**IMISCOE Research Series**

## Alice Massari

# Visual Securitization

Humanitarian Representations and Migration Governance

**IMISCOE Research Series**

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Alice Massari

# Visual Securitization

Humanitarian Representations and Migration Governance

Alice Massari Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies Pisa, Italy

ISSN 2364-4087 ISSN 2364-4095 (electronic) IMISCOE Research Series ISBN 978-3-030-71142-9 ISBN 978-3-030-71143-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71143-6

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*To my parents Giovanna e Paolo*

## **Preface**

This book is about the role that images produced by transnational humanitarian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) play in global governance, with particular emphasis on photographs depicting Syrian displacement between 2015 and 2016. The idea of this research originates in the encounter of my two professional lives. For I combine academic research with professional experience as an active humanitarian practitioner during the response to the Syrian refugee crisis in Jordan between 2013 and 2015 and the prior displacement of Iraqis. This experience within the relief sector has critically affected the drafting of this book. Both as a humanitarian practitioner and as researcher, I have developed ambivalent feelings toward the work of transnational NGOs in the Global South. My personal feld experience and studies on the humanitarian system have combined to make me skeptical about humanitarian organizations and their intended goals. I am sympathetic with the large body of scholarship that has pointed out the problems related to the universalist claims of humanitarian organizations (Chandler 2001), the neo-imperialist character of many INGOs interventions (Petras 1999), the complicated relation with politics (De Lauri 2016), the intrinsic culturalism of relief organizations (Cuttitta 2015), and the ambiguous role NGOs play in neoliberal governance policies (Duffeld 2001a, 2007).

This notwithstanding these sympathies, I am also strongly convinced of the need for transnational solidarity among people and countries that experience dramatic inequalities, especially when confict and natural disasters destroy lives. I cannot deny being deeply appreciative of the existence of organizations that work according to an ideal of solidarity and that engage on the front line, providing humanitarian assistance to those affected.

I came to design and carry out this study because of these ambivalent feelings. Humanitarian action is crucial and needed, yet there is large room for improvement. My hope is that my study, as an insider who knows that world, could contribute to its improvement. In this sense, a note of caution is in order. Considering the contemporary socio-political context in which I have written this book, one which is regrettably marked by xenophobic and nationalistic feelings in Europe and elsewhere,

I often fnd myself in the diffcult position of criticizing the "good guys," those who in a particular historic moment were (and still are) trying to affrm positive values of international solidarity in an otherwise rather racist environment. The intention of this book is not to attack humanitarian actors for the sake of criticism. For a world without relief organizations would be even more intolerant, ignorant, closed, and negligent than the one we live in today. It is important, however, given the crucial role now played by international humanitarianism, to refect on how its discourses and practices affect the attempt to create a better world.

#### **References**

Pisa, Italy Alice Massari

## **Acknowledgments**

It is my great pleasure to thank all the people without whom this book would not have been possible. Starting from my doctoral studies, from which this book began, would like to thank Francesco Strazzari who has shown his interest in my research project and supported its implementation throughout the years. I also owe my deepest gratitude to Anna Triandafyllidou, whose commentary, critique, support, and advice have made this book infnitely better. I hope I have been able to incorporate her broad scope of knowledge and keen analysis in my dissertation.

A special thanks to my friends Mjriam, Monica, Sharif, and Marcello, who have shared their knowledge and sharp criticism with me. They have supported this study in so many ways, hosting me during feldwork, facilitating networking, forwarding papers, briefs, and artistic works' news relevant to my research, and, most importantly, organizing trips around the world to take a break from the study and enjoy their company. Among them, I would like to especially thank Mjriam, who despite her hectic intellectual and personal life has always found the time to read and comment my work. In my new life in Florence, I am indebted to Serena and Alessandro, who have been the perfect companions for entertainment and academic exchange, and the *Cafecionados* families that have believed in the importance of friendship when social life has been challenged by COVID-19 containment measures.

I am profoundly grateful to my unconditionally supportive family: my sister Mila, my parents Giovanna e Paolo, and my mother-in-law Mariangela who have been there in every moment of need to allow me to work, focus, spend time in the feld, attend conferences, and rest, while they were taking care of Mariangela, Pietro, and Antonio. They have travelled last minute by car, train, and plane to make this book possible. They have facilitated relentless travels between Florence, Amman, Milan, San Diego, and so many other places while making the kids feeling always at home.  To all of them goes my gratitude.

I owe a special thank you to my kids Mariangela, Pietro, and Antonio. They have put up with two working and travelling parents, bore my stress, and shared our roaming life around three continents over the past years. Although at times I had been desperate for extra time for my work, I cannot avoid appreciating how their being around, jumping, singing, shouting, and playing has allowed me not to lose my mind in the project and enjoy life with them.

Finally, to Luigi, my life-companion. Words cannot possibly express my gratitude for the unique pleasure of a life spent in his company. To him goes my debt beyond the countless suggestions, comments, and feedback he has given me on this book. We have written, researched, discussed, and travelled together for 14 years by now, and I hope to continue to do so for the rest of our lives.

## **Note**

This book is based on the study of four major transnational NGOs' photographic representation of Syrian displacement between 2015 and 2016: Save the Children, Oxfam, CARE, and Médecins Sans Frontières. I would like to thank MSF, Save the Children, CARE, and the artist Khaled Hourani for their kind permission to use their images. Oxfam did not grant permission.

## **Contents**

## **List of Figures**

## **Chapter 1 Introduction**

"How do we see refugees? The refugee has become a multifaceted symbol, the most prominent political fgure of our time" states the brochure of an art retrospective by Khaled Hourani, a Palestinian artist refecting on the reduction of refugees to abstract symbols of victimhood by humanitarian representations. In the eyes of the artist, the blue fgure (Fig. 1.1), so common in relief organizations´ visual depictions, is the migrating human being, without a specifc national, religious, ethnic, or gender identity. Yet, the visual landscape of contemporary displacement is anything but abstract. Images of overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean, refugee camps, improvised shelters along migration routes, children and families in need, and people stranded behind fences and walls have come to constitute a powerful reminder of contemporary conditions of displacement for people on the move. Yet, the question remains: how do we see refugees?1

This is a book on the role that transnational humanitarian NGOs play in migration governance through visual representation. It offers an innovative account of how relief organizations' visual depiction of Syrian displacement contributes to reproduce and reinforce a securitized account of refugees, one in which refugees are framed in terms of threat. Images of overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean Sea, refugee camps, improvised shelters along the migration routes, children and families in need, and people stranded behind fences and walls have come to constitute a

1Throughout my work, I will use the term refugees, migrants, displaced people, and people on the move interchangeably. This is, on the one hand, a practical choice since the different terms are often used as synonyms by humanitarian NGOs. On the other, I agree with the studies that have highlighted the (in)appropriateness of the various labels, pointing out how they do not represent the complexities of displacement and they contribute to creating categories of ´deserving´ versus ´undeserving´ asylum seekers. (see among others Zetter 1991, 2007; Long 2013; Crawley and Skleparis 2018). I agree with Monsutti on the need of a "new theoretical sensitivity" critical of "the effects that a national frame of reference may have on research related to refugees and other displaced persons" (Monsutti 2005, 18). For these reasons, and in the attempt to dilute the rigidity of these labels, I will use all terms as synonyms of people on the move. When observing how specifc humanitarian organizations use one or other of the terms, I will report it accordingly.

A. Massari, *Visual Securitization*, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71143-6\_1

1 Introduction

**Fig. 1.1** ©Khaled Hourani, The Blue Figure 2017

powerful reminder of today conditions of global displacement. While visual representation is certainly media-driven today, more than ever, it is humanitarian organizations – and NGOs in particular – who while doing their relief work produce the great bulk of the images presented to the public that contribute to shape our understanding of the refugee issue. In this context, how do transnational humanitarian NGOs represent refugees? What are the implications of this visual depiction within the larger role that relief agencies play in global governance?

The text is based on a multi-method and multi-modal analysis of the role that humanitarian NGOs now play in global governance. The visual investigation focuses on the photographic material representing Syrian displacement published by four major transnational NGOs (CARE, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontier, and Oxfam) over the years of the so-called ´European refugee crisis´, between 2015 and 2016. The book analyses a dataset of over 1000 images through a combination of visual methodologies: visual content analysis for a preliminary classifcation; iconography for its potential in identifying visual trends and patterns in a large body of images, and visual social semiotics for its attention to visual signs and means of representation within a situated cultural and social context. Simultaneously, the exploration of humanitarian visual material has been combined with feldwork in three of the countries that have hosted, and still host, some of the largest populations of Syrian refugees (Greece, Jordan and Lebanon). Interviews with key informants were combined with analysis of the organization's guidelines and strategic documents.

This book adopts a critical approach to study humanitarianism, humanitarian visuality, and their interrelation with global governance and securitization with the ultimate goal of shedding light on the political, cultural and ethical dynamics at play. It shows that the way through which transnational humanitarian organizations engage in the international political arena is manifold. On the one side, the different NGOs' organizational culture (including mission, vision, approach to humanitarian action, funding strategy and advocacy objectives) shape the distinct roles that each of them has chosen to play in their interaction with state-nation politics and in global governance. On the other side, it empirically demonstrates how relief agencies engage with world affairs through the analysis of their visual production.

In this sense, inspired by the securitization theory elaborated by the Copenhagen school, the book argues that humanitarian NGOs' visual representation of Syrian displacement is contributing to the securitization of the refugee issue. Through visual analysis, it empirically demonstrates how the securitization process takes place in three different ways. First of all, even if marginally, through the reproduction of mainstream media and political accounts that have depicted refugees in terms of threats. Secondly, and more consistently, through a representation of Syrian displaced people that, despite the undeniable innovative aesthetic patterns focusing on dignity and empowerment, nevertheless continues to reinforce a visual narrative around refugees in terms of victimhood and passivity. In so doing, the book does not want to deny the efforts NGOs are currently making to challenge victimizing and essentializing representations of displaced people. On the contrary, they are to be commended. However, there are still many aspects that without further problematization end up impairing their attempts, something this book aspires to untangle. Third, through the dialectic between what is made visible in the picture and what is not, transnational humanitarian NGOs reinforce a representation of Syrian refugees that reduces the portrayed individuals to abstract humanitarian subjects, eventually eliding any political claim and agency that Syrian people on the move might have.

The book argues that there is also another important dynamic at play. While on the visual level NGOs continue to securitize and depoliticize Syrian refugees (despite dramatic recent changes in the way humanitarian information is communicated), the analysis of NGOs' policy and strategic documents, and the interviews with practitioners have also revealed a countertrend. Indeed, relief agencies put a great deal of effort into trying to empower the benefciaries of the assistance and also to go beyond the traditional humanitarian communication that – as humanitarian actors they are themselves perfectly aware of – unfairly depicts refugees in terms of victimhood and helplessness. In this sense, despite the consistency of contemporary visual representations in portraying refugees with no (or very limited) agency, it also seems that the continuous intellectual engagement and efforts put into changing this depiction is creating what Yurchak defnes as the "minute internal displacements and mutations into the discursive regime in which they are articulated" (Yurchak 2013, 28).

These micro mutations are visible to a certain extent in the wider range of aesthetic topics that some NGOs present to the public. For example, when the represented subjects encompass the actual threats looming over people in their countries, in the hosting countries and along the migration routes (such as perpetrators of violence, border apparatus, law enforcement, fences, and detention centres), and the complexity of displacement condition not only in terms of humanitarian need, but also in terms of everyday life, community solidarity, and mundane details not necessarily linked to the experience of loss. It is in expanding the visual patterns used to portray refugees into a photographic portfolio that humanitarian organizations have the opportunity to offer a discourse counterpoising the mainstream, one able to account for the complexities and multiple narrative facets of displacement.

