'Anti-governmental NGOs' Grasping the political meaning of violent actions targeting humanitarian actors

Since 2003, humanitarian actors have become an common target in war-torn societies. A critical point have been reached in 2015 where 329 aid workers were victimes of major actors, causing 120 deaths (Humanitarian Outcomes, 2015). These figures have been received both with anger and misunderstanding by academics, humanitarian practitioners and policy-makers throughout the world. A question is on every lips : who dare to target solidarity actors who risk their life to alliveate gobal suffering ? Why is a solidarity ideal so massively rejected ? How can we interpret such a form of violence ? Few are the authors who actually seek to understand the root causes of such violence. Most of the time, a rather « naive » reading of such events prevail, invoking the rejection of Western values, or claiming that local armed groups actually make a confusion between neutral humanitarian actors and political ones. Yet, these explanations neglect a critical alternative hypothesis: the political nature of such attacks. Such an hypothesis seems to be confirmed by a prelimenary analysis of empirical data : not all the humanitarian actors are equally targeted, and some theatre of intervention appear to be more dangerous that other. This article seeks to explain this paradox, by bringing back the political meaning of the targeting of aid workers. To do so, it builds both on the contentious politics literature determining the factors and dynamics of the use of violence to achieve political aims. By doing so, this article demonstrates that is is precisely the growing politization of humanitarian aid – increasingly sed as a foreign policy tools – that explain their status as a war targets. It also analyzes the impact of such threat on the global humanitarian aid system. The analysis draws on an innovative sets of data collected through field research, and gathered in a database on humanitarian intervention in war torn societies since 2015. The overall aim of the paper is to contribute to the renewal of approaches dealing with violent non-state actors, by emphasizing the political nature of their strategies.