The “humanitarianization” of urban violence

Abstract

This paper describes how international humanitarian organizations (IHOs) are adapting their operations to working in the urban environment. When levels of armed violence in urban areas are sufficient to trigger international humanitarian law, organizations such as the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) may argue that they have an important contribution to make by offering a set of skills and experience gleaned in conflict and non-governed settings. This paper reflects on this humanitarian turn to the city and uses it to problematize certain assumptions within the existing understanding of “urban violence” and the nature of humanitarianism itself. What does it mean to “humanitarianize” urban violence? What is the value-added that humanitarians might bring? And in what ways might such engagements be changing the nature of the problem itself? Drawing upon a wide range of literature that sets the local structures of violence in light of wider national and international processes, we analyze the “humanitarianization” of urban violence as a cross-scalar governmental assemblage that is likely to play an increasingly important role in cities in the global South in the future.

I. Introduction

Humanitarians are increasingly “going urban” in their relief work. One consequence of this is that over the past decade, international humanitarian organizations (IHOs) have become a prominent and important actor in the field of urban violence prevention. No singular humanitarian framework or doctrine guides this activity; the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), for example, insists that what it does is not actually violence prevention but mitigation of the “humanitarian effects” of armed violence. Nonetheless, there are certain commonalities in the approach of such IHOs as the ICRC, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and World Vision International (WVI), including: a focus on reducing individual vulnerabilities and enhancing community “resilience”; building trust between victims, perpetrators and political authorities; and working as a bridgehead into “no-go areas” on behalf of other actors, including the private sector and the state. These common elements enable us to speak of a distinctive humanitarian approach to armed violence reduction in cities in the global South.

From the humanitarians’ own point of view, what is interesting – and challenging⁽¹⁾ – about this activity is how much it differs from the sector’s traditional approach to emergency care. From the point of view of violence studies it raises four key issues: first, it forces us to rethink how “urban violence” is being understood and defined from the perspective of non-violence, and in particular how this is happening in dialogue with certain dominant readings of urban space; second, it affords insight into contemporary efforts to mitigate the causes and consequences of endemic levels of violence in urban areas; third, it opens up ways of thinking about the relations between local and non-local (international) governance actors and the scaling of their efforts to address local social and political issues; and fourth, it represents a novel and potentially productive example of cross-sectoral engagements around the management of urban violence (e.g. INGO–state, humanitarian–criminal, public sector–private sector). Each of these issues raises fundamental questions not only about the lives of those subject to violence and what is being done to prevent it but also about the operations and responsibility of those who engage in addressing urban violence, including, ultimately, the role of the state, whose single most important mandate is the protection of its citizens.⁽²⁾

Thus, the aim of this paper is to demonstrate that humanitarian actors offer a unique and illuminating window onto a wider part of the “urban violence” problematic than has to date been considered by scholars, as they seek to categorize and define the causes of violence in urban areas and to distil the lessons learned.⁽³⁾ There is a continued need for work on the causes and consequences of such violence, but we believe it is also important to begin to problematize “urban violence” as a normative (what in Judith Butler’s terms might be called “performative”⁽⁴⁾) concept itself. That is, we have to explore how the meanings attributed to a phenomenon such as urban violence themselves play a role in shaping that phenomenon – how different actors, by treating it in a certain way, help to give it a particular form. That, in turn, means considering extant analyses and emergent understandings of “urban violence” as these circulate between academics, policy makers and the like, and refusing any one solidified definition.

The work of humanitarians is of particular interest here since they have come relatively late to the field and yet have done so with a distinctive and self-conscious approach, both to the city and to the violence that, in poorer cities in particular, they see (in a common but revealing trope) appearing there in “epidemic” proportions.

