intended effect, of guaranteeing the humanitarian space it seeks. Arguably the door
has long been opened. The horse has bolted. As we saw in Chapter 2, professional
humanitarians frequently function in spaces and contexts in which no such
guarantee is available. Indeed, in moments of “crisis of humanity”, it is the
contestation of their putatively universal notion of humanity that precisely lies at
the heart of the suffering with which they are engaged.
The key question then becomes: do humanitarians nevertheless still want to
identify and ring-fence a distinct humanitarian space, which arguably involves
collaboration with states anyway, as we will see, or to make all international
political space more humanitarian? And if so, how best to conceptualise the politics
of achieving that latter goal?
Humanitarian space is a vital trope in recent humanitarian discourse, and
provides a useful focus for further elaboration of the themes outlined above. It
serves to describe and ring-fence humanitarian action within an international
context. For Hopgood, humanitarian identity is intimately intertwined with the
concept, in the sense that “legitimacy comes from the idea of a humanitarian space
bordered by neutrality, impartiality, and independence”.^8 It can evoke many
different types of space, rhetorical, physical, legal, political, ethical or functional. If
we cannot define it outside of or against politics, we can still examine its distinctive
elements within.
In a recent study of state fragility, the question was posed “of whether
humanitarian space means primarily the space for humanitarian agencies to
operate safely and effectively on the ground, or whether it relates to a wider social,
political or geographical space within which human welfare is preserved and
promoted”.^9 The ICRC’s Johanna Grombach Wagner attributes the phrase
“humanitarian space” itself to Rony Brauman, who defined it as “a space of
freedom in which we are free to evaluate needs, free to monitor the distribution
8
9 Hopgood, "Saying "No" To Wal-Mart?" 119.
Sarah Collinson, Samir Elhawary and Robert Muggah, States of Fragility: Stabilisation and
Its Implications for Humanitarian Action , HPG Working Paper (London: ODI, 2010), 14.
Available at http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/download/4881.pdf; accessed on 17 June
2010.