Humanitarianism without a Donor Label: A Critical Review and Three-Tier Typology of State-Led Humanitarian Diplomacy

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to ask why scholarship on state-led humanitarian diplomacy attends closely to states that fund humanitarian action and barely at all to those shaping outcomes by other means. Humanitarian diplomacy is treated here as deliberate conduct, in which a government uses positional, political or normative leverage to alter what relief reaches whom, rather than the incidental effect of policy adopted for other ends. In design, the article is a critical narrative review of literature published between 2000 and 2026 in Scopus, Web of Science, JSTOR and publisher platforms, read through Global International Relations, postcolonial IR, practice theory and critical humanitarian studies. Items were retained where a sovereign state was the acting subject, non-governmental practice was treated as context, and the search ran in English. The findings establish that the organising assumption of the field, that humanitarian influence follows financial capacity, was inherited from OECD-DAC measurement rather than argued for. A three-tier typology follows, sorting states by structural position and mode of engagement: established Western donors, emerging non-Western donors, and positional actors, whose humanitarian diplomacy runs through hosting, mediation, peacekeeping, access facilitation and advocacy. The third tier is thinly represented in the corpus, the pattern pointing to measurement conventions rather than insignificance. The limitations are that a narrative design yields an analytical frame rather than systematic evidence, that case selection is disputable, and that an English-language search understates relevant regional outlets. The practical implication is that burden-sharing recognising only financial transfers misstates who carries the system.