#### **1.1 Contributions**

This book intends to make four important academic contributions. First, it sets out to expand the body of literature on migration and securitization by providing a thorough study of visual representational practices of transnational humanitarian NGOs. The analysis will not only touch upon themes such as the changes in aesthetic patterns over time, but will also highlight similarities and differences among the four major relief organizations' visual registries and narratives. Scholars have shown the different ways in which humanitarianism and securitization interplay (inter alia see Aradau 2004a; Andersson 2014; Musarò 2017; Chouliaraki and Georgiou 2017). A few have pointed out the role that relief organizations play as actors of securitization (Aradau 2004a; Watson 2011). However, none of the existing studies have demonstrated empirically how these dynamics work. This book intends to fll this gap by showing how humanitarian NGOs contribute to the securitization of the refugee issue through their visual representations.

Secondly, in the feld of International Relations (IR), nobody has systematically carried out an analysis using visual social semiotics. More generally, as Lene Hansen – one of the scholars who has produced the most ground-breaking work on visual securitization – has noticed, very few studies in IR have engaged in the investigation of large bodies of images. Most existing studies have employed content analysis that focuses on the identifcation of the portrayed subjects. However, none of these works have explored how these forms of content analysis differ or could be combined with other visual methodologies (Hansen forthcoming). Moreover, as Andersen et al. have observed the "most recent 'visual security' work in IR has been on the iconic image and has assumed a 'powerful intertextuality around the image' which puts the image 'in danger of vanishing" (Andersen et al. cited in Hansen forthcoming, 8). This book seeks to address these challenges in three ways. It is based on a large body of images (over a thousand). It combines the content analysis with a more qualitative visual methodology, and it addresses the need to attribute more attention to the image *per se.*

This study draws on an additional innovative methodological approach. It is not only based on a multi-methods analysis that combines different visual methodologies, but it is also a multi-modal investigation. Thorough visual analysis has been combined with feldwork in three of the countries that have hosted, and still host, some of the largest populations of Syrian refugees. Since most academic work on images and security has been based on content analysis, by combining it with visual social semiotics, and especially by incorporating feldwork, this study intends to offer a different understanding of the role and impact of images within the wider context of global governance.

Last, but not least, this book links visuality with governance. This is particularly interesting when one considers that humanitarian communication and governance interplay at different levels. Relief organizations have at certain historical times worked in competition with nation-states and international policies, such as in the case of the aid blockade during the Biafra crisis, and more recently during search

and rescue (SAR) operations in the Mediterranean which contrast with European migration policies. At the same time, NGOs' the funding and advocacy strategies of many humanitarian are tightly connected with states' political agenda. In today's highly competitive media environment aid agencies represent the refugees at the same time that they represent themselves, their mission, and goals. In this sense, transnational humanitarian organizations, and their communication practices, merit study because they do political work in a political environment. This book unpacks the dynamics through which relief agencies contribute to the humanitarian systems of governmentality through their visual communication and shows empirically how these two dimensions of visuality and governance do relate to each other and interact.

#### **1.2 Why ´How Do We See Refugees´ Matters**

Questions around the representation of refugees and the implications of visual narratives in the understanding and management of displacement are particularly relevant in the context of contemporary political debate on the ´refugee crisis´. It should be noted that I use the term critically because, as many scholars have pointed out, the intensity of arrivals in Europe has neither been a new phenomenon in the history of migration, nor has it constituted the ´invasion´ that has been presented in public accounts (see among others Fargues 2015; De Genova et al. 2016; Krzyżanowski et al. 2018). The large majority of refugees are still hosted by Syria's neighbors. It is undeniable that the term ´refugee crisis´ has come to defne a specifc historical phenomenon that entails important political implications in the way refugees are represented, perceived, and ultimately managed and how societies in countries of destination are deciding to face contemporary questions of international mobility. In today's securitized context (Krzyżanowski et al. 2018; Mountz 2015; Huysmans 2016) it is therefore particularly interesting to explore the role played by some of the most important actors in the management of the refugee crisis – the humanitarian organizations – which are not commonly associated with the securitization effort routinely performed by other entities (such as Frontex, law enforcement agencies or national border apparatuses).

All this is especially thought-provoking if we consider the role that humanitarian NGOs have been performing in terms of humanitarian governance (Fassin 2011; Barnett 2013) not only in the Global South (e.g. Syria's neighboring countries), but also at the very centre of the Mediterranean vis-à-vis refugees, European migration policies, and domestic politics. The highly politicized and mediatized debate around refugees' mobility (Krzyżanowski et al. 2018) has been further intensifed by discussions around maritime SAR and accusations made by populist governments that NGOs facilitate irregular migration. NGOs have produced research reports refecting on the impact of their maritime operations and concluded that not only are the accusations unsubstantiated, but that the "involvement of humanitarian vessels was associated with a signifcant improvement in maritime safety compared to other periods" (MSF 2017b). Even though legal accusations may, at least for the moment, have diminished (Repubblica 2018b), statal institutions (especially the Italian Ministry of Interior and the Libyan coast guard) were – at the time of writing – preventing SAR operations from happening (Repubblica 2018a; Rome 2017; Cuttitta 2018). The topic remains therefore very actual and relevant as public political debate rages and political scientists have shown how NGOs with SAR operations have contributed to the re-politicization of international waters into a political environment from which they can advocate for humanitarian commitment, political change in migration management, and solidarity (Stierl 2018; Cuttitta 2017), while at the same time they themselves "become part of a hybrid border management system" (Cuttitta 2017, 20).

From a visual perspective the odyssey of people attempting to fnd better lives in third countries has attracted unprecedented public attention with the publication of sadly famous pictures such as that of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian whose lifeless body was washed up on the Turkish shore after his infatable boat capsized. Such images, together with those of rubber dinghies full of people arriving on Greek shores, those of child victims of chemical gas attacks and of Syrian cities bombed and besieged have animated national and international public debate. This study is important because it pays special attention to the visual representation of displacement and it unpacks the implications that humanitarian visuality has on the refugee issue. For focus on humanitarian visuality "can help address a gap in visual studies, which in its analyses of the myriad of signifcant actors shaping the ways in which images are created, selected, displayed, and interpreted – whether we think of national governments, private corporations, media organizations, political movements and campaigns, or lay audiences – has tended to overlook the crucial role of NGOs in informing the visual cultures of national and global civil societies" (Kurasawa 2015, 44).

#### **1.3 Research Design**

#### *1.3.1 The Syrian Crisis*

This book is based on the analysis of the visual representation of Syrian refugees offered by four major transnational humanitarian NGOs (CARE, Save the Children, Oxfam and Médecins Sans Frontières) between 2015 and 2016. It looks particularly at the images produced and disseminated online through the agencies' websites and Facebook pages.

Since the beginning of the confict in 2012, Syrian people have sought refuge in neighboring countries. At the time of the research, over 5.5 million people were registered as Syrian refugees with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (UNHCR 2017c). Turkey hosted the biggest proportion (nearly three and a half million people), Lebanon registered a million refugees, Jordan 655,000, Iraq 230,000 (in addition to 3.2 million internally displaced people), and Egypt around 115,000 (UNHCR 2017c). The humanitarian effort inside Syria has been severely hindered by the very limited access to affected populations, dramatic level of violence, and serious security concerns for humanitarian staff. Most relief has been delivered in neighboring host countries where UN agencies, international organizations and most transnational NGOs have established or substantially enlarged their operations. Starting from March 2012, the coordination of the humanitarian response has been systematized at the regional level under the leadership of UNHCR, as specifed under the UN-wide cluster system.2 The number of agencies that participated in the Humanitarian Regional Response Plan rose from 34 in 2012 (UNHCR 2012) to 144 in 2017 (UNHCR 2017a). Organizations active in the response to the Syrian crisis mostly include UN agencies, transnational and local NGOs, and a few foundations. Over the years, relief agencies have been working in all sectors of humanitarian interventions (such as health, education, shelter and protection). Their regional aggregated budget has risen from \$84,159,188 in 2012 (UNHCR 2012) to \$4,400,570,955 in 2017 (UNHCR 2017a).

In 2015, the movement of Syrian people took another direction. For a variety of reasons, including the worsening of the situation in several neighboring countries (Achilli 2015; UN 2015), and opening of the eastern Mediterranean and Balkan route (Fargues 2015), Syrians also started to move toward Europe, where a little less than a million people applied for asylum (UNHCR 2017b). The intensity of arrivals of people of different nationalities – but mostly from Syria – on Europe's southern coasts, and especially on Greek shores, between 2015 and 2016 led many humanitarian, institutional and academic commentators to talk about a refugee, migrant or Mediterranean ´crisis´ (ECHO 2015; UNHCR 2015; Fargues 2015; Pallister-Wilkins 2016). The monthly number of sea arrivals in Europe increased from around 5000 people in January 2015 to a peak of over 220,000 in October 2015, after which it gradually decreased until the end of 2016 (UNHCR 2017d). At the end of 2016 the number of arrivals in Europe drastically decreased, *de facto* concluding the crisis. What happened was the entry into force in March of that year of an agreement between the European Union and Turkey, the so called EU-Turkey Agreement (European Council 2016). The deal aimed at stopping irregular migration fows from Turkey to Europe by preventing Syrians (and others on the move) from travelling from Turkey to Greece or from Greek islands to the Greek mainland and then onwards into Europe and also by forcibly returning those judged to have moved irregularly.

Together with this new strict migration regime European discourse on migration became increasingly militarized and securitized (Perkowsky 2016; Garelli and Tazzioli 2017; Musarò 2017). This study focuses specifcally on this period, from

2The Cluster approach is a coordination mechanism (set by the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 46/182 in 1991 and defned in the 2005 Humanitarian Reform Agenda) which seeks to improve the coordination of the international humanitarian response. Clusters are coordination groups divided into thematic areas, including protection, water and sanitation, nutrition and health) whose members include major aid agencies working in the respective sectors.

January 2015 to December 2016, a time whose seemingly unexpected association of humanitarianism and securitization discourses in the response to the ´crisis´, provides a unique opportunity to empirically explore their interconnected and mutually constitutive nature (Aradau 2004a).

#### **1.4 The Non-governmental Organizations**

Within the variegated landscape of humanitarian organizations responding to the Syrian crisis, I have had to circumscribe the object of analysis. Acknowledging that humanitarianism has undeniably various expressions originating from different historical and cultural backgrounds (Kennedy 2005; Fiori 2013), I also agree with Pacitto and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (2013). They have noted how dominant humanitarian theory has been based on a tradition of Western humanitarianism with its specifc set of values and practices. Present-day humanitarianism – defned by some authors as a 'new humanitarianism'– with its special relationship with the political sphere and its assumingly universal language, is even more embedded in Western culture (Chandler 2001). Without denying the relevance of ´other´ important forms of relief action, my book will focus on the tradition of Western professionalized and transnational humanitarianism.