II. The Turn to the (Violent) City: “Humanitarianizing” Urban Violence

Changes in international politics and the global political economy have fundamentally restructured the nature of organized and armed violence, particularly in urban areas. Globally, today’s wars are more likely to be civil wars⁽⁵⁾ and conflict is increasingly likely to be civic conflict,⁽⁶⁾ which is largely urban in nature. Moreover, criminal violence and armed conflict of various sorts are increasingly hard to distinguish from one another in many parts of the world, again particularly – as Moser points out – in the cramped and often less effectively governed spaces of urban “slums”.⁽⁷⁾ There is already a substantial literature on the nature of such “urban violence” and many overlapping forms of response to it, including criminal justice approaches to local community strategies for coping with lives saturated by violence or the threat of violence, militarized policing initiatives, municipality-driven social services approaches, and more recent Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) programmes (see, for example, the World Bank’s 2011 Report, Violence in the City). What is of interest (though it goes somewhat under-remarked) is that many of these are in fact internationally driven responses that work to contain the problem within the places where it is found. This is a point to which we shall return, but first, what is “urban violence” and what is it to humanitarian organizations in particular?

a. Concepts of urban violence

As the editors of this special issue have earlier demonstrated, violence in cities can take many forms. It may be state based or occur during situations of war (as in Gaza City or Baghdad or Kabul); or it may be non-state based (as with resistance movements and terrorist groups in these same cities, or relatively localized gang violence in places such as Guatemala City); or it may be a combination of the two, with large-scale gang conflicts in some places increasingly drawing-in the state (as in Brazil or Colombia): what the ICRC refers to as “other situations of violence”. The city is not itself violent, however, and Rodgers usefully draws attention to the ecological and demographic assumptions that lie behind many accounts of urban spaces (and global South slums in particular) as inherently dangerous.⁽⁸⁾ There is a reductionist reading of urban space at work in these assumptions in conjunction with a fear of social disorder, pejorative in its implications for those individuals deemed to be the bearers of urban anarchy.⁽⁹⁾ But even critical accounts of slums are not immune to this, and in much of the literature on urban violence “the urban” is taken for granted.⁽¹⁰⁾ Jütersonke et al. take even geographers to task for this.⁽¹¹⁾ Yet in truth, as David Harvey’s work from 1989 reminds us, geographers have been more attuned than most to the need to treat processes of urbanization and socioeconomic changes as mutually constitutive.⁽¹²⁾

A lot hangs on the conceptualization of urban space, then. There is, first, a notable geographical variation in the way that violence is defined in different urban settings that needs to be better taken into account. In Tegucigalpa, for example, urban violence is understood as inherent to the city, such that, in one MSF worker’s words, “… violence is the main strategy for solving ANY problem.” (authors’ emphasis)⁽¹³⁾ In Beirut, by contrast, the tendency is to speak of violence in urban areas. The city itself is seen as an amplifier of violence in the one, and as the victim of violence, even “urbicide”, in the other.⁽¹⁴⁾ Of course, these are very different urban environments; while there may be poverty in parts of Beirut, it does not reach the level of structural embeddedness that it does in Tegucigalpa. But this is just the point: the discourse of urban violence cannot make room for such differences in its scripting of urban space as uniformly fertile terrain for violence.

Second, and most important, the current discourse around urban violence may perhaps be too readily co-opted by those who wish to localize the problem (and who often reserve the right to do so from a position of supposed international authority). The problem with this, as Stephen Graham writes, is that it misses the wider point:

“… just as it is no longer adequate to theorize cities as local, bounded sites that are separated off from the rest of the world, so, similarly, political violence is now fuelled and sustained by transnational networks that can be global and local at the same time.”⁽¹⁵⁾

This results in a “rescaling” of cities and organized violence in relation to one another, which comes, as Beall et al. point out, from what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “… the implosion of global and national politics into the urban world.”⁽¹⁶⁾

b. Humanitarian actors and urban violence

Urban violence, however defined, is not a traditional area of interest, much less expertise, for humanitarians. “Violence is linked to fear and insecurity, which pervades people’s lives with serious implications for trust, well-being and social capital among communities and individuals”( ¹⁷ ) writes Caroline Moser, and these are all, to be sure, issues that humanitarians have confronted in their missions around the world. But they are not humanitarian issues as such. Or at least they weren’t until recently. It may still have been the case in 2007, as David Satterthwaite then pointed out, that “… many bilateral agencies still avoid funding urban areas and have no urban policies [and that]… most bilateral agencies give a very low priority to infrastructure.”⁽¹⁸⁾ But funding is not always an appropriate guide to policy interest, and today humanitarian actors are taking the question of urban emergencies very seriously. UNHCR, in its 2009 Policy on Refugee Protection and Solutions in Urban Areas⁽¹⁹⁾ identifies a range of problems specifically confronting urban refugees, from the threat of arrest and detention to inadequate and overcrowded shelter, as well as vulnerability to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), HIV–AIDS, human smuggling and trafficking. The “humanitarian consequences” of such violence are now routinely discussed.⁽²⁰⁾ Conflict has transitioned from the peasant wars of the twentieth century to new forms of urban-indexed conflict and violence,⁽²¹⁾ and it seems, in short, that humanitarians, traditionally concerned with the former type of conflict, are simply adapting themselves to the new global geography of organized violence. The result in any case, as António Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees puts it, is that “… increasingly, cities will be the main site of humanitarian response to the needs of the population.”⁽²²⁾

