The Politics of Humanity

Global Justice 5. The Pursuit of a Humanitarianism beyond Contingency: Accountability, Human Rights and

Accountability, Human Rights and Global Justice

This chapter looks at three related attempts, three normative projects, to resolve
some of the contingencies of humanitarian action explored in the previous chapters
through different kinds of institutionalisation: internal accountability mechanisms,
universal human rights and global social justice. These represent three different
visions of how the “politics of humanity” should be pinned down. The chapter
argues that looking at the institutionalisation of humanitarian impulses, and
humanitarian action, inevitably returns us, via the nature of the action that is
institutionalised, to the question of the purpose and scope of humanitarianism, of
what it can, and should achieve, a problem that evades easy resolution.
Institutionalising humanitarian action has often simply been a matter of
readiness, of creating a capacity to respond to crises that will inevitably emerge in
order to temper, wherever possible, their inhumanity. The birth of professional
humanitarianism was itself the result of a desire to be ready when the next act of
rescue was needed, and readiness to rescue is itself a kind of rescue-in-advance, the
attempt to make the capacity to rescue less contingent and coincidental. When
Dunant composed his A Memory of Solferino , it was exactly for this purpose: so that
the relief of the next army of battlefield wounded would not be entirely the result
of spontaneity or coincidence. This approach is at the heart of the Dunantist
tradition of humanitarianism and of the central question he puts to his readers:

Would it not be possible, in time [sic] of peace and quiet, to form relief

societies for the purpose of having care given to the wounded in wartime by

zealous, devoted and thoroughly qualified volunteers?^1

Writing of Dunant’s efforts in the aftermath of the battle of Solferino, Ignatieff
remarks that “[it] is doubtful Dunant saved a single life that weekend”.^2 His
1
2 Dunant, A Memory of Solferino.
Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor , 110.