with human rights, we will see that injustice creates a space that demands a
broader account of humanitarianism in response to the question: when justice is
not done, can nothing be done?
In setting humanitarianism against the work being done in international
political theory on justice, and in particular against the global justice projects
advocated by cosmopolitan theorists, we come up against an initial conundrum:
humanitarianism is often thought of as a cosmopolitan category, yet many
cosmopolitan thinkers see humanitarianism as profoundly unsatisfactory, because
relying on the contingencies of charity or philanthropy, rather than generating, or
serving, an account of justice. So, many accounts begin by contrasting what we owe
to each other as a matter of justice, with what we might offer out of charity,
compassion or “mere” humanity.^84 There is an initial contrast between justice and
humanitarianism that, on the account given so far of humanitarianism, represents a
category error, in the sense that the concern of global justice theorists to formulate
principles of justice to do away with unnecessary suffering is in almost every case a
humanitarian concern. The starting assumptions, such as that the child drowning in
the pond offends our basic humanity, are, in a relatively trivial sense, clearly
humanitarian.^85 Brian Barry relates this assumption to “duties of humanity”.^86 So
too are the moral awakenings that these theorists sometimes describe. For
instance, Thomas Pogge links his to finding out about the Holocaust when a child in
Germany: “My discovery of the Nazi crimes was the experience that I had
misunderstood the world – completely”.^87 Pogge then describes a process of
questioning and rebuilding his moral universe from this negative moment, in a
84
I will argue later that the problem is actually seeing humanitarianism as a necessarily
cosmopolitan category. 85
That the statement seems trivial could be seen as a success of humanitarianism, at least
in the sense that the assumption is now easily made for a child of any race, religion etc.
Also, it is not always so obvious in an era of child soldiers and when the Rwandan Genocide
saw the bodies of children pile up by the thousands 86.
Brian Barry, "Humanity and Justice in Global Perspective", in Global Justice: Seminal
Essays , ed. Thomas Pogge and Darrel Moellendorf (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2008), 180-
- 87
Thomas Pogge, Politics as Usual: What Lies Behind the Pro-Poor Rhetoric (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2010), 1.