The Politics of Humanity

vocabulary of emergency may not describe everything “bad” about the situation,
for instance that the people in question might have been ethnically cleansed from
their homes. But it might enable the practical work of keeping them alive. In a
natural disaster (to the extent that there is ever a “natural” determination of how
much human suffering a disaster will produce) this case seems even stronger.
Moreover, for all the criticisms that have been levelled at the way the
vocabulary of emergency is deployed in articulating a crisis situation, few would
argue that in these kinds of context there is simply no crisis, no practical problem,
no hungry or injured people.^14 For instance, a brief visit to the ReliefWeb
practitioner hub run by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) yields a vast array of detailed information about
current disasters and emergencies and the needs associated with them, together
with costed appeals detailing practical proposals to meet these needs.^15 The UN
system may or may not provide the best route for those needs to be met. But it
would be extremely hard to maintain that the assessments of numbers of people at
risk of malnutrition are purely fictional, or entirely strategic.^16
Here it is important to acknowledge the point made by Jenny Edkins, among
others, that concepts such as hunger and malnutrition can vary in their meaning,
and that this variation is often highly political.^17 But there are limits to this kind of
critique. The first is very simply that of the biological death of bodies.^18 But it also
seems that there is a broader level at which we can meaningfully talk about, for
14
The critiques of emergency here tend to be more along the lines of the following themes,
which will intervene later in this work: (1) the concept obscures the longer term causes and
responsibilities associated with the problem; (2) it depoliticises the agents involved; (3) it
obscures other potential sources of alleviation (such as coping strategies among the
affected); (4) it obscures other equally or more urgent problems; (5) the response that
emergencies engender do more harm than good. 15
16 ReliefWeb. Available at http://www.reliefweb.int/; accessed on 13 August 2010.
Though, anticipating the argument of following chapters somewhat, the response may be
highly strategic. The best funded crises are not ne 17 cessarily those with the highest needs.
18 Edkins, Whose Hunger?^
Even if there are some limited circumstances in which the exact point of biological death
is difficult to decide, this thesis shares the view of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (who
both experienced criticisms of such “binary” thinking, amusingly related by the latter) that
it is best simply to consider “death as opposed to life”. Martha C. Nussbaum, "Human
Capabilities, Female Human Beings", in Global Justice: Seminal Essays , ed. Thomas Pogge
and Darrel Moellendorf (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2008), 497-498.