The Politics of Humanity

intervention”.^93 This categorisation is not uncontroversial. For example, he includes
MSF as an example of solidarism, but MSF certainly would not see themselves as
abandoning impartiality. On the contrary, a concern to act impartially precisely
drives their qualification of neutrality, outlined in the previous section.
The approach here is to consider all humanitarianisms as embodying
versions of politics. Classicists clearly see their apolitical nature in terms of their
commitment to neutrality and impartiality, but Laura Suski makes the point that if
“the principles of neutrality and impartiality are the only measurements of the
(a)political nature of humanitarianism, we are certainly employing a limited view of
the political”.^94 I will take seriously, throughout the thesis, the merits of a politics of
appearing apolitical in different contexts, but ultimately I endorse a more expansive
view of the political, as set out in the introduction to the chapter. As such, I will not
adopt this, or any other classification, that describes approaches in terms of “their
degree of political involvement”.^95 It makes sense for Weiss, as for him the key
types of politics are “the competition among states”, “the struggle for power and
influence within donor and crisis states”, and “efforts to agree upon desirable
international public policies within governmental, intergovernmental, and
nongovernmental arenas”.^96 But this thesis will employ, for instance in Chapters 2
and 3, much broader understandings of social life as a political context. The
question of politics is not one of degree, but of kind.
What Weiss’ classification does help us identify, however, is what
humanitarians see as the core political issues, and these are important for our
purposes. The first of these, implicit in the preceding discussion, is how
humanitarians understand the status of the principles introduced in the previous
section. That is, which they consider to be ethical principles and which operating
principles, and how to construct a politics that turns that view into a workable
package. Secondly, the concern of minimalist political humanitarians, of which Mary
93
94 Ibid.: 3.
Laura Suski, "Children, Suffering and the Humanitarian Appeal", in Humanitarianism and
Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy , ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 217. 95
96 Weiss, "Principles, Politics, and Humanitarian Action": 4.
Ibid.: 11.