Humanitarian assistance as containment: new codes for a new order

Using the recent earthquake in Haiti as a case study, this paper describes how new international normative mechanisms emerged in the post-Cold War period to facilitate states' control over actors delivering humanitarian assistance. Generated through an intermixing of donor (state) and nongovernmental organization (NGO) priorities and mechanisms, these norms have subsumed humanitarian actors into a vertical structure of power and have made them complicit in enacting the foreign policy objectives of states under the guise of humanitarianism.