Among the wide range of different organizations operating in the humanitarian sector, I decided to focus on non-governmental organizations, as opposed to UN agencies and state actors, for two main reasons. First, because although it is a fact that humanitarian assistance is today provided by a multiplicity of actors, NGOs have nowadays become one of the most prominent actors of the humanitarian sphere, performing "the vast majority of the operating work of the international humanitarian system" (Maxwell and Walker 2014, 117). Secondly, and most importantly, a large body of scholarship has explored the relationship between International Organizations (IOs) and securitization (see for example the work of Abrahamsen 2005; Andersson 2012; Chandler 2007; Gabiam 2016; Geiger and Pécoud 2014; Gerstl 2010; Russo and Giusti 2017; Longo 2013; Mason 2014; Musarò 2013, 2017). Analysis of the securitizing role of NGOs has been much less investigated (with the notable excptions of Duffeld 2007, 2014; Aradau 2004a; Watson 2011).

The world of transnational humanitarian NGOs is still populated by a numerous and variegated set of agencies. The term NGO encompasses organizations with different geographical membership and activities. There are national organizations that only operate in a specifc country and transnational ones that intervene across borders and are composed of a variety of members in different States. This study concentrates on the latter because of their wider geographical presence, outreach and potential to shape the transnational humanitarian discourse. Among all organizations, I decided to focus on the major ones. Cottle and Nolan (2007) describe the Red Cross, Save the Children, Oxfam, World Vision, CARE and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) as "the world's major aid agencies" (Cottle and Nolan 2007, 862) and show how these organizations have contributed to shape the discourse of today's

humanitarianism. Similarly, Barnett and Weiss (2008) list MSF, CARE, S, World Vision International, Catholic Relief Services (CRS), and Oxfam as the best-known humanitarian agencies. Among these organizations, I have selected the four NGOs identifed by the authors quoted above (i.e. CARE, MSF, Oxfam and Save the Children). Moreover, since the time-space framework of the research is the humanitarian response to the Syrian refugee crisis both in the neighboring countries and in Europe between 2015 and 2016, this study will focus on the organizations that have or had operations in all those areas. This will inevitably exclude World Vision and CRS as they have not participated in the refugees/migrants emergency response in the Mediterranean. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been excluded because, although often referred to as an NGO, it has in fact a hybrid status.3

#### **1.5 Multi-modal Analysis**

The case study is based on a multi-modal analysis that combines the use of multiple methods, namely: visual methodologies (visual social semiotics and iconography) and multi-sited feldwork. As Bleiker has argued, the "political signifcance of images is best understood through an interdisciplinary framework that relies on multiple methods" (Bleiker 2015, 872). Since images circulate and acquire meaning at various overlapping levels, simultaneously in the international arena and in the viewer's mind, Bleiker has observed how their meaning is always dependent on context and interpretation. For this important reason the methodology of this book is based on the combination of visual methods with a multi-sited feldwork in three countries along with analysis of NGOs' strategic documents, policies, and guidelines.

#### *1.5.1 Images Collection and Classifcation*

The visual data used for this study consist of 1184 pictures. Images have been collected from the websites and Facebook pages of the four selected NGOs according to the following criteria: (1) images should be photographic images; (2) they should represent Syrian displaced people and/or the causes of their displacement and (3) they should have been published between 2015 and 2016. Data have been stored on Nvivo software for classifcation and analysis purposes. For websites, I privileged the pictures published on the NGOs international profle as opposed to the websites of the different country offces. Given the impossibility of navigating websites

3 ICRC is neither exactly an NGO nor an Intergovernmental Organization because it is not mandated by any Government. However, it is treated like other intergovernmental organizations and enjoys privileges reserved for this latter category.

historically, I have collected images using *the way back machine* free software that periodically takes snapshots of websites' different pages and stores them online. Through this tool, it has been possible to access NGOs' website pages from January 2015. Every relevant page was saved in PDF and HTML format every 4 months until December 2016. All pictures have been individually uploaded on Nvivo.

For Facebook pages, the international account has been taken into consideration, or the account specifcally dedicated to the Syrian crisis. When the latter was not available, as in the case of Save the Children and Oxfam, the choice has fallen on the profle of the organization headquarters. Data were automatically extrapolated by Nvivo software through its application for social media analysis that creates datasets listing all posts, pictures, video, and metadata of the selected period. I eliminated the duplicates, keeping the image the frst time they were used within a media. In the case of pictures used both on Facebook and an agency's website, unless specifcally required by the image (e.g., publication with a particular caption, of for belonging to a Facebook campaign), I privileged data found on websites where the compositional meaning could also be explored. Since the focus of the study is the transnational humanitarian NGOs' representation of Syrian displacement, I have not considered the images that would only depict NGOs staff, though I kept the pictures representing NGOs workers and managers with Syrian refugees. The data collection of pictures from the websites and Facebook pages of the four selected NGOs has generated a corpus of 1184 pictures composed as indicated in the table below (Table 1.1).

#### *1.5.2 Multi-sited Fieldwork*

Field research for this study was carried out intermittently between March and November 2017. Through multi-sited ethnography and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders, I gathered a ´visual reconnaissance´ of the locations of the so-called Syrian refugee crisis. This opened a window into how visual products are conceived and developed, the NGOs' intentions and key messages behind the representation of the Syrian crisis, and practitioners' understanding of their respective organizations' visual communication policies and strategies. The presence and movements of both Syrian refugees and major humanitarian NGOs in Syria's neighboring countries and in the Mediterranean makes a multi-sited research the most appropriate method of enquiry. I decided to focus on Lebanon and Jordan in the Middle East, and Greece on the European shore where Oxfam, SCF, CARE and

**Table 1.1** Breakdown of data collected, divided by producing NGO and media

MSF have ongoing humanitarian operations. For each of the four organizations on which this study focuses, I have gathered and analysed organizational guidelines, strategic documents, and policy briefs. In all locations I visited, project implementation sites, formal and informal refugee camps, I interviewed NGO staff, humanitarian advocacy and communication specialists, local authorities, photographers working for the NGOs, volunteers active in the emergency response, and academic researchers.

#### **1.6 Methodological Considerations**

A couple of methodological considerations are in order before proceeding. The frst concerns my professional experience as a humanitarian practitioner. Although I am surely not the frst researcher to have worked in the humanitarian sector before undertaking an academic career, I am inspired by a post-modern sensibility. I believe that to go beyond the object-subject dichotomy and the myth of the ´view from nowhere´ it is crucial to refect on the researcher's positionality. The best way to acknowledge the situated nature of my research (Finlay and Gough 2008) is to address the question of self-refexivity. In this sense, I cannot deny that my experience in the feld, and particularly my work in responding to the Iraqi displacement following the US-led invasion in 2003 and the Syrian refugee emergency caused by the confict in Syria, have infuenced my analysis. Although ultimately interested in contributing with my work to the solidarity effort undertaken by many organizations, I found myself increasingly refecting on the nature of information fows within the sector in which I worked.

My research has also been a way to explore how some humanitarian practices were also causing more harm than good. Probably more often than I wanted, my eyes were at frst looking for what was wrong about an image, taking for granted what was indeed good. And that is also why I had frequently to go back in my analysis and make more explicit the different meanings of the pictures so as to clearly acknowledge what I always expected to be included in the image: the ´good´ message. Eventually, my position toward the object of analysis and its situated nature, helped me to account for the polysemic character of images. Systematically refecting and making sense of it throughout the research has been essential.

A second consideration regards the use of visual material. In showing with pictures what I was arguing I may have risked falling into the trap of inadvertently implying that what was presented visually was therefore ´true´ or somehow ´real´, a premise that I discard epistemologically in recognizing that all visual representation – photography included – constitutes an interpretation of reality and not its objective visual transposition. Drawing on Bal's concept of expository tradition (1996), Szörényi (2006) notices how by presenting pictures of refugees, academic publications can reproduce the problematic dynamic that they were instead trying to challenge. That made me think that although throughout the study I have sought to provide alternative interpretation of the images presented, and to highlight the absence of the voice of the people represented in the pictures, my position toward the represented participants remains that of an outsider, one that does not give any voice to them, their interpretation, and their self-representation.

My last refection concerns the methodological strength of much visual analysis. While acknowledging the existence both of extremely important contributions specifcally focusing on the methodological aspect of visual analysis (Rose 2001; Van Leeuwen and Jewitt 2001; Hansen 2011; Heck and Schlag 2013) and also the fundamental advancement at this level, there may still be room for improvement. In many excellent IR and political science studies on visuality I read I could not help being struck that frequently the paper omitted to indicate and explain the methodology used for the visual analysis and the elaboration of the argument. This is not a minor faw. For, especially in the relatively new feld of visuality in IR, it ultimately undermines the power of the insight and the perspicacity of the argument. Against, this background, I hope that with the extensive effort put into the defnition of a visual methodology from both a theoretical and practical perspective, I have been able to improve the strength of my insight.

#### **1.7 The Content of this Book**

The book is divided into six chapters. Following the introduction, Chap. 2 presents the theoretical framework that constitutes the backbone of the whole study. After introducing the notion of humanitarianism and presenting the academic discussion around the interrelation between humanitarianism and politics, it outlines the role that civil society plays in global governance with a particular attention to the specifc role of transnational humanitarian NGOs. In so doing, the section links presentday humanitarianism, sometimes referred to as ´new-humanitarianism´, with governance. In the second part, the chapter presents the analytical framework of the securitization theory elaborated by the International Security Studies (ISS) literature. It explains how the approach of the Copenhagen School is the one which is here adopted to explore securitization, one of the realms in which relief organizations actively participate in the international political arena and global governance. The section also outlines the different studies that have so far focused on the interrelation of humanitarianism and securitization and clarifes how this study is innovative, for the frst time focusing on visuality, instead of practices. Finally, the last part, puts the work of transnational humanitarian NGOs into the contemporary context of communication and the highly competitive environment in which organizations contend for funds, public mobilization and media attention. This section touches upon the features of humanitarian communication, and how it has changed over time, with particular attention to the humanitarian representation of refugees.

Chapter 3 completes the theoretical framework by providing the intellectual premises of a visual approach to the study of IR. It frames visual analysis within the larger strand of critical discourse analysis to then explain the origin of the attention given to images and the added value of visual social semiotics – combined with iconography – as method of enquiry. Since this book is based on photographic images, this section also outlines what are the features and the politicalepistemological claims of this specifc genre and addresses the crucial aspect of the polysemic value of images.

Chapters 3, 4, 5 and 6 constitute the analytical part of the book. Chapter 3 is dedicated to the analysis of the specifc role that each of the four selected NGOs plays in global governance. The exploration is based on the investigation of each of the relief organizations' background, humanitarian approach, mission, vision, funding policy, and advocacy strategy. The investigation of the four different organizational models allows us to highlight similarities and differences in the ways each of the four NGOs selected for this study perceives, describes and presents its own role within global governance.

Chapter 4 is the frst of the following three chapters based on the visual analysis. It focuses on the different NGO representational practices that contribute to the depiction of Syrian people on the move as a threat. Through the visual analysis of fve aesthetic patterns – vectors without goal, emergency, boats, conceptual structures, and the visual construction of the other – this section intends to shed light on the ways through which aid agencies, to a certain degree, reproduce and reinforce a culturally and politically dominant public and media securitized account of refugees.

Chapter 5 is the exploration of images that, in the attempt to challenge mainstream discourses of securitization around people on the move, privilege a representation of refugees that portrays them as referent object of a threat. In line with contemporary humanitarianism's focus on human security, protection and the rights-based approach, these kinds of depictions introduce innovative elements and perspective. This section is dedicated to the exploration of six aesthetic patterns – pity, victimization, infantilization, suffering, innocence, and the savior-hero - that consistently represent Syrian displaced people securitized as referent objects of different kinds of existential risks. The aim is to show how these relatively new kinds of depiction continue to portray refugees in terms of victimhood, passivity and very limited agency.

