The Politics of Humanity

development of bodies of International Humanitarian Law, Refugee Law,
International Human Rights Law, International Criminal Law, and at specific pieces
of Public International Law, such as the Genocide Convention.
We would also have to consider more loosely defined practices. Most
obviously here we would explore professional humanitarianism, international
human rights advocacy and international development assistance. But a strong
argument could also be made for the relevance of military humanitarian
intervention, conflict resolution, peacekeeping, or statebuilding.
Finally, cutting across these categories are overarching concepts and
vocabularies to ground and justify these institutional realisations: universal human
rights, development, global social justice, perhaps the emerging notion of a
“Responsibility to Protect” (R2P).
This thesis undertakes the groundwork necessary to justify all of the above
as part of the humanitarian conversation and the “politics of humanity”. Inevitably,
it is impossible to do justice to all of the possibilities, all of the particular
crystallisations of the humanitarian impulse, cited above in a work of this scale.
Therefore, the following approach is adopted as a solid basis for a rigorous and
revealing conceptual analysis:
(1) Build the discussion from the dilemmas and paradoxes of humanitarian
action as they appear in concentrated form in the experiences of professional
humanitarians, through subjecting the literature on the humanitarian identity crisis,
summarised in the next section, to critical analysis. This comes with the caveat that
the actions of professional humanitarians should be seen as embedded in wider
social understandings and identities that enable their actions, as will be seen
especially throughout the thesis.
(2) Broaden the discussion out to other putative formulations of or
alternatives to humanitarian action, such as human rights and global social justice,
because they are posited by professional humanitarians as possible resolutions to
the dilemmas that emerge from the analysis, and they provide a way to flesh out
the normative questions at stake.