7. Conclusion: The Struggle for Humanity
The “humanitarian identity crisis” turns out to be something of a proxy war. The
prominent place of humanitarianism in international public discourse since the end
of the Cold War has, above all, provided a context in which to express a perennial
struggle, that over the meaning and content of human identity. This struggle takes
place through a “politics of humanity”, an inevitably complex politics, the breadth of
which can never fully be encompassed by any particular practice, even one that
aspires to always act in its name. This thesis has set out some of the crucial
parameters of this politics.
I suggested, in Chapter 2, that the first area of complexity and negotiation
concerns human suffering. I argued that it is important to look beyond pre-
determined framings of “emergency” and “crisis”, and to pay attention to how
concern is prompted and nourished by our responses to suffering, such as a visceral
rejection of cruelty. It is through these that we come to formulate our sense of
common humanity, in response to instances of inhumanity that take on a greater
symbolic power as “crises of humanity”. As such, professional humanitarians may
indeed be the “sentinels between the human and the inhuman”, but the boundary
that they patrol is not always clearly marked out in advance.^1 Indeed, they cannot
always be sure themselves of exactly which side of it they are on.
Expanding and defending the territory won for “humanity”, depends in part
on the ability to tell “sad and sentimental stories” that help to see others as “like
us”. Sometimes, for those with an already rich sense of common humanity, such as
the Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, seeing others as “like us” simply at the
level of a shared human identity can be enough to prompt action. For such tales to
have wider traction, they need to both draw on but also expand our capacity for
empathy. In Chapter 3 I argued that in overcoming indifference and the abstract
quality that the suffering of others can acquire, sentimental stories can also
1
Ignatieff, The Warrior's Honor , 161.