The Politics of Humanity

humanitarian intervention returns us to the paradoxes of humanitarian violence,
and moreover raises the question of what else but humanitarianism can describe
the sphere of concern and the acts of last resort that lie beyond the inevitable
failures of any given version of a human rights regime. A similar set of issues affects
the ambition to devote humanitarianism to seeking a more comprehensive
engagement with the root causes of suffering through projects of global justice. But
engaging with such projects yielded two insights important to understanding
humanitarianism: that we do not necessarily need to find or agree on
transcendental ideals of justice to improve the world around us, and that
humanitarians can usefully politicise the unacceptability of the suffering they
encounter as representing injustice. A common sense of injustice can provide the
basis for an account of human solidarity.
The politics of this human solidarity were then explored in Chapter 6. I
argued that it is ultimately both impossible and undesirable for humanitarians to
ring-fence their endeavour within a separate “humanitarian space”, and that, if they
are to take the politics of their endeavour seriously, they need to take seriously the
weightiest bearer of political authority, the state. Rather than risk reifying the state
as the definitive humanitarian actor, I then set out an account of internationalist
solidarity, one that acknowledges the ways in which states can provide the context
to institutionalise humanitarian gains, and the potential for expressing a collective
humanitarian politics in the world. This was illustrated by an engagement with the
international political theory of Michael Walzer, whose thin universalism provides a
useful description of how our identities and solidarities structure our lives, and can
enable a suitably modest humanitarian presumption in interacting with others,
whether at national or international levels.
In the remainder of this concluding chapter, I will first reconsider, in the light
of the contours I have set out for the “politics of humanity”, David Rieff’s
contention that “even at its best, humanitarian action is always an emblem of
failure”.^2 I will argue that while expanding the scope of humanitarianism beyond
the realm of professional humanitarianism has revealed much that is troubling
2
Rieff, A Bed for the Night , 304.