The last of the analytical chapters, Chap. 6*,* focuses on invisibility, the absences that emerged from the visual analysis and the comparison between humanitarian (discursive) narrative and the elements visually present in the NGOs' pictures. It approaches the representation of Syrian refugees with a particular attention to the dialectic between what is visible in the images and what is not, and the exploration of the various reasons behind absence. The chapter aims to show how various securitization processes are connected with visibility but also, and not less importantly, with invisibility. It argues that paying attention to this dialectic is important to glimpse glimmers of minor displacements and the way NGOs represent refugees. Finally, the conclusion sums up the various fndings and shows how they empirically support the argument that transnational humanitarian organizations play a key role in global governance, specifcally in the way in which their accounts of displacement interrelate with mainstream securitization discourses. However, within this visual depiction it is possible to distinguish signals of micro-displacements.

#### **References**

Rome, Jon Henley Angela Giuffrida in. (2017). Three NGOs halt Mediterranean migrant rescues after Libyan hostility. *The Guardian*, 14 August 2017, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian. com/world/2017/aug/14/three-ngos-halt-mediterranean-migrant-rescues-after-libyan-hostility

Rose, G. (2001). *Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials*. Sage.

Van Leeuwen, T., & Jewitt, C. (2001). *The handbook of visual analysis*. Sage.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## **Part I The Theory and Methodology of Visual Securitization**

## **Chapter 2 Humanitarianism, Securitization and Humanitarian Communication**

#### **2.1 Introduction**

To unpack the role that transnational humanitarian NGOs play in contemporary systems of governance and highlight how they contribute, through their visual production, to the securitization of the refugee issue, it is important to introduce the notions of humanitarianism, global governance, and securitization. Also, since NGOs do not operate in a vacuum but within a highly competitive media environment, it is equally important to refect on the ways in which humanitarian ideals are translated into their communication strategies and how these ft within the larger communication landscape. This chapter presents the literature and the theoretical framework on which this book is based.

It starts by briefy presenting the concept of humanitarianism, its origins and characteristics, by also addressing the 'elephant in the room', the ambiguous relationship that humanitarianism entertains with politics. Since the beginning of humanitarian assistance its relationship with politics has been subject to debate. If it is true that the notion of humanitarianism is based on concepts and principles that mostly have to do with the realm of ethics and also very often defned in opposition to the political dimension, its relationship with politics has always been very complex. A brief overview of the debate around this interplay is essential as the need to understand this complex relation is an assumption underlying the whole study.

Going beyond the intense debate on the interconnections between humanitarianism and politics, this book focuses on the role that NGOs perform in global governance. The second section of the chapter lays out the literature that has highlighted the position of civil society in infuencing the supra-national political arena and the key role that transnational organizations play in it. For an exploration of the specifc ways through which contemporary transnational humanitarian NGOs engage in global politics and global governance, it is also necessary to present the features of present-day humanitarianism (sometimes referred to as 'new humanitarianism'). Academic work has investigated the various mechanisms through which relief agencies seek to affect policy changes in the various national and international contexts in which they intervene. This study builds on this strand of work to explore how the different organizations' origins, missions, policies, and approaches to humanitarianism indicate different dynamics of participation in global governance.

Among the different sectors in which NGOs can play a role in today's global governance (such as on issues around economy, environment, and health) this study is particularly interested in the security dimension. This is mainly because the refugee issue has been consistently linked with security discourses by various political and media accounts. In apparent contrast, the work of humanitarian NGOs has been commonly associated with an ethical and moral dimension. The third section hence outlines the securitization theory developed by the Copenhagen School. Its theoretical approach is all the more valuable as it has explained how security can be intended as something objective, but that it also has a very important discursive dimension. The concept of securitization is particularly relevant insofar as it enables us to grasp different dimensions of the securitization process. We thus see not only the framing of refugees in terms of threat, but also their framing as terms of referent objects of a threat with the notion of human security. Inspired by the International Security Study literature, I build on the body of scholarship that has focused on the interconnections between securitization and humanitarianism to empirically show how NGOs have contributed to the securitization of the refugee issue.

To do so it is also important to look at transnational humanitarian organizations' communication policies and visual material. Humanitarian communication is the object of the last section of this chapter. In order to fully grasp its impact on the constitution of humanitarian discourse(s), it is crucial to understand that NGOs do not operate in a vacuum. Rather, relief organizations contend, in a highly competitive environment, for funds, public support, and media attention. Moreover, communication strategies, representational styles and approaches need also to be contextualized culturally and historically. Clearly, they assume different meanings in different cultures, and over the years have undergone substantial modifcation. The chapter concludes with the presentation of how refugees have been visually represented in humanitarian communication throughout history.

#### **2.2 Humanitarianism and Its Complicated Relationship with Politics**

Humanitarianism, as a form of compassion and charity, has been present throughout history. Since its origin, the practice of humanitarianism has had different forms depending on the various cultural, religious or secular, philosophical and philanthropic inspirations of the concept. Although the idea of saving lives and alleviating suffering has been present in different cultural and religious backgrounds, "modern humanitarianism's origins are located in Western history and Christian thought" (Barnett and Weiss 2008, 7). The concept – in the sense it is used today – fnds its

origin in the early nineteenth century and became, acknowledged and, in some ways, institutionalized, by the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 1863 (Barnett 2011).

Barnett and Weiss' (2008) understanding of humanitarianism helps us seems adept in grasp the socially constructed and historically contingent meaning of the term. The notion is based on the way practitioners have conceptualized the humanitarian sphere since its early usages. "Many within the humanitarian sector tend to conceive the ideal humanitarian act as motivated by an altruistic desire to provide life-saving relief; to honour the principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality, and independence; and to do more good than harm" (Barnett and Weiss 2008, 10–11). More formally, the United Nations Offce for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) defnes humanitarian assistance as "aid that seeks, to save lives and alleviate suffering of a crisis affected population" (OCHA 2003, 13).

Despite the fact that the concept of humanitarian action is a rather complex notion, defned in different ways by different humanitarian actors (Collinson and Elhawary 2012), there is a general consensus considering neutrality, impartiality and independence as the fundamental principles of humanitarian actions (Leader 2000; OCHA 2003).1 Today the majority of humanitarian actors have embraced the same humanitarian principles in their offcial documents (Hilhorst and Jansen 2010). Consequently, according to OCHA, the humanitarian space is a "conducive humanitarian operating environment" in which agencies can work in compliance with the principles of neutrality and impartiality and their intervention can be independent from military and political action (OCHA 2003, 32).

Within the humanitarian space there are a multiplicity of actors operating in different capacities, including Governments' aid structures – like for example the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) or the former British Department for International Development (DfID) (renamed in 2020 as the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Offce) – International Organizations (IOs) – such as the United Nations (UN) agencies and the EU Agency for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO) – organizations with hybrid status – i.e. the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and NGOs. Among this assorted group of agencies, this study focuses on the NGOs which, that as Stoddard has noticed, "have evolved into a crucial pillar of the international humanitarian architecture." (Stoddard 2003, 1). What substantially differentiates NGOs from all other humanitarian actors is summarized in the frst part of their acronym: non-governmental. In this sense, NGOs constitute themselves as actors completely independent from State politics and interests and often, in contraposition to these, as actors willing and able to take action when States seem negligent, absent or, worse, the perpetrator of the wrongdoing which need to be addressed.

1The principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence, along with another four fundamental principles, are defned in the Statutes of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, adopted by the 25th International Conference of the Red Cross, Geneva (ICRC), 1986, available on the ICRC website. For an overview of the basic principles of humanitarianism and their practical implications, see (Slim 2015).

The qualifer 'non-governmental', combined with the adherence to humanitarian principles, are the two elements that situate humanitarian NGOs in a humanitarian space, in theory unrelated with politics and power but actually, on the contrary, constituting fundamental features of governments' interests. Despite the aspiration of humanitarianism to neutrality and independence (Hilhorst and Jansen 2010), a wide range of scholarship has highlighted how humanitarian agencies, including NGOs, have a much more complex relationship with politics (among others Weiss 1999; Duffeld 2001; Slim 2003; Rieff 2003; Donini et al. 2004; Barnett and Snyder 2008). A better understanding of the multifaceted and heterogeneous relationships that NGOs have with politics and power could help us to make sense of the complex role that humanitarian organizations play in current global governance and security.

 Debate on the implications of the interconnections between humanitarianism and politics is far from over.2 Within the wide range of perspectives, the two scholarly positions at the extremities of the spectrum are worth mentioning. In his seminal *A Bed for the Night*, David Rieff (Rieff 2003) argues that traditional humanitarian action has been ruined by politicization. Rieff's claim for a politically independent humanitarianism is based on the opinion that any connection with politics and long-term goals such as the promotion of human rights and good governance have basically reduced and hindered the humanitarian space at the expense of the victims. On the contrary, argues Slim, not only "humanitarianism is always politicized somehow. It is a political project in a political world. Its mission is a political one – to restrain and ameliorate the use of organised violence in human relations and to engage with power in order to do so" (Slim 2003, 1). For the author, the politicization of humanitarianism does not pose a problem in itself. Rather, it is a matter of choosing the 'good' politics of humanitarianism.

The centrality of the problematic relationship of humanitarianism with politics, intended mainly as government politics at the national and inter-governmental level, is refected in different scholarly attempts to categorize NGOs. Even though extremely heterogenous in the defnition of variables, all typologies hitherto proposed in the literature have considered the level of interrelations with politics (in its various forms) as a central part of the equation. In 1999, Weiss classifed NGOs along two axes. On one side, he considered the strengths of the relationship of the organization' humanitarian action with politics, and, on the other, the NGOs' attitude toward "traditional operating principles" such as neutrality, impartiality and non-discriminatory provision of aid. According to Weiss (1999), ICRC represents the perfect example of 'classicist' organization and its humanitarian action as completely separated from politics, with no engagement with political authorities. At the other end of the spectrum Weiss situates MSF, an agency which for the author,

2 (For different position on the complex relationship between humanitarianism and politics see Cutts 1998; Dany 2015; De Lauri 2016; Donini et al. 2006; Duffeld et al. 2001; Fiori 2013; Hilhorst and Jansen 2010; Macrae and Leader 2001; Nascimento 2015; Terry 2013; Fox 2001);

embodies the "solidarist" organization, an NGO that considers abandoning neutrality to pick sides in disputes to be part of its organizational mandate.

In reviewing their trends and challenges Stoddard (2003) categorizes NGOs by their Dunantist or Wilsonian traditions. Dunantist is derived from Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross and winner of the frst Nobel Peace Prize, and refers to the importance given to the principle of independence. The Wilsonian approach, named after the American President Woodrow Wilson, refers to its hope to "to project US values and infuence as a force for good in the world" (Stoddard 2003, 2). The author, considering NGOs' attitudes more or less dependent on and cooperative with governments, classifes CARE, Save the Children US and IRC as Wilsonian and Oxfam, Save the Children UK and MSF as Dunantist.

