the voice of the victim of injustice, rather than assume that our model of justice will
fit. In acting in defence of common humanity, it remains possible that satisfactory
acts of justice will be within our reach, or that pity will turn out to be our only
resource, but seeking to enable an empathetic sense of injustice seems a more
workable way to make sense of and act through the contingencies of humanitarian
action.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that we cannot find a resolution to the contingencies of
humanitarian action, notably its unaccountability, in either human rights or global
justice, but it has provided us with a useful way to account for our visceral sense of
the unacceptable and the inhuman in a shared sense of injustice, as suggested by
Judith Shklar, and in Amartya Sen’s useful shift from seeking transcendental
resolution to problems of injustice, and looking for practical ways of making the
world less unjust. A definitive sense of accountability remains elusive, largely
because humanitarianism encompasses actions of last resort, and the moment of
last resort is by definition an unaccountable one. But, as Stein argues accountability
“works best when it is used as an opportunity to widen the conversation about the
politics, power, and ethics that define humanitarian space”.^108 This prompts us to a
serious engagement with the political context in which humanitarianism exists, the
distinctive space it sees itself as occupying, and to suggest a way forward for
articulating human solidarity as the continued development of a shared human
identity. Such is the topic of the next chapter.
108
Stein, "Humanitarian Organizations", 142.