c. Explaining humanitarians’ turn to urban violence

It is tempting, but wrong, to read IHOs’ increased focus on urban violence as an attempt to expand their market share (or at least adapt to the changing marketplace of human suffering). Humanitarians have, to date, actually found it quite hard to fund their operations in cities: by our reckoning, they are at present doing so largely at cost to themselves and in the face of a good many actors who would rather they were not there. This has certainly been the case in Nairobi, for example, where 60 per cent of the city’s dwellers are packed into less than five per cent of the city’s total land area and distributed among more than 130 informal settlements. Clearly, there is no readily accessed space here where humanitarian actors might think about setting up traditional disaster response programmes. But, what is more, no two urban environments are alike: Kibera in Nairobi is not the same as Complexo do Alemão in Rio. This makes the sort of “standardized” response that humanitarians like to operate with, and to some extent have grown dependent upon operating with, much less useful.⁽²³⁾

More convincing explanations for humanitarians’ growing interest in addressing violence in cities turn upon the unique contributions that humanitarians are able to make in what, as other contributors to this volume underscore, are highly complex situations. Humanitarians themselves sometimes point to the fact that humanitarian needs may exist alongside chronic problems of poverty in urban environments. They also suggest that, when violence in cities begins to resemble a classic armed conflict situation, then they have considerable expertise that may be useful.⁽²⁴⁾ These are post-hoc justifications for the most part, however. To explain what really put urban violence on the humanitarian agenda, we would argue that it is necessary to take a more historical approach and to locate the humanitarian interest in urban violence at the confluence of two developments.

The first of these was what might be termed a “Collier moment”⁽²⁵⁾ for humanitarians: the macro-level (and much commented upon) demographic “tipping point” in the shift to an urban world in 2008 and the fallout from the Haiti earthquake of January 2010, both of which put the problems of working in urban environments at the very forefront of the humanitarian agenda. An important component of this was the IASC’s “Meeting humanitarian challenges in urban areas” strategy document from 2010.⁽²⁶⁾ It is a two-year Action Plan circulated to IASC agencies and interested partners that largely took its rationale from the urgency of the fact that: “Of the total 3.3 billion urban dwellers today, one-third or one billion, live in precarious, under-served informal settlements and slums which compound their vulnerability to humanitarian crises.”⁽²⁷⁾ Results from the Haiti six-month post-earthquake evaluation also fed into this agenda-setting report and into humanitarian thinking more broadly. And while this may not have any particular bearing upon the reasons why they have turned to violence in particular, the nature of humanitarians’ “turn to the city” is nonetheless important to understanding how violence is perceived as a specifically urban problem.⁽²⁸⁾

Second, as Michael Barnett has shown, humanitarian organizations have over recent years, and independently of these other developments, expanded their operations more generally, beyond simply offering relief.⁽²⁹⁾ Especially since the end of the Cold War, IHOs have increasingly begun to act on the root causes of suffering rather than its amelioration, and it is in this context that the challenge of the city has been raised. In 2010, for example, a political advisor at the ICRC wrote in the pages of the organization’s in-house journal – specifically referencing urban violence in Paris, Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro – that “… this article is inspired by problems that cry out for a humanitarian response.”⁽³⁰⁾ Asking why the ICRC is operating in countries at peace, with no applicability of international humanitarian law of which the ICRC is a recognized guardian, the author observes:

“Perhaps the answer is that, precisely because the ICRC’s mandate and primary interest in armed conflict are so clear, it can afford to explore situations on the periphery of its mandate where it can offer its services on the basis of its right of humanitarian initiative, recognized by all. While remaining within the framework drawn for it by the international community, the ICRC would be failing to live up to its responsibilities if it were not to attempt to understand how better to prepare for the challenges of tomorrow. In doing so, it has to establish criteria by which to gauge whether or not it should try to work in these situations.”⁽³¹⁾

The reference to urban violence being “on the periphery of its mandate” is important for two reasons. First, it directs attention to IHOs’ recognition that they are entering what is for them relatively uncharted terrain. Second, and more importantly, it reveals that they are willing to experiment with norms and procedures in order to better incorporate this. As we explore below, this recognition of limits – lack of knowledge, mandate, trust, etc. – is central for an appreciation of how IHOs conceptualize and seek to govern in urban settings.