Dijkzeul and Moke (2005) have created a typology based on two axes. On the horizontal, the authors consider the principles according to which aid is delivered: "impartial" if the organization provides non-discriminatory and need-based assistance and based on "solidarity" if the agency contemplates siding with one of the parties to the confict and/or their political cause. On the vertical axis, NGOs are classifed according to the relationship that they entertain with States and particularly through their level of dependence on institutional donors in the country where their headquarters are situated, in the case of major UK NGOs the former DfID and for US NGOs with USAID. According to the typology developed by Dijkzeul and Moke, MSF and ICRC are organizations with the highest degree of impartiality and independence, followed by Oxfam and Save the Children UK who appear slightly below but within the same matrix's quadrant. CARE, at the bottom of the left quadrant, is classifed as an organization with a moderate level of impartiality but strongly dependent on State funding.

In another classifcation effort, Hansen (2007) mapped humanitarian organizations working in Iraq according to criteria that included the "degree of cooperation with/distance from political and military actors, degree of visible acceptance/refusal of security from combatants or security contractors, and acceptance/refusal of funding from parties to the confict" (Hansen 2007, 68). Save the Children UK, Oxfam GB and MSF have been classifed in the Dunantist/Contractors quadrant, while CARE appeared on the right border of the same quadrant, leaning toward the Wilsonian/Pragmatist end of the axis.

Barnett and Snyder (2008) have highlighted how, with the exception of ICRC and MSF,- almost all of the other NGOs "have accepted the challenge of attempting to transform societies and have become comfortable with their political intentions" (Barnett and Snyder 2008, 158). In a subsequent and longer publication Barnett (2009) proposes a more detailed map of the organizational responses based on the different relationships of the humanitarian agencies with politics, identifying two main approaches. On one hand, there are "emergency" organizations such as MSF that are primarily concerned with relief assistance and are generally more independent. On the other hand, NGOs such as CARE International can be defned "alchemic" because of their transformative aspiration to social change while addressing the root causes of suffering which are generally more dependent on States. Even though alchemic organizations could be accused of being more

implicated with politics, they usually disagree and instead present their political interventions in technical terms. Chapter 4 will explore this dynamic in detail.

Far from offering a homogeneous indication about the different NGOs position vis-à-vis politics and levels of (in)dependence from governments, what all these different classifcations suggest is that idea of the humanitarian space as an environment completely unrelated with politics and power needs to be problematized. So does the idea of the purist compliance with humanitarian principles since all these studies have highlighted that, in one way or another, NGOs need to accommodate and negotiate those principles in order to achieve their strategic objectives and fulfll their specifc mandates. Although it would be extremely interesting to directly engage with the intense scholarly debate on the interrelations between humanitarianism and politics, this is outside the scope of this study. What I believe it is important to retain here is an understanding of humanitarian action as strictly and, in various ways, interrelated with power and state politics at different levels. In fact, not only do NGOs do work in a highly politicized context (especially during conficts) but also they carry out work that has, and very often is intended to have, important political implications. As Duffeld has effectively summarized, the politics of humanitarian action: "in the sense that humanitarian action is 'political', would appear to hinge on two factors. First, it circumscribes all the decisions, actions, compromises, and so on, that humanitarian actors make during the course of their work. Second, these decisions and actions are political in that they are seen as making a difference and capable of altering outcomes" (Duffeld 2001, 96). In the following sections I will attempt to defne more clearly how exactly relief agencies interact with politics and power specifcally through the lenses of their role within global governance and security.

#### **2.3 NGOs and Global Governance**

#### *2.3.1 NGOs and Global Governance: A General Overview*

Scholars have long acknowledged that transnational NGOs have today become one of the key non-state actors of global governance (see, for example, Weiss and Gordenker 1996; Duffeld 2001, 2007; Chandler 2004). As Weiss (2000) has noticed, the scholarly use of the term global governance is mostly based on the observation that although non-state actors are not something new in the international system, their proliferation, combined with their increasing relevance and power, has become a distinguishing character of present-day international affairs. Rosenau's understanding of global governance, intended as "systems of rule at all levels of human activity—from the family to the international organization—in which the pursuit of goals through the exercise of control has transnational repercussions" (Rosenau 1995, 13) is particularly useful. For it allows us to consider social practices as able to affect the economic, social and environmental spheres even in the absence of formal institutions authorized to take action (Oran Young cited in Weiss 2000).

In discussing global governance – and the role of transnational humanitarian NGOs within it – I draw on the work of Barnett and Duvall on power in global governance (Barnett and Duvall 2004). The two authors point out that the two terms are indeed strictly linked as governance encompasses the norms, structures and organizations that rule and control social life. In their understanding, power refers to the creation of effects that, through social relations, affect the ability of actors to shape their state and prospects. Among the four different expressions of power that they identify in *Power in Global Governance* – compulsory, institutional, structural and productive – the notion of productive power is particularly relevant for this book. "Productive power is the socially diffuse production of subjectivity in systems of meaning and signifcation" (Barnett and Duvall 2004, 3). In Barnett and Duvall's taxonomy of forms of power productive power is *diffuse* – it works through connections at a certain 'distance' or that are mediated –and works through *social relations of constitution* – social relations that determine who the actors are and what capacities they have, their 'power to'. Productive power is therefore about "discourse, the social processes and the systems of knowledge through which meaning is produced, fxed, lived, experienced, and transformed" (Barnett and Duvall 2004, 20). Discourses are here intended in Foucauldian terms as sites of social relations of power that produce social identities and capacities. Barnett and Duval's conceptualization is particularly relevant here as it allows analysis of the discursive production – including contested ones – of subjects and the determination of meanings in global governance. In particular, it allows us to investigate how the 'other' is defned and how the fxing of meaning is connected with determined practices and policies (Barnett and Duvall 2004).

The added value of this approach is that it enables a study that not only looks at how a specifc actor regulates the world, but also at how the actors constitute it. In order to explore the role played by transnational humanitarian NGOs in global governance, it can be useful to situate the discussion within the broader conceptual framework of the role of transnational civil society in global governance. The syncretic defnition of civil society provided by Edwards (2009) seems to be particularly apt to acknowledge the concept as a "contested territory" (Edwards 2009, vii), and conveys the complexity of the term. In his defnition, the concept of civil society merges three theoretical models that see civil society respectively as the associational/non-proft sector, a normative model of 'good' society, and as an arena for public debate and action. Even though the origins of the concept of civil society are to be found in the Greek philosophical tradition, the modern notion of civil society separated from the State was articulated by Hegel in the nineteenth century to be then defned further as the public space of political, ideological and cultural debate in the twentieth century (Kaldor 2003). Present-day civil society does still share a "common core of meanings" (Kaldor 2003, 585) with previous defnitions. Its contemporary feature is that of having transcended national borders to become transnational (Florini 2012; Kaldor 1999) or even global (Anheier et al. 2001; Kaldor 2003). The actors of transnational civil society are heterogeneous and include social movements and advocacy networks (Davies 2014), coalitions and various kinds of associations (Florini 2012), grass-root groups (Anheier et al. 2001), and, incontestably, non-governmental organizations (Anheier et al. 2001; Chandler 2004; Davies 2014; Florini 2012; Kaldor 1999, 2003).

#### *2.3.2 Humanitarian NGOs Role in Global Governance*

While the key role that NGOs plays in global governance has been widely acknowledged, it is important to consider how relief organizations specifcally perform this role, and what are the distinctive aspects of present-day humanitarianism that defne them as actors in global governance. The next three sections intend to highlight the characteristics of contemporary humanitarianism by shedding light on the different ways each infuences and attempts to transform the supra-national political arena.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> The Features of Contemporary Humanitarianism or 'New Humanitarianism'**

Present day humanitarianism has often been referred to as "new humanitarianism" (see among others Tirman 2003; Fox 2001; Chandler 2001; Duffeld 2001; Macrae 2002). Duffeld et al. (2001) places its origin in the 1990s, at a time when it was being realised that traditional humanitarian action was often perversely having unintended negative consequences. This realisation led to the emergence from a coalition of NGOs of the Do no Harm (DNH) principle which has subsequently become enshrined in the guiding principles of most humanitarian agencies.

There is no universally accepted defnition of the concept of 'new humanitarianism'3 but its characteristics can be traced in the humanitarian sector's selfacknowledgement of the complex relation of their actions with politics (and often the explicit decision to directly engage with this reality as part of the organization's mandate). A second feature has to do with the increasingly common merging of development intervention into humanitarian action. The last distinctive character of the new humanitarianism is the widespread (although not always accepted, as I shall show below), shift from a needs-based approach to humanitarian assistance to a rights-based approach.

With regards to the frst feature – the increasingly explicit interrelation of humanitarianism and politics – in the 1990s there was a shift of perspective from the traditional focus of humanitarian action on 'only' saving lives and alleviating suffering. As Macrae and Leader explained "during the 1990s a consensus emerged within the international humanitarian system that there was a need to enhance the 'coherence'

3 (For a compelling review of different authors' attempts to provide a defnition of new humanitarianism, see Tirman 2003)

between humanitarian and political responses to complex political emergencies. Closer integration between aid and political responses was seen to be necessary in order to address the root causes of confict-induced crises, and to ensure that aid did not exacerbate political tensions" (Macrae and Leader 2001, 290). Duffeld has pointed out how "the new humanitarianism, therefore, implies a drive for coherence where humanitarian action becomes part of a comprehensive political strategy" (Duffeld et al. 2001, 271). Academic perspectives regarding the coherence approach are far from homogenous. Scholars are divided between those who have welcomed the approach, all things considered, as a positive development (Abiew 2003; Charny 2004; Harmer 2008; Slim 2003; Weiss 1999 among others) and those who have underlined its challenges and remain extremely critic (see for example Donini et al. 2008; Macrae and Leader 2001; Metcalfe et al. 2012; Pandolf 2003). Leaving aside this interesting debate, the importance of this relatively new distinctive feature is that not only is humanitarian action conceptualized and implemented as part of international political endeavors, but, most importantly, relief agencies become key actors when it comes to response to (Macrae and Leader 2001) or management of (Dillon and Reid 2000) contemporary complex emergencies.

The second distinctive character of new humanitarianism is the integration of long-term objectives into the relief intervention (Duffeld 2001), in other words, the merging of humanitarian action with development. To understand what this means, it is probably important to briefy go back to the defnitions of the two terms. While humanitarian action is mostly intended to address the immediate need of an emergency situation, such as providing urgent health care, food and water, and emergency shelter, development work has a long-term time frame, usually applied in non-emergency settings and aiming at addressing conditions of under-development. Development includes a much larger set of reforming interventions that can include infrastructure, vocational training, female empowerment, rule-of-law promotion, judicial reform or agriculture and education support. The decision to integrate both humanitarian and development objectives into a sort of holistic approach to a crisis situation is therefore a move with important implications for the kind of impact humanitarian actors have within the societies in which they operate. Although, as I have discussed earlier, humanitarianism does not exist in a realm extraneous to politics and power, the link between development, power and politics seems even more explicit. Seminal academic contributions have clearly highlighted how development policies have worked as systems of control. Their extensive and pervasive effects in the countries of their operations are similar to the mechanisms of colonialism (Escobar 2011). As a neo-colonial Western project, it has often hidden the root causes of underdevelopment amidst its obsession with economic growth (Rist 2014). As Duffeld et al. (2001) has argued, the new humanitarianism has become development-oriented with an aspiration to transform society and to avoid confict which is seen as among the effects of underdevelopment. Development discourse, traditionally seen as depoliticized and technocratic, reveals its politicization exactly through its intentions of radical social change. The new or politicized humanitarianism "complements the radicalisation of development which now sees the role of aid as altering the balance of power between social groups in the interests of peace and

stability. From saving lives, the shift in humanitarian policy has been towards analysing consequences and supporting social processes" (Duffeld 2001, 80). Consequently, decisions regarding the extent of organizational mandates, whether to stick to a purely humanitarian concern to relieve suffering or one or which combines relief with development, have practical political implications for the way an organization perceives its role in global governance. The different NGOs' choices in this regard and their implications are discussed in Chap. 3.

