Compromising the humanitarian principles? Ethical foundations of humanitarian negotiations with a ruthless regime

Humanitarian action is commonly defined by the principles of humanity, impartiality, neutrality and independence. In spite of the prevalence of these principles, disagreements on their justification and practical application persist. While this is a source of great frustration among policy-makers and practitioners, it expresses familiar tensions between fundamental positions in the ethics of global politics. In this article, we explore these tensions by analysing a controversy over humanitarian compromises with the Assad regime in Syria during the recent civil war. The regime ruthlessly instrumentalised humanitarian assistance to mop up after its atrocities, suppress political opposition, and prop up its war economy. This was reflected in continuous humanitarian negotiations with the regime where humanitarian actors either had to compromise on their principles or leave the victims behind. In spite of public criticism, major agencies consistently compromised, entailing debates on whether they thereby violated their principles and whether such violation would be justified. In this article, we start out by sorting the ethical premises of this debate with a basic distinction between deontology and consequentialism, and between pluralism and solidarism. We then demonstrate that rather than falling neatly into these categories all actual positions in the debate involved combinations of all four types. This is illustrated by placing the positions along two intersecting continuums. In this way, we nuance standard accounts of the ethics of global politics while introducing a new theoretical framework to the ethics of humanitarian action.