Natural Disasters,Principled Humanitarianism,and the Prospects for a New Solidarism in International Solidarity

States, Disasters, and Diplomacy: An Overview of the Literature

The field of disaster diplomacy examines the impact of disasters on patterns of conflict and cooperation in international society. Its main finding is that disasters lead to short-term or ad hoc cooperation which does not necessarily lead to longer-term cooperation (Kelman, 2007). Cases ranging from Cuba–USA cooperation in the aftermath of hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, India–Pakistan cooperation in the aftermath of earthquakes to Russia–Norway cooperation in the aftermath of oil spills in the Arctic corroborate this pattern. Three conditions help explain disaster-related cooperation in more advanced terms: (i) pre-existing diplomatic baseline, (ii) authority-recognition issues in the disaster-hit region, and (iii) the differential impact of the disaster on different actors.

Between R2P and R2PROVIDE: Pluralism, Solidarism, and the Question of Humanitarian Aid Delivery

I again solemnly appeal to the Burmese authorities to lift all restrictions on the distribution of the aid by the most efficient channels. The specialized United Nations agencies and NGOs must immediately be able to have access to the victims. To address human suffering, wherever it may be, is precisely what is meant by the ‘responsibility to protect’ accepted by the international community and initiated by France. This is what we wanted to remind the Security Council (quoted in Relief Web, 2008; emphasis added).

On 8 May 2008, six days after Cyclone Nargis made landfall in Myanmar (Burma), the then French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner invoked the R2P doctrine as the government there refused to allow the delivery of international aid into the country. The situation was being debated at the UK parliament at around the same time. One member of the Parliament stated that:

The Burmese Government must give unfettered access for the international humanitarian relief effort. A key lesson from the tsunami is the need for the international response to dovetail with the local relief effort; trying to go against the grain does not work. We need to persuade the Burmese authorities to be as co-operative as possible. This House can assure the Government of Burma today that the aid workers are there for non-political humanitarian reasons, to save lives, rather than for political positioning (quoted in Mitchell, 2008).

As Junk (2016) notes, the idea that withholding humanitarian aid constitutes a crime against humanity and therefore constitutes a legitimate ground for launching a military intervention as a last resort under R2P finds support from international legal scholars. For Barber (2009, p. 3), even if Cyclone Nargis itself did not justify a military intervention, “it is possible to envisage situations where… a government’s refusal to allow access to survivors might be so complete, and the humanitarian needs so immense, that the use of force may be warranted.” While genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity pass the “just cause” threshold for invoking the R2P, Barber (2009) reminds that the definition of “crimes against humanity” in Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court includes “other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious injury to body or to mental health” next to enslavement, rape, torture, and other crimes. Withholding aid from disasters victims can fall within the scope of “other inhumane acts” in Barber’s (2009, p. 19) analysis. International law also requires that this inhumane act be widespread and systematic with “knowledge of the attack” or the intention to harm to warrant an international intervention. In this case, the authorities took some limited action to deal with Cyclone Nargis and while part of their actions may have been pre-planned, Barber (2009) believes that these criteria were not fully met to classify Nargis as a possible R2P case. This does not, however, preclude the applicability of R2P to other post-disaster situations when all the criteria are clearly present.

Thakur (2008), one prominent expert involved in the creation of R2P, argued that natural disasters in general and Nargis in particular do warrant invoking the doctrine. As he reasoned:

Morally, there is no difference between large numbers of people being killed by soldiers firing into crowds or the government blocking help being delivered to victims of natural disasters. To the extent that R2P is rooted in solidarity with victims of atrocity crimes, the sophistry of the distinction between a lakh killed by troops or through deliberate government neglect is morally repugnant (quoted in Thakur, 2008).

Thakur also reminded that the initial formulation included “overwhelming natural or environmental catastrophes” as a just cause for invoking the R2P although this was dropped later. He advocated invoking the R2P after Cyclone Nargis with the involvement of foreign soldiers on the ground as the only other option left was to drop aid parcels from the air which the military junta would likely seize anyway. Still, he acknowledged that it would start looking like a military occupation to the Asians to see Western military forces on the ground and this would alienate the Asians from the very concept of “R2P” (quoted in Thakur, 2008).

