Foreign Policy Blogs

The Perils of Humanitarianism

“Everything is fine, until the moment when it is not. And when that moment comes it can be very quick and very bad.” — Aiméry Mbounkap, a site planner for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. 

The New Yorker has a lengthy feature revealing just how difficult it is to be a humanitarian aid worker in eastern Chad. The conditions on the ground would be bad to begin with, exacerbated, indeed largely created, by the deluge of refugees coming from Darfur. Geopolitics are exacerbated by a fraught domestic and local political situation. Poverty is endemic. The geography is hostile, the weather no less so, the infrastructure nonexistent.

 

Author

Derek Catsam

Derek Catsam is a Professor of history and Kathlyn Cosper Dunagan Professor in the Humanities at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin. He is also Senior Research Associate at Rhodes University. Derek writes about race and politics in the United States and Africa, sports, and terrorism. He is currently working on books on bus boycotts in the United States and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s and on the 1981 South African Springbok rugby team's tour to the US. He is the author of three books, dozens of scholarly articles and reviews, and has published widely on current affairs in African, American, and European publications. He has lived, worked, and travelled extensively throughout southern Africa. He writes about politics, sports, travel, pop culture, and just about anything else that comes to mind.

Areas of Focus:
Africa; Zimbabwe; South Africa; Apartheid

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