phenomenology of our moral life directs our attention to how humanitarian
problems arise in a world of states, the world in which humanitarians on the ground
have to work. Finally, it serves to cast our focus on the sources and variety of our
moral responses in a manner closely related to the account of the humanitarian
impulse explored in the previous chapters.
Conclusion
This chapter has argued that a hermetically sealed “humanitarian space” is both
unrealistic and undesirable, especially given professional humanitarians’ misgivings
about becoming rulers. As such, it was seen that an engagement with the state as
an actor was inevitable. The argument made was that this engagement should not
merely be seen as a damage limitation exercise, for the state, in its more benign
forms, can come to represent precisely the kind of sustained institutionalisation of
humanitarian gains for which professional humanitarians strive. There is, for
instance, a strong argument that humans are less “made to suffer” in liberal
democracies than any other form of polity yet invented. Moreover, as actors in
international politics, states are capable both of action on a scale inaccessible to
other kinds of actors, and are also capable of embodying collective understandings
of what humanitarian politics should entail. This is not without its excesses of
course. Many of these are the excesses documented throughout the thesis. But a
modest internationalism suggests a good basis for humanitarian solidarity
nevertheless. This was illustrated by engaging with the work of Michael Walzer,
whose thin universalism sets out a useful account of how our identities and
solidarities structure our moral and political lives, one that realistically reflects the
muddle of solidarities and empathetic interactions so characteristic of the “politics
of humanity”, as set out in earlier chapters of this thesis.