. Han hör hemma där men saknar inte förmåga till kritisk blick och viss distans i en föränderlig värld. I sin senaste bok tar han upp spörsmål som når utöver den traditionella jargongen och tangerar centrala frågor som sällan berörs i Sverige.
Citaten nedan visar att Slim ibland är inne på väsentliga saker som handlar om självbestämmande, nationell förankring och icke-inblandning:
“National self-determination is an important part of building lasting and culturally adapted humanitarian capacity, and it is not respected as much as it should be today by overbearing and imperial international humanitarians. Western international dominance in humanitarian aid needs to change as we head for a new era of warfare and humanitarian response in an equally new world of Great Powers and intensifying climate crisis.
Dunant’s [Henry Dunant som under andra hälften av 1800-talet lade grunden för det internationella Röda Korset] instinct to invest equally in national humanitarian networks is fairer and wiser. When many countries are simultaneously battling climate crisis, unplanned urbanization, conflict, displacement and disease, it is best to invest in single national humanitarian systems that can cope with such concurrent and compound crises in people’s lives. A parallel system of international intervenors setting their own rules and operating their own national humanitarian platforms is destructive and diluting of national capacity.
[…]
The commitment to invest in national networks must always remain the main operational focus of humanitarian aid and the first objective of international response. Anything else is probably colonialism of a kind that creates new problems of its own, but then, at least, their societies will need to own them. Under imperial humanitarianism, aid-recipient governments too often deflect national problems and blame them on interfering outsiders.
[…]
But, in his mind, it is the ‘horror of war’ that counts most, a phrase he uses repeatedly and rhetorically. For Dunant, war’s reasons, its justifiable moral purpose and its victories are rendered null and void in the blood-drenched mud of the battlefield and the agonizing deaths of young men. He was not interested in why people fight for things like self-defence, liberation justice, domination and greed.
[…]
Dunant’s politically agnostic frame, which he crafted into a universal narrative, has cascaded through humanitarian organizations since he wrote, and twenty-first-century humanitarians have made a strong recommit to neutrality.”
Citaten är hämtade från Hugo Slims bok Solferino 21. Warfare, Civilians and Humanitarians in the Twenty-First Century, Hurst 2022.
Boken är något spretig men läsvärd.
Läs mer om boken och med den sammanhängande spörsmål i professor Kai Ambos utförliga recension:
Humanizing Warfare as a Project of Power Politics and Colonial Exclusion – Verfassungsblog