Is it possible to communicate differently? (De)colonisation of visual humanitarian communication

International humanitarian aid aims to help vulnerable groups or populations. To ensure the success of their work, international organisations draw on private sources of funds, thereby avoiding financial dependence on the State, preserving their own identities and maintaining their capacity for rapid response to emergency situations¹. The most direct way for them to raise money – from individuals or from businesses, among other funding sources – is via communication, essentially via the ‘humanitarian photograph’.

In the nineteen-seventies, humanitarian aid made use of visual communication, primarily still photography, to reach out to the public, inform them about their activities and alert them to political and social injustice. Conflicts such as the war in Biafra, the famine in the Sahel² or the Vietnam War were the origin of humanitarianism without borders³. The French organisation Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) became the paradigm for humanitarian aid, putting into practice its own mission statement: ‘take action and speak out, provide treatment and bear witness’⁴. The denunciatory power of an image or photograph makes it a key element in communication. Pictures of starving children and weeping mothers embody ‘ideal victims’⁵, moving spectators – the public – to compassion⁶, an emotion already aroused in the past by photographs taken by missionaries during the colonial process. These photographic images are, at best, ambivalent: while the primary objective of humanitarian aid is to relieve people’s suffering and to ensure ‘respect for life and for people’s physical and moral integrity’⁷, photographs are taken of moments of extreme suffering⁸.

There are two issues: we need to know if photographic images of ‘ideal victims’ have changed in our own time, and, if they have, how this change has come about.

Humanitarian communication and social engagement in the nineteen-seventies

From the earliest days of humanitarian aid, photographs have been the key element in the communication process. Rapid advances in photography made it possible for Europe and the West to record their humanitarian interventions as visual triumphs⁹. The camera became a witness, accompanying different organisations, becoming their most valuable tool. The outcome is ‘social photography’ which aims to show reality in the field, from a western viewpoint, despite the fact that the images raise doubts or questions¹⁰.

Since the nineteen-seventies, with the development of aid without borders, the social engagement angle has become increasingly significant. It is the main axis of media coverage: it is the means of communication that most effectively draws attention to forgotten causes. Relying on social engagement and denunciation, it is ‘… the enemy of indifference and arbitrariness, the instrument of a global conscience’¹¹, giving birth to a whole new genre: humanitarian photography¹².

The display of images of suffering, despite its origins in social engagement, becomes de facto the preferred communication mode of organisations aiming to arouse public compassion and thereby to mobilise donations of aid for the global South. Such images have a catalysing effect on international solidarity, while also creating a specific regime of representation¹³. The continual broadcasting of images with inherent dichotomies and hierarchies engenders a way of seeing and imagining derived from the modern colonial system. Suffering human bodies are seen alongside pictures of health-care professionals in action, contributing to the notorious construct of the imaginary ideal of the western saviour − or ‘white saviour’¹⁴ − committed to science-based action, asserting neutrality in aid interventions.

These images are responsible for a deterministic representation of the humanitarian victim, calling for a kind of universal morality by way of response, illustrated by one-way aid from North to South, which in its turn legitimises the dehumanisation of ‘the other’, making their suffering seem inevitable.

The literature on humanitarian communication states that the principle of social engagement inherent in the process just described is being gradually transformed. This is partly because of an increasingly generalised assumption that social equity has been achieved, and partly because of an advertising model which integrates new, neoliberal communication methods. All this in combination has yielded what we call post-humanitarianism¹⁵.

New principles of communication in humanitarian aid

The increase since the nineteen-nineties in the sheer number of NGOs, and acceptance at policy level that their activities needed regulating, led to the international solidarity movement’s becoming highly professional. This was particularly true of its communication strategies. Many organisations began to compete with one another, prompting state involvement in a humanitarian communication code of ethics¹⁶, while the NGOs resorted to the regular use of advertising agencies¹⁷: ‘associations began to think in terms of strategy and of institutional communication […] and thus turned to advertising agencies’ to help them raise money. In Rony Brauman’s view, ‘communication is being allowed to insidiously take the place of information […]¹⁸.’ If we think of ‘informing’ as a social process and ‘communicating’ as an advertising process, we are witnessing a fundamental change in the basic principles of humanitarian communication.

