Anand Giridharadasoct :
The scale of the challenge emanating from Syria has far exceeded the amount of assistance that governments, including the United States, have been willing or able to provide. The United States has given about $14 per citizen in humanitarian aid and plans to admit at least 10,000 Syrian refugees, out of four million displaced abroad. America would have to welcome 30 times more refugees to match Germany’s intake as a proportion of its population.
And so the White House last week announced new partnerships to help citizens to engage in foreign aid on their own. They can go to Kickstarter and donate $15 to buy a refugee a sleeping bag. They can, while paying for their groceries on the online portal Instacart, also spring for food for the displaced, to be delivered by the United Nations. They can give while paying at a Starbucks.
Crowdsourcing aid is a cunning way to work around the do-nothing corridors of official Washington. But it also raises complicated questions about the nature of humanitarianism and what it means for a “nation” to help.
Yancey Strickler, a co-founder and the chief executive of Kickstarter, told me the new program “opened up a lot of questions, including what it means for a citizen to act in an area where governments typically act.”
“Is that a step that strengthens the bonds of society?” he asked in an interview. “Is it the start of a libertarian utopia?”
Notably, in this new model, the government doesn’t disappear. Its role changes. It becomes what foreign-policy scholars like Anne-Marie Slaughter have been prognosticating for years: a direct actor in the world at times, and at times a broker and convener using its authority to create connections among private actors.
Ms. Slaughter, a former head of policy planning at the State Department and now the president of the New America Foundation, called the new approach “terrific” and “a bridge between the geopolitical world of traditional diplomacy and the networked world of people, businesses, and civic groups that shapes the environment in which most of us live in this century.”
It remains to be seen whether crowdfunded humanitarianism will “crowd in” or “crowd out” the public variety. Perhaps people will get hooked on helping refugees through Kickstarter, become early adopters of the cause, and evangelize their compatriots to help as a collective. Or perhaps it becomes a cop-out – a method that politicians use to seem like they’re doing something when it’s too hard to do something.
And perhaps it changes the very nature of humanitarianism itself.
Would the meaning of the Marshall Plan be different had it been financed by a thousand self-organized bake sales worldwide?
Surely for the refugee on the receiving end, a tent is a tent. But aid is also a statement of values and solidarity.
“Fund-raising from public and individual sources doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive,” said Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas and a former State Department adviser. He added, “Still, government aid must remain the largest source of funding, both because of the political will it demonstrates and because other states are more likely to contribute based on the demonstration effect of public, not private, contributions.”
Aiding from behind will continue to raise questions: Does it matter if we help one another collectively and by law versus privately and voluntarily? Is it old-fashioned to do things in the name of a nation? Is there a difference between a public and a crowd?
The scale of the challenge emanating from Syria has far exceeded the amount of assistance that governments, including the United States, have been willing or able to provide. The United States has given about $14 per citizen in humanitarian aid and plans to admit at least 10,000 Syrian refugees, out of four million displaced abroad. America would have to welcome 30 times more refugees to match Germany’s intake as a proportion of its population.
And so the White House last week announced new partnerships to help citizens to engage in foreign aid on their own. They can go to Kickstarter and donate $15 to buy a refugee a sleeping bag. They can, while paying for their groceries on the online portal Instacart, also spring for food for the displaced, to be delivered by the United Nations. They can give while paying at a Starbucks.
Crowdsourcing aid is a cunning way to work around the do-nothing corridors of official Washington. But it also raises complicated questions about the nature of humanitarianism and what it means for a “nation” to help.
Yancey Strickler, a co-founder and the chief executive of Kickstarter, told me the new program “opened up a lot of questions, including what it means for a citizen to act in an area where governments typically act.”
“Is that a step that strengthens the bonds of society?” he asked in an interview. “Is it the start of a libertarian utopia?”
Notably, in this new model, the government doesn’t disappear. Its role changes. It becomes what foreign-policy scholars like Anne-Marie Slaughter have been prognosticating for years: a direct actor in the world at times, and at times a broker and convener using its authority to create connections among private actors.
Ms. Slaughter, a former head of policy planning at the State Department and now the president of the New America Foundation, called the new approach “terrific” and “a bridge between the geopolitical world of traditional diplomacy and the networked world of people, businesses, and civic groups that shapes the environment in which most of us live in this century.”
It remains to be seen whether crowdfunded humanitarianism will “crowd in” or “crowd out” the public variety. Perhaps people will get hooked on helping refugees through Kickstarter, become early adopters of the cause, and evangelize their compatriots to help as a collective. Or perhaps it becomes a cop-out – a method that politicians use to seem like they’re doing something when it’s too hard to do something.
And perhaps it changes the very nature of humanitarianism itself.
Would the meaning of the Marshall Plan be different had it been financed by a thousand self-organized bake sales worldwide?
Surely for the refugee on the receiving end, a tent is a tent. But aid is also a statement of values and solidarity.
“Fund-raising from public and individual sources doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive,” said Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas and a former State Department adviser. He added, “Still, government aid must remain the largest source of funding, both because of the political will it demonstrates and because other states are more likely to contribute based on the demonstration effect of public, not private, contributions.”
Aiding from behind will continue to raise questions: Does it matter if we help one another collectively and by law versus privately and voluntarily? Is it old-fashioned to do things in the name of a nation? Is there a difference between a public and a crowd?
(Anand Giridharadas is an author and New York Times columnist. He writes the “Admit One” column for the arts pages of The Times, and the “Letter from America” for its global edition).