The last major feature of the new humanitarianism lies in its approach to humanitarian assistance. While early humanitarianism has been traditionally based on a needs-based approach, intended to save lives and alleviate people's suffering according to their practical' needs, over the last decades there has been a shift toward a new paradigm: the right-based approach. Contemporary humanitarian aid not only targets people's needs, but it also focuses on protecting people's rights. New humanitarianism is more concerned with the outcomes of the assistance, rather than the assistance *per se* (Duffeld 2001). The shift toward this new paradigm has not been accepted by practitioners and scholars without controversy. The critique has included post-colonial (Chandler 2001; Žižek 2005) and feminist (Brems 1997; Coomaraswamy 1994) critiques the human rights regime *tout-court*, adding to an intense debate on the ethics, effectiveness and righteousness of the rights-based, as opposed to the needs-based, approach (Brown 2014; DuBois 2007; Duffeld 2014; Fox 2001; Rieff 2003; Slim 2003). Chandler has pointed out "the transformation of humanitarianism from the margins to the center of the international policy agenda has been achieved through the redefnition of humanitarian policy and practice and its integration within the fast-growing agenda of human rights. The new international discourse of human rights activism no longer separates the spheres of strategic state and international aid from humanitarianism but attempts to integrate the two under the rubric of "ethical" or "moral" foreign policy" (Chandler 2001, 678).

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Advocacy**

Following the end of the Cold War NGOs started to use public advocacy as part of their strategies to accomplish their humanitarian mandate. Although the role of advocacy in the history of humanitarianism is not completely new, it has progressively gained momentum. Today, the importance of infuencing, campaigning or advocating for something – according to the different organizations' defnitions – in relief organizations' work has increased to such a point that many NGOs, in their programmatic documents, mention advocacy on the same level as their 'hands-on' humanitarian and development interventions. The increasing attention NGOs pay to advocacy has been also complemented by moves towards greater cohesion and the coordinated networks such as the International Council of Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) or the Voluntary Organizations in Cooperation in Emergencies (VOICE). Through them aid agencies can more effectively infuence national and international policies, (Duffeld 2001). This infuence, as Hudson has specifed, seeks policy change "to favour the poor and marginalized Southern communities whose interests

NGOs aim to promote" (Hudson 2001, 33). Advocacy is, therefore, one of the practical tools through which NGOs participate in global governance by explicitly trying to infuence policy-making at different local, national and global levels. Transnational NGOs advocacy networks lobby on a wide range of topics including international debt reduction, child labor, landmines, and the arms trade (Hudson 2001). Particularly, humanitarian advocacy has been interested in drawing attention to forgotten humanitarian crises and complex political emergencies and progressively introduced long-term development objectives (such as fghting poverty or empowering women) so as to address the root causes of underdevelopment.

Present day humanitarian advocacy has been read in connection with the rightsbased approach of new humanitarianism. There are opposed views, either seen as a positive development (Booth 1991b) or as something intrinsically problematic (Chandler 2002; Pugh 1998; Pupavac 2006). For its advocates, such 'moral advocacy' is a sign of the development of a global social movement based on moral and ethical human rights discourse. As Booth has argued "Universal human rights are solidly embedded in multiple networks of cross-cutting universal ethical communities. The fundamental weakness of the critics of universality is that they take too territorial a view of the idea of human community, human political solidarity and human social affnity. Their perspective is conservative, overdisciplined by constructed notions of states and cultures" (Booth 1991b, 61).

For its critics, the increasing focus that humanitarian organizations have put on advocacy has contributed to the erosion of a more principled humanitarianism and consequently subordinated people's needs to strategic human rights objectives (Pugh 1998). Moreover, as Pupavac (2006) has argued, for most NGOs the calls to intervention to protect people since the 1990s have been accompanied not only by aspirations to promote social change but also by openly challenging the sovereignty of the developing state in question when state actors were considered as responsible or complicit in violence. With this logic, humanitarian advocacy has tended "to reinforce international inequalities rather than overturning them, by casting conditions in the developing world as moral rather than political and material issues, with dubious results for those in whose name the advocacy is conducted."(Pupavac 2006, 268). There are opposed scholarly views on the appropriateness and righteousness of contemporary humanitarian advocacy. In this debate what I believe is extremely relevant is acknowledgement of the importance that relief organizations' advocacy work perform into global governance. How this happens in practice will be explored in Chaps. 4, 5, 6 and 7.

#### **<IP_ADDRESS> Humanitarian Governance**

The key role played by humanitarian actors in the global arena over the last decades has led one of the most famous scholars of humanitarian studies to coin the term 'humanitarian governance' (Barnett 2013). Drawing on the work of Michael Foucault and Didier Fassin, Barnett has defned the modern international humanitarian order in terms of 'humanitarian governance': a global system of governance of humanity aimed at the protection of lives, the alleviation of suffering and the general improvement of individuals' well-being. The notion encompasses a wide range of activities pertaining to the humanitarian sphere, including relief, security, nutrition, development and medical assistance. Inspired by a critical theoretic tradition, and including power in his study of governance, Barnett has suggested ways to reorient the exploration of humanitarian governance in different important ways (Barnett 2013; Barnett and Duvall 2004). First, he suggested addressing attention to the *effects* of an humanitarian enterprise, rather than the study of its effectiveness. He further rejects the assumption that humanitarianism is inherently good, acknowledging that it can serve to promote both emancipation and domination. He has advocated for incorporation of the study of power into the study of humanitarian governance. Additionally, he has sought to shift focus from the normative characteristics of the system to questions about its construction. Finally, he highlights the importance of studying the "underlying discourses of humanitarianism themselves" (Barnett 2013, 382) as constitutive humanitarian actors. All of these points have inspired this book, for they allow us to unpack the role that transnational humanitarian NGOs, and their underlying discourses, play in global governance.

As Barnett has noted, academic study of the different aspects of governance has often been treated in terms of governmentality (Dean 2009 and Neumann & Sending 2006 cited in Barnett 2013). This was defned by Foucault as the "ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses, and refections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specifc albeit complex form of power"(Foucault 1991, 102). That is also why it is all the more important to take into consideration power in general and Barnett and Duval's notion of productive power in particular. In this perspective, non-state actors are no longer considered in opposition to state power, but rather a "most central feature of how power operates in late modern society" (Sending and Neumann 2006, 652). The literature on humanitarian governance has identifed several ways through which humanitarian actors infuence governance. These include rationalization processes that present political and power dynamics as bureaucratic and knowledge-based systems (Ferguson 1990); bureaucratization (Barnett and Duvall 2004); psychosocial support (Pupavac 2001b); gender equality (Olivius 2014); biopolitics (Reid 2010; Rozakou 2012; Vaughan-Williams 2015); the international refugee regime (Barnett 2002) as agents of stability in areas of instability (Duffeld et al. 2001), and as key actors in the management of complex emergencies (Dillon and Reid 2000). Within this extremely interesting strand of studies, I am particularly interested in those which have focused on the way relief agencies participate in global governance in connection with international security, and securitization in particular. In order to speak about security, a key concept of international relations, and a crucial part of today's debate not only on global governance, but also on humanitarianism, development, and migration it is important to take the time to introduce it theoretically. The next section is dedicated to the defnition of the concept and the relatively more recent innovative conceptualization of securitization.

#### **2.4 Securitization and Humanitarianism**

#### *2.4.1 Security, Securitization and the Copenhagen School*

From a theoretical perspective, this book builds upon the International Security Studies (ISS) literature that has broadened the concept of security and elaborated the notion of securitization. In their ground-breaking *Security: A New Framework for Analysis,* Buzan et al. (1998) criticized the realist ontological and epistemological approach to security that considered the State the (only) unit of analysis within the international security system. The call for widening the study of security beyond the traditional focus on States, already introduced by Krause and Williams (1996), has allowed for analysis of other subjects as referent objects of security and the consideration of security threats other than military force. The second crucial contribution of *New Framework* has been the elaboration of a concept able to broaden the notion of security without an invalidating "conceptual stretching" (Sartori 1970): the concept of securitization. This fundamental notion refers to the framing of an issue in terms of security. It is a discursive construction in which "a securitizing actor uses a rhetoric of existential threat and thereby takes an issue out of what under those conditions is 'normal politics'" (Buzan et al. 1998, 24–25).

Wæver (1995) has conceptualized securitization as a rhetorical structure by virtue of which the actor asserts the urgency of the situation and the consequential need for exceptional measures. According to its theorists, in order to have a case of securitization, there must be the acceptance of a determined discourse. Without it, we can only talk of a 'securitizing move'. However, the acceptance does not refer in any way to the implementation of the security measures implied in the specifc issue's framing. Rather, it is about the level of resonance that a securitization discourse is able to attain in legitimizing emergency measures. Therefore, as Buzan and Wæver have argued, the role of the researcher is to investigate the "process of constructing a shared understanding of what is to be considered and collectively responded to as a threat" (Buzan et al. 1998, 26). In its frst conceptualization, securitization has been defned as a speech act, "the utterance itself that is the act. By saying the words, something is done"(Buzan et al. 1998, 26). Although in the *New Framework* the authors in the book specifcally referred to language theory, the possibility and the necessity of attention to other utterance dimensions, with particular emphasis on the visual realm, but not only it, has been widely discussed (Hansen 2011; Heck and Schlag 2013; McDonald 2008; Williams 2003). I will go back to the visual approach in the next chapter. Here, I would like to focus on the fundamental value that this theoretical framework offers for this book.

The theory of securitization – elaborated by Buzan and Wæver and subsequently to become known as the Copenhagen School – is one of the most innovative and productive areas of research in international security studies (Huysmans 1998; Williams 2003), In many ways it is relevant to this book. First of all, by broadening the security agenda it has underlined the importance of studying the role that nonstate actors play in international relations theory in general and in the feld of security studies in particular. Secondly, by opening up the possibility that securitization actors are to be found beyond traditional military and other state agents, it offers a theoretical framework to investigate securitization discourses and practices of actors not formally attributable to security apparatuses such as humanitarian organizations. Indeed, in the elaboration of the concept of securitization the Copenhagen School was concerned with understanding what could be the thresholds of the notion in terms of scale and signifcance in order not to lose its powerful theoretical utility. Instead of trying to identify different levels of importance of the various security referent objects, it suggested the need to focus on the impact of the securitization process. Instead of asking how important is a sector to have more 'securitization' potential, it proposed considering "how big an impact does the securitizing move have on wider patterns of relations? A securitizing move can easily upset orders of mutual accommodation among units" (Buzan et al. 1998, 26).

Williams (2003) has pointed out that while broadening the range of securitizing actors, the Copenhagen School has delineated its borders by identifying the specifc structure of the securitization process. It can, in principle, come from 'any' actor that can in turn frame any issue and any referent object in terms of security. At the same time, the securitizing claim has different levels of effcacy that depend on the "external, contextual and social" (Buzan et al. 1998, 32) and the position of the actor vis-à-vis the issue and the audience. In this sense, the analysis of humanitarian NGOs securitizing potential is particularly interesting exactly because of the role they play in humanitarian discourses, a domain seemingly antithetical to security utterances. As Barnett and Weiss (2008) have shown, aid agencies derive power primarily from their alleged expert and moral authority.4 Borrowing form Dahl's defnition of power as "effects" (Barnett and Weiss 2008, 40) that determine the ability of other actors to impact circumstances, the authors highlighted how humanitarian organizations have power in the sense that they affect regulatory and constitutive effects. On the one hand, humanitarian actors seek to govern other's actions through both normative and symbolic practices. On the other, constitutive effect sheds light on the reality as social construction and determines the boundaries of normality, desirability, and best solutions. In this sense, the exploration of humanitarian NGOs discourses and their securitization potential is even more interesting if we take into account their supposed expert and moral authority.

