Drawing a line: ethical and political strategies in complex emergency assistance

Faced with massive crises in the 1990s, such as in Rwanda-Zaire, aid agencies
have had to make ethical and strategic choices of great magnitude. One approach
seeks to compare goods and bads from agencies’ involvement, and to specify a
'bottom line' beneath which bads outweigh goods so that agencies should withdraw or
change their involvement. In a second approach a line is drawn between (a) an
agency's area of responsibility and (b) actions and consequences which are the
responsibility of others--not a bottom line but a line dividing mine from thine. The
paper probes and assesses those approaches, showing problems with both but
especially with the second; qualifies them by reference to issues of motivation,
feasibility and organisational level, and presents some complementary types of
approach; and stresses finally that effective strategic action must be guided by broad
causal analysis.