Review Essay: On the Politics of Our Humanitarian Present

Abstract

Humanitarianism has become such a central feature of international politics over recent decades that we are in danger of taking it for granted. Yet not only is humanitarianism an increasingly popular, and by no means unproblematic, way in which Western citizens are invited to respond to world around them; its ready purveyance of moral absolutes--we shall do something--is no less useful to their governments. There is a distinctly liberal moral geography at work here: emerging power humanitarianisms having neither public airs nor quite moral precepts attached to endeavour in West (though see Hirono and O'Hagan, 2012). But even if dominant Western form of humanitarianism may constitute no settled doctrine itself, it does present a consistently fertile way of framing political issues in a moral vernacular and vice versa (for a helpful recent overview, see Collinson and Elhawary, 2012, pages 5-6; see also Barnett and Weiss, 2011). Such developments have generated sustained interest over past two decades in a variety of academic disciplines. But Humanitarian Studies seems to be fast becoming a discipline of its own. In 2009 International Humanitarian Studies Association was founded. Meanwhile, research centres devoted specifically to humanitarian issues are cropping up everywhere, from Harvard's Programme on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research to Feinstein International Center at Tufts University (with an affiliate office in Ethiopia). There are even journals such as Humanity and Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, in which humanitarian concerns are problematised, in main, by anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and international relations scholars. It is timely, then, that over past year what will surely number among this field's defining monographs have also been produced. Empire of Humanity, by American political scientist Michael Barnett, offers what historian Bertrand Taithe describes as the political history against which every other account of humanitarianism will have to be measured. In Humanitarian Reason French medical anthropologist Didier Fassin offers, by contrast, a Foucault-inspired account of form of power/knowledge which lies concealed within humanitarianism's will to care. And in The Least Of All Possible Evils, Israeli architect and social scientist Eyal Weizman turns houses of both reason and morality against themselves to explore violence that is too regularly, and too knowingly, unleashed in name of saving lives. Each of these three books is an important work, product of many years' research and many smaller studies brought together pleasingly on page. Each is written from a different disciplinary background, albeit with surprisingly little convergence in literature upon which they build (a point to which I will return). And each has a distinct intellectual focus. It pays to read them together, however, for connections between them are revealing of what, following Fassin and Weizman, we might term our humanitarian present; a present that reader is prompted throughout all three works to contemplate with Hannah Arendt's warning of dual-edged nature of 'passion for compassion' very much in mind. Humanitarian faith: there are worse things in life than being duped It is with Barnett's book that one ought to begin and end. His treatment of humanitarianism is a periodical one, in both senses of term. It is firstly a division of history of humanitarian endeavour into three ages (of imperial humanitarianism, covering roughly late 18th century to early 20th, of neohumanitarianism, covering post- Second-World-War era, and of liberal humanitarianism, covering post-Cold-War period to present). It is also an act of classification within this, since across these three ages he charts parallel histories of two distinct forms of humanitarian endeavour. …