The Politics of Humanity

theory represents an acknowledgement that, for many international or global
problems, it makes little sense to separate out the ethical from the political.
However, the discourse of international political theory, in so far as it can be
summarised, can display a tendency to privilege certain core issues at the expense
of other foci which might productively be examined as revealing and central
concerns for international political theorists. A key claim that I want to advance
here is that humanitarianism is just such a concern. Central to this claim is the
proposition that international political theory as a self-conscious discourse has
instrumentalised and therefore impoverished the study of humanitarianism,
reducing it to a relatively narrow debate on the specific and controversial practice
of military humanitarian intervention, instead of focusing on the vital debates
outlined in the previous section.
There is a danger, here, incidentally, in that part of the point of doing
international political theory is precisely to bring together relevant bodies of
thought in response to problems in our international moral life, in ways that the
authors who form the substantive content of the resulting international political
theory debate had not perhaps anticipated. So to criticise a lack of conscious
engagement with humanitarianism as a distinct focus is not necessarily a valid
criticism for an international political theorist to make, it merely directs him or her
to do the job of identifying an international political theory debate about
humanitarianism. That is one of the key tasks of this work, and I pointed in the
previous section to some key sources for that. But the point here is that within
recent international political theory, humanitarianism has ostensibly been a rather
prominent concern. Here, I want briefly to demonstrate how, within key debates in
international political theory, humanitarianism, while prominent, has largely been
instrumentalised as part of ongoing discussions about sovereignty, rights and
justice, in a way that is potentially unhelpful as a starting point for our task. As such,
a conscious move away from the manner in which the discourse of international
political theory has explicitly treated humanitarianism is necessary, before the
contributions of leading international political theorists, in terms of their implicit