Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality - Chapter 08 - Humanitarian organisations: behemoths and butterflies

Every two weeks I am going to feature one of the chapters of our Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality which was published in spring 2024.

This week we are taking a closer look at Chapter 08 - Humanitarian organisations: behemoths and butterflies - contributed by Sarah S. Stroup.

From the introduction
One of the fascinating and sometimes frustrating aspects of international humanitarian response is that anyone can do it. According to the Good Humanitarian Donorship Initiative, humanitarian action seeks to ‘save lives, alleviate suffering and maintain human dignity during and in the aftermath of man-made crises and natural disasters, as well as to prevent and strengthen preparedness for the occurrence of such situations’ (GHD, no date). This emphasis on behavior (‘humanitarian action’) highlights that the humanitarian response comes from corporations, relief, and development NGOs, Western governments, Red Cross agencies, local religious groups, and many others (Barnett, 2011). Acting upon the Dunantist impulse to ‘lighten a little the torments of all these poor wretches’ (Redfield, 2013), humanitarian actions are undertaken by everyone from college students raising funds for victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the Emergency Relief Coordinator at the United Nations.
This chapter describes the many organisations involved in the humanitarian response and the efforts to collaborate on fundraising and coordination. While the humanitarian impulse seems universal, the power, authority, and resources to act upon it are distributed very unequally. The humanitarian response is thus a highly decentralised, heavily populated endeavor. To describe the variety of humanitarian organisations, this chapter follows the simple and striking categorisation offered by Swidler and Watkins (2017). In their analysis of another area of global action, the global AIDS sector, they describe two ends of an aid spectrum: ‘Behemoths’ are institutional altruists with deep pockets and slow bureaucracies, a category that includes multilateral and bilateral organisations and large international NGOs. ‘Butterflies’ are fast moving amateur altruists that are too small or transitory to get noticed by the big players.
The first section of this chapter describes the humanitarian behemoths, highlighting bilateral donors, multilateral agencies, international NGOs, and the Red Cross. The second section explores the diverse array of humanitarian butterflies, focusing on grassroots organisations and those outside the humanitarian sector that respond to crises. The third section focuses on fundraising and coordination, two key tasks for ensuring that the collective efforts of these butterflies and behemoths actually meet basic humanitarian needs.

Note on contributor
Sarah S. Stroup is professor of political science at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA) and executive director of the Davis Collaborative in Conflict Transformation. She is author of Borders Among Activists (Cornell, 2012) and co-author with Wendy Wong of The Authority Trap (Cornell, 2017), winner of the 2019 ARNOVA Outstanding Book Award.
Her teaching and scholarship focus on international NGOs, humanitarian relief, and human rights. Her recent projects examine the human rights and democracy promotion sectors and European Union humanitarian aid.

Overviews are already available for the following chapters:
Introduction: humanitarianism and inequality – a re-orientation

Humanitarianism and colonialism

Humanitarianism and the global Cold War, 1945–1991

Humanitarianism and the new wars: humanitarianism, security, and securitisation

Humanitarianism, development and peace: a southern perspective

Localisation and the humanitarian sector

Human rights and humanitarianism