Non-Western Agency in Refugee Humanitarianism: Turkey and ‘Operation Provide Comfort’

Abstract The evolution of refugee humanitarianism is commonly studied in terms of critical junctures. One such historical moment is the creation of a ‘safe zone’ for Iraqi Kurdish refugees above the 36th parallel of Northern Iraq through the 1991 United Nations (UN) mission known as ‘Operation Provide Comfort.’ The UN intervention is widely accepted as a critical juncture because it marked the beginning of international humanitarianism's extra-territorial phase. ‘Operation Provide Comfort’ brought a paradigm shift in the management of displaced populations by means of introducing “preventive protection” as a novel approach combining protection with control as the idea is to keep refugees in their own countries and offer them help without the need to cross an international border. The standard narrative underlines Western historical priority by attributing the preventive protection to a single source of ideas and processes stemming from the West. Drawing on postcolonial research, this paper argues for recognizing the agency of the non-West in the formulation and execution of the safe haven concept as a historical milestone. More specifically, it demonstrates the pioneering role that Turkey played through international debates and diplomatic action, which culminated into the new episode of refugee humanitarianism. The findings also invite us to revisit current explanations of the evolution of international humanitarian norms by showing the entanglement of refugee protection on the one hand, and domestic and regional questions of ethnicity and counter-insurgency on the other.