(3) Explore these areas through the contemporary normative debates on
them in international political theory, as every point of contention raised in the
thesis speaks to these debates, and the context of international political theory is
the suitable one to explore the issues raised by the particular blend of ethics and
politics that characterises humanitarian action. In section III below, I explain why
this juxtaposition has not been done before. Though much weight is put on the
experiences of practitioners, the lived experience of humanitarianism, the thesis
endorses the view of Peter J. Hoffman and Thomas G. Weiss that “[the] survival and
success of humanitarianism rests on moving beyond a divide that presents
practitioners as guardians and scholars as gadflies. In war zones the price of
humanitarian failure has always been paid in blood.”^19 As such, it is hoped that the
conceptual work here may contribute to dispelling some of the fog of war.
(4) To illustrate the argument, draw on practical examples from the core
sites of crisis of recent humanitarianism, such the Rwandan Genocide or Srebrenica.
But also illustrate the argument with a selection of examples from empirical cases
and problems that speak to one of the core dilemmas of humanitarianism: that its
justification in terms of a concern for humanity has implications far broader than
that which it is willing to accept as falling within the remit of humanitarian
responsibility. Especially important here are events or problems that do not fit the
conventional understanding of professional humanitarian action, but the exclusion
of which would render impossible any plausible definitional attempt. In particular, I
will return frequently to three cases.
Firstly, British abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
century.^20 Martha Finnemore argues that “[the] abolition of slavery and the slave
trade in the nineteenth century were essential to the universalization of
‘humanity’”.^21 As such, the British campaign that led to substantial British political
19
Peter J. Hoffman and Thomas G. Weiss, "Humanitarianism and Practitioners: Social
Science Matters", in Humanitarianism in Question: Politics, Power, Ethics , ed. Michael
Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss (London: Cornell Univer 20 sity Press, 2008), 285.
This story is particularly well told in Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: The British
Struggle to Abolish Slavery 21 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005).
Martha Finnemore, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).