such as the “neutral, impartial provision of relief”, though it helps to explain why
such practices may well be desirable. If, however, we are to envisage not only
patients but agents as the objects of humanitarian action, we need to take seriously
the complexities of the “politics of humanity”, and seek in it the expression of a
democratic impulse, as the best way to manage a rich and constantly contested
idea of shared humanity. This more expansive view of the problem of
humanitarianism is certainly more demanding, but yields a richer sense of the ways
in which it has already been successful in enabling people to live lives less tainted by
degradation and inhumanity.
II Humanitarian Futures: The Challenge of Climate Change as a “Crisis of Humanity”
There is no indication that the earthquakes, floods, droughts, massacres, civil
conflicts, wars and forced migratory flows that have kept professional
humanitarians so busy during their “identity crisis” are on the decrease. In the
course of this thesis I have attempted to enrich the discussion of the many
dilemmas and paradoxes that emerge as professional humanitarians tackle them. In
this final section, though, I wish to argue that the broad concept of humanitarianism
that I summarised in the previous section allows us not just to have a richer sense of
the role of humanitarianism in our moral lives, our sense of human identity and the
possibilities of human solidarity. It also provides us with important conceptual tools
to make sense of climate change as a humanitarian problem. While the brief
analysis presented here has no silver bullet policy prescriptions to make, it aims to
demonstrate the conceptual value-added of my approach in addressing climate
change, to warn against the wrong turnings taken by dominant international
political theory approaches, and, in doing so, to suggest the contours of a wider
research project of establishing more fully the nature of climate change as a crucial
humanitarian problem.