III. Urban Governmentalities: The Politics of Urban Violence Mitigation

In contrast to many domestic security service and police responses, the humanitarian response to violence in urban areas is arguably less categorical in recognizing the multi-faceted nature of the problem. Here, IHOs seek to translate into the domain of urban violence existing approaches to what they would call “complex emergencies”. In Colombia, for example, the ICRC are keenly aware that perpetrators of violence may also be victims. In Brazil, WVI are alert to the “economics” of the gang trade, which actively seeks out youth labour precisely because minors cannot be jailed if caught for breaking the law. This willingness to engage in the political (at times even the political-economic) factors surrounding violence is surprising for anyone familiar with humanitarian operations. So too is humanitarians’ emphasis on context-specific factors in the design of programmes: indeed, there seems to be a clear recognition of the fact that urban areas do not conform to any one particular type but are, rather, “… complex and context specific.”⁽³²⁾ And yet, in their own classifications, one does also see the traditional humanitarian desire to separate out perpetrators (gangs, irresponsible states, political radicals) from victims (“vulnerable groups”, “affected populations”). And as we discuss below, there is a distinct governmental logic at work here that we think stems, paradoxically, from IHOs’ own limited agency in these contexts.

a. Mobilizing vulnerability for the task of governing

Urban populations, in contrast to refugees in camps, may always remain largely undocumented.⁽³³⁾ They are also typically seen as less “legible”.⁽³⁴⁾ The result is that a governmentalizing inclination is increasingly being brought to bear by humanitarian organizations upon urban populations, so as to close this gap. As part of “getting the strategy right” in their approach to the city, for example, one important policy document states that: “Humanitarian actors should be prepared for ‘governance gaps’ and manage these through their operational strategies.”⁽³⁵⁾ Furthermore, there is a strong emphasis on the need for humanitarian relief in urban settings, particularly with regard to violence, to be “community based”. This is a significant shift in register from humanitarians’ traditional focus on individuals in need (as the rights-bearing subjects of international humanitarian law) and it directs focus towards the “community” as the reference point for governance efforts.

Crucially, it is their approach to urban space and the risk factors that are perceived to go with it that, we argue, have prompted this shift of emphasis in the traditional mode of operation of IHOs. The perceived challenges of offering protection in an urban setting now become a key rationale in themselves for developing a series of techniques that address violence as a product of local community dynamics. The tail is thus seen to be wagging the dog: gaining community “trust” becomes a strategic priority because it is the trust and acceptance of the local community that is central to allowing humanitarians to be there in the first place.⁽³⁶⁾ The IASC guidelines thus variously state, for example, that “… a community-based approach may be more appropriate …” and that “… putting communities at the core of an integrated response yields higher impacts.”⁽³⁷⁾

The issue of “legibility” (in Scott’s sense⁽³⁸⁾) – of making a particular urban locale both governable and safe for IHOs – has even led humanitarian organizations to link financing mechanisms directly to the quest for detailed knowledge about the “needs” of the community and possible entry points for action. World Vision International (WVI) has thus made use of its child-sponsoring programme, which requires the collection of information about the children in question and their families, as an asset in its urban violence programming. Data gathered through the reporting requirements for these child-sponsoring programmes are being used to develop new modes of intervention.⁽³⁹⁾ And in a pilot project in Rio de Janeiro, the ICRC is working in part to improve conditions of detention in prisons: an effective way to demonstrate that their presence is a neutral one, upon which basis they may hope to gain local ‘purchase’ with the gangs themselves, without treading on the feet of the police authorities either.⁽⁴⁰⁾

b. Governmentality and inequality

There is a link, albeit indirect, between this productive way of conceptualizing and acting on urban violence on the one hand, and the relative marginalization of inequality as a source of violence on the other. As Moser and McIlwaine point out, “… acknowledgement of the context-specific nature of people’s experiences of violence does not preclude an analysis of the structural inequalities of power that underlie these variations.”⁽⁴¹⁾ But in practice, it may do: as we have seen, IHOs enter a pre-defined space of both symbolic and material constraints that they seek to transform and render amenable to intervention. In so doing, IHOs focus on engaging the community – from which trust and access and security is seen to flow – and not on the structural features (such as locally expressed inequalities) that help sustain the phenomenon of urban violence in the first place.

