Colonisation, développement, aide humanitaire. Pour une anthropologie de l'aide internationale

Abstract

For some, humanitarian aid is seen as a new theme in anthropological research, and therefore virgin territory. However, the study of humanitarian aid is part of a long intellectual history that we trace in this article. However, this history needs to take into account recent changes in humanitarian aid and development and in anthropological research on these themes. We find an increasingly marked thematic and conceptual blurring between humanitarian aid and development aid, a phenomenon that is noteworthy among aid actors and among anthropologists who take development and humanitarian aid as their objects of study. This blurring has an eminently political aspect, which can only be grasped by an anthropology of international aid.