Sacred Aid

Faith and Humanitarianism

Michael Barnett and Janice Gross Stein

Examines the dynamic relationship between the secularization and sanctification of humanitarianism.
Explores the structures and everyday acts of aid agencies and other actors that create, sustain, and dissolve the differences between religious and secular humanitarianism.
Argues against the dominant line in international relations theory that suggests that the only kind of faith is religious faith.

Sacred Aid

Faith and Humanitarianism

Michael Barnett and Janice Gross Stein

Description

The global humanitarian movement, which originated within Western religious organizations in the early nineteenth century, has been of most important forces in world politics in advancing both human rights and human welfare. While the religious groups that founded the movement originally focused on conversion, in time more secular concerns came to dominate. By the end of the nineteenth century, increasingly professionalized yet nominally religious organization shifted from reliance on the good book to the public health manual. Over the course of the twentieth century, the secularization of humanitarianism only increased, and by the 1970s the movement's religious inspiration, generally speaking, was marginal to its agenda. However, beginning in the 1980s, religiously inspired humanitarian movements experienced a major revival, and today they are virtual equals of their secular brethren.

From church-sponsored AIDS prevention campaigns in Africa to Muslim charity efforts in flood-stricken Pakistan to Hindu charities in India, religious groups have altered the character of the global humanitarian movement. Moreover, even secular groups now gesture toward religious inspiration in their work. Clearly, the broad, inexorable march toward secularism predicted by so many Westerners has halted, which is especially intriguing with regard to humanitarianism. Not only was it a highly secularized movement just forty years ago, but its principles were based on those we associate with "rational" modernity: cosmopolitan one-worldism and material (as opposed to spiritual) progress. How and why did this happen, and what does it mean for humanitarianism writ large? That is the question that the eminent scholars Michael Barnett and Janice Stein pose in Sacred Aid, and for answers they have gathered chapters from leading scholars that focus on the relationship between secularism and religion in contemporary humanitarianism throughout the developing world. Collectively, the chapters in this volume comprise an original and authoritative account of religion has reshaped the global humanitarian movement in recent times.

Sacred Aid

Faith and Humanitarianism

Michael Barnett and Janice Gross Stein

1 Introduction: The Secularization and Sanctification of Humanitarianism

2 Faith in Markets
Stephen Hopgood and Leslie Vinjamuri

3 "Cultural proximity" and the Conjuncture of Islam with Modern Humanitarianism
Jonathan Benthall

4 Religious Obligation or Altruistic Giving? Muslims and Charitable Donations
Ajaz Ahmed Khan

5 The Role of Spirituality in Humanitarian Crisis Survival and Recover
Peter Walker, Dyan Mazurana, Amy Warren, George Scarlett, and Henry Louis

6 Religious Giving Outside the Law in New Delhi
Erica Bornstein

7 Pyrrhic Victories? French Catholic Missionaries, Modern Expertise and Secularizing Technologies
Betrand Taithe

8 Faith in the Machine? Humanitarianism in an Age of Bureaucratization
Michael Barnett

9 Bridging the Sacred and the Profane in Humanitarian Life
Andrea Paras and Janice Gross Stein

Notes
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index

Sacred Aid

Faith and Humanitarianism

Michael Barnett and Janice Gross Stein

Author Information

Michael Barnett is University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at George Washington University.

Janice Gross Stein is Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management and Political Science and Director of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto.

Contributors:

Michael Barnett is University Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at the George Washington University. His most recent book is Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Cornell University Press).

Jonathan Benthall is Professor of Anthropology at the University College London. He has published widely in the fields of the sociology of religion and humanitarianism. His most recent books are The Charitable Crescent: Politics of Aid in the Muslim World (with J. Bellion-Jourdan) and Returning to Religion: Why a Secular Age is Haunted by Faith.

Erica Bornstein is Associate Professor of Anthropology at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her books include Disquieting Gifts: Humanitarianism in New Delhi (Stanford University Press, in press) and The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (Stanford University Press 2005). She is co-editor (with Peter Redfield) of Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics (School for Advanced Research Press 2011) and has published articles in American Ethnologist, Cultural Anthropology, Ethnos, Political and Legal Anthropology Review (PoLAR), and the Journal of Religion in Africa.

