understandable causal pattern, such as characterises complex emergencies or
apparently intractable civil conflicts, we neglect suffering such as the grinding
everyday poverty in which a huge percentage of the world’s population lives. This
can be deeply counterproductive in the case of slow-onset disasters, and complex
phenomena such as climate change.^75 This points humanitarians back to more
dispassionate, technical assessments. The challenge, then becomes neither to reify
the causes or consequences of suffering, as both risk doing injustice to those
humanitarians aspire to help. As will be seen, this is an extremely difficult and
complex challenge. Either way, humanitarians are locked in to the play of what
Craig Calhoun terms “the emergency imaginary”, and the struggle to define what is
normal and abnormal both in terms of human suffering and of political order, and
what merits and legitimises intervention.^76 Nicholas Onuf traces the history of this
struggle back to the early nineteenth century, and notes the tendency for suffering
to become secondary to one’s own programmatic concerns.^77
I put forward this starting context for debates about humanitarianism as a
necessary alternative to twin tendencies to reduce them entirely to either
philosophical or practice-based discussions, because, as this chapter has shown,
neither framing suffering as a practical matter of saving lives nor as a philosophical
hatred of cruelty can ever fully resolve the issues at stake. The suggestion here is
that the distinctiveness of humanitarianism is not to be found in a definitive
account of human suffering, but rather on how it operationalises that suffering as a
politics of humanity.
Conclusion
This chapter has begun to fill out the category of humanitarianism in one important
respect, charting how suffering enters the discussion. Framings such as emergency
75
I will argue in the concluding chapter that climate change precisely needs to be seen as a
crisis of humanity, in the sense put forward in thi 76 s chapter.
77 Calhoun, "The Imperative to Reduce Suffering", 82-89.
Nicholas Onuf, "Humanitarian Intervention: The Early Years", Florida Journal of
International Law 16, no. 4 (2004): 785.