Two weeks before the war in Kosovo ended, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross wrote in the International Herald Tribune, "The most urgent thing in Kosovo right now is the need for the creation of a humanitarian space."

He didn't mean just hospitals, kitchens, water stations, or even the vast infrastructure of refugee camps. He was also talking about the freedom to move, speak openly with those in need, and gain access to information and to people on all sides of the conflict. At its most basic level, humanitarianism calls out for a special kind of space – a space of neutrality. Relief work challenges borders and governments; it aspires to create and protect a nonpartisan zone in the name of ordinary people, whether they are the victims of natural disaster or of violent conflagration.

At the beginning of 2002, according to the United Nations, there were about 12 million refugees around the world, as many as 25 million people displaced within their own countries, and more than 500 nongovernmental organizations acting in partnership with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Yet even as the need for relief grows, humanitarian space is shrinking – in the physical realm of camps as well as the conceptual arena of neutral conditions. This is due to a variety of pressures: As aid agencies mobilize ever greater amounts of resources – trucks, tents, food, medicine – and operate in more and more politically charged situations, other parties are increasingly exploiting their work.

Sometimes repressive governments placate their people by outsourcing basic services to the NGO community. In 1999, some two years after the Taliban took control of Afghanistan, half of Kabul's 1.2 million citizens depended on Western food aid. Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid notes in his book Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia that this gave the country's warlords "the excuse to absolve themselves of taking responsibility for the civilian population." Relief agencies, committed to helping the weak and suffering, kept the assistance flowing freely.

Refugees often are the incidental result of war. But in many conflicts, one of the warring parties intentionally displaces people. As author David Rieff points out in Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West, the UNHCR vehemently protested the ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats from Serb-controlled areas of Bosnia in 1993. Yet, he writes, "there had been times when it found itself having to in effect abet it." The mandate to protect refugees put the UN agency in an impossible position: "either standing by and watching the murders go on, or itself facilitating the larger Serb war aim of the transfer of the non-Serb population" out of parts it had seized. The agency chose to move people to safety, and hence to "purify" the territory. "I prefer 30,000 evacuees to 30,000 bodies," said the agency's head in Bosnia.

At other times, defining a crisis as humanitarian provides a convenient alibi for an international community that prefers to avoid a political or military response. The world stood by in the spring of 1994 as Hutu militants in Africa killed up to a million of their Tutsi neighbors. The Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Army finally put an end to the massacres and ejected the former government and its paramilitary legions. Only then did Western nations respond with a massive show of relief. The attention came too late to address the political crisis, and only after those responsible for the genocide had fled into camps in neighboring Tanzania and Zaire, taking with them millions of Hutus who were terrified by their leaders' talk of Tutsi reprisals. In the camps, the killers took advantage of the flow of aid and money to regroup, rearm, and organize an effort to continue the pogrom.

In the aftermath of these experiences, many relief agencies concluded that they needed to adopt a more political stance, whether that meant taking sides, adding the protection of human rights to their mandates, or simply working in league with the world's powerful governments and their armies. In early 1999, for example, along the border of Kosovo, aid agencies toiled essentially as subcontractors of NATO; one UNHCR official told a reporter, with satisfaction, that "NATO not only builds the refugee camps and ensures their security, it sets the humanitarian agenda."

But the defense of neutral space has never been more important – precisely because of the inescapable burden of politics. Far from being a way to avoid politics, humanitarianism offers an essential yardstick for measuring the possibilities and stakes of political action, including the use of military force. In December 1999, James Orbinski, then head of Doctors Without Borders, put this most clearly as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for the organization. "No doctor can stop a genocide," he said. "No humanitarian can stop ethnic cleansing, just as no humanitarian can make war. And no humanitarian can make peace. These are political responsibilities, not humanitarian imperatives."