Brokers and Translators: Exploring the Limits of Pluralism in International Humanitarian Negotiation

Through ethnographic observations from international humanitarian work and interviews with humanitarian professionals, Joe Cropp’s The Humanitarian Fix: Navigating Civilian Protection in Contemporary Wars engagingly describes the daily practice of humanitarian negotiation and persuasion. The book illustrates how the international humanitarian has morphed from the more classical neutral intermediary to emerge as a broker and translator with a toolbox of more official and less official reframings of international law and policy to grapple with local problems and persuade different actors. In this review essay, I highlight the hidden insight for international lawyers in Cropp’s book regarding questions of universality and pluralism in international humanitarian law and the double-bind practitioners face: while these practices of translation look like an openness to pluralism in humanitarian law, within the current international framework, any translation by necessity re-emphasises how these reframings are not the law, and ultimately work as techniques to reinforce the authority and claimed universality of the central system.