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Barnett (Editor) - Humanitarianism and Human Rights - A World of Differences - Cambridge University Press (2020)

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Humanitarianism and Human Rights

This book explores the ﬂuctuating relationship between human rights

and humanitarianism. For most of their lives, human rights and huma-
nitarianism have been distant cousins. Humanitarianism focused on
situations in faraway places dealing with large-scale loss of life that
demanded urgent attention while human rights advanced the cause of
individual liberty and equality at home. However, the twentieth century
saw the two coming much more directly into dialogue, particularly
following the end of the Cold War, as both began working in war
zones and post-conﬂict situations. Leading scholars probe how the
shifting meanings of human rights and humanitarianism converge and
diverge from a variety of disciplinary perspectives ranging from philoso-
phical inquiries that consider whether and how differences are con-
structed at the level of ethics, obligations, and duties, to historical
inquiries that attempt to locate core differences within and between
historical periods, and to practice-oriented perspectives that suggest
how differences are created and recreated in response to concrete pro-
blems and through different kinds of organized activities with different
goals and meanings.

Michael N. Barnett is University Professor of International Affairs and

Political Science at the George Washington University. He has written
critically acclaimed books on global ethics, humanitarian intervention,
and humanitarianism, including Eyewitness to a Genocide: The United
Nations and Rwanda (2002) and Empire of Humanity (2012), and edited
Paternalism Beyond Borders (2016).

Edited by

Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, University of California, Berkeley

Samuel Moyn, Yale University, Connecticut

This series showcases new scholarship exploring the backgrounds of human rights
today. With an open-ended chronology and international perspective, the series
seeks works attentive to the surprises and contingencies in the historical origins
and legacies of human rights ideals and interventions. Books in the series will
focus not only on the intellectual antecedents and foundations of human rights,
but also on the incorporation of the concept by movements, nation-states,
international governance, and transnational law.

A full list of titles in the series can be found at:

www.cambridge.org/human-rights-history

Edited by
Michael N. Barnett
George Washington University, Washington DC

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Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108836791
DOI: 10.1017/9781108872485
© Cambridge University Press 2020
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2020
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Barnett, Michael N., 1960– editor.
Title: Humanitarianism and human rights: a world of differences? / edited by
Michael N. Barnett.
Description: New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2020. |
Series: Human rights in history | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identiﬁers: LCCN 2020012055 | ISBN 9781108836791 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781108872485 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Humanitarian intervention. | Human rights.
Classiﬁcation: LCC JZ6369 .H895 2020 | DDC 341.5/84–dc23
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Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

List of Contributors page vii

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction: Worlds of Difference 1

michael n. barnett

Part I Differences or Distinctions?

1 Human Rights and Humanitarianization 33
samuel moyn
2 Suffering and Status 49
jeffrey flynn
3 Humanitarianism and Human Rights in Morality
and Practice 71
charles r. beitz
4 For a Fleeting Moment: The Short, Happy Life
of Modern Humanism 89
stephen hopgood

Part II Practices
5 Humanitarian Governance and the Circumvention
of Revolutionary Human Rights in the British Empire 107
alan lester
6 Humanitarian Intervention as an Entangled History
of Humanitarianism and Human Rights 127
fabian klose

7 Mobilizing Emotions: Shame, Victimhood, and Agency 140

bronwyn leebaw
8 At Odds? Human Rights and Humanitarian Approaches to
Violence Against Women During Conﬂict 160
aisling swaine
9 Innocence: Shaping the Concept and Practice
of Humanity 185
miriam ticktin
10 Reckoning with Time: Vexed Temporalities in Human
Rights and Humanitarianism 203
ilana feldman
11 Between the Border and a Hard Place: Negotiating
Protection and Humanitarian Aid after the Genocide
in Cambodia, 1979–1999 219
bertrand taithe
Conclusion: Practices of Humanity 235
michael n. barnett

