Paper details

Paper authors	Thomas Bamforth (University of Sydney)
In panel on	Humanitarian Aid Workers: Ethics, Altruism, and Best Practices
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

This paper will explore the ways in which aid workers themselves have written about the ethical complexities, motivations, and best practices of humanitarian work. There is a literary sub-genre of humanitarian memoir comprising of around published forty books, beginning with Henry Dunant’s Battle of Solferino in 1859, that reflection on humanitarian action and conceptualisations of applied ethics in times of disaster and crisis. While these texts have been largely ignored in scholarship, they provide valuable insight into the origins, attitudes, preoccupations, and narratives of humanitarian action as it has evolved over the course of the last century. The memoirs entwine personal narratives with reflections on the origins, ethics, politics, and complexities of humanitarian action and international social activism as described by aid workers themselves. They also reflect on practitioner debates around power, colonialism, race and humanitarianism. The memoirs concern humanitarian action as it evolved during the 1990s ‘multilateral moment’ with the rise of global NGOs after the end of the Cold War and present evolving practice up until the present day. Humanitarian memoirs are commercially available and often popular works in the public domain and are influential in forming wider social ideas and attitudes about human rights and humanitarian crises.

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