the previous chapter how humanitarian action could cause harm and be deeply
unaccountable at the level of specific acts of rescue. Institutionalisation has always
amplified and complicated these problems. A fundamental question, such as
whether humanitarianism embodies charity or justice, finds itself complicated when
humanitarians find themselves committing injustices themselves.
The chapter first considers the pursuit of accountability within the sphere of
professional humanitarianism. It then explores whether it can subordinate itself to
the project of enshrining universal human rights. The deepest tensions are brought
into focus through an examination of the question of humanitarian intervention.
Finally, the chapter asks whether justice itself can provide a leitmotif for
humanitarian action.
I Accountability and “Humanitarian Rights”
The narrowest sense in which humanitarians have tried to resolve the contingencies
of rescue is through the creation of internal accountability mechanisms within the
practice of professional humanitarianism. Humanitarians have devoted a lot of
energy to holding others to account. But in recent years they have found
themselves to be unaccountable in the carrying out of humanitarian action.
Accountability thus presents a particularly interesting problem for actors like aid
NGOs.^4 Janice Gross Stein underlines the importance of accountability to the study
of humanitarianism, noting that though her “subject is accountability, what is at
4
Leif Wenar, "Accountability in International Development Aid", Ethics & International
Affairs 20, no. 1 (2006): 13. In what follows I will also draw on the debate on accountability
relating to the “development” sector, which presents very similar issues for our purposes.
This is of course not surprising, as the international development aid sector is clearly an
instance of professional humanitarianism on the terms set out in this thesis, and there is a
relevant and often cross-cutting literature on the failure of “good intentions”. See for
example William Easterley, The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest
Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good (London: Penguin, 2006). Dambisa Moyo, Dead
Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is Another Way for Africa (London: Allen Lane,
2009). For a forceful critique of a rigid humanitarian/development distinction, especially in
the context of the turn towards rights-based approaches, see Hugo Slim, "Dissolving the
Difference between Humanitarianism and Development: The Mixing of a Rights-Based
Solution", Development in Practice 10, no. 3 (2001).