I From “Humanitarian Crisis” to “Crisis of Humanity”
Typically, the trigger for humanitarian action, or at least humanitarian concern, is
described as an “emergency” or a “crisis”.^5 The idea of emergency serves to indicate
human suffering that has become worthy of concern and action at the level of
humankind. It implies both a threshold breached and a sense of urgency. The
concept has come under attack. For instance, Alex Bellamy notes that we often
work with a “partial and restrictive conception of ‘humanitarian emergency’ that
provides human suffering with temporal and spatial borders”.^6 Yet the vocabulary
of emergency has much intuitive appeal, for it does express quite effectively the
radical and rapid change in circumstances that can, for instance, lead to a flooded
village with villagers clinging to rooftops and trees. The recent floods in Pakistan, or
the earthquake that devastated Haiti in early 2010 are cases in point, and the
vocabulary of emergency seems eminently appropriate here. Perhaps Bellamy’s
point might simply spur us to be more careful about our application of the term, to
incorporate developmentalist concerns and slow-onset disasters.
But a deeper unease persists within the literature. David Rieff writes of
“what we rather antiseptically and misleadingly call the humanitarian emergencies
that scar our times”.^7 There is a widespread sense that the vector through which
humanitarianism incorporates suffering simultaneously sanitizes and depoliticises
it.^8 This section discusses how the identity of humanitarianism is linked to
understandings of humanitarian emergency or crisis. The key problem is eloquently
expressed by Rony Brauman, long a leading figure within MSF:
The simple fact that the genocide in Rwanda or massacres of civil
populations and a strategy of terror in Bosnia could be labeled as
‘‘humanitarian crises’’ is sadly eloquent ... The UN as well as governments,
the press, and the NGOs are constantly using this formula, which leads me5
6 I use the terms interchangeably.
Bellamy, "Humanitarian Responsibilities and Interventionist Claims in International
Society": 329. 7
8 Rieff, A Bed for the Night , 2.
This is, for instance, one of the core concerns of Edkins, Whose Hunger?