suffering of others, their embodiment in laws and practices owes much to struggles
driven by self-help. Moreover, there is no guarantee that human rights can
represent a stable summary of self-regarding and other-regarding concerns. There
is no necessary reason for them to always pull in the same direction.
While humanitarianism may give voice to a project like human rights, one of
its potential hubristic excesses is of seeing itself as the sole vehicle through which it
might come into being. The important point here is not to effect an ultimate
decoupling of human rights and humanitarianism. Such an endeavour would be vain
as they, at least in part, issue from the same source, and share a common history.^66
Rather it is to recognise the inherent complexity of the idea of “action” within
humanitarianism, which can never be reduced to a single set of agents or acts.
This relates to the problem of enforcement, one of the strongest arguments
against collapsing humanitarianism and human rights together. As Lynn Hunt pithily
puts it, human rights are “easier to endorse than to enforce”.^67 The international
protection of human rights, as we will see with the humanitarian intervention
example in the next section, is a highly imperfect science. We might well identify
greater success in terms of longer-term normative change, and this goes back to the
point that human rights may be most effective when they become integrated into
the texture of people’s lives: a local vernacular and not just a kind of moral
Esperanto. But humanitarianism, understood more broadly, preserves the
possibility of acting in the last resort, where human rights structures fail or are
absent. In these cases, it is not clear that we can plausibly create an infinite chain of
human rights responsibility. Recent scholarship is finding new and creative ways to
conceptualise human rights responsibility for non-state actors.^68 But states clearly
represent the central bearers of human rights responsibility, for good reasons that
will be returned to in the next chapter. Furthermore, it is not clear that it is either
66
67 Wilson and Brown, "Introduction", 5.
68 Hunt, Inventing Human Rights , 208.
For a summary of recent thinking, see Steiner, Alston and Goodman, eds., International
Human Rights in Context , 1385-1432. For an interesting argument relating to transnational
corporations, see David Jason Karp, Human Rights Responsibility and Transnational
Corporations: An International Political Theory Analysis , unpublished doctoral thesis
(London: University College London, 2010).