"touring" London and more

Well, last week my tutor cancelled on me, so I had a great essay written, and a week left for it to be judged. A lack of a tutorial this week gave me an opportunity to work on other important tasks, such as m essay about the feuding divas and my presentation, and my research for the following week on climate migrants. Part of my research, fortunately included a documentary produced by and starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Before the Flood.

What was significant about this past week, however, was our trip to London. I will note that I am going to complain about this excursion, not because I am at all unthankful of the opportunities I had, but for the sake of showing my disappointment at the organization and my own professor's planning for this particular trip.

For one, we had to be on a bus at 8:00 am which is not bad for most people, but for a girl who has a had time going to sleep by midnight, 8:00 am is pretty early. On the two hour bus ride, while I was trying to nap, the loud conversation of particular individuals who I will not name kept me awake and annoyed. I was grumpy.

Approaching Westminster, we drove past many landmarks which our tour guide described to us over the bus' muffled P.A. system. We dismounted the coach, and split into tour groups by class. Our tour guide was a friendly woman, an Art Historian, who knew a whole lot about London. She was great and her tour, was fairly elaborate. I only would've wished to have gone into Westminster Abbey, and that Big Ben would have not been under construction.

My poor planning left me cold, very hungry, and uncomfortable. I should have packed more snacks, a sweatshirt, and advil. I didn't expect 65 degrees to be so cold and windy. That was an easy fix though: buy a tourist sweatshirt. I now have a nice warm hoodie that says "London, England" on it. Food, also an easy fix, we stopped for lunch very, very, briefly. A butter and smoked salmon sandwich, and a latte, not quite filling enough, but left me room for a pastry later. The pain in my feet from walking for 6 hours, not quite as easy to solve.

The first tour, I appreciated. It was worth it. The second tour, led by my professor, was not as fulfilling. It was a tour of composer Handel's London. We walked around the West End, looking at construction sites, modern buildings, run down spaces, saying, this is where *insert random location related to Handel* was, clearly it is not here anymore. We ended our day at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where I wish we had just spent the day. It was an amazing museum, full of history, art originals & replicas, and big enough to spend the day! Unfortunately, by the time we got there I was too tired to explore and to enjoy it. I slowly observed a few rooms, but at that point we had one hour left to make it back to the bus which was at least an hours walk away.

At the end of the day, me and my friends made it back to the bus, with blisters on our feet, and exhausted from all the things we learned and saw. I took a fat nap on the bus ride back (apparently with some light snoring), and that was my Saturday.

Sunday and Monday were work days again, until Monday night when we were celebrating a housemate's birthday. She's one who I believe has been struggling to make friends, so we did what we could to make it fun for her. We bought her a slice of cake and she bought and made lots of drinks for her 21st. We played music, danced, played games. She had a good time (until she threw up). Some of the boys were a bit rude, came late and left early. They couldn't bring it onto themselves to do something nice for a girl who cares so much for everyone, and deserved a happy birthday.

I also explored a new meadow this week and ran through a field of cows, but speaking of runs, it hasn't been all great. I ran into another thorn bush (more like tragically tripped into) and my entire left leg is now covered in hives so SEND PRAYERS!

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It is a Theory Not a Rule

Introduction

After repeated misguided humanitarian responses to international crises, arose the importance of establishing a framework for deciding when intervention should take place and when it should be withheld. The Rwandan genocide in 1994 made it clear that an organized method to precede intervention was necessary. In a matter of eight weeks, there were over 800,000 deaths[1]. This was due to strategic inaction by the United States and their discouragement of other states responding to the Rwandan crisis. The United States became so opposed to providing assistance to Rwanda, which was facing a grave ethnic dispute, because of the recent failure of humanitarian assistance in Somalia. The United States, in collaboration with the United Nations, and their attempts at peacemaking amidst the Somali civil war, ended up causing more violence and death than would have been anticipated without intervention. Humanitarian aid gave more power to the persecuting group, including providing them access to technology to loot, and food aid, which they would redirect from the aid groups’ target population, to their own soldiers. The failure is best known by its Hollywood claim to fame, the film Black Hawk Down. The production illustrates the tragedy and mass death that occurred in the first battle of Mogadishu. To reiterate, the tragedy in Somalia led to inaction in Rwanda which ended up being a mistake. This leaves policymakers and humanitarians wanting to implement some sort of framework to classify situations with respect to how likely they are to use humanitarian aid for purposes of war. This outlook is problematic because just as snowflakes and fingerprints are one of a kind, so are individual refugees and refugee crises. While it is acceptable to use the framework as a base of thinking, the realm of international relations is unpredictable. This uncertainty means that we cannot take guiding theories as strict rules.

The Framework

Dr. Sarah Kenyon Lischer provides a convincing framework that could be beneficial for the initial evaluation of forced migration events. Her idea involves setting up refugee groups into three categories: situational refugees, persecuted refugees, and state-in-exile refugees[2]. Situational refugees are the unlikely, according to Dr. Lisher, to use Humanitarian Aid to wage war. These individuals are characterized by their lack of political organization, and their reason for flight being surrounding war, chaos, or deprivation[3]. Persecuted refugees might have a weak inclination to use humanitarian aid for war[4]. They flee because of targeted persecution or oppression[5]. This makes it more likely for them to organize politically for military activity, which increases the chances of misuse of humanitarian aid[6]. State-in-exile refugees are left then, to be the most vulnerable for using humanitarian aid as weapon for war. They flee their state due to a defeat in a civil war[7]. What makes them so likely to use aid for war is their strong political organization[8]. The strong political leadership exiling the refugees, may have them in mind as a strategy of war or, may be able to divert assistance to sustain the conflict[9].

