Description
Building back trust and upgrading the UN are points 6 and 8 of the key proposals in the UN’s Common Agenda. These may be seen as implicit acknowledgments of a system that is, if not in crisis, at least experiencing contestations and a questioning of the relevance of the international institutions that have purported to uphold frameworks of global governance. This paper examines how these contestations manifest within those institutions that govern the human rights and humanitarian sphere, which have often put forth both moral/ethical as well as expert narratives in order to claim legitimacy when acting to “serve” the needs of so called “vulnerable populations.” Despite this, both human rights and humanitarian actors have often failed to uphold their protection mandates.
The refugee protection industrial complex is one area where “failures to protect” have provoked in some quarters an erosion of trust and a critical examination of those actors, in particular of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Building on a critical analysis of Barnett and Finnemore’s theory of “pathologies” in international organizations, and using interview data collected from UNHCR and other international humanitarian actors, this paper explains the failure of these organizations to successfully fulfill their mandates as a result of key weaknesses in their trust building and lack of organizational upgrades. While the UN’s Common Agenda may be correct in identifying these points as key proposals for the future, this paper highlights the limits of humanitarian institutions’ ability to do this in practice.