In the immediate run, a regional response was mobilized as China in particular exerted strong diplomatic pressure on Myanmar (Burma) to be more cooperative with the international community in responding to Cyclone Nargis. Cook (2010) explains how ASEAN soon stepped in and formed the Tripartite Core Group which mediated between Myanmar (Burma) and the international community. The Core Group facilitated the entry of UN aid workers and collected disaster-related data for use by international aid agencies. The immediate impasse was thus resolved through diplomatic channels.

In the longer run, the debate on the applicability of R2P to disaster situations continued after Nargis and a new doctrine, the Responsibility to Provide (R2Provide) developed in Asia which emphasizes consensual-regional (Asian) response to disasters (Tan, 2017). As Junk (2016) reminds, some objections to invoking R2P maintained that natural disasters are not a threat to international peace and security with which the doctrine is concerned, and disasters should be dealt with at a regional level as a result. Yet the catastrophic impact of climate change-related disasters is likely to invalidate this objection as climate change itself has already been identified as a threat to international peace and security (Brown & McLeman, 2009). There is more on the climate change-conflict nexus in the concluding section. Other objections to applying R2P to disaster situations included twisting the meaning of the concept to the point of rendering it inapplicable. Evans (2008) another architect of the R2P doctrine, warned against this possibility as the debate over Cyclone Nargis continued:

If it comes to be thought that R2P, and in particular the sharp military end of the doctrine, is capable of being invoked in anything other than the context of mass atrocity crimes, then such consensus as there is in favor of the new norm will simply evaporate in the global South. And that means that when the next case of genocide or ethnic cleansing comes along we will be back to the same old depressing arguments about the primacy of sovereignty that led us to the horrors of inaction in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990s (quoted in Evans, 2008).

It is possible to link R2P and R2Provide to solidarist and pluralist conceptions of international society, respectively, in the ES theory (Bull, 1966). Solidarism is a more universalist, interventionist, and justice-oriented type of international society while pluralism is less universalist, less interventionist, and an order-oriented one. In this specific context, solidarism would further link with universal disaster interventionism while pluralism would remain on the side of consensual-regional responses. The possibility of conceptual overstretch raised by the opponents of invoking R2P in disaster situations resonates strongly with the pluralist literature within the ES theory. Indeed, Bull was precisely concerned with the prospects raised later by Evans (2008) and others that pushing already fragile concepts to their limits could destroy the original consensus built around them. We would thus be “imposing upon international society a strain which it cannot bear” according to Bull (1966, p. 70). The typical solidarist response to this has been to assert that pluralism is a status quo oriented approach that closes off the possibility of moral progress in international society. The pluralist-less interventionist approach to disaster response is established in UN practice through Resolution 46/182 adopted on 19 December 1991:

The sovereignty, territorial integrity and national unity of States must be fully respected in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. In this context, humanitarian assistance should be provided with the consent of the affected country and in principle on the basis of an appeal by the affected country (Guiding Principles 3, Resolution 46/182, 1991).

“State capacity” to respond to disasters has been a key concept in this issue. The fifth guiding principle in Resolution 46/182, while acknowledging that disaster response may really exceed the capacity of states, insists that other states, international and non-governmental organizations should keep “working impartially and with strictly humanitarian motives” to “make a significant contribution in supplementing national efforts” (Guiding Principles 5, Resolution 46/182, 1991). Resolution 46/182 therefore adopts a solid pluralist stance in international disaster response.

A nascent solidarist approach, however, may be emerging as the increasing scale, severity, and frequency of disasters has led the International Law Commission (2016) to propose a new legal framework. The Draft Articles on the Protection of Persons in the Event of Disasters link the absence of “response capacity” to a “duty” to accept aid:

Article 11: To the extent that a disaster manifestly exceeds its national response capacity, the affected State has the duty to seek assistance from, as appropriate, other States, the United Nations, and other potential assisting actors (International Law Commission, 2016, p. 4 emphasis added).

