Prof. Shai Dromi

Prof. Shai M. Dromi is an associate senior lecturer on sociology at Harvard. He is “particularly interested in how ideas about morality—about what’s good and what’s bad, what’s worthy and what’s unworthy—actually affect institutions that we inhabit and work through. One of [his] big topics of interest has been humanitarian organizations, thinking about how the specific, ethical codes that animate them today, and the specific moral significance that they hold for donors, stakeholders, beneficiaries, came to be. In the more recent several years, [he’s] been working on universities and on academic life and how ideas of what’s right to research—not just in the neutral sense, but also in a moral sense—actually animate our academic life and our questions about what we should research, how we should research it, how an academic should conduct themself, and so on.”

ZEITGEIST: I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about specifically religion shaping humanitarian NGOs. How have these religious underpinnings shaped popularities about NGOs, and how do you talk about them in your book?

PROF. DROMI: So first of all, religion provided that foundational ethical framework for humanitarian NGOs to even emerge to begin with. Around the mid 19th century, there were multiple ideas kind of circulating, both in Central Europe and to some extent also in the United States about, you know, in what way can civil society help the people in need such as orphans, widows, soldiers who were wounded in war, and others. And specific to Geneva, there was a movement called the Réveil, French for awakening, a movement within the Swiss Protestant reformed church, that was placing a great deal of emphasis on grassroots organizing, on not relying on the state for providing assistance, but relying on personal charity, individuals taking responsibility, and so on. And the people who founded the first Red Cross group were strong adherents of that faith movement. I show in the book how they transferred those religious ideas into the ethical code that they envisioned for the Red Cross movement. So for example, being independent of state involvement. Being neutral, not aside to any conflict. Being impartial, kind of treating everyone only according to their needs and not according to their race, gender, religion, and so on. And all those were really being transferred from religious thinking at the time. And throughout the book, I show how also the Red Cross really succeeded in advocating, first in Europe, but very quickly in Asia, in the Americas with north, south, middle, central, and elsewhere to adopt this model. The humanitarian organizations ought to be these free, independent, neutral agents as opposed to, let’s say, state welfare, or medical corps that are operated by the military, and so on. And this was really unusual and new for the time because a lot of the thinking in the late 19th century was that the state is the one that should do these things. Right? You know, especially in progressive circles of that time, that the state should really take responsibility. But the model of the humanitarian NGO became so popular. It drew so many people with the volunteering spirit that it became really the fixture in the way we often think about humanitarian aid today.

ZEITGEIST: That’s so fascinating, especially because we are in a context right now where humanitarian aid is a really big deal. I mean, certainly, we have multiple ongoing genocides. I’m from the state where two major hurricanes are now hitting, one of which happening as we speak.

PROF. DROMI: As we speak. Totally.

ZEITGEIST: I hope you don’t mind if we jump around a little bit. This sort of segues into both of the next questions. I think a major thread of the final bit of your answer was talking about this transition away from state governments helping in aid. And I don’t know if, for example, you’re familiar with, here on campus, FUP, the first-year orientation program. When freshmen come on campus, we do a pre-orientation program, one of which is committed to service. And we have, for example, a lot of really interesting conversations about if nonprofits should really be the ones bearing the most of this brunt. Does this in any way sort of assuage and shift responsibility from state governments? Could you discuss some of the possible alternatives or the alternative considerations to NGOs? I’m really also begging the question: do NGOs shift a responsibility that is inherent to the government?

PROF. DROMI: This is an ongoing question. I teach a course on humanitarian aid, and we always come up with these questions that really don’t have straightforward answers. Especially when an emergency strikes and people can’t wait for us to sit around and figure out what’s right to do, which is oftentimes itself a problem. But, I think it’s best not to think about it in terms of alternatives, but more in terms of possible ways forward that will provide a better balance between what nonprofits are doing and what the state is doing. Because, you know, when there are, let’s say, hurricanes, disaster strikes, oftentimes the nonprofits that are there, that are local, that understand the local needs, that understand the potential resources that are available, are the ones who can respond most immediately and directly, as opposed to some state agencies that can provide resources, but it’ll take them a little while to understand what the needs are and what the best ways to respond are. However, at the same time, there’s a critical conversation about whether these sort of nonprofit interventions unintentionally shift responsibility away from the state, and potentially actually impede long term development. Because the more citizens come to rely on nonprofits, on aid that’s coming in from the outside, the less they are actually holding the state and the government accountable for helping restore the infrastructure, provide basic necessity support, reestablish an economy where that economy was lost.

