and military action to ban the Atlantic slave trade is a particularly useful case.
Secondly, the acts of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.^22 The Holocaust is
frequently seen as a foundational episode in the understanding of how we can fail
to honour our common humanity and the cornerstone of post-Second World War
moral universalism.^23 We will see that the exceptional actions of Rescuers come
close to a quintessence of humanitarian action, yet do not “fit” current accounts of
what humanitarian action supposedly consists of. Thirdly, the challenge of climate
change, which not only threatens to massively increase the frequency and intensity
of humanitarian crises of different kinds, but also arguably represents a watershed
“crisis of humanity”, challenging in a profound way the political agency and
responsibility of humanity as a category, and the possibilities of human solidarity.^24
Having set out in broad terms the starting point of the thesis, I will now
briefly set out the key elements of the humanitarian identity crisis, showing that it
raises profound normative questions about the politics of our common humanity.
II The Humanitarian Identity Crisis.....................................................................................
For professional humanitarians, as indeed for many observers, the two decades
since the end of the Cold War have been a disorientating period. In 1999, Thomas
Weiss published an influential dissection of an emerging “humanitarian identity
crisis” in Ethics & International Affairs.^25 1999 was a crucial, yet bittersweet year in
the recent history of humanitarianism. The French medical humanitarian NGO
22
23 Henceforth the capitalised noun refers to this particular group.
On the process underlying this, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, "On the Social Construction of
Moral Universals: The `Holocaust' from War Crime to 24 Trauma Drama", 5, no. 1 (2002).
See for example UNDP, Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World ,
Human Development Report 2007/2008 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Available
at http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/hdr2007-20 25 08/; accessed on 20 June 2010.
Thomas G. Weiss, "Principles, Politics, and Humanitarian Action", Ethics & International
Affairs 13, no. 1 (1999). See also the thoughtful responses to Weiss’ analysis. David Rieff,
"Moral Imperatives and Political Realities", Ethics & International Affairs 13, no. 1 (1999).
Cornelio Sommaruga, "Humanity: Our Priority Now and Always", Ethics & International
Affairs 13, no. 1 (1999). Joelle Tanguy and Fiona Terry, "Humanitarian Responsibility and
Committed Action", Ethics & International Affairs 13, no. 1 (1999).