The benefits to the organizational approach to responding to crises is evident. Creating a theory helps to simplify a complex situation. On the other hand, we must take care to not oversimplify because this can lead to misreading situations, withholding aid when it is needed, and providing aid when it could be harmful.

Situational Refugees

Mozambique refugees who fled to Malawi during the civil war classify as situational refugees. The civil war between the Marxist government and rebels left the majority of refuges to be characterized as politically uninvolved migrants fleeing the violence of the crossfire[10]. The Mozambique refugees not only were unlikely to unite politically, but did not unite politically. This let these refugees fit perfectly into the theory that situational refugees should receive aid because they are unlikely to use aid for war. The fact that they did comply with the trend for situational refugees, does not mean that they could not have diverted from the trend and acted differently. It is possible that the refugees could have reacted vengefully at the fact that they were being pushed out of their homes. They very well could have organized in their communities and camps that they settled into. They easily could have picked a side and redirected the aid to their power of preference. It would not have been difficult for the situation to go awry. The outcome luckily did not go this way, and humanitarian aid was, overall, successful.

Persecuted Refugees

During the war in Bosnia, the combatants, the Serbs, in an effort of ethnic cleansing, would clear areas of the opposing ethnic group, Muslims and Croats creating persecuted refugees[11]. While these refugees fled without using humanitarian aid to their advantage, another group classified as persecuted refugees, the Burundian Hutu in Tanzania, did. Exiled to refugee camps at the border of Tanzania and Burundi, these forced migrants did gather politically to generate a military response to the Tutsi-dominated government[12]. At this category the lines between being a threat to war or not begins to blur. Lischer provides two instances where similar situations generated significantly different reactions to humanitarian aid. One of the persecuted groups fled, accepted aid, to return home when peace could be possible. The other group, accepted aid and used it to their advantage, to recruit a military force, and to retaliate against their persecutors. While the circumstances were similar, the opposing reactions illustrate the role of internal factors, such as emotional responses, psychological trauma, the culture of the refugee group, and the values of the forced migrants. The difference between the Muslims and Croats and the Burundian Hutu were that one group chose to wait out the struggle in hope of peace, the other group chose to react to their exile, be it in vengeance, or in defense of one’s dignity, or even just a reaction to having withstood enough persecution.

State-In-Exile Refugees

Rwandan Hutu refugees are Lischer’s illustration of state-in-exile refugees. These Hutu fled their state under pressure from Hutu leaders, who used them to divert assistance to the military. The humanitarian aid that was supposed to be supporting people in exile would end up perpetuating the state in exile[13]. This example is very problematic as it only identifies one type of refugee from the crisis in Rwanda, when the Rwandan refugee crisis cannot be simplified into just a state-in-exile crisis. This is because they contain all three categories of refugees: situational refugees fleeing the crossfire of war, persecuted Tutsi refugees, and state-in-exile, Hutu politically motivated refugees. The presence of all three categories complicates the crisis because international agencies would want to intervene to aid the civilians caught in the crossfire, but know the risks present due to the other refugees’ propensity to organize . Not only is individual behavior unpredictable, but humanitarian agencies have to make difficult decisions based on this unpredictability. They have to consider the greater good for the greater number. This complicates the decision to act or not. After the case of the Somalian civil war and humanitarian aid exacerbating conflict, international organizations were apprehensive to providing aid. In both cases, more than one type of refugee was present. For Somalia these groups were Somali civilians caught in the crossfire (situational refugees), the factions competing with each other (persecuted refugees), and state-in-exile refugees (due to the threat of the Somali government by Al-Shabaab)[14].

Conclusion

Although it is helpful to have different theories and organizational frameworks to help guide decisions, the unpredictability of individual choice makes it especially difficult to predict behavior. It makes sense that policymakers and policy analysts would make generalizations like this because it is a trend to see refugees as united, cohesively thinking groups. This tendency prevails over the truth, that these people are individuals. They are not just defined by their forced movement, but by their upbringings, their values, their religions, and their cultures. These people have agency, and this agency makes them unpredictable. Furthermore, while trends like Lischer’s may be helpful to guiding the international refugee regime in making policy decisions and providing selective aid, it cannot be used exclusively and religiously. It must be used with care and with skepticism.

Bibliography

BBC, ‘The Trouble with Aid’ (Documentary).

Gourevitch, P. (2010) Alms Dealers: can you provide humanitarian aid without facilitating

conflicts? The New Yorker, October 10. Lischer, S.K. (2003) Collateral Damage: Humanitarian Assistance as a Cause of Conflict,

International Security, 28(1): 79-109.

Power, S. (2001) Bystanders to Genocide. The Atlantic, September.

Stockton, N. (1998) In Defence of Humanitarianism, Disasters, 22(4): 352‐360.

[1] Stockton 352

[2] Lisher 87.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid. 90.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid. 92-93.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid. 88.

[11] Ibid. 90

[12] Ibid. 91-92

[13] Ibid. 93.

[14] The Trouble with Aid