Expedient Humanitarianism in Kenya? the case of Islamic relief Worldwide in Garissa County, 2007-2017

Abstract

This project paper is about the humanitarian activities of the Islamic Relief Worldwide in Garissa County of Kenya from 2007 to 2017. It uses that case study to understand whether humanitarian organizations remain humanitarian in practice or not, and to illuminate the significance of humanitarian principles in the contemporary era. With the beginning of the Cold War, humanitarianism started its gradual change of spirit, moving astray from Henry Dunant’s idealistic identification of humanitarian action and more towards a political or ideological use of this type of aid. The stakeholders of humanitarian aid, be it the activists, donors and governments, to a large degree, accepted that in order to make humanitarian aid work effectively, there need to practice flexibility and compromise. Despite the purely altruistic actions by the humanitarian organizations and their positive impacts on peoples’ lives, the mentioned change of approach opened the horizons of instrumentalization of humanitarian aid, or in other terms, expedient humanitarianism. This paper shows that the demographic and political traits attributed to Garissa could pave way for the Islamic Relief Kenya (IRK) to make a partial (religious, clannist, political) use of humanitarian aid. A historical introduction of Garissa is offered to prepare the reader about the context of this study.