Humanitarian neutrality and language at the International Committee of the Red Cross

Abstract

This article examines the articulation of the humanitarian principle of neutrality and language as the vehicle of this political stance at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The ICRC is a neutral humanitarian actor recognised by the Geneva Conventions and historically linked with Swiss political neutrality and multilingualism. Through interviews, focus groups and institutional documents, I analyse the ICRC delegates’ linguistic negotiation of neutrality in humanitarian encounters. Based on the semiotic process of iconisation (Gal & Irvine, 2000) with a focus on the politics of embodiment (Bucholtz & Hall, 2016), the analysis reveals that raciolinguistic ideologies reinforce the dominance of English (Footitt et al., 2020) and the imagined figure of the White, male European humanitarian (Fassin, 2012) who does not speak local and regional languages such as Arabic. “Neutrality” emerges as a contextual and relational concept based on a negotiation in terms of possession of a language repertoire, racialised embodiment and cultural closeness. In the Middle East and Northern Africa, this results in stakeholder perceptions of lesser neutrality attached to Arabic-speaking “Westerners” and “Arabs”, who destabilise the imagined humanitarian figure linked with neutrality.