Here, as elsewhere, questions of insecurity are often framed as a problem requiring a concomitant solution drawn from the toolbox of security, thus excluding from view questions of vulnerability, political exclusion or socioeconomic inequalities. The concept of “resilience” that is gaining traction within IHOs and other organizations working in conflict-ridden contexts is a manifestation of this relative de-politicization of insecurity. Resilience is, wrongly we would argue, scripted as the “progressive” way of responding to security problems because it shuns overt, top-down security responses in favour of bottom-up strategies for coping.⁽⁴²⁾ But coping is not redistribution or political change. By building on, rather than challenging, the underlying securitization of the problem, the concept of resilience has a tendency to remove political issues from the picture. While Barnett⁽⁴³⁾ is right to point out that humanitarian actors have moved beyond symptoms and have started to act on root causes, IHOs’ move to act on urban violence suggests that they are doing so in a rather narrowly defined way, approaching the city as a space to be secured and closed off rather than enabled or opened up. And what is selected for intervention at the end of all this are not the structures themselves but those “local bearers” of structural problems that present themselves as more readily legible, such as the participants in programmes aimed at consciousness-raising, educational programmes, mobile clinics and so on. This has implications, as we discuss below, when it comes to the “internationalization” of urban violence.

IV. Global/Local Linkages: Internationalizing Urban Violence

Much is made of the fact that lying behind the problem of escalating violence in urban slums in Latin America are international “drugs circuits” and “crime networks”.⁽⁴⁴⁾ While there is indeed a significant transnational dimension to the drugs trade and thus to urban violence, an equally important transnational aspect that has so far received much less attention is the nature of international responses to it. The crucial question here, from the humanitarian perspective, is how to account for the particular ways in which violence in specific geographical spaces takes on meaning as part of a “global” phenomenon.

a. The “humanitarianization” of security and the securitization of humanitarianism

Humanitarian actors have long advanced a set of universal norms – such as the “protection” (of civilians), grounded in International Humanitarian Law – that has helped legitimize and give strength to their call for a “responsibility to protect” (R2P).⁽⁴⁵⁾ This R2P has served to lower the threshold for interventions to protect against genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. While humanitarian organizations are adamant that their long-standing concern with protection as a humanitarian concern has little to do with the charged discussions of intervention and sovereignty, the result is nonetheless a certain “humanitarianization” of international security discourse. This is intimately linked to the success of humanitarian and also human rights advocacy in general over the past two decades. The result has been that humanitarian arguments have become more central to international security debates, not least in the UN Security Council, which has referenced the protection of civilians as a justification for interventions, most recently in Libya and in Côte D’Ivoire.

At the same time, humanitarian organizations have, over the last decade, increasingly come to operate in settings where armed groups have directly targeted their staff at a new scale – the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq being the most prominent examples – prompting humanitarian actors to establish new safeguards aimed at protecting staff and, at times, having to make difficult decisions to withdraw from particular settings. In August 2013, for example, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) issued a statement explaining why they felt compelled to leave Somalia:

“… security is not the reason we left, nor is the presence of criminal elements. What dashed our last bit of hope of working in the country was that the very parties with whom we had been negotiating minimum levels of security tolerated and accepted attacks against humanitarian workers.”⁽⁴⁶⁾

These two developments – the way that humanitarian concerns have become central to debates about international security, and the localized relationship between trust and security as it plays out on the ground – have reconfigured the relationship between humanitarian organizations and other actors.