Neoliberalism in humanitarian aid

In the past twenty years or so, humanitarian aid has changed significantly. The emergence of online networks and digital media made for widespread social movements, which influenced NGOs’ communication methods, as well as what was communicated. Citizens, like institutions, began to take an interest in social and political questions, in the context of an evolving neoliberal model of society¹⁹. The international community expressed a concern to maintain world peace, and organised the first UN Security Council summit²⁰. Concomitantly, an ideology based on minimal regulation, privatisation and the withdrawal of the State from the provision of social services obliged all social activity to acknowledge the sovereignty of the market²¹.

Humanitarian aid is therefore influenced by an ideological system that assumes the ‘neoliberalisation’ of humanitarian aid²²: it is still characterised by its social denunciatory power but depends on the advertising principles of the market²³.

We are witnessing a process by which social issues are being depoliticised, instrumentalised and commercialised. The objective is now a style or regime of representation which will have the desired response in the public it reaches (the ordinary members of the public who donate money) but will do so by putting the humanitarians themselves at the centre of the debate. The revolution caused by the surge in digital communication methods is responsible for putting ‘I’ at the centre of the aid process, in a similar way to businesses developing projects. International NGOs are no longer simple associations, but multinational businesses²⁴ and as such they depend on neoliberal depoliticisation to increase financial giving by e.g., targeted advertising. They rely on the neoliberal ethos: in other words, NGOs, structured like businesses, approach their work in the same way as businesses. Advertising marketing techniques underlie their campaigns for donations: they continually parade and sell their own achievements. To put it differently, they put themselves out there by developing an image. They project themselves as ‘I, the saviour’. This form of communication is closely linked to the colonial process of ‘the civilising guiding hand’. This, too, is neoliberal: to put oneself at the centre and make this act of self-centring the mark of one’s identity. This is the basis of today’s post-humanitarianism, when we applaud the altruism of someone who works in the humanitarian aid sector, the ‘I at the centre’; while allowing some space to the beneficiaries of humanitarian aid, especially women, but seen from a western perspective.

We are dealing, in fact, with a stereotype which either attempts to cross the divide by using language that revictimises ‘the other’ (in this case, the beneficiaries of humanitarian aid); or makes claims for an unrealistic notion of equality based on women’s self-sufficiency and their efforts towards achieving greater autonomy, generally aiming at ‘western freedom’, which is assumed to be the paradigm. Humanitarian communication is thus undergoing a metamorphosis, a sort of plunge into neoliberal values. At the start, in the nineteen-seventies, humanitarian representation had ‘the other’ as its focal point, but in the twenty-first century the sensationalist exhibition of victims − that shock effect − has been abandoned, with our gaze now turned elsewhere. This process illustrates the instrumentalisation of humanitarian aid, a business model which persuades and encourages people to play their part in social change, despite the absolute impossibility of reconciling two diametrically opposed realities.

