Humanitarian System Resilience & Crisis-societies’ Engagement: Philosophical Entrenchment and Diagnostic Challenges in Perspectives of Humanitarian Governance

It is easy to follow the current global trend to advocate humanitarianism as a desirable form of relief paradigm. Nor is it difficult to make normative judgments about how nations should behave if humanitarianism is to grow into a positive agent of change. Nevertheless, it is not so easy to conceptualise it as a working process, which is balanced against strategy, to determine what makes for real, as opposed to vacuously formal process. As a way of contributing to the overcoming of these difficulties, we may theorise humanitarianism as the dynamic interaction of strategy and process. It is possible to see humanitarianism as the playing out of objective and critical standards, rules and concepts of economic, social and political conduct in the goals and activities of all participants, those of public officials who make and administer the rules as well as those of ordinary citizens. The issue here is not simply one of application of rules to particular activities. Nor is it one of dissolving agent-catered strategies of humanitarianism into objective principles and norms. It is rather the production or articulation of process elements and forms within and through the strategic (and non-strategic) activities of various participants. Highlighting the reciprocally constitutive and regulative enunciation of approach and course of action, we shift the centre of analysis away from the two as separate formations that enter only external relations with each other. This shift of analytical focus serves to emphasise the critical point that the task of broadly structuring humanitarianism as a social system is more important than that of promoting it within the specific programme. The making of broadly inclusive humanitarianism should consist of an articulation of process and agency, which can be sustained in its system by any agency or government operating it...