Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality - Chapter 14 - Humanitarianism and the military

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 14 – Humanitarianism and the military - contributed by Silke Roth.

From the introduction
The concept of ‘military interventions’, i.e. the use of military force to address conflicts and human rights violations, and subsequent debates about the ‘shrinking humanitarian space’ became prominent in the 1990s during the peacekeeping missions in former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq (Chandler, 2001; De Torrente, 2004). However, the entanglement of military action and humanitarian aid has a much longer history going back to the crusades and various patterns of the militarisation of relief organisations can be distinguished (Perouse de Montclos, 2014; see also Terry, 2002; Greenburg, 2023). This chapter seeks to unravel the entanglements of civilian humanitarian actors and military forces in a variety of contexts, while paying close attention to how these relations are shaped by and perpetuate intersecting inequalities.
(…)
The chapter is structured as follows: The first section of this chapter introduces military-civilian relations and notes differences in organisational cultures and access to resources. In the second section, I focus on the role of military forces in disaster relief and epidemics. The third section discusses peacekeeping, reconstruction, and borderwork. The fourth section considers the sexual exploitation and abuse of local populations by peacekeepers and notes the impact of military humanitarianism on the security of humanitarian aid workers and security measures of humanitarian organisations.
Throughout the chapter, I employ an intersectional perspective (Hill Collins and Bilge, 2020), which acknowledges that multiple aspects of inequality, such as gender, race, and class, are not mutually exclusive but intersect and interact with each other. In the context of humanitarian aid this includes power differences between international and national actors; of course, neither of these two groups is monolithic. In my conclusion, I highlight intersecting inequalities within military forces and between military and civilian actors.

Note on contributor
Silke Roth is professor of sociology at the University of Southampton in the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology.
She is working on the intersections of political sociology and the sociology of work. The red thread that runs through her work is the question how organisations overcome and perpetuate inequality through the in- and exclusion of different constituencies in membership and leadership, and through their goals and objectives.
She studies various forms of engagement in historical and biographical perspectives. Her latest book co-authored with Clare Saunders is Organising for Change: Social Change Makers and Social Change Organisations (Bristol University Press, 2024).

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

Humanitarian organisations: behemoths and butterflies

Faith actors in humanitarianism: dynamics and inequalities

Diaspora assistance 

Political solidarity movements and humanitarianism: lessons from Catalonia, Spain (1975–2020)

Subversive humanitarianism

Citizen’s groups and grassroots humanitarianism