Post-humanitarianism as a neocolonial construct

This change in strategy influences wider perception, and indeed encourages the normalisation, of injustice or systemic exploitation. It hides the true complexity of the dynamics involved and reinforces the cursory nature of giving: ‘click, donate and forget’²⁵. As this neoliberalism-based communication model has developed, women and girls in the South have been increasingly used in humanitarian aid representation or imagery as the ultimate social group. Their visibility has been enhanced by – amongst other things – the growth of activism, political speeches, social networks and also by the institutionalisation of feminism. This enhanced visibility illustrates the way humanitarian communication is imbued with new principles. Lillie Chouliaraki suggests that post-humanitarianism conjures the image of women and girls in the South as the latest ideal victims, who will end up living better lives thanks to the North’s allowing them to achieve greater autonomy. The concept of ‘empowerment’ developed in the West sets up white, middle-class women as the feminist hegemonic paradigm to aspire to. Taking a colonial perspective, post-humanitarian discourse presents the beneficiaries of humanitarian aid as victims of patriarchal cultural practices, discriminating between them because of racial or ethnic differences. They thus reconstruct and disseminate the imaginary figure of the ‘poor’ woman, from ‘the third world’, ‘oppressed’ – the opposite of western femininity – who needs aid from the global North to be saved, reproducing the neocolonial trope: ‘if western femininity is construed as the chosen norm, southern femininity is depicted as profoundly shaped by the patriarchy, by poverty and by victimisation. This reinforces the sense of a barrier, or a dichotomy, between “us” and “them”²⁶.’ This neocolonial construct is closely tied to neoliberal principles, since it relies on the processes of corporatisation and depoliticisation, creating a re-imagined concept of victimisation, while highlighting differences.

How might humanitarian communication be decolonised?

In the decolonial studies tradition, one can envisage other types of discourse which subvert today’s regime of representation by breaking stereotypes at the centre of the matrix²⁷. There are organisations, mainly at local level, that shape narratives of resistance. Humanitarian aid and the management of humanitarian representation are related to what Maldonado Torres calls the decolonial turn²⁸ in the construction of a different world. Some photographs act as insurrectional demonstrations of self-representation: they provide alternatives to those which depend on the framework of the dominant system. The organisation Cocomacia is an example: its photographs reflect the multidisciplinary character of its work and its interventions, but above all they reflect the way it operates by networking²⁹. This is the opposite of the communication process adopted by international organisations. It is worth noting that the photographs taken by Cocomacia constitute a local ‘circularity’: photographs are taken by themselves, of themselves, for themselves, breaking out of the dominant system and constituting a collective hermetic space which refuses the neoliberal principles of post-humanitarianism³⁰. Cocomacia does not wish to be part of the dominant representational or imagistic framework, but instead to construct its own stories, keeping distinct from the use of representation or imagery as a tool of capital. This intra-community interlinking is championed by decolonial studies, which acknowledge the possibility of constructing an international relationship between North and South within the framework of today’s critique of neoliberal practices in international cooperation. At a conference held by the Andalusian Agency for International Cooperation for Development³¹, the theorist Ochy Curiel maintained that for an international coalition between North and South to be possible, the North would need to examine its own approaches to humanitarian action, e.g., its approach to communication.

Cristina García Martinez, PhD in Hispanic Studies (Université de Grenoble Alpes) and in Information and Communication Sciences with a Gender Perspective (Université Rovira i Virgili).

