The Politics of Humanity

Chapter 3 deepens and broadens the analysis, exploring how humanitarian
concern might spread beyond the sphere of already-committed professional
humanitarians. It unpacks the idea of a humanitarian impulse, emphasising the
importance of the emotional capacities that underpin it, in particular empathy. It
then explores the countervailing emotional and psychological obstacles that often
stand in the way of humanitarian action. These present a challenge to those who
would stir the humanitarian impulse through humanitarian campaigns. As such, the
chapter goes on to examine the mediation of suffering, the context in which we
might enact a “sentimental education”, and the importance of taking politics
seriously in anchoring humanitarian concern in our identities and in generating
humanitarian action in response. The final section of the chapter argues that, given
this account, critics of humanitarian action who emphasise its selectivity, as well as
professional humanitarians who assert the possibility of an impartial stance,
somewhat miss the point about how the kind of solidarity characteristic of
humanitarian action comes into being.
Chapter 4 focuses on the idea of rescue, arguing that this is a concept at the
heart of humanitarianism, not least because of extraordinary examples of
humanitarian action in response to “crises of humanity”, such as the Rescuers who
saved Jews during the Holocaust. Yet a focus on rescue puts into sharp relief the
ambiguities and contingencies of humanitarian action. How to understand and
conceptualise the humanity of those being saved is a deeply problematic
endeavour, as tensions emerge between bodily rescue and acts that risk neglecting
bodies in favour of more intangible conceptualisations. Moreover, rescue often
refers as much to the ways in which we attempt to save our sense of self. This again
prompts irresolvable tensions. Action is more likely when it is understood as vital to
preserving the integrity of our identity, yet the action that results often involves an
imposition of that identity, and its presumptions, on others. The play of motives,
intentions and consequences in humanitarian action is then examined. It emerges
that there is a forceful case for a consequentialist focus on saving lives. But the
wider social context in which such an end can be willed should not be neglected.
Furthermore the process of different motivations coalescing into agreed-upon