are used in the service of rescue, whether these have the potential to cause harm,
and whether that provides a definitive criterion for acts of humanitarian rescue.
Among means, the most controversial point must surely be the use or threat
of violence.^62 The problem of violent means has been debated throughout the
history of humanitarianism. It is arguably the single most important issue in
discussing whether military humanitarian intervention can ever lie within a
coherent understanding of what humanitarianism is. The issue here is not whether
the ICRC should have a standing army at its disposal. Rather, the key question is
whether professional humanitarian organisations’ many understandable reasons for
separating themselves from the use of violence are also adequate arguments for
excluding the use of violence entirely from the wider discussion involved in
humanitarianism’s politics of humanity.
David Rieff’s disenchantment with the notion of humanitarian violence is a
particularly interesting case here, for he is equally without illusions as to the purity
of the humanitarian endeavour and to the consequences of violence. Having
acknowledged the impossibility for humanitarian action of doing no harm, his work,
as it has evolved, also makes clear the sense that by allying itself to the use of force,
humanitarianism risks undermining its ability to do any good. He criticises the
obscuring of the reality of violence by defenders of humanitarian violence. “The
image evoked [by figures like Bernard Kouchner] is one of a burly man breaking
down a door in a burning building, rather than of an action that even in the best of
circumstances is inseparable from the slaughter of innocents.”^63 Rieff is not a
pacifist, and believes that force may be sometimes morally required, but he wishes
to separate that moral justification of the use of force from the practice of
humanitarianism, which should lose its utopian streak and abandon a sense of itself
as a saving idea. As Orbinski puts it: “Humanitarian action exists only to preserve
62
Here I mean violence in the visceral sense, not the forms of structural violence that could
be read into the “harms” described above. Or indeed in the form examined in Riina Yrjola,
"The Invisible Violence of Celebrity Humanitarianism: Soft Images and Hard Words in the
Making and Unmaking of Africa", 63 World Political Science Review 5, no. 1 (2009).
Rieff, A Bed for the Night , 216.