The Politics of Humanity

or crisis have serious practical benefits, but leave unanswered a wider set of
questions about why they are justified, and the limits of acceptable suffering. We
may have to step back to identify our changing, but nevertheless visceral,
understandings of what is unacceptable in terms of cruelty and inhumanity.
Through that process, we fill out our understanding of what is human.
Humanitarianism in that sense represents the discussion about how to enlarge that
category. But to engage in that is to engage in a “politics of humanity”, negotiating
the content and political salience of the category of “human”, as well as the
response to attacks on the integrity of the human (which may even come from
within). The following chapters will thus chart how this politics emerges and is
negotiated.