4As Barnett and Weiss (2008) have pointed out "expert authority exists when an actor's voice is given credibility because of his or her specialized training, knowledge, or experience. Moral authority exists when an actor is perceived to be speaking and acting on behalf of the community's values and interests and defending the lives of the weak and vulnerable" (Barnett and Weiss 2008, 39).

#### *2.4.2 Securitization, Societal Security and Human Security*

In broadening the agenda of critical security studies, the Copenhagen School has identifed fve security sectors, each one with specifc threat and referent objects: the military, environmental, economic, societal and the political (Buzan et al. 1998). Within this framework, the concept of societal security elaborated by Wæver is particularly relevant for this book. It refers to the security of the society in terms of identity and as opposed to State security. For him "society is about *identity,* the *selfconception* of communities, and those individuals who identify themselves as *members* of a particular community. *"Society"* should basically be conceived of as both *Gemeinshaft* and *Geselshaft,* but thereby, to some degree, necessarily more than the sum of the parts (that is, not reducible to individuals)" (Wæver 1995, 66).

In its original conceptualization, societal security referred mainly to European societies that securitizing processes framed as referent object of threats. However, the notion is applicable to any society. This was and is crucial because for the frst time it included the individual in the picture of the international security system as traditionally conceived. Successively, in a book on the evolution of International Security Studies, Buzan and Hansen (2009) discussed the widening and deepening of the security agenda. The authors presented the different approaches calling for the need to expanding the concept of referent object of security beyond the Western State and suggested including human security as referent object and development as security sector. They argued that 'UNDP's [United Nations Development Programme] conceptualization of conceptualization of Human Security is probably the most encompassing expansion of the concept since Galtung launched structural violence and, like Marxist Peace Research, it sought to bring development and North–South issues into ISS.' (Buzan and Hansen 2009, 203).

Given the importance that the concept of human security5 has in discourses about the protection of people's lives, and its conceptual origin – historically situated in the dramatic genocides of Rwanda and former Yugoslavia in the 1990s – approaching it through the lenses of securitization theory brings into discussion the question of ethics, particularly the ethics of securitization. While other perspectives on securitization have seen human security as potentially emancipatory (see in this regards the position of what has come to be known as the Welsh School and particularly the work of its most prominent advocates Booth 1991a; Wyn Jones 1999), the Copenhagen School has not attributed to the securitization process any intrinsic positive acceptation.

According to the Welsh School, the concept of human security, by placing the individual at the heart of the international security system, implies an emancipatory promise. In a prophetic speech delivered at the British International Studies Association in 1991, right at the end of the Cold War, Booth argued that in the new world order security meant the absence of threat. In his words, "emancipation is the

5For a defnition of the concept of human security, see Massari, A. (2020a) *Human Security* In Humanitarianism: Keywords (91–93). Brill.

freeing of people (as individuals and groups) from those physical and human constraints which stop them carrying out what they would freely choose to do. War and the threat of war is one of those constraints, together with poverty, poor education, political oppression and so on. Security and emancipation are two sides of the same coin." (Booth 1991a, 319). For Booth, human security is of crucial importance because of its pivotal role in a State-based international security system. For threats to human beings and their rights create instability at the national level that could easily have global spill-over effects. In this conceptualization, security would encompass both security concerns based on domestic interests and those based on the need to fght oppression and underdevelopment. Although given attention mainly for its functional role in a traditional security framework, human security is already linked with the concept of emancipation at the point where for Booth, at the theoretical level, emancipation means security.

In further development of this critical security studies approach, the Welsh School has conceptualized the two concepts so intertwined that in the words of Wyn Jones "security in the sense of the absence of the threat of (involuntary) pain, fear, hunger, and poverty is an essential element in the struggle for emancipation" (Wyn Jones 1999, 126). Since then, scholars have infused human security with claims of tremendous emancipatory power in different sectors. These include the potential to challenge economic, social and political contexts that produce human insecurity (Newman 2001), questioning existing power relations (Grayson 2004); the claim that human security tends to, and is produced through, individual empowerment (Tadjbakhsh and Chenoy 2007) to the potential for human security to give voice to the voiceless and powerless (MacFarlane 2004; Suhrke 1999). The goal, common to many humanitarian NGOs is as we will see, to place people at the center of attention by representing them as threatened victims of human insecurity and to make peoples¨ voices heard. Thus, it falls within this logic.

However, as many authors have argued over the last two decades, the emancipatory power of security (or securitization) is far from unproblematic. In this sense, to understand the implications of the human security framework, I fnd the Copenhagen School's perspective more useful. As Williams has pointed out, "in most cases, securitization is something to be avoided. While casting an issue as one of "security" may help elevate its position on the political agenda, it also risks placing that issue within the logic of threat and decision, and potentially within the contrast of friend and enemy. *Security*, accordingly, is something to be invoked with great care and, in general, minimized rather than expanded – a movement that should be sought in the name of stability, tolerance, and political negotiation, not in opposition to it" (2003, 523). Subsequently Browning and McDonald (2011) have shown how this approach not only neglects the potential negative consequences of depicting an issue within the logic of security, but, that by framing security into an emancipatory process it also fails to explore whether emancipation would be better served by other languages (such as justice and economics).

Refecting on the link between security and emancipation, Aradau (2004a) has explained how the logic is eventually counterproductive since it reproduces the same dynamics of inclusion/exclusion and passivity that was initially challenged. Even acknowledging the important mobilization effect of securitization for emancipation implies a logic of exceptionalism that is at odds with the democratic project. In fact, the equation of emancipation with security, legitimizes the security strategy and "endorse(s) the exclusionary logic of security and the politics that is instituted by doing security" (Aradau 2004a, 398). Moreover, her observation that NGOs, by representing a specifc group (in Aradau's case study, traffcked women) as threatened victims, accomplish their scope at the expenses of those whose voices remain silent and excluded (i.e. prostitutes and asylum seekers in Aradau's example) it is quite relevant when one refects over humanitarian communication. NGOs, along with their efforts to ensure that the (innocent) humanitarian subjects' voices are heard, are at the same time at risk of reproducing and reinforcing an exclusionary logic of security toward the dangerous 'other'. Emancipation thus can only be achieved overcoming an inclusion/exclusion logic. According to Aradau, there is a dual problem. On the one side, drawing on Balibar's writings, she notices how nobody could be emancipated by an external actor. On the other, the power of emancipation is only available for those who are considered to be members of the community and refugees and migrants are not recognized as such. Specifcally, addressing the limits of human security with regards to its emancipatory potential, McCormack (2008) has pointed out how this framework not only fails to disrupt the existing power inequalities but, on the contrary, actually reproduces them. She has pointed out how the contradiction of the empowering and emancipatory promise of human security lies in its relocation of sovereignty in international community's institutions and powerful states instead of citizenship. Indeed, "there is no 'golden age' of human security policy in which the 'voiceless' and most vulnerable set international and national security policy priorities. Even before the 'war on terror', the human security agenda was set according to Western priorities—albeit in the name of the poor and disempowered." (McCormack 2008, 120). In this context, she argues that the external actors who intervene to protect human security do not have any obligation of accountability. Instead of empowering individuals, the human security framework endows international institutions and NGOs with agency.

#### *2.4.3 Securitization and Humanitarianism*

After having outlined the notion of humanitarianism and the concept of securitization – as we have seen intertwined with that of human security – it is now possible to look at the interconnections of these two dimensions. Despite humanitarianism' aspirations for neutral, impartial and independent action,6 a large swathe of scholarship has already shown the interplay of humanitarianism with military action and security (De Lauri 2018; Donini et al. 2004, 2008; Duffeld 2001; Macrae 2002; Tirman 2003). This growing literature has been mainly concerned with the

6The principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence, along with other four principles, are defned in the *Statutes of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement*, adopted by the 25th International Conference of the Red Cross, Geneva, 1986.

increasingly blurred lines between humanitarian operations and military and security interventions, and their crucial political implications. Emerging scholarship has put the emphasis on a different interplay: that between humanitarianism and securitization. In her compelling analysis of traffcked women identifed as illegal migrants and victims, Claudia Aradau (2004b) has brilliantly shown how humanitarianism and securitization discourses are not mutually exclusive but, rather, reciprocally constitutive. As she points out, it is not just a question of human rights framed within the 'new' concept of human security, but, rather, how two seemingly conficting "discursive regimes are entwined and feed upon each other" (Aradau 2004b, 252). In her view, the two articulations should be considered as two interconnected systems of Foucauldian governmentality. Her perspective allows us to go beyond a dichotomic understanding of humanitarianism and securitization that, in trying to unpack how such supposedly antithetical realm could interact, misses the point of how inherently similar their premises are. In this sense, Aradau's conclusion provides a fundamental assumption underpinning this book.

Focusing on the study on the case of Syrian refugee crisis, I build on the scholarship that has shed light on the relationship between humanitarianism, security and governance in the context of refugee crises. There are a variety of studies that have investigated how humanitarian practices interrelate with security and securitization discourses. For example, Pupavac (2001a, 2005) has explored the convergence of humanitarian aid with global therapeutic governance goals. Reid (Reid 2010) has analysed the biopoliticization of humanitarianism – through practices of interventions that, instead of saving bare lives, secure them by constituting biohuman life in a political way. Rozakou (2012) has explored "the biopolitical connotations of the production of the asylum seeker– refugee as a guest" (Rozakou 2012, 563). Vaughan-Williams (2015) has investigated the zoopolitical space of humanitarian border security. Andersson (2014) has shown how the securitarian and humanitarian dimensions are part of a complex dynamic of threat and vulnerability that enables a security-humanitarian response. More recently, Gabiam (2016) has highlighted how humanitarian focus on resilience, sustainability and self-reliance to tackle the "adverse socio-economic effects"7 of the Syria refugee crisis have been linked with global security concerns. With reference to the recent Syrian displacement to Europe, Chouliaraki (2017) has argued how security and humanitarian responses collaborate in a new moral order that she defnes of hospitability, whereby the border is reaffrmed as a space of power and exclusion but simultaneously enables 'micro-connections of solidarity' that reinforce it and challenge it at the same time. Focusing on SAR operations in the Mediterranean, Cuttitta has argued that "the humanitarianization of migration and border management converges with its securitization" (Cuttitta 2017, 5).

These theories are crucial to understanding the process and practices through which humanitarian work contributes to the shaping of a security discourse and how

7United Nations Development Programme and UNHCR, *Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan 2015–2016*, 28 July 2015, accessed 15 December 2015, cited in Gabiam (2016).

securitization and humanitarianism interact in multiple ways. However, none of these studies has focused on visual representation, rather than humanitarian practices. This book intends to fll this gap. By drawing on this literature, it intends to push forward this approach to investigate the role of transnational humanitarian NGOs in global governance through the lenses of securitization theory by studying relief organizations' visual production.

