Ritu Mathur reviews Liisa H. Malkki’s monograph The Need to Help: The Domestic Arts of International Humanitarianism (Duke University Press 2015).
To remove the varnish from the “gloss” of humanitarianism this book poses a simple question: “who ‘the needy’ are in the humanitarian encounter”? The thoughtfulness with which this question is posed demonstrates Liisa Malkki’s unwillingness to take assumptions about the neediness of the Global South for granted. On the contrary she situates her ethnographic fieldwork in Finland: a country known for its neutrality, where a large number of the population devotes its time to voluntary service and the Finnish Red Cross holds special influence and prestige.
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