1. Marie-Laure Le Coconnier & Bruno Pommier. L’action humanitaire, Paris : Presses Universitaires de France, 2012.
2. An example of such an image is ‘Weighing a child for a food aid programme’, taken by the Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. He worked in a number of countries, and during several conflicts. His photographs of the Sahelian drought (Amar, 2000) were published as ‘Sahel:the end of the road‘, a cooperative venture with Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), with revenues from the book benefitting MSF. The image is at https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/cR5d7ob.
3. Rony Brauman. L’Action Humanitaire, Paris : Dominos Flammarion, 2000 ; Philippe Ryfman. Une histoire de l’humanitaire. Paris : La Découverte, 2016.
4. Rony Brauman. Op. cit.
5. Ofra Koffman, Shani Orgad & Rosalind Gill. «Girl power and ‘selfie humanitarianism». Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 29(2), 2015: pp.157–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1022948
6. Susan Sontag. Regarding the pain of others. New York: Picador, 2003.
7. CICR. « ¿Qué es el derecho internacional humanitario? ». Servicio de asesoramiento en derecho internacional humanitario, 2004. https://www.icrc.org/sites/default/files/document/file_list/dih.es_.pdf
8. Luc Boltanski. La Souffrance à distance. Morale humanitaire, médias et politique. Paris: Éditions Métailié, 1933.
9. Lilie Chouliaraki & Anne Vestergaard, Routledge Handbook of Humanitarian Communication. London: Routledge, 2022; André Rouillé. La photo numérique : une force néolibérale. Paris : Éditions l’échappée, 2020.
10. In 1985, Sebastiao Salgado created a photographic essay for Médecins sans frontières. This led to the collection published as Une certaine grâce (A Certain Grace), 2002. One of the photographs in this collection may be seen at: https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/ressources/oeuvre/cR5d7ob. See also Susan Sontag, Op. cit.
11. Rony Brauman & René Backmann. Les médias et l’humanitaire : éthique de l’information ou charité-spectacle. Paris : Cfpj éditions, 1996, p. 20.
12. Heide Fehrenbach & Davide Rodogno (Eds.). Humanitarian Photography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107587694
13. Stuart Hall defines the regime of representation as the sociological structure arising from fixed stereotypical representations or images of a specific population group, in this case the recipients of humanitarian aid. See Stuart Hall. Representation. Cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage Publications, 1992.
14. In 2012, the activist and novelist Teju Cole used the expression ‘white saviour’ in his response to the short film Kony made by the US NGO Invisible Children Inc, produced by its founder Jason Russell, whose aim was to denounce Kony, the leader of the LRA in Uganda. See: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843
15. Lilie Chouliaraki. « Post-humanitarianism». International Journal of Cultural Studies, 13(2), 2010, p.107–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877909356720
16. Pascal Dauvin. La communication des ONG humanitaires. Paris : L’Harmattan, 2010.
17. Amélie Gastaut. La publicité au secours des grandes causes. Paris : Les Arts Décoratifs, 2010, p. 8.
18. Rony Brauman. L’Action Humanitaire. Paris : Dominos Flammarion, 2000, p. 69.
19. Isis Giraldo, « Postfeminismo / Genealogía, geografía y contornos de un concepto ». Debate Feminista, 59,2020. https://doi.org/10.22201/cieg.2594066xe.2020.59.01
20. On 31 January 1992, the first UN Security Council summit was held in New York, with the five permanent members represented: China, the US, France, the Russian Federation and the UK.
21. Jess Butler. «For White Girls Only? Postfeminism and the Politics of Inclusion». Feminist Formations, 25(1), 2013, pp. 35–58. https://doi.org/10.1353/ff.2013.0009
22. Lilie Chouliaraki. « Post-humanitarianism». International Journal of Cultural Studies. 13(2), 2010, pp.107–126. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367877909356720
23. An example is the campaign by Action contre la Faim (Action against Hunger): ‘Leila, 100 francs later‘. This image is at https://madparis.fr/IMG/pdf/livret.pdf
24. Peter Redfield. « Doctors, Borders, and Life in Crisis », Cultural Anthropology, 20(3), 2005, pp. 328– 361.
25. Koffman, Orgad & Gill. Op. cit.
26. Ibid.
27. See note 13 above.
28. Nelson Maldonado Torres. «Sobre la colonialidad del ser: contribuciones al desarrollo de un concepto», In El giro decolonial. Reflexiones para una diversidad epidémica más allá del capitalismo global, pp. 127–169, 2007. Siglo del Hombre Editores.
29. This organisation was the subject of the author’s doctoral research. It is based in the Chocó region of Colombia. It has a gender team, which works on the social, economic, political and territorial rights of women engaged in agricultural activities in the region. https://www.facebook.com/generococomacia/photos_by?locale=es_LA
30. This organisation, like others in the Chocó region, is based on the principle of mutual aid among the women who make up its membership. It thus benefits from a sort of permanent horizontality, which is transmitted via the photographs described.
31. Ochy Curiel, « Crítica de los movimientos descoloniales a la cooperación para el desarrollo». Las Claves de Ochy Curiel. Feminismo Descolonial, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZSHqvKLANQ