Contexte du marché international de l'aide humanitaire (document en anglais)

The context of the contemporary humanitarian aid is the one of the globalization of the exchanges and the cultural models: savings became interdependent, financial markets are interconnected in real time, the cultures become standardized and communications satellites spread the same images on five continents. In this context, we observe:

The loss of power of certain States: while certain States rise in power (the United States and China, for example), the others on the contrary collapse, so digging the distance enter both. A lot of countries stemming from the decolonization lost the support of the former metropolises when the crisis pulls the temptation of fold on one of Europe and where the end of the cold war removes them any geostrategic interest. Doubtless States remain inescapable actors, both on the international scene and in the internal order. But they seem often powerless, vulnerable, dependent and corrupt. They seem less and less capable of printing a direction in the economy and of formulating a mobilizing cultural and political project. It is because their power is by-passed and through the top and through the bottom. Through the top: penetration of the flows of information by the media and the home computers compete with international organizations, with uncontrolled interventions of the transnational economic operators (relocations, national currencies victims of the speculation, etc.), and. Some of the classic instruments of the state authority, such the definition of a foreign policy and an interview of an army for the national defense thus call a redefining of their office. But States are also competed "through the bottom": Everywhere burst the identical demands of groups or minorities which do not recognize any more in the Nation-state or which throw reject the logic of solidarity. In the name of the right to have themselves, these peoples, groups and minorities dispute the authority of the State, maintaining uncountable homes of tensions, guerrilla warfare or civil wars.

"Natural" natural or said disasters (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal wave torrent): we evoke them here only for the record and not without having drawn the attention on the danger "to naturalize" events which, in the analysis, would not show themselves foreign to sociopolitical causalities. At first sight, we could believe that they escape any critical analysis, as far as they would result only from the fate and from the statistical probability. The ecological reflection however creates that the man became a «natural actor ", and that he presses more and more heavily on the evolution of the natural phenomena. We shall quote in particular his incidence on the greenhouse effect which will pull during the next decades, a multiplication of typhoons and tidal wave, even the disappearance of certain small countries, such the Maldives Islands. To note also the multiplication of the "green" conflicts or the conflicts for natural resources, some the water, among which the quantity and the quality rarefy. Impossible to treat these questions as if they recovered only from the fate. It would also be necessary to wonder why populations so numerous continue to invest with «zones in top risks ": deltae threatened by torrents, slopes of volcanic mountains, zones of shock between tectonic patches. We would not then miss to reveal the socioeconomic logics which so lead populations to explain

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