So there are several initiatives that focus on balancing the state and the nonprofit sector. One is increasing use of unconditional cash transfers. So, traditionally aid providers would come and bring water, food, basic necessities. Today, more and more aid providers actually are moving to just giving cash, with the understanding that individuals will be able to better determine for themselves what they need and use it. And also with the understanding that then they wouldn’t be kind of injecting outside, let’s say, goods or services into an area that may already have those, but people just need the means to get them. And this way, the nonprofit intervention would be less of a disruption, or in the long term would be less of a kind of outside force, more like a supportive intervention in helping people actually stand back on their feet. Right? So that’s one.

Another, this is more international, but the UN has an initiative on what they call localization of aid where you had UN agencies swooping in when disaster strikes—one example is Haiti that’s been at the center of multiple natural disasters. For a long time, until recently, the model was international aid agencies swooping in. Given that they are perceived as neutral, apolitical, impartial, as we said earlier, they’re very well trusted. But at the same time, they’re offering the aid that they determine is required, and oftentimes creating so much trust in them that citizens are no longer looking for their own state to provide the help. And the program centers on localization. Rather than doing that, actually working to empower local agencies to understand the UN’s general goals, but at the same time, to work on the local level really around empowering local populations and handing over as much as possible of the decision making of the supplies of the resources to the local agencies with the understanding that this will make it more likely for local governance to be restored.

Now all of this relies on the fact that international organizations, especially humanitarian ones, enjoy the perception of being completely neutral. That’s why oftentimes they’re trusted by local populations, and almost instinctively, when in fact what needs to happen is more accountability toward the local state.

ZEITGEIST: This is really fascinating. Specifically the point about neutrality and trust. I think not only does that lead into our next question, but it reminds me of potentially an addendum to this one. I’m very interested now that you’ve said that because we know realistically that the UN and a lot of these organizations are not neutral. Right? I was thinking very specifically, I’m part Southeast Asian, for example, and I remember growing up when the UN refused to send supplies and aid to Myanmar, for example. So I guess for this next question, with a slight modification, how do you see this moral culture playing out in relief efforts in a lot of the major humanitarian crises we’re seeing right now: Palestine, Congo, and, you know, American South post hurricane Helene. How is that being demonstrated in the current moment? What are the complications when aid not only is blocked, but also when the UN directly or some sort of organization directly chooses to withhold aid? How does that impact trust?

PROF. DROMI: That’s an excellent question. Sadly, all of the sites that you mentioned—Palestine, the Congo, Sudan, currently Yemen—present very, very serious challenges to the humanitarian organizations that work there, in part because of the question: How do we maintain this thing called neutrality? How do we, especially when we’re working in a politically and religiously tense area, like modern day Syria and other such conflict sites. And what we often see is that the fact that they’re perceived as neutral actually gets usurped or at least struggled over by different actors. One example is when competing actors want these neutral providers to actually partner with them. Right? So in the case of Syria, for example, on one hand, the Syrian Arab Red Cross was tasked with providing aid to the entire country. But on the other side, it was perceived by many as working with the Syrian government. Right? And, hence, when it traveled in more distant parts of the country, it was oftentimes targeted because it was perceived like, no, you’re not neutral. You’re working with the government. Conversely, organizations that were working primarily in the farther out areas of Syria where government hold was challenged by other groups, like Doctors Without Borders, were often perceived by the Syrian government as a foreign agent. So this question of who is neutral becomes really, really crucial. Another very complex challenge is areas or buildings or vehicles that are designated as neutral. So, for example, ambulances, hospitals, refugee camps, and so on that are, at least on paper, designated as neutral, but then there becomes a struggle on what’s allowed and what’s not allowed in there. Oftentimes, because of the cover of neutrality, different groups might use those, let’s say, a refugee camp in order to hide ammunition, to recover while, let’s say, a conflict is ongoing, and so on. And thus they also endanger that neutrality. They’re undermining it through these actions.