Stephen Hopgood is Reader in International Relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and co-Director of the Centre for the International Politics of Conflict, Rights and Justice (CCRJ) at SOAS. His publications include Keepers of the Flame: Understanding Amnesty International (Cornell University Press, 2006). He is currently the holder of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship under the title "Empire of the International."

Henry Louis, a former researcher at the Feinstein International Center, works in the areas of international development and humanitarianism.

Dyan Mazurana is Associate Research Professor at the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University.

Andrea Paras recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto and is now on faculty at the Women's University of Bangladesh.

George Scarlett is a Senior Lecturer at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University.

Janice Gross Stein is the Belzberg Professor of Conflict Management in the Department of Political Science and the Director of the Munk School for Global Affairs at the University of Toronto. She is the co-author, with Eugene Lang, of the prize-winning The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar, and co-editor, with Peter Gourevitch and David Lake, of Credibility and Non-Governmental Organizations in a Globalizing World (2012). Her most recent book is Diplomacy in the Digital Age.

Betrand Taithe is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Manchester, where he also is a director of the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (hcri.ac.uk) and edits the European Review of History- Revue européenned'histoireand book series for Manchester University Press. He has published widely on war and medicine, humanitarianism and missionaries including: Defeated Flesh (1999), Citizenship and Wars (2001), The Killer Trail (2009), Evil Barbarism and Empire (2011, eds T. Crook, R. Gill, B.Taithe).

Leslie Vinjamuri teaches at the School of Oriental and African Studies where he co-directs the Center for Conflict and of the Centre for the International Politics of Conflict, Rights. Her articles have appeared in leading journals, including International Security, Ethics and International Affairs, Survival, and the Annual Review of Political Science.

Amy Warren is Research Associate at the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University.

Peter Walker is Director of the Feinstein International Center, an institute of Tufts University's Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy. In addition to his ongoing consultation work, he previously worked for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and Oxfam International. He has published widely on humanitarianism, including, with David Maxwell, The Shape of the Humanitarian System.

Sacred Aid

Faith and Humanitarianism

Michael Barnett and Janice Gross Stein

Reviews and Awards

"This marvelous book transgresses many boundaries. It examines foreign aid through the dual optics of sanctification and secularization. Since all humanitarian organizations are faith-based and since efficiency has become perhaps their highest calling, we are left without established categories to make sense of the world. Michael Barnett and Janice Stein force us to think anew. And they have assembled an impressive set of authors who provide the evidence that makes this book's far-reaching claims compelling. Sacred Aid opens entirely new vistas and compels us to reconsider fundamental political issues."--Peter J. Katzenstein, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor of International Studies, Cornell University

"Everybody now recognizes that the 'faith-based' or 'faith-inspired' NGO is a crucial component of the global architecture of humanitarian relief and economic development. But almost nobody has thought critically about what exactly a 'faith-based' or 'faith-inspired' NGO really is, much less what distinguishes it from its 'secular' counterparts. That is, until now. In Sacred Aid, distinguished international relations scholars Michael Barnett and Janice Stein have brought their characteristic creativity and lucidity to this crucial though neglected thicket of conceptual and practical puzzles. In the process, among the many insights they and their contributors offer is that the boundary between 'sacred' and 'secular' humanitarianism is not nearly so neat as most of us have assumed."--Timothy Samuel Shah, Associate Director of The Religious Freedom Project, Berkley Center For Religion, Peace, and World Affairs

"This volume is a timely response to the challenge of how to think and write about the politics of humanitarianism after the critique of secularism. These essays take us deep inside a diverse series of projects, actors and associations that intervene in the lives of individuals and communities around the world in the name of convictions and commitments both secular and religious. Sacred Aid sets a high bar for a new research agenda on these influential actors and processes, and the political and religious worlds that they create."--Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Associate Professor of Political Science, Northwestern University

"Sacred Aid is a welcomed addition to the aid literature. While there is much research to be done, this book serves as a good first step to understand the changing nature of humanitarianism. The book is highly recommended for scholars, humanitarian workers, and policymakers interested in understanding the intersection of religion and humanitarian work. Sacred Aid is also a must read for anyone who teaches classes in economic development, non-profit studies, or foreign aid."--e-International Relations