can agree with Brauman that humanitarians are those who believe that humans are
not made to suffer, but we need to recognise the contingencies inherent in every
term of that phrase.
Therefore, we should envisage humanitarianism as a discussion within which
the category of “human” is not only defended, but more importantly negotiated
and understood. This negotiation takes place through human suffering that we
consider cruel and inhuman. But we also bring to bear on the discussion prior
conceptions of humanity that may contain their own cruelties and sources of
inhumanity. Framings of suffering become the arguments put forward in a “politics
of humanity”, a politics through which we negotiate and defend our sense of the
“human” and its place in our political landscape, even if, as Amir Pasic and Thomas
G. Weiss remind us, humanity “is not a category for which we have prepared our
political concepts”.^73 Putative humanitarians are engaged in a high stakes game
against those who wish to narrow the category of the human, but can also fall prey
to valid charges of narrowing or ring-fencing that category themselves. More
troubling, in negotiating the meaning of “humanity”, humanitarians are, in effect,
negotiating the humanity of others. In doing so, they can slip into a deeply
possessive relationship. For instance, Alex de Waal refers to the danger of “the
humanitarians’ moral ownership of other people’s suffering” engendering “the
legitimacy of their intrusion into other societies”.^74
Related to this is a danger inherent in this necessary politics of humanity:
the production of hierarchies of suffering, based on its causes. This is the flipside of
the danger of articulating perfect crimes with only victims, as warned against by
Brauman. Taking things to the other extreme, we can come to devote ourselves
exclusively to identifying dragons to slay, and miss the more diffuse forms of
suffering, that though unjust (see Chapter 5) may not present the drama of
obviously cruel action, or a clear agent to whom to attribute guilt and blame. We
may come to idealise our own moral agency (as good) as well as the moral agency
of the perpetrator (as evil). In the absence of a “bad guy” to hunt down, or an easily
73
74 Pasic and Weiss, "The Politics of Rescue": 126.
de Waal, Famine Crimes , 216.