The Politics of Humanity

hands, express humanitarian concern, and do nothing. The concern is that
humanitarian language, rather than operationalising calls to “do something,” in
reality becomes a dangerous threat to the pledge of “never again.”
These are challenging claims. On the one hand, they suggest that if a clear
rhetorical acknowledgement of the political dimension is made, it makes it harder
to contrast humanitarian space with political space, and thus defer problems into
the realm of the former. It forces states to find political solutions to political
problems that have terrible humanitarian consequences. On the other hand, if
humanitarian space is brought fully into political space, do humanitarian claims
forfeit in an unacceptable way their privileged status, opening the way for all
humanitarian claims to be seen as equally valid, or simply give the emperor the
benefit of some new clothes?
One view of this question is that the only way for humanitarian language to
retain its distinctive status is to fudge the question and keep humanitarian space
distinct rhetorically at least from political space, even if a tacit acknowledgement is
made that this move does not quite fit the reality on the ground, and with a pang of
guilt regarding the human misery and suffering that are kept out of humanitarian
space, on the grounds that operationally they are impossible for humanitarianism
to alleviate anyway. A more radical, but even more implausible, solution is to
maintain a universal humanitarian space, separate from political space, but
simultaneously to articulate “global civil society” not as political space but as
humanitarian space. Alternatively, we can accept the intermingling of the two
spaces, while trying to maintain and describe a distinctive quality and privileged
status accruing to humanitarian space (for nefarious or worthy reasons, depending
on one’s interpretation).
Ultimately, a pure humanitarian space apart from politics is impossible. A
humanitarian space apart from other political spaces seems, for humanitarians who
do not want to get into the business of ruling, undesirable. The question becomes a
broader one of how to increase the space of humanitarian concerns in international
politics and better situate the problem of human solidarity. As Thomas Weiss puts
it: