alter the fundamental problem that faced those professional humanitarians who
denounced the failure of the West to engage with the Rwandan Genocide in 1994:
how to generate political will to intervene? Professional humanitarians cannot a
priori detach themselves from full involvement in this conversation (although some
organisations may wish to for operational reasons). We are returned to questions of
how to mobilise the humanitarian impulse and how best to situate this effort in
contemporary international politics. A plea for an internationalist perspective of
humanitarian politics will be the subject of the next chapter.
But before engaging in that discussion, it is worth considering the other big
conceptual vocabulary through which humanitarians attempt to avoid contingency
and unaccountability: the language of justice.
IV Global Justice and the Recognition of Injustice
A more comprehensive, and ambitious, attempt to address human wrongs, than the
mass atrocity crimes at the centre of R2P, are contemporary projects of global
justice, which also make the most demanding claims about how common humanity
is best protected by a comprehensive global scheme of duties of justice. On this
view, the focus on mass atrocity crimes ignores the crushing everyday poverty in
which billions live, and should not monopolise humanitarian concern.
As with human rights, the question is whether humanitarianism as a project
should embrace the pursuit of justice, as a way of escaping the contingencies of
charity. As with human rights, justice is a vocabulary that humanitarians draw upon
in making claims about the truth of a situation, and the need to hold those
responsible to account.^83 Rather than delve too deep into the intricacies of different
global justice theories, I would like to situate humanitarianism in relation to the
project of fixing global duties of justice to account for unacceptable suffering. As
83
Rony Brauman recently noted the increasing enthusiasm for international retributive
justice projects within the NGO community. Brauman, "1989-2009: What Has Changed?" In
what follows, however, I will largely focus on projects of global social justice, as these make
the biggest claims to deal with the root causes of suffering.