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Global humanitarian needs are at a record high. A staggering number of people around the world require assistance due to ongoing conflicts, natural disasters, and other emergencies. State donors, however, have been caught on the horns of a dilemma of wanting to “do good” and making the hard choices about the allocation of scarce resources. What motivates state donors to assist other countries in need? When the demand for life-saving aid is high but the resources are scarce, how do governments decide which lives are worth saving?
“COVID-19 ‘Humanitarianism’: Geopolitical Logics of Chinese, American, and Russian Assistance” tackles the question of states’ motives for aid in a novel way. Instead of taking “need”, “interest,” or “merit” as self-evident motives for states’ decisions about aid, it treats them as parts of geopolitical discourses through which states, represented by their elites, construct the spaces for political action. It uses a critical geopolitics perspective to study the systems of meanings within China’s, Russia’s, and US’ humanitarian practices punctuated by their histories of accumulated experiences with foreign assistance. It also shows how geopolitical competition between the US, China, and Russia has prompted these states to react to humanitarian crises in ways that undermine the integrity of the humanitarian system.
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