Humanitarianism, Responsibility, Links, Knots

Abstract

The doctrine of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P), adopted as a guiding principle by the United Nations at the World Summit in 2005, was initially conceived as a way to resolve the state sovereignty–universal rights bind and to rectify the failures of humanitarian intervention in cases such as Somalia, Rwanda and Kosovo. While R2P has not exactly succeeded in these aims, the debates surrounding it point to an urgent need to reimagine both the ethics of humanitarian intervention and the meaning of the term ‘responsibility’. This essay poses Nuruddin Farah's Links (2003) and Knots (2007) – the first two novels of his Past Imperfect trilogy – as texts that take up this challenge. Along with offering an important critique of the US-led UN intervention in Somalia in 1992, these novels represent modes of humanitarian action where responsibility is conceived outside of hierarchical moral terms. Ultimately, they reveal the links that oblige humans to help each other as reciprocal knots, and suggest that productive humanitarianism begins not from an external desire to untangle or ‘solve’ political crises but from an intimate sense of ethical, emotional and material ‘entanglement’.