Mission Impossible? Humanitarian Actors and the Civilizational Logic of International Aid Delivery during the "Congo Crisis," 1960–1964.

This article examines the historical lineages and colonial logics underpinning humanitarian officials' misconduct whilst deployed to the UN peacekeeping mission Opération des Nations Unies au Congo or ONUC, (1960–1964). Using oral testimonies, UN video footage, personal photographs, archival documents, and newspaper articles, I piece together a fragmentary history of humanitarian officials' misconduct on the ground. These individual behaviours provide rare insights into the not only incidents of humanitarian harm, but also how these behaviours were contextualised and justified by field-based officials. I trace how Western paternalism, humanitarian bravado, and racial stereotypes of the Congolese population provided both motivation for the act of misconduct and a minimising response in the aftermath. European colonial administrators and soldiers believed that it would be 'impossible' for them to uphold the same standards of 'civilised' behaviour as in a Western nation, thus allowing a culture of impunity to thrive among the international officials, as well as racist anxieties about Congolese criminality. Exploring a range of different types of misconduct by humanitarian officials, I interrogate how they compounded this colonial logic and racialised ideas of difference with a moralising framing of their 'good intentions' in an emergency context. By tracing civilisational logic from its origins in liberal colonial governance, this article uncovers how UN staffing decisions shaped a mission strategy of anti-bureaucratism and 'cutting through the red tape' on the ground. This fostered a permissive environment for experimentation and improvised utilitarian 'problem-solving' in response to intense humanitarian pressure to 'save lives'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]