The draft articles are still under discussion and as Valencia-Ospina (2012), the UN Special Rapporteur emphasizes, many developing states in particular expressed concerns over the ambiguous wording of draft Article 11 while also conceding that linking aid strictly to consent could stand in the way of rapid disaster response.

Departing from the term of this debate, we can come up with the following continuum that matches disaster diplomacy with the ES concepts of pluralism and solidarism. The spectrum starts with the pluralist origins of disaster response as expressed in Resolution 46/182, moves forward with the International Law Commission’s Draft articles, and reaches a solidarist endpoint with the possibility of a direct military intervention to deliver aid (Figure 1).OPEN IN VIEWER

Post-Cyclone Nargis developments are further pushing our response to disasters towards the solidarist end of the spectrum. These include Resolution 2165 on Syria whose significance resurfaced during the February 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake. In this case, access to rebel-held northwest Syria turned into a major issue that brought heavy criticism to the UN. Earlier, Resolution 2165 introduced a solidarist-coercive aid delivery mechanism into Syria which by-passed the Syrian government’s consent and worked through the consent of Syria’s neighbors. Yet this mechanism fully collapsed in July 2023 and was replaced with a pluralist one that placed the Syrian government back in control (expect for a temporary post-earthquake period).

Adopted unanimously on 11 July 2014; Resolution 2165 was very strongly worded in its condemnation of the Syrian government’s “arbitrary and unjustified withholding of consent to relief operations” in Syria. It subsequently decided that “United Nations humanitarian agencies and their implementing partners are authorized to use routes across conflict lines and the border crossings of Bab al-Salam [Turkey], Bab al-Hawa [Turkey], Al-Yarubiyah [Iraq], and Al Ramtha [Jordan].” Resolution 2165 thus created a coercive aid delivery mechanism linked to the consent of Syria’s neighbors rather than Syria itself and the government of Syria was to be “notified” only of aid deliveries. Shortly after the adoption of the Resolution, the Syria Cross-Border Humanitarian Fund was set up and truckloads of food and goods started entering Syria. This cross-border aid became a lifeline for the displaced communities in and around Idlip area in the northwest especially, the same communities also hit during the February 2023 earthquake, who have no local procurement substitutes.

Resolution 2165 was a landmark decision. As three experts underline, international law mostly regulates humanitarian access to civilians in cases of international armed conflict between two or more states. The Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) in particular is relevant which requires all belligerents to “allow the free passage of all consignments” such as food and medical supplies to all civilians in need (Article 23). International humanitarian law is weaker, however, in cases of non-international armed conflict which involves non-state groups or “entities with standing” in ES theory terms. Additional Protocol (1977) and Rule 55 of customary International Humanitarian Law attempt at regulating certain rules of humanitarian access during non-international conflict but these nonetheless remain state-centric and largely preclude the possibility of cross-border aid from being delivered (Harmer et al., 2018). Rule 55 states that:

The parties to the conflict must allow and facilitate rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian relief for civilians in need, which is impartial in character and conducted without any adverse distinction, subject to their right of control (emphasis added) (International Humanitarian Law Databases, nd).

Resolution 2165 targeted this “right of control” through which states are able to obstruct humanitarian aid deliveries. It is a particularly significant resolution amid a growing recognition that the three main principles of impartiality, neutrality, and independence that underpin humanitarian work no longer function. Indeed, as Belloni (2007) reminds, the well-known NGO Doctors without Borders was founded in reaction to the inaction of the International Committee of the Red Cross in the Biafra (formerly part of Nigeria) conflict in the 1970s in the name of neutrality. As subsequent conflicts from Rwanda to Bosnia further revealed the limits of these principles, Belloni (2007) notes that a mental transformation has taken place in favor of a more proactive and interventionist approach to humanitarianism. For Harmer et al. (2018), these principles have already become invalid on the ground as access to vulnerable communities requires diplomatic negotiations with various sub-state groups. New principles to reflect the new circumstances of conflict are therefore urgently required.

