Paper details
| Paper authors | Kristoffer Lidén |
| In panel on | The politics of negotiating with authoritarian regimes |
| Paper presenter(s) will be presenting |
In-Person / |
Abstract
Quoting a humanitarian negotiator par excellence, Jan Egeland: ‘If you are there to help the victims from the depths of hell, you have to speak to the devil’ (Hoge, 2004). As such, humanitarian negotiations exemplify what has elsewhere been discussed as moral dilemmas, tragic choices, ‘dirty hands’ problems, emergency ethics and non-ideal theory (Slim, 2015: 163-167). These choices have been at display in their extremes during the Syrian civil war – from the multiple frontlines of relief operations to the diplomatic chambers of New York and Geneva. Yet, they have always been part of humanitarian action and continue with unabated force in places like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Venezuela and Yemen.
Meanwhile, humanitarian action is itself subject to ethical critique and soul-searching for its Western biases and unintended effects. As reflected in calls for localizing and decolonising aid and enhancing trust in humanitarian agencies, this makes it necessary to explore the ethical dilemmas from all sides of the negotiation table, and indeed from the perspective of the affected communities. Taking negotiations with authoritarian regimes as our point of departure, this paper outlines a research agenda for exploring these multiple dimensions of the ethics of humanitarian negotiations.
