The Politics of Humanity

it not possible that violence may always be the worst way to honour our sense of
humanity, but on very rare occasions the only way to save or preserve it?
A first point to make here is that humanitarian identity need not be co-
terminus with particular agents across all time and all actions engaged in by the
relevant agent. Immaculate humanitarian identity is not necessary to engage in
humanitarian action or rescue, and it may be inappropriate for some coherent acts
of rescue carried out in the name of a common humanity. Arguably the tendency to
think that it this is not the case reflects the desire to preserve the moral authority
that humanitarian NGOs carry as a result of the more singular character of their
agency and voice within international politics. The impulse to rescue looms large in
our understanding of what humanitarianism is. But it necessarily coexists with the
desire to pre-empt future occasions for suffering, to engage in rescue-in-advance
through the elaboration of laws, institutions and practices. An obvious example
here is the development of human rights, and this will be examined as a key
example in the next chapter on institutionalised humanitarianism. Perhaps when it
came to designing a more just system that obviated the need to rescue at all,
someone who had spent their life publicly arguing against prejudice on the basis of
race or religion would be able to make a more coherent input. Thus we may well
require high priests of humanitarianism, to go back to Hopgood’s notion of the
sacred and the profane. We should not ask these high priests necessarily to get
their hands dirty, but merely tolerate within the politics of humanitarianism, the
“politics of humanity”, some who accept that burden.
This potential burden is complicated in two ways. First, the agents involved
in actual humanitarian action are more likely to be collective agents. How to
understand that complication of responsibility within the context of
humanitarianism will be addressed in Chapter 6. But my argument, while mitigating
against a blanket exclusion of violence from humanitarian action, fails to account
for an important dimension of the actual use of violence in humanitarian acts of
rescue. We might reasonably argue that a reactive killing in defence of an innocent
as an act of last resort does not represent a moral crime. But in more likely real-
world scenarios faced by collective agents, violence usually involves a strong