Queering the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality: Implications for humanitarian action, IHL effectiveness and gender justice

Institutions are often reluctant to openly engage on controversies around the patriarchal underpinnings of the humanitarian sector, or the hard questions around implementing rights-based approaches in spaces where the dominant social norms run counter to an enabling environment for principled humanitarian and development assistance. A reluctance to engage on these issues can lead to unintended suppression of gender justice efforts under the urgency and scale of needs-based humanitarian response. Pre-crisis unequal power relations can be visible or invisible, difficult to measure and even more difficult to address through humanitarian action. Engaging on root causes and drivers of human suffering is often viewed as “political” in contexts of closing civic space and restricted humanitarian access. This article will explore tensions and synergies between the humanitarian principles and the gender justice agenda with a view to helping humanitarian actors contribute to long-term goals of transforming social norms. The article applies a critical feminist lens to the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality, with a focus on the wider development agenda, the nature of the State in a State-centric global order, and the continuum of violence. Drawing on critical feminist theory and decolonization discourses, and building on gender analyses of international humanitarian law, this article looks to queer the humanitarian principles of neutrality and impartiality within the context of the shifting aid system in which they are applied. The objective is help address some of the gaps in literature, identify ways in which aid actors can reduce unintended harm to the gender justice agenda, and help contribute to the more transformative agendas of gender justice.