On the other hand, we have governments that are withholding humanitarian aid or trying to usurp it in order to use it to their advantage. So people who are on their side will get it, people who aren’t won’t get it. And that’s been the case with North Korea, actually, with several aid attempts with North Korea, that the North Korean government was very insistent that they themselves will be the one to determine who gets this ostensibly neutral and partial aid, which, of course, was not neutral and not impartial because of their interference.

So all that to say is that this slippery term, neutrality, ends up funnily enough being non neutral in so many different ways and in so many different directions that humanitarian providers often struggle tremendously with how to maintain the appropriate distance from the various parties to a conflict. I know, for example, that in some cases, humanitarian aid workers are even cautious about taking a ride with someone in their car so they won’t be seen together with, let’s say, a government employee, and then in people’s minds, that’ll challenge their perception as a neutral worker. So that is to your first question.

Your second question is about the broader decision making. So, huge parts of global humanitarian funding come from the UN, and from various UN agencies, as well as the World Bank, and several other related agencies. And there’s extremely complex decision making processes, where oftentimes impossible decisions have to be made. Simply impossible. We have, god forbid, a hurricane in country A, a civil war in country B, a famine in country C, and we only have this amount of funding: Where do we send it? And this also involves a question: Do we send a little to everyone in a way that might be insufficient to everyone across the board, or do we focus on country A, B, or C? You know, country A at the expense of country B and C?

To tell you that those decisions are free of broader political questions, I can’t. I can also tell you that there is very little way to actually determine how, for us as outsiders, to actually know what happened behind the scenes because, oftentimes, the deliberations are confidential. I can tell you that one thing that there has been a great deal of movement for, and, I’m hoping it’ll make a significant difference in the future, is involving more people from the actual affected areas in the conversation and in the decision making process. Both in terms of understanding the needs, but also in terms of moving beyond simply providing the basic necessities to thinking about justice in a broader way than we’ve thought about it before within the humanitarian context.

ZEITGEIST: I think as follow-up to all that, because we’ve explored all of these complexities with neutrality, how all these organizations that are perceived to be “neutral” (or are positing a level of neutrality) come from utterly partial places, whether that’s religion or involvement from governments. I’m interested: What do you see as the way forward? You talked about justice in your last answer. Is neutrality really the pathway to justice?

PROF. DROMI: I think, at the end of the day, there are two separate spheres here. Humanitarian aid, first and foremost, is about addressing an emergency. Acute food insecurity, serious and immediate medical needs—those are the areas that humanitarian aid, first and foremost, is concerned with.

There is a separate sphere that maybe overlaps a little bit, but at the end of the day, it’s separate. One of them is development and another sphere is human rights. And those tend to be concerned with the longer term questions. Right? So, you know, the development would be: How do we restore longer term infrastructure, education, work towards self-sustainability? And human rights would be: How do we ensure that everyone, regardless of nationality, religion, and so on, enjoys the same basic rights that all of us as human beings are entitled to?

Now there are movements within the humanitarian world to bring in also questions of human rights even in an emergency with the understanding that everyone at all times is entitled to rights such as freedom of movement, freedom of religion, and so on. So there is growing work, for example, for protecting people’s human rights in refugee camps or people who are fleeing, let’s say, a conflict zone, and so on. That’s been developing, it’s called rights based humanitarian aid, which I think is a very welcome direction. And that also sets the infrastructure for the later processes of really rebuilding and developing a sustainable political and social arrangement. So that is one of the directions.

I think another welcome direction which I’ve mentioned is localization. It comes out of a serious concern and understanding within UN agencies that we really need much more of the weight of the decision making to be on the local areas by the people who are actually the stakeholders, right, who are going to be affected by the decisions. And I think that’s also a very welcome direction. I don’t think it undermines the neutrality of any organization. If anything, I think it actually helps, let’s say, the international organizations remain neutral by saying that we’re working to provide the same services and the same support to everyone who’s in need, especially using their own kind of resources and interest.

On the less optimistic side, one thing I should mention is that the global humanitarian needs are always desperately underfunded. Every year, there’s an appeal for donations from states, by the UN, and it’s uniformly under, it does not reach the funding goals. And this is a problem because, sadly, the humanitarian needs are growing internationally, and the funding is not growing quickly. So that is my less optimistic side of things. It’s something to think about also moving forward.