Humanitarian struggle : the politics of cross-border aid on the Thai-Burma border

Abstract

Through an ethnographic study of a cross-border aid organisation, this thesis examines problems that go to the heart of the politics of humanitarian aid. At a time of significant political change in Burma, members of the Back Pack Health Worker Team had to grapple with questions that have shaped the history of humanitarianism but continue to raise complex political and ethical dilemmas. The Back Pack Health Worker Team - or Back Pack, as it is commonly known - is a Non-Government Organisation made up of indigenous medics who provide healthcare to ethnic minority communities in Burma's disputed border areas. Ten years after its creation in 1998, Back Pack had become an influential yet controversial player in the politics of aid to Burma. This thesis explores how humanitarian actors, systems and practices can at different times be defined as legitimate or illegitimate. It examines ways in which an 'embodied history' of violence can influence the worldviews and actions of humanitarian actors, as well as institutions that develop in a particular context to mitigate human suffering. Back Pack's 'humanitarian struggle' unites the provision of aid with a politico-moral vision, itself tied to the life experiences and embodied histories of state violence of its founders and members. This humanitarian struggle implies an attribution of legitimacy to some socio-political actors in Burma rather than others. For over a decade, it was endorsed by international donors and political actors. At a time of significant (geo)political change, however, international-level attributions of legitimacy to different socio-political actors in Burma shifted, with significant impacts on an already polarised and emotive politics of aid. This ethnographic study highlights the importance of analysing systems through which aid works from the perspective of values attributed to these systems by actors at different scales of analysis and in relation to wider political and geopolitical changes. It focuses on the complex and often-invisible webs of local organisations, international NGOs, donors and other socio-political actors, which can develop in a cross-border and extra-legal context - a context where competing constructions of systems as legitimate or illegitimate, humanitarian or not humanitarian are highlighted. It is in such a context and at a time of significant (geo)political change that constructions of 'licitness' can become most pertinent and that divergent and shifting attributions of value by actors at different scales become particularly significant. Finally, the thesis links this analysis to a conceptualisation of humanitarianism as an unequal 'politics of life' and 'politics of value'. It thus highlights ways in which actors differentially situated in an international system of 'humanitarian government' can be involved in contests over the attribution of value not only to human lives per se, but also to the systems and practices that enable the government of these lives. Show more