The Politics of Humanity

inadequate in the face of suffering, they simultaneously want to shape politics in
order to combat the causes of that suffering more effectively. Clearly, shaping
politics is a political act, but so too is naming a genocide, and finding ways to win
the argument against those who will inevitably deny it.^25 Janice Stein confirms this.
“Bearing witness is, at its essence, a deeply political act that shapes the reality of
those who tell the story.”^26 Furthermore, restoring autonomy carries with it the
burden of defending the conception of autonomy at stake. Defining humanitarian
framings of suffering against politics, as an apolitical act, thus appears untenable.
While Orbinski’s view is just about compatible with Ogata’s “no
humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems”, he is effectively implicating
humanitarianism in the political negotiation of potential solutions. Of course,
another option would simply be to retreat back to the vocabulary of “complex
gynaecological emergency” and build a set of operating principles (which might well
include not pointing fingers and rocking the boat) that fit the technical problem of
relieving the suffering caused by such emergencies everywhere, in order to
maximise the chances of relieving the most suffering in the long term. But this
position is also profoundly troubling, as it seems to leave humanitarianism with
nothing to fall back on to justify the value of saving lives except those operating
principles.
Moreover, returning to the idea that humanitarianism has developed as a
practice with a strong sense of the possible. Orbinski is opening a space to frame
and engage with suffering where practical measures to relieve it may not be
possible, or may be of negligible use, such as in the midst of a genocide. In such a
context, he wishes to assert the possibility of a humanitarian act of speaking out,
fitting his concept of “an ethic of refusal”, which is also really, when played out in
practice, a politics of refusal, a negotiation of the boundaries of the acceptable
across different social and political contexts. In this he sees the continuing
possibility of humanitarianism, if not through practical acts of humanitarian relief,
then through a different kind of humanitarian action: testimony and calling for
25
See for example Mahmood Mamdani, "The Politics of Naming: Genocide, Civil War,
Insurgency", 26 London Review of Books 29, no. 5 (2007).
Stein, "Humanitarianism as Political Fusion": 741.