What is it about?
What motivates states to assist other countries in need? When the demand for life-saving aid is high but the resources are scarce, how do countries decide which lives are worth saving? This book examines Chinese, Russian, and American allocations of COVID-19 aid and vaccines. It shows how states develop unique reasoning and ethical frameworks that guide their decisions and practices of humanitarian aid. The book illuminates how the competition over alternative frameworks for assistance undermines the integrity of humanitarian regime.
Featured Image
Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Humanitarian aid has been viewed as a distinct form of assistance . With its roots in international humanitarian law, it is expected to be guided by the principles of humanity, neutrality, and impartiality that remove political conditionality from the donors’ decisions. Yet, the practice of humanitarian assistance has departed from these principles keeping the debate about states’ motives for aid alive. This book 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 aid. The book traces the differences in COVID-19 aid allocations between the US, China and Russia to these distinct geopolitical ideas and experiences with foreign aid using a novel dataset of aid and vaccine allocations. China’s global rise and its competition with the US over leadership across all facets of the global governance, including the international humanitarian regime, has turned Chinese motivations for aid into an issue of enormous significance. The book shows how China’s, Russia’s, and US’ humanitarian assistance has been affected by shifting global power relations and accompanying this shift contestation between the dominant and alternative approaches to humanitarian aid. This competition, in turn, has prompted these states react to humanitarian crises in ways that reproduce the many limitations of the dominant humanitarian system and the geopolitical (neoliberal) logic enfolding it.
Perspectives
This book is a product of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although, the rapid spread of an infectious pathogen turned lives upside down and ruined national economies, it was powerless in the face of geopolitics. This observation became an impetus for the book. Instead of strengthening international collaboration for coping with the deadly disease, many countries, including the US, chose to react individually rather than collectively to the health crisis, by putting their national interests above the individuals who bore the brunt of the pandemic. Instead of subsiding, the mounting geopolitical tensions between the US and China escalated during this time. This book interrogates the nexus of global health security and geopolitics, and medical humanitarianism and health diplomacy. It extends the conversation about COVID-19 humanitarianism to include the role that identity, history, and political discourse have had in shaping perceptions of competition among China, Russia, and the US. Our understanding of geopolitics is not limited to the analysis of the interaction between countries’ geographical settings and ways in which they inform their foreign policy choices. Our conception of geopolitics foregrounds ideas, concepts, and knowledge that map specific mental images on physical spaces.
Mariya Omelicheva
National Defense University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Geopolitical, Geoeconomic, and Humanitarian Considerations for COVID-19 Assistance by the United States, April 2024, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004692671_006.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
