The Politics of Humanity

dehumanise those whose tales they tell, leading to responses of pity at best. Yet
there seems little else but to tell better, more representative stories, and to work to
bring together disparate kinds of engagement with suffering into political
constituencies for a more humane politics. This was seen to be a process that does
not sit particularly well with a blanket demand for impartial concern, not least
because it represents a struggle, and struggles are not dispassionate affairs.
At the heart of the humanitarian action that does take place are practices of
rescue. The apparently simple notion of saving a human life must always be central
to humanitarianism, as I argued in Chapter 4. Yet it presents perhaps the most
profound conundrum of humanitarian action: attributing significance to humanity
means that saving a human life is necessarily far more complex than simply saving a
human body. Any action, claiming to take place in the name of humanity, that fails
to save human bodies will always be suspect. But so too is action that privileges the
saving of bodies above all else, for it too will rightly be seen as lacking in humanity
in its more ineffable sense. The carrying out of even the simplest act of rescue was
thus seen to be a deeply contingent and presumptuous occasion. It involves taking
the consequences of action seriously, not least because of the demonstrable
capacity for humanitarian action to cause harm, but it also requires that we
understand the broader motivational context in which “good” humanitarian
consequences come to be envisaged and marked as valuable. Moreover, along with
problems of unintentional harm comes the irresolvable paradox of humanitarian
violence.
Attempts to overcome, or at least minimise, these contingencies were
explored in Chapter 5. A core concern of professional humanitarians is their
unaccountability, but their own efforts to hold themselves to account ultimately
cannot equate to truly empowering those they aspire to help. Frequently, in fact, it
renders them more accountable to the donors, and the social contexts of concern,
that fund and enable them. As such, I examined more ambitious attempts to
empower current and potential future victims of unacceptable suffering. The
dominant project in this regard is the language and institutions of universal human
rights. But in extreme contexts of human rights violation, the possibility of