It is this that helps explain the seeming inevitability of the turn to urban violence. Now that they work more frequently in risk-prone and violent urban settings, humanitarians are adopting new internal guidelines and new modes of operation.⁽⁴⁷⁾ But in the absence of an already established modus operandi for these risk-prone settings and a discourse on risk and security that privileges individuals as subjects with universal rights (that are protected by humanitarian organizations when states fail to do so), humanitarian organizations’ thinking about urban violence would have seemed that much less logical. An in-built tendency to universalism is thus the condition of possibility for humanitarian organizations to move towards the edges of their self-described mandates locally in cities. Discourses on securitization and resilience are not so much drivers of this as concepts that become pervasive to the extent that they travel in the same direction. And given the professionalization and transnationalization of humanitarian relief as a distinct system or field over the last two decades, these ideas refract back beyond the humanitarian sector.

b. Transnationalization of the local

In our view, there are epistemological as much as institutional implications that follow on from this simultaneous professionalization and transnationalization of humanitarian relief over the last two decades. The modern humanitarian network – consisting of professionals who make careers in different humanitarian organizations, both NGOs and international organizations – establishes the parameters within which something is identified, made into a “problem” and acted upon.⁽⁴⁸⁾ Here, humanitarian actors thrive on competition and cooperation, and the position from which “urban violence” is defined and acted upon is taken up in this process. But what is ultimately at stake in defining urban violence as a distinct problem to be defined and acted upon as a humanitarian concern? Asking this question, we argue, invites reflections on how the specialization and professionalization of certain tasks to be performed by some types of actors rather than others (by professionals, say) hollows out the space for meaningful political debates over what is defined in terms of “urban violence”, and that could, or perhaps should, be defined in terms of marginalization, inequality or redistribution.

As Ilana Feldman has shown in the case of Gaza, there is much at stake in defining something as principally a “humanitarian” crisis, as it tends to direct attention away from debates about the underlying political causes and their potential solutions.⁽⁴⁹⁾ The general humanitarian modus operandi is that of addressing immediate needs and recognizing the particular value of not engaging in sensitive debates about the causes of suffering. This is not to suggest that humanitarian organizations are not vocal in their advocacy. It is merely to highlight that, as with the governmentalization of urban violence discussed above, the translation of locally manifest forms of violence (albeit they may be the product of international processes) into a universalist humanitarian discourse is a very distinctive way of defining and addressing urban social challenges – one that privileges professionals steeped in an often technical policy language and that serves to downplay rather than elevate the political and structural stakes involved.

Humanitarian organizations use and establish categories that shape how urban violence is understood, this time as part of a wider set of debates about a “global public sphere”.⁽⁵⁰⁾ The tendency towards universalization – urban violence as a global problem – can marginalize or transform vernacular political categories through which urban violence might also be addressed and understood. Here, human rights language is of the essence, as it is human rights that are increasingly seen to be lost or violated when violence erodes the various forms of social, natural, financial, physical and human capital that individuals require to support their livelihoods and protect themselves in vulnerable situations.⁽⁵¹⁾

c. Human rights and urban violence

While the promotion of human rights may be a means of reducing armed conflict as part of a negotiating strategy, restoring human rights is not necessarily something that will straightforwardly reduce violence itself. This renders the value of a “human rights-based approach” to armed violence less apparent than it intuitively sounds since, as Harry Englund has shown, human rights language may draw attention away from the structural problems at stake and hollow out the categories used to direct attention to the problem.⁽⁵²⁾ More directly, one effect of humanitarian organizations’ actions is to apply different (international) legal frameworks to different scales of violence. From the perspective of IHOs this is very useful. The ICRC, for example, justifies its activity in relation to its own Other Situations of Violence (OSV) doctrine (situations that “… while not reaching the threshold of armed conflict, can have serious humanitarian consequences”⁽⁵³⁾) when the blanket coverage of International Humanitarian Law (which applies only to situations of war) is deemed insufficient. Another frequently used justificatory-cum-legal framework is that of human rights.

The problem is that such selective framings rebound back upon those experiencing violence in the first place and may alter how they are expected to “claim” their material right to security.⁽⁵⁴⁾ Nonetheless, to the extent that the forms of “civic conflict” that urban violence in practice often entails are “… generally linked to state failures to provide security, growth and welfare in urban areas …”,( ⁵⁵ ) it is clear that finding ways to establish “civic rights” is important. The point is simply that doing this might imply a reduction in the activity of humanitarians rather than being an invitation for them to do more, which is what it tends to be taken to mean.

