This struggle takes place in relation to a different set of choices. Referring to
Rwanda in 1994, Orbinski tells us: “[the] genocide was life as we can choose to live
it.”^125 We will see in Chapter 2 how the “struggle to create the space to be fully
human”, to expand the possibility of humanity, often takes place in response to
explicit attempts to close down that space, in choices made to act with inhumanity.
But the element of identity means that the discussion of choices does not
capture everything. At the root of solidarity is identity, and the ways we feel,
emotionally experience, understand and act on our human identity are not always
just a matter of considered choices. This relates back to Walzer’s notion that “[the]
central issue for political theory is not the constitution of the self but the
connection of constituted selves, the pattern of social relations. Liberalism is best
understood as a theory of relationship, which has voluntary association at its center
and which understands voluntariness as the right of rupture or withdrawal.”^126 This
account is complicated by considering the role of the “human” in our selves. How
we make sense of the “human” in our selves, and how we produce relationships of
human solidarity, in a broadly liberal sense, is, then, the central question of the
thesis.
3. A Brief Defence of a Liberal Humanitarian Framework
Our heroes here could be seen as somewhat unlikely, from the point of view of a
thesis that remains, at heart, a liberal defence of humanitarianism. Like all really
compelling heroes, they are all seen as flawed, and none provides us with wholly
satisfactory answers. Rather, the gains that ensue from the crucial questions they
ask drive the argument forward until, it is hoped, it stands full-square on its own
two feet (to adopt a shamelessly anthropocentric metaphor for dignified posture).
As I noted above in Section II, the voices drawn on from the practice and analysis of
125
126 Ibid., 10. Italics in original.
Michael Walzer, "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism", in Thinking Politically:
Essays in Political Theory , ed. David Miller (New Haven & London: Yale University Press,
2007), 111.