Overview

This book provides the first historical inquiry into the quantification of needs in humanitarian assistance. Ultimately the book argues that we cannot understand the global humanitarian aid movement, if we do not understand how humanitarian agencies made human suffering commensurable across borders in the first place. The book identifies four basic elements of needs: as a concept, as a system of classification and triage, as a form of material apparatus, and as a codified standard. Drawing on a range of archival sources ranging from the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), and the Sphere Project, the book traces the concept of needs from their emergence in the 1960s right through to the modern day, and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's call for ""evidence-based humanitarianism"". Finally the book assesses how the international governmentality of needs played out in a recent humanitarian crisis, drawing on detailed ethnographic research of Central African refugees in the Cameroonian borderland in 2014-2016. This important historical enquiry into the universal nature of human suffering will be an important read for humanitarian researchers and practitioners, as well as readers with an interest in international history and development.

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9780367464165

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Reviews

In this innovative and grounded study, Joel Glasman reveals how it came to be that the smallest unit of our shared humanity-its least common denominator-is neither you nor me, but the calorie, the liter of water, the metrics of our need in our moments of deepest distress. This fascinating work deserves wide readership and demands deep reflection. - Gregory Mann, author of From Empires to NGOs in the West African Sahel: the Road to Nongovernmentality (2015)

Author Information

Joël Glasman is a Professor of African History at University of Bayreuth, Germany

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