The Politics of Humanity

2. Humanitarianism and Human Suffering

There are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems.^1

Sadako Ogata’s oft-repeated caution goes to the heart of the crisis of
humanitarianism, suggesting as it does a profound mismatch between what
humanitarians are able to do and what they would like to do. Many of the
subsequent chapters explore this tension, challenging in the process our
understanding of what “fits” and defines the category of humanitarianism. But to
jump straight into this discussion would be to miss a crucial starting point. Ogata’s
quote implies that we know what a humanitarian problem is, that we know what
one looks like, and that, presumably, we could describe this. It presumes to know
the purpose of humanitarianism.
Indeed, to some extent this is true: while we might (and do) disagree on the
causes and responsibilities attaching to fatally malnourished children, few would
disagree that a thousand starving children constitute a problem, broadly
describable as a problem of human suffering. There might be disagreement over
whether it represents a problem of justice, or “merely” of humanity. But the
identification of human suffering, and its qualification as wrong, seems, in this case,
relatively uncontroversial. Perhaps, then, we could simply draw up a list of types of
human suffering and misery and use that to ground our understanding of
humanitarianism.
This immediately raises a problem. Referring to recent anthropological and
sociological work on the subject, Barnett and Weiss remind us that “suffering is an
inherently subjective category”.^2 Kleinman and Kleinman caution us against
“essentializing, naturalizing, or sentimentalizing suffering. There is no single way to
suffer; there is no timeless or spaceless universal shape to suffering.”^3 More
1
2 Ogata, The Turbulent Decade , 25.
3 Barnett and Weiss, "Humanitarianism", 5, fn. 7.
Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman, "The Appeal of Experience; the Dismay of Images:
Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times", Daedalus 125, no. 1 (1996): 2.