Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality - Chapter 30 - West Asia and North Africa

Welcome back to a new year!

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 30 - West Asia and North Africa - contributed by Josepha Wessels.

From the introduction 
West Asia tends to be called ‘Middle East’, a term embedded in Eurocentric geopolitics and colonialism, whereby the region is referred to in relationship to their proximity to Europe. The region has large quantities of the most vied natural resources on this planet: oil and gas. The role and power of energy supply systems cannot be ruled out in defining international diplomacy (Jones, 2012; Mammadov, 2018). Countries and nation-states of Europe, the US, China, and Russia, have a vested strategic military and geopolitical interest in this region (Jones, 2012; Mammadov, 2018). Diplomatic ties with fossil fuel producing countries in the region, that are far from liberal democracies, but rather close to neoliberal autocracies or outright dictatorships, often muddle the very principles of international humanitarian aid. The author herself worked for over 22 years in the WANA region, as a development practitioner, scholar, and ethnographic documentary filmmaker. Besides cases such as Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq, this chapter features Syria, where the author has lived and worked for many years, and which is now considered by many the worst humanitarian crisis of the twenty-first century (Inglis, 2018). Gregory (2004) argues in his book The Colonial Present, that the attacks on the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, triggered a series of military campaigns in this region, followed by humanitarian interventions that were ‘politically and culturally profoundly colonial’ (Gregory, 2004; Heinze, 2006). Gregory provides a geopolitical analysis of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) narrative with interventions in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq (Gregory, 2004). Gregory’s colonial present are Western power constellations that continue to colonise lives globally, but his book does not look beyond the US and Britain and fails to analyse how non-Western states, such as Russia, use the GWOT in a similar vein to justify their military and ‘humanitarian’ interventions. Whenever the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) wants to address human rights violations and humanitarian aid in this region, it risks a veto from one of the permanent members. 
(…) 
This chapter will first provide an exposé on how the GWOT narrative is interlinked to humanitarian intervention and its politics in the WANA region with examples of interventionist humanitarianism from Israel/Palestine and Iraq, before focusing on the exemplary case of Syria, politics, and inequalities in humanitarian aid.

Note on contributor 
Josepha Wessels is an associate professor in media and communication studies at the School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University with a background in Development Studies and Visual Anthropology. 
She teaches Communication for Development (ComDev) and is PI of several research projects on Sudan on Climate Change Resilience and as co-PI on Syrian Refugees in Jordan, Turkey, and Sweden in collaboration with Gothenburg University, and a project on the post-migrant condition in Sweden working with Arabic-language performance artists and musicians. 

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

Humanitarianism and the military

Race, racialisation, and coloniality in the humanitarian aid sector

Humanitarian organisations as gendered organisations

Sexuality and humanitarianism: colonial ‘hauntings’

Class matters in humanitarianism

Humanitarianism and disability 

Media representations of humanitarianism

Humanitarianism and pandemics 

Humanitarian technologies

Linguistic inequality in the humanitarian sector: unravelling English-centric multilingualism

Climate change, disasters and humanitarian action 

Refugee protection and assistance

Trafficking in persons, long-term vulnerabilities, and humanitarianism

Humanitarianism and Native America

Australia, New Zealand, and Pacific Regions

International humanitarianism in East Asia 

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