Description
The humanitarian consequences of organized criminal violence frequently equal or exceed those in armed conflicts. In 2018, for example, 78,667 people were killed violently in Brazil and 43,089 in Mexico, compared with 29,584 in Afghanistan and 16,905 in Syria in the same year. In light of this, international humanitarian agencies—which traditionally respond to armed conflicts and ‘natural’ disasters—are increasingly responding to large-scale criminal violence. An initial wave of literature made the case for a humanitarian response to urban violence, and made suggestions as to how humanitarian agencies should be responding (Harroff-Tavel 2010; Lucchi 2010, 2012; Savage and Muggah 2012). Subsequently, more critical literature has emerged, problematizing the framing of criminal or urban violence as humanitarian crises (Fiori et al. 2016; Reid-Henry and Sending 2014; Sandvik and Hoelscher 2016). However, there has been little work grounded in empirical research on how humanitarian agencies are actually responding in practice. Drawing on three months of research in Mexico, interviewing humanitarian agency officials, this paper begins to address that gap, providing an explanation of what the largest aid agencies are (and are not) doing in that context. It argues that the particular dynamics of criminal violence, and the fact that international humanitarian law does not apply, generate a unique set of challenges, limiting the work of humanitarian agencies, and leading to compromises on humanitarian principles.