V. Urban Violence as Assemblage: Cross-Sectoral Challenges of Urban Violence

For humanitarians, the question of what their role in addressing armed violence in cities should and could be (if anything at all) is still open. Humanitarians may be able to work in conjunction with local health services and ministries of health as “force multipliers” in a more positive sense than the term was perhaps originally intended to connote. And they may be willing to go where others are not and can actively direct people towards relevant care services where that is otherwise unlikely to happen.⁽⁵⁶⁾ The benefit of this work is not something that is likely to be affirmed through statistical exegesis, not least because the context can vary so greatly.⁽⁵⁷⁾ What nonetheless seems clear is that humanitarians increasingly find themselves at the intersection of governments, private sector actors and civil society actors, all of whom, as Moser points out, “… increasingly prioritize violence reduction.”⁽⁵⁸⁾ But all of them also prioritize maximizing their own authority. It is to this particular assemblage – of “… sites, objects and tools …” as Collier and Ong put it – that we now briefly turn.⁽⁵⁹⁾

a. Protection and claims to authority over urban violence

As explored in Section IV, there is at present no clear answer that can be given to the question of precisely what formal legal basis IHOs such as the ICRC, WVI and MSF operate on. And to the extent that there isn’t one, this can only be a marker of a lack of state sovereignty in these urban settings.⁽⁶⁰⁾ For some, this may be an open invitation to “humanitarianize” the situation; but there are always limits to what humanitarian organizations can do. In 2009, 13 IHOs were ejected from Darfur when the government decided that they were connected with the ICC decision against President Omer Al-Bashir. It was a reminder that, for all the talk of humanitarians as a third wing of western imperialism, they are ultimately only able to operate (at scale) at the behest of host governments.

It warrants setting this tension between IHOs and local states in historical perspective. In the mid-twentieth century, it was traditionally argued, the state’s monopoly over legitimate violence was most strongly challenged at the margins of state territories and across non-urban expanses of land. Today, as is clear from such varied actions as Mexico’s mano dura or Brazil’s UPPs, it is the question of “… how the public safety problem in urban spaces is dealt with …” that will, as urbanization intensifies, increasingly “… determine citizens’ perceptions of the accountability and effectiveness of the state in upholding the social contract between the citizens and the state.”⁽⁶¹⁾ Urban spaces that have become effectively no-go areas as a consequence of high levels of violence may well appear to be sites at some distance from de facto sovereign authority. But these spaces are also of increasing importance to states and international organizations, as is evidenced, for example, by the UN–Habitat bi-annual World Urban Forum (established in 2002). With power and resources concentrating in urban space, control over these spaces is likely to become of increasing global, and not just local, importance.⁽⁶²⁾ This is leading to some novel engagements between humanitarians and host states – whereby, for example, humanitarian organizations seek to develop preventive “social violence” modules in collaboration with host government ministries of education that can be inserted into the national curriculum.⁽⁶³⁾

To the extent that this contrasts with much of the work examined above it also challenges humanitarians’ current mode of operations.

b. Shifting terrain – and map?

Humanitarians have often had to deal with local armed and non-democratic political groups in conflict situations. But they have not previously, to our knowledge, sought to mitigate that violence or to actively prevent people from joining groups involved in organized violence, as they are now doing in urban areas across Latin America. The question, as a former ICRC operative puts it, is: “How can you work – via volunteers – to reduce risk and vulnerability so as not to be captured by violent behaviour?” The answers that IHOs have thus far been giving to this sees them drawing on behaviourist approaches from social psychology in a variety of programmes seeking to deter vulnerable individuals from engaging in violence. This has frequently been “added on” to existing work (with youth in violent areas, for example), as in Panama, where an earlier ICRC programme, Brigadas Escolares, has been developed to add violence prevention activities as part of a wider discussion on promoting more effective violence prevention “methodologies”.

Humanitarians thus find themselves in the midst of a wider geography of violence and insecurity that encompasses a greater diversity of actors and institutional logics than is usually recognized, but that also, in the process, demonstrates how rapidly and how broadly humanitarians are establishing themselves in this area. The question that this raises for humanitarians is how they can best learn to deal with both local security services and local gangs on the one hand, and competing discursive constructs on the other. How, for example, should they deal with the wider political implications of large-scale violence that is not covered by International Humanitarian Law? What sort of collaborations and engagements can or should they make with local community groups and civil society actors, with a host of governance actors at the local and international level, and even with state militaries?

