NGOs
Some extracts from Mariella Pandolfi’s “Contract of Mutual (In)Difference: Governance and the Humanitarian Apparatus in Contemporary Albania and Kosovo” (Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies, 10:1, 2003):
With the explosive growth of NGOs of all scales and varieties that has occurred since 1945, we are witnessing a massive transformation in the nature of global governance. Such growth has been fueled by the connected development of the U.N. system, and, more particularly, by the increasing global circulation and legitimization of discourse and politics of “human rights.”
Resolutions adopted by the U.N. Security Council and various international agencies and meetings show that new forms of sovereignty have come into place alongside older, territorialized forms. These new forms legitimize the right of interference and intervention, identifying a deterritorialized sovereignty that migrates around the globe to sites of “crisis” and humanitarian disaster.
She refers to this mobile complex as ‘migrant sovereignties,’ arguing that ‘military forces and multi- and bilateral organizations are transforming into a new form of transnational domination.’ Moreover, she defines the ‘humanitarian apparatus’ as
the entire complex of ideologies, organizational strategies, and actions that unfold due to pressure exerted by two elements: the right to interfere and the temporality of emergency.
This ‘right to interfere’ is, according to Pandolfi, paradoxical: both seeking to strengthen state sovereignty and to apply global principles of governance. She refers to this as ‘two opposed modes of sovereignty,’ which is I think quite wrong, historically and operationally. The ‘paradox’, then, isn’t quite a paradox - it’s inter-nationalism.
Her albeit brief discussion of the ‘temporality of the emergency’ is more interesting, I think.
Determined as a temporal and temporary derogation in a precise context, the emergency category is “logically” opposed to the category of the ordinary. Paradoxically, emergency no longer constitutes an extraordinary or exceptional temporal category in humanitarian intervention. In the territories of humanitarian intervention, it has become the sole temporal modality of the new social contract, which includes the right of interference, temporality of emergency, and necessity of action.
[…] intervention most often occurs where there is the sudden breakdown of a pre-existing equilibrium. Humanitarian action is constructed out of such a “crisis,” for it is here that it legitimates its operation. Yet the notion of the breakdown of a pre-existing equilibrium is ambiguous, as dramatic examples can testify.
