Syria’s localization agenda is caught in an ethical bind. Since the beginning of the war, much of the aid to Syria has been channelled through a regime that the vast majority of funding agencies oppose, a government that “blackmails” civil society actors, “weaponizes the delivery of aid” and stands accused of war crimes.
As the Syrian state is failing under collapse of the economy, localization is also no longer only an enlightened tactical choice by the aid industry, but a vital necessity that increasingly seems to be the only way to alleviate the suffering of millions within government-held areas.
Localization as movement for justice and liberation, here clashes with the humanitarian principle of impartiality and thereby lays bare some of the moral challenges inherent in the practice. Yet, Syrians themselves have practiced radical forms of localism throughout the war. These home-grown localizations suggest that “the local” itself is predicated on ethical action and that liberation from all forms of oppression has to be at the core of the localization project in Syria or elsewhere.
The World Humanitarian Summit of 2016, with its commitment towards the Grand Bargain and other forms of localization occurred in the fifth year of the Syrian Civil War. So, it would seem only logical that the largest humanitarian crisis at the time—in which local and national actors only received 1.4% of the total humanitarian funding for Syria in 2016[1]—should become the testing ground for localization. UNHCR and UNDP, for example, set up a joint secretariat in order to localize the response and “concretely catalyze the contributions” of local, civil society, governments, and the private sector to the war and the ensuing refugee crisis. Further, INGOs have developed new approaches to localize humanitarian aid that are based on long-term mutual partnership. With the reclamation of most of the territory by the Government of Syria (GoS), today most aid agencies operating outside of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES) have struck the Faustian bargain with the government and are learning the “hard lessons” of delivering principled and ethical aid in government-held areas.
As a whole, the aid industry tends to situate the local within the colonial binaries of local/traditional, global/modern. Moral understandings of localization mirror this hierarchical simplicity. The local is either suspicious in terms of fiscal morality or seen as panacea though which humanitarian aid, tainted by colonial legacies and capitalist economies, can be absolved by returning to an essentialized and often exotified state of nature. In peacebuilding the “local turn” is a turn away from grand liberal peace projects exemplified by internationally brokered peace accords, towards the communal realities of injustice and violence and the processes that lead to their management.[2] Peacebuilding scholarship has been at the vanguard of interrogating the “local turn.” In response to this simplistic representation, scholars have called for a localization that is based on “a critical approach to the analysis of power, dominance, and resistance, with sensitivity to all power relations and circulations.[3] Syrians themselves have even surpassed these critical interrogations of localization, by instituting them into liberatory practice.
This blog is part of CDA’s From Where I Stand series, designed to listen to people most affected by aid as they explore and amplify their leadership experiences, stories, and lessons for the aid sector.
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