A recent international commission has embarked on the task of redefining the three core principles of humanitarianism as not only the nature of conflict has changed but also the widespread imposition of unilateral sanctions has started interfering with humanitarian work (Spiegel et al., 2024). This last point on sanctions is becoming more urgent as a UN special rapporteur who examined their impact concluded that they cause “overcompliance” by the organizations in the imposing countries and prevent even legitimate humanitarian aid from being transferred to target countries such as Cuba or Syria (UN General Assembly, 2021). Several other scholars have urged the members of the new commission to recognize immediately that apolitical humanitarianism is an illusion and that a fresh “principled engagement” with existing systems and structures of politics is required to re-define humanitarianism, particularly in view of the post-October 7 situation in the Gaza Strip. Three specific reasons have been advanced for a more principled approached to humanitarianism; the first is that the existing “apolitical” approach is Eurocentric and based on a legacy of racism, colonialism, and white savourism. The second and related reason is that apolitical humanitarianism ignores marginalized communities and the systems of oppression that perpetuate their marginalization. The third reason is that apolitical humanitarianism fails to prevent states from using and weaponizing aid for their own geopolitical advantage (Elnakib et al., 2024). The weaponization of aid has been acutely the case in Syria where the government even interfered with the water and hygiene infrastructure and criminalized medical care provision in opposition-held areas in the northwest. This led to an increase in cholera outbreaks which risks becoming endemic in these areas. The closure of the Yarubiya (Iraq) crossing in the northeast earlier 2020 had already prevented the entry of cholera detection kits and rehydration solutions to Syria (Tarnas et al., 2023).

Calls for a more principled humanitarianism align closely with solidarist thinking in the international society literature which is based on the premise that there is a corpus of moral truth, derived out of natural law, that is beyond dispute (Bull, 1966). It is simply wrong beyond dispute, for instance, to intentionally cause cholera outbreaks or to withhold aid from cyclone or earthquake victims and we need to take a stance against such injustices. This new thinking around humanitarianism is turning into a practical reality on the ground as Carpi (2020) demonstrates through ethnographic research between 2011 and 2013 with Syrian refugees and a mixture of international and Arab Gulf-funded NGOs in Lebanon’s Akkar village. Through interviews with refugees and NGO workers, Carpi (2020) finds that a gap has emerged between Geneva-style neutrality or old/apolitical humanitarianism adopted by NGOs such as the Norwegian Refugee Council and new/political humanitarianism adopted by Qatari and other Gulf-funded NGOs that support and advocate for the opponents of the Syrian regime. Meanwhile, a resentful interview with a wounded Free Syrian Army fighter who was denied medical assistance by an international NGO in the name of not taking sides in the Syrian civil war demonstrates how individuals expect to be supported by humanitarian workers (Carpi, 2020, p. 421).

Still, the solidarist / coercive aid delivery mechanism to Syria which was re-authorized every six months started collapsing in July 2020 when Russia forced the closure of three out of the four authorized crossings, leaving the Bab al-Hawa / Cilvegözü crossing from Turkey as the only operational one. Except for a brief post-earthquake re-opening of additional crossings between 13 February and 13 May 2023, the coercive aid delivery mechanism to Syria came to an end on 11 July 2023 as Russia vetoed its renewal. Together with Syria, Russia argued that the delivery of aid across the border from Turkey, Iraq, and Jordan undermined Syrian sovereignty and that only Syrian government could distribute aid inside its territory. This was called cross-line aid which would be delivered from government held areas into opposition-held areas (Security Council Report, 2023).

The collapse of Resolution 2165 came under the spotlight on 6 February 2023 when a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southeast Turkey at 04:15 a.m. local time, followed by a magnitude 6.7 aftershock 11 minutes later and another 7.5 aftershock 9 hours later (US Geological Survey, 2023). The earthquake sequence affected over 16 million citizens in 11 provinces in southeast Turkey and five governorates in Syria. 50.783 Turks and 5900 Syrians were killed (Delforge et al., 2024).

