The Need to Help

"Many have noted that heroic humanitarianism, if often inadvertently, tends to presume a passive, suffering other. In this work, Liisa H. Malkki shatters that one-way mirror. With uncommon imagination and insight, she turns her gaze back on the neediness of the benefactor: on the ways in which distant care-giving might offer an escape–a sense of passion and purpose–to those alienated in prison-houses of relative affluence." - Jean Comaroff, coeditor of Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism

"With The Need to Help Liisa H. Malkki changes the agenda of the study of humanitarianism. This is much more than a study of Finnish humanitarians, as Malkki provides an extended meditation on a range of neglected topics in the study of humanitarianism, picking up and addressing fresh conceptual and moral questions. A vital contribution."
- Harri Englund, author of Human Rights and African Airwaves: Mediating Equality on the Chichewa Radio

"The Need to Help situates aid work firmly in the social realities of the sending countries, rather than in the context of the abstract cosmopolitan values that academic accounts usually emphasise. For many of the Finnish workers Malkki studies, aid work is also linked to different notions about what is good and what is bad about Finland and about being Finnish. Complementing her focus on professionals who work in crisis settings across the world, Malkki looks at the needs that are associated with some of the more mundane ways in which people connect to the humanitarian enterprise, such as the knitting of bunnies and teddies for imagined children-in-need far away." - Monika Krause, Times Higher Education

"This book would be a valuable text in undergraduate and graduate courses on development and humanitarianism. Malkki’s skilled ability to link together so many different intellectual inspirations makes this book very useful to examine as a model for theoretical conceptualization and for her methodology." - Jeremy Rich, African Studies Quarterly

"...its extensive exploration of and emphasis on the ambiguity between politics—as the context for humanitarian institutions and aid workers—and neutrality—as the underlying principle for humanitarian affect, work, and motivation—will be of interest to the general anthropology audience and those invested in the specialized debate on humanitarian ethics. These discussions open up a wider re-evaluation of affect theory in anthropology as well as invigorating the discussion of humanitarian affect as politics in and of itself." - Tina Shrestha, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"[A]n original and highly significant analysis of 'Aidland,' essential reading for anyone interested in the growing literature on the people who work in the development industry and humanitarian organizations." - R. L. Stirrat, Journal of Anthropological Research

"...this book provides finely textured material with which to debate the salience of the various rationales that people give for helping others." - Erica Caple James, American Ethnologist

"This beautifully written book artfully navigates the purchase of domestic arts on international humanitarianism. . . . It is a book crafted with finesse, weaving in subtle threads of Western political thought on humanism, animism, cosmopolitanism with the empathetic understanding of an ethnographer engaged in painful and complex fieldwork." - Ritu Mathur, Society & Space

"Perhaps one of the more captivating and accessible texts on humanitarianism. The text would be a useful tool for students seeking a deeper knowledge about the drivers of humanitarianism, as well as connections between the ‘local’ and ‘global.’ Yet, it has sufficient theoretical depth for researchers to find value when reflecting on broader questions about the power of humanitarianism." - Simon Dickinson, Progress in Development Studies