In their response to this, humanitarians are in many respects seeking to establish a certain degree of local order that, as we argued above, may come to resemble the governmentalizing approach that also leads people to tolerate armed groups in their midst in the absence of state services: “… a clear and predictable social order …” as Ignacio Cano puts it, albeit one based on violence and the threat of violence.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Is the future one of multiple “authority” actors competing for people’s allegiance, then? This seems unlikely. One of the problems that leaves violence so ingrained in vulnerable urban spaces is that over time communities have become socialized into living with it, leaving them to expect nothing else. Humanitarians have the potential to challenge such expectations. At the same time, humanitarians must be careful to avoid being quite as selective as other violence reduction actors have been, such as Brazil’s much-touted Police Pacification Units. These units have been successful in reducing violence in certain areas rather than others – typically the more visible favelas – while displacing the problems elsewhere and leaving suburban areas, such as Baixada Fluminense, with the highest homicide rates.⁽⁶⁵⁾

VI. Conclusions

What humanitarian organizations are doing to respond to armed violence in urban areas should be of interest to urbanists and scholars of violence alike. The twenty-first century city is quite clearly a site of acute human need: a space not only of conflict and violence but also of spatial separation and socioeconomic marginalization and of interlocking forms of injustice. It is only in some senses a humanitarian space, however. Humanitarian organizations may indeed be well positioned to facilitate dialogue between state and local violence actors, but that does not mean that they are necessarily capable of addressing the root causes of gang enrolment (as in many cases they are seeking to do) by trying to compensate for the lack of, say, educational, recreational or employment opportunities that confronts local citizens, and youths in particular. Humanitarians have traditionally sought to work around local host states in their rural operations. Perhaps the greatest challenge for them in addressing urban violence will be to learn how to work to restore state capacity rather than to replace it – to wittingly become civic multipliers rather than the force multipliers that they have, in certain contexts, unwittingly become – and to do so without compromising either their independence or impartiality or their neutrality.

Such a task will frequently be one that facilitates the reintroduction of political capacity to the slums (as opposed to relying on non-state forms of governance), perhaps first by creating situations in which capacity and legitimacy can be reconstructed on “neutral” terrain and in ways that substitute for what violence perpetrators currently offer, rather than simply seeking to oust violence perpetrators from the local community (since the two can hardly be straightforwardly separated). Doing this will involve humanitarians resisting the temptation to take control of local forms of governance themselves, since to do so will ultimately only further remove the local state from slum areas. And this, in turn, means resolving the four key challenges identified above. First, it means incorporating a more critical understanding of urban space and the social life of cities in the construction of humanitarian mandates for intervention. Second, it means resisting the tendency towards a governmentalization of the problem of violence in cities. Third, it means local urban problems will themselves need to be seen in relation to international structures, and not just as localized failures or as spaces somehow outside of the global capitalist political economy. More specifically, urban violence will need to be seen not just in its political, institutional, social and economic context,⁽⁶⁶⁾ but in its inter-digitations with wider social and economic structures and, in particular, with various forms of inequality. Finally, it means addressing some quite complex (but also promising) cross-sectoral challenges, which raise their own questions of coordination and, above all, oversight and accountability. Here it is not so much humanitarians’ experience with the violence of warfare that qualifies them to be important urban violence reduction actors, so much as their political experience building bridges between a range of very different actors.

It is widely accepted that understandings of violence as complex and multi-dimensional, and in certain senses subjective even, are a challenge to policy makers who prefer to work with concrete categories.⁽⁶⁷⁾ This makes the humanitarian approach unusual in that humanitarians are themselves the instigators of an approach to armed violence reduction that is at odds with their own preferred institutional norms: they are challenging themselves, that is to say, as much as they are challenging other actors on the ground. But this may be something that humanitarians are uniquely capable of doing, since their organizations, after all, prioritize values as much as means and seek constantly to better juggle the two.⁽⁶⁸⁾ Seen in these terms, humanitarians represent one of the most intriguing and potentially important violence prevention actors in the slums at the same time as they constitute one of the most pervasive new governance actors, raising questions not only about what can be done to reduce violence in urban areas but who should be doing it and how.