Reconstruction 7.3 (2007)


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Humanitarian Space and International Politics: The Creation of Safe Areas
by Hikaru Yamashita. Burlington: Ashgate, 2004.

 

<1> In Humanitarian Space and International Politics Hikaru Yamashita discusses a practice, the creation and maintenance of humanitarian "safe areas," that was never fully realized and whose time may have already passed. At least, that would be the dystopian reading of Yamashita's conclusion and individual chapters on 1990s humanitarian disasters in Northern Iraq, Bosnia, and Rwanda. As Yamashita notes in his conclusion, "since the fall of Srebrenica and Zepa [in Bosnia] in the summer of 1995, no safe area has been declared by the Security Council" and that one might "argue from this that humanitarianism, after a brief period of activism and convergence with human rights, has returned to its [conservative] origin." In response to this dismal possibility, Yamashita offers up a rather weak flame: "it is up to us whether and how we can enhance the practice of humanitarian space on this new political landscape in a way that protects the lives of future generations" (192-93).

<2> Yamashita's conclusion is weak because of its investment in academic conventions. Although the field of international politics should be as experimental and forward looking as the vanguards of science and art, it, like many other academic discourses, tends to rely on concepts of empiricism that prevent a more speculative approach. Hence, we have conclusions like Yamashita's, which look more like weather forecasts than socially engaged explorations. His main criticism of Weiss and Chopra's idea of "global humanitarian space," for instance, is that it "does not allow one to study cases on specific temporal/spatial settings" (191). In other words, Weiss and Chopra do not offer the academy a chance to do what it loves best, spend time examining archives.

<3> That said, Yamashita's time in the archives does provide for three stellar examinations of the humanitarian crises in the three countries mentioned above. Obsessively footnoted, examined in extreme but engaging detail, they are indispensable contributions to our understanding of the vicissitudes of "safe areas" as instantiated in the 1990s. They are accessible enough to be studied by undergraduates and subtle enough to provide a basis for further theorization of workable humanitarian practice in the future.

<4> Indeed, rather than wait to see "where international policy might go" in the future, we should consider the very radical possibilities of safe areas as theorized and instantiated in the 1990s. Yamashita performs some of this work in his first major chapter, "A Conceptual Analysis of Humanitarian Space." Traditional concepts of international space, Yamashita argues, are "best explained through the concepts of state territory, based on the norm of state sovereignty, and homeland, based on the norm of self-determination" (10). While state sovereignty and self-determination differ in where they locate power, they are both largely conservative in their shared "goal of gaining and sustaining a single space that can be administered by a single agency" (14). In this sense, they both have investments in totalitarian ideology, a fact which should be considered in attempting to understand situations ranging from the violence plaguing postcolonial states in Africa to the current attempts at "installing" democracy in Iraq.

<5> The "shelter model" of humanitarian space, by contrast, "is founded on incompatibility with the practice of sovereign space" (20). If one agrees that "sovereign space" as instantiated in nation states is inherently authoritarian (as perhaps someone like Yamashita, funded by Japan's "National Institute for Defense Studies," is unprepared to do), then one recognizes that the shelter model of humanitarian space is not new at all, but has a long history in anarchist theory and practice. The complete absence of reference to this history, given Yamashita's subject matter, is telling. If one takes this history seriously, then a truly humanitarian space would not be "indifferent to the existing territorial arrangements of states" (21), as Yamashita asserts, but inimical to them. One does not name an organization "Doctors Without Borders," for instance, without at least unconsciously critiquing nationalism and the violence it engenders.

<6> Despite its limitations, I read Yamashita's book from cover to cover and felt compelled to review it because it discusses issues of the utmost importance in an intelligent and provocative way. I do not wish to understate its both radical and practical potential. Its conceptual intervention does remain, however, even within the context of an academic book, an unrealized potential. Nevertheless, it is an admirable first book and, starting from the important context of the 1990s, poses many of the right questions concerning humanitarian space in the new millennium.

 

Alan Clinton

 

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