While international aid started arriving in Turkey immediately, access to rebel-held northwest Syria was not possible as the Syrian government did not authorize aid agencies. The UN was heavily criticized during these critical hours for not bypassing Syrian government’s consent and delivering aid “coercively.” As Garthwaite (2023) underlines, it is already possible under a permissive reading of international humanitarian law for “impartial” actors to deliver aid without authorization under such circumstances. Yet the UN waited, and its aid to northwest Syria was both delayed and insufficient in the end that met only between 5% and 10% of what local hospitals needed to serve a population of 4.5 million (Alkhalil et al., 2023).

Aid to rebel-held northwest Syria was also affected by some of the fundamental conditions that shape disaster diplomacy: pre-existing diplomatic baseline and authority-recognition issues. At the time of the earthquake, Turkey and Syria had no diplomatic relations for over a decade and authority in northwest Syria was split between the central government of Syria, the group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and the Turkish armed forces which maintains troops in the region under a “de-escalation zone” as agreed at a regional summit in Astana, Kazakhstan in 2017. ⁵ It remains unclear, however, who the relevant authority was in the northwest pocket of Syria.

Disasters such as the February 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake sequence stand at the intersection of diplomacy, the ES concept of world society and pluralist-solidarist conceptions of international society. Increasingly, they are turning into test cases of interventionism and the R2P doctrine which may apply to post-disaster situations. The final section below discusses whether the increasing scale, severity, and frequency of climate-related disasters can lead to thicker forms of solidarism in the foreseeable future. The non-binding UN Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015–2030) provides the basic conceptual tools for approaching disasters in more solidarist-universalist terms.

Conclusion

The projected increase in the scale, severity, and frequency of climate-related disasters is paving the way for transforming the established patterns of disaster diplomacy and its short-term nature in particular. This article compiled a review of recent developments in international law, climate science, and humanitarianism to advance the claim that climate-related disasters are likely to lead to more structured disaster cooperation and more disaster interventionism in the international society. One of its key contributions is the structuring of these different topics around a suitable IR theoretical framework.

By taking Cyclone Nargis, the civil war in Syria, and the Turkey–Syria earthquake as case studies, the article linked consensual versus coercive aid delivery to the ES theory concepts of pluralism and solidarism, and to the R2P and R2Provide, respectively. The paradigm shift towards disaster preparedness articulated in the Sendai Framework, the draft articles of the International Law Commission that mention a “duty” to accept disaster assistance and Resolution 2165 which set a legal precedent for coercive aid delivery were pointed to as the key developments in international law that aim to strengthen the prospects for disaster solidarism/interventionism. The search for new humanitarian principles was cited as further strengthening the solidarist narrative.

As the Myanmar (Burma) example shows, the concepts involved such as R2P and R2Provide are fiercely contested among the various actors and there are reversals from solidarism as the collapse of the coercive aid delivery mechanism into Syria shows. Indeed, we should underline this contested nature of humanitarianism and notice how the solidarist/coercive narrative encroaches upon state sovereignty. As Ekengren et al. (2006) note, disaster response is entangled with “sovereignty sensibilities” even in the EU where there are particularly advanced practices of sharing sovereignty in numerous other policy areas. Berchtold et al. (2020) recently demonstrated through interviews with officials from seven EU member states that different governance structures, organizational cultures, legal conditions, and preferences keep constituting obstacles to cooperation in this field despite a strengthening of Union-level disaster response mechanisms in 2019. Disaster-related sensibilities are compounded by a fear of interventionism in the global South with the use of disasters as a pretext. The pluralist-solidarist debate in the ES theory can further structure the debate on disaster interventionism following the initial steps taken in my discussion.

Finally, the article highlighted the potential of emerging climate-disaster models through artificial intelligence and machine learning in enabling targeted information for regional adaptation plans in particular. The computational costs and coordination among various research groups working on these advanced models remain issues to be addressed. Building on the developments reviewed in this article, future research may benefit in particular from evaluating the ethical and policy implications of these new models that herald major advances in climate science.