Before proceeding to the next section that will theoretically introduce the NGOs communication space and the humanitarian representation of refugees, an important consideration on the 'acceptance' of the humanitarian securitization process is in order. As mentioned above, the Copenhagen School outlines a substantial difference between a securitization *move* and a securitization *process* and the difference between the two mechanisms lies precisely in the question of acceptance. Basically, in order to be able to speak of a securitization process, it is necessary that an actor's utterance in terms of security is accepted by the public. Without the acceptance, we can only speak of a securitization move. Some scholars have criticized the Copenhagen School for having overlooked the question of audience and having left the concept underdeveloped. Indeed, for some authors, the role of the audience would be so important that they have not only argued for paying more attention to the concept, but they have also proposed a refnement of the notion. For Balzacq for instance, the audience is a core element of securitization. In order to achieve its perlocutionary effect – to convince the public – the actor has in fact to "tune his/her language to the audience's experience" (Balzacq 2005, 184). In this sense, according to the author, the context, as well as the psycho-social disposition of the audience, would be crucial for the securitizing process.

Moreover, Balzacq and other scholars have pointed out that the audience should be understood as multiple audiences following distinct logics of persuasion (Balzacq 2005; Salter 2008; Vuori 2008). Another issue lies in the intended intersubjective character of the securitization process and what this would entail for the role of audience. Côté has pointed out that the audience should be understood as an active subject, "capable of having an independent effect on securitization outcomes" (Côté 2016, 543).

From all this it is quite evident that the question of audience is anything but a small detail when talking about humanitarian securitization. Indeed, this book will show that transnational humanitarian NGOs can be considered securitizing actors exactly because their discourse has been accepted. There is, therefore, a crucial node to disentangle here. On one hand, as will be discussed in the next chapter, this book will mainly focus on two 'sites' of the images8 : production and image *per se*. It will mostly overlook the site of audience to which the literature (mainly in communication studies, sociology and psychology) has dedicated a great deal of

8With the concept of sites of images, I refer to what Rose has indicated as the different levels at which visual artefacts produce meanings: '"interpretations of visual images broadly concur that there are three sites at which the meanings of an image are made: the site(s) of the production of an image, the site of the image itself, and the site(s) where it is seen by various audiences" (Rose 2001, 16).

attention. From an IR perspective, this book, rather than focusing on the individuals' perception and reception images, is more interested in unpacking the various meanings that are made possible by the polysemic value of visual artefacts and, most importantly, their impact on the role that relief organizations play in global governance. In this sense, a certain degree of acceptance in a humanitarian securitized discourse is taken for granted not only for the "expert authority" for which they are recognized (Barnett and Duvall 2004, 171), but also implied in the role that humanitarian actors are granted – by public opinion but also state-based politics – in the management of human suffering and displacement. In other words, the fact that relief organizations are commonly considered legitimate actors to address human insecurity entails a certain degree of acceptance of their discourse. I will leave the discussion regarding the different forms that the humanitarian securitization process can take for the analytical Chaps. 4, 5 and 7. Here, I would like to conclude by acknowledging lessons derived from the literature outlined above. It has highlighted the importance of context and the existence of multiple audiences. These two crucial points will be discussed in detail in the chapter dedicated to the visual approach.

#### **2.5 Humanitarian Communication**

#### *2.5.1 Humanitarian NGOs and Marketing*

Present-day humanitarianism "has been affected by the forces of production; by the ascendance of a business discourse of markets, effciency, accountability, and effectiveness; by shifting ideologies regarding the state's role in the economy and society; and by new funding patterns" (Barnett and Weiss 2008, 28). Following this reasoning, Stephen Hopgood (2008) provocatively asked whether Wal-Mart – one of the world's biggest multinational retail corporations – could be considered a humanitarian organization. He has highlighted the connection between contemporary humanitarian enterprise and neoliberalism, showing how the logic of business has permeated the former. It should come as no surprise, he argues, that relief organizations such as CARE, Oxfam and Save the Children have developed tight relationships with private capital, as they have to attract both public and private funding in an increasingly competitive environment. In a context in which several organizations have embraced this neoliberal logic, "humanitarian aid" has become synonymous with "aid industry", whereby NGOs become an effective donors' tool to transfer development funds to low-income countries or a way to privatize foreign assistance in a way that reduces accountability both to governments and benefciaries (Polman 2010; Rieff 2002). As John Quelch and Nathalie Laidler-Kylander have very effectively explained, "mission effect is the surrogate for profts. Mission aligns the organization with its stakeholders, sets the boundaries for the organization, and provides the foundation on which trust is developed. Strong NGO brands succinctly articulate their missions in terms of what, how, and for whom; these missions are equivalent in many ways to brand-positioning statements" (Quelch and Laidler-Kylander 2005, 10).

Against this background, branding becomes an essential element to raise money in a competitive market. Since fundraising is fundamental to sustain NGOs' operations, branding also becomes an important part of the organizations' mission. Cottle and Nolan have highlighted how in a highly competitive environment humanitarian NGOs do not only compete for funds, but also for public attention, and have today thus assimilated a"media logic". Their relationship with the media is "at once indispensable and inimical to NGO aims and ideas of global humanitarianism" (Cottle and Nolan 2007, 763). In order to raise awareness of forgotten crises and mobilize support, aid agencies need to successfully compete within the media environment. However, by focusing on organizational branding, designing stories in a certain way and using celebrities in order to appeal to media interests, regionalizing and personalizing the assistance via downplaying the work of local organizations, and by dedicating time and resources to protect their reputation and credibility, they end up detracting from their original goal and humanitarian principles (Cottle and Nolan 2007). "On the television, in the newspaper, in the mail—the public face of the aid industry is never far away. This is a face which is quite literally a face, that of the hungry child, helpless mother, homeless refugee. Through these faces, aid agencies sell themselves and their missions; they use marketing techniques honed over the decades by businesses and non-profts" (Kennedy 2009, 1).

#### *2.5.2 Humanitarian Communication*

Over the last three decades, NGOs have used communication technologies to create an international space of solidarity and activism. This is the reason a large swathe of scholarship has identifed as the precursors of an emerging civil society (DeChaine 2005). In this sense, NGOs have contributed to the symbolical and material shaping of an international community able to overcome the challenges of international solidarity (e.g., political fragmentation, economic colonization, and cultural homogenization) through their humanitarian discourses. At the same time, they have contributed to the mainstream discursive process of construction of social reality and public morality of the global civil society.

Present day humanitarian communication can be best understood in terms of mediatized humanitarianism, as Vesteergards has suggested. Mediatization is intended as the: "process whereby society to an increasing degree is submitted to, or becomes dependent on, the media and their logic resulting in enduring changes to the character, function and structure of social institutions and cultural processes. Institutions to an increasing degree become dependent on resources that the media control, and will have to submit to the rules the media operate by in order to gain access to those resources" (Vestergaard 2011, 99).

However, this is only one side of the coin for at the same time another process occurs: that of "mediation" by which social and cultural transformation in turn, affect the forms in which media can be produced and perceived. In this sense, mediatization is best understood as "a thoroughly dialectic process of mutual constitution between humanitarian organizations and audiences which themselves continually undergo transformations without homogenous or isolatable causality" (Vestergaard 2011, 100). Her perspective is particularly relevant as it underlines a characteristic of humanitarian communication that is generally overlooked: the fact that over the last decades it has been increasingly infuenced and transformed by the media logic, but that at the same time, social and cultural conditions have affected the way humanitarian organizations have represented themselves and their work. While investigating the role that relief organizations play in global governance and securitization, the features of humanitarian communication, are an important dimension to address for their role in consolidating and disseminating humanitarian discourse.

The literature focusing on humanitarian communication has highlighted how it has been traditionally focused on suffering. In a famous book, Boltanski (1999) has analysed the representation of distant suffering and the moral and political implication for the spectator. For the sociologist, present day humanitarianism is undergoing a "crisis of pity" that can be read as a crisis of a theatrical conception of politics, through which the call for action in the name of humanity conceals the complicity of humanitarianism with power behind an emotionally powerful representation of suffering (Chouliaraki 2013). Boltanksy was more interested in the exploration of the rhetorical "topics" available for the expression of the spectator reaction to the spectacle of suffering. This he identifed in the topics of denunciation, of sentiment and the aesthetic topic. Other authors have focused on the process of production and dissemination of suffering. Kennedy (2009) has explained how humanitarian agencies use the representation of suffering as a mean to "bridge the distance (…) in relation to a wider theoretical literature on proximity and assistance that maintains that people are less likely to respond to aid victims who are far away" (Kennedy 2009, 1).

The result of this marketing strategy, he maintained, is that of commodifying suffering with ambivalent effects. While it is functional to the organization's goal of attracting funds and raising awareness, it simultaneously contributes to the construction of the humanitarian narrative in terms of hopeless and passive victimhood.

Following this line of reasoning, but also keeping account of the changes that humanitarian communication has undergone throughout the years, Lilie Chouliaraki has introduced the useful concept of "post-humanitarianism". Refecting both on the mediatization process, but also on the dominant representation of suffering that distinguished emotion-based humanitarian communication at least until the 1990s, she has pointed out how present-day humanitarian rhetoric has shifted to a postemotional style (Chouliaraki 2010). She has shown how the communication of contemporary humanitarian organizations has abandoned its claims of universal morality for styles that are based on corporate branding and that rely on aesthetic topics of contemplation to refect upon, rather than grand emotions to inspire immediate action. Post-humanitarian communication is based on puns, extremely high aesthetic quality as well as: "low intensity emotional regimes and a technological imagination of instant gratifcation and no justifcation. While still depending on realistic imagery (of the poor, the wounded or the about-to-die), the key feature of post-humanitarianism lies precisely in loosening up this 'necessary' link between seeing suffering and feeling for the sufferer, and in de-coupling emotion for the sufferer from acting on the cause of suffering. Central to the post-humanitarian sensibility is the particularization of the cause, whereby the representation of suffering becomes disembedded from discourses of morality and relies on each spectator's personal judgement of the cause for action" (Chouliaraki 2010, 119). In this new form of communication, the target of the campaign is the single individual and her/ his personalized reaction of ludic engagement, rather than the universalized and collective action that was the goal of traditional rhetoric. As Chouliaraki has observed, the problem of this new style is that it tends to reproduce a political culture of Western narcissism, a kind of sensibility that makes the emotions felt by the individual the measure of the understanding of the suffering of others.

Since the end of the nineteenth century images of human misery have been used to draw attention to forgotten humanitarian crises and create a "humanitarian imaginary" of human suffering in worlds distant for the European and American public (Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015; Massari 2020b) in order to mobilize support and fundraise. Indeed, humanitarian communication has always utilized visual material and technologies have progressively and increasingly been introduced: photography, videos, web-based interfaces, and now the use of interactive media. It has been acknowledged for quite some time now the that photographic accounts of the Biafra famine in 1968 and subsequent humanitarian crises in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel were crucial in drawing the general public's attention to places that, to an Western audience, were and felt even more distant than today (Sontag 2003). However, throughout the years, visual humanitarian communication has been criticized for various reasons. Vivid and shocking images of suffering have been denounced for reproducing a colonial perspective. This further distances the observer and the victim (Hall 2001), contributes to the humanitarian reduction of the victim (Fassin 2007), and ultimately dehumanizes the sufferer (Benthall 1993; Lissner 1977). Representations of suffering, a characteristic trait of humanitarian communication, have also been criticized for their inherent commodifcation of suffering (Kennedy 2009), compassion fatigue (Moeller 1999), and their role in concealing the root political causes of humanitarian disasters (Campbell 2012).