On January 12, 2010, Haiti was hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake that killed over 200,000 people, opening a devastating new chapter in the troubled nation’s history. As often happens after such tragedies, developed nations and international organizations convened a donor conference a few months later to discuss Haiti’s reconstruction and development. Among those that sought to shape the debates were major private relief and development organizations that had long experience in fragile states like Haiti. But they did not all say the same thing, nor did they say it in similar ways. The medical relief organization Médecins Sans Frontières...

Upon arriving in Paris in early 2007, I was greeted by a vivid illustration of French civil society in action. Blocks away from my apartment, lining the canal Saint-Martin, two neat columns of bright red tents had been set up by an organization calling itself “the Children of Don Quixote.” The organization had created this “sleep-in” in to demonstrate solidarity with France’s homeless population. Given the relatively small number of homeless in France relative to the United States, I was struck by the vibrancy of this public protest and by the fact that it was an INGO, Médecins du Monde,...

Humanitarians attempt to improve the lives of those affected by war or natural disaster. The “humanitarian imperative” has driven major relief efforts from Biafra to Bali to Bosnia, and the impulse is an inherently universalistic project to alleviate the suffering of individuals anywhere in the world. Humanitarian organizations face this daunting task with limited resources and a wide array of possible strategies. How, then, do they choose particular practices? There is really very little information available on this question. There are many organizational histories and practitioner journals, but these offer largely descriptive and often uncritical accounts of different organizations’ practices....

The concept of human rights is an explicitly universalist one, and human rights activists seek to transcend cultural and political boundaries to protect the rights of all humanity. In practice, of course, each human rights INGO can only address a bounded set of issues given limited time and resources. How can we explain the process by which human rights INGOs select arsenals of strategies and structures? One critique emanating from the global South is that the leading human rights INGOs only address those human rights claims related to classic Western liberal values. Here I explore how the national origin of...

Against those who would argue that INGOs have developed shared practices and norms through participation a global community of humanitarian or human right activism, the preceding case studies have revealed marked divergence in the core strategies and structures of some of the largest and most transnationally active organizations. National origin plays a critical role in determining how INGOs raise funds, embrace professionalism, engage in advocacy, relate to governments, and choose issues. In short, national origin determines how INGOs approach the work of human rights activism and humanitarian relief. Globalization may have increased the frequency of interaction among these organizations, but...