of it are practices of rescue, as will be set out in Chapter 4. But what rescue means
is as ambiguous as the question of what is being saved. Does it entail providing “a
bed for the night” or a roadmap to a fulfilled and happy life?
Furthermore, however professional humanitarians understand rescue, they
face questions about the boundaries of the acceptable with regards to the means
they employ. Important here are questions about the legitimacy of using violence in
the exercise of humanitarian action (see Chapters 4 and 5). But arguably more
significant is the question of how to situate different kinds of agents within or
outside the scope of humanitarianism. The question of how individuals experience
the humanitarian impulse will be examined in Chapter 3. How the humanitarian
impulse is best enacted in a world of states, and whether the scope of
humanitarianism needs to be seen as inclusive of international politics, is the topic
of Chapter 6.
All these debates raise a serious of normative questions that cannot be fully
understood within debates among professional humanitarians, who can at times
employ slightly instrumentalised, impoverished accounts of ideas like human rights
and global justice, and present sometimes limited accounts of the normative
aspects of international politics, or indeed, the notion of common humanity at the
core of their concerns and ours. Therefore, it makes sense to look to an area of
theorising which has rather a lot to say about these issues.
III Why Is There No International Political Theory of Humanitarianism?
In this section I argue that when it comes to contemporary international political
theory, humanitarianism is frequently discussed but little understood.^102 The set of
problems and dilemmas introduced above could plausibly be the focus for a
detailed study from a variety of different disciplinary perspectives, including
international law, development studies, sociology and anthropology. Indeed, a
102
The title is of course a play on Martin Wight, "Why Is There No International Theory?" in
Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics , ed. Herbert
Butterfield and Martin Wight (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1966).