Notes 252
Bibliography 286
Index 330

michael n. barnett is University Professor of International Affairs

and Political Science at the George Washington University.
charles beitz is the Edwards S. Sanford Professor of Politics at
Princeton University.
ilana feldman is Professor of Anthropology, History, and
International Affairs at the George Washington University.
jeffrey flynn is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham
University.
stephen hopgood is Professor of International Relations at the School
of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
fabian klose is Professor of International History at the University of
Cologne.
bronwyn leebaw is Associate Professor of Political Science at the
University of California-Riverside.
alan lester is Professor of Geography at the University of Sussex.
samuel moyn is the Henry Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at the Yale
Law School and Professor of History at Yale University.
aisling swaine is Professor of Gender Studies at the School of Social
Policy, Social Work and Social Justice at University College Dublin.
bertrand taithe is Professor of History and the Executive Director of
the Humanitarian and Conﬂict Response Unit at the University of
Manchester.
miriam ticktin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New
School for Social Research.

vii

My ﬁrst thanks go to those who contributed to the volume and partici-

pated in the two workshops at George Washington University. In addi-
tion to those who wrote, I want to thank the following for their
commentary and contributions: Susanna Campbell, Daniel Cohen,
Ruti Teitel, Kathryn Sikkink, Bill Luban, Melani Macalester, and
a huge thanks and debt of gratitude to Sally Engle Merry. I also benefited
from presentations given at various institutions and conferences on the
topic: University of Minnesota; University of Sydney; a conference on the
history of the ICRC at the University of Adelaide; a presentation at
a conference on the history of humanitarianism at the Leibniz Institute
of European History, Mainz; and the University of Washington.
Although he declined to review the book for Cornell University Press,
Roger Haydon provided some exceptional suggestions that strengthened
the manuscript and made it more likely to survive the review process at
Cambridge. The volume also benefited considerably from the trenchant
reading by and suggestions from two anonymous reviewers, and Samuel
Moyn and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman, the editors of the series in which this
book appears. Last but hardly least, Danielle Gilbert helped organize the
two workshops at GWU. It is fair to say that none of this would have been
possible without her, in part because I never would have organized
a conference on my own.
Much like humanitarianism and human rights, all the good thoughts,
hard work, and compassionate criticism would not have been possible
without a donor with money. The generous donor in this case is the Office
of the Provost at the George Washington University, which provides the
funds for the university professorship that I am able to use for events such
as the ones that made possible this volume.
Lastly, thanks to Michael Watson and Emily Sharp at Cambridge
University Press for expertly shepherding the manuscript through the
entire process.

viii

Michael N. Barnett

For most of their lives, human rights and humanitarianism have been distant
cousins. They were the offspring of the Enlightenment, Christianity, and
humanity, but they soon went their separate ways. Humanitarianism
focused on situations in faraway places where natural or humanly made
events caused large-scale loss of life that demanded urgent attention.
Human rights, on the other hand, advanced the cause of individual liberty
and equality at home. Because they were doing different things in different
places, they rarely encountered or took the measure of the other. World
Wars I and II reduced some of the distance. After World War I, humanitar-
ianism became attentive to refugees, who were conferred rights, and human
rights became more international with the invention of international minor-
ity rights. After World War II and decolonization, each went through
a growth spurt that brought them into greater proximity. Although now
circulating in some of the same networks, they largely kept to themselves.
Everything changed beginning in the 1990s. The end of the Cold War
produced an explosion of internal conflicts and humanitarian emergen-
cies from the former Yugoslavia to Somalia and beyond. In these so-called
“new” wars, civilians were not “collateral damage” but rather the
intended targets. Millions of innocents fled conflict and sought shelter
and protection where they could. Sometimes they managed to cross
a border and become bona fide refugees where they received aid in
internationally organized camps. But in many instances the displaced
were stuck in their home country, requiring aid agencies to undertake
a perilous mission of bringing relief to them. For many the temporary
became the long term, and agencies had to consider questions of educa-
tion, livelihoods, community organization, and even rights. Because of
these and other changes on the ground and the growing ascendency of
a human rights discourse, aid organizations began embracing a “rights-
based” framework. Human rights ascendant included an expansion into
armed conflict and the protection of the same populations that concerned
humanitarians. Challenging the artificial boundary between needs and

rights, human rights activists insisted that victims had a right to, and not
just a need for, relief, alongside other basic rights. Furthermore, relief
might be adjusted to better prepare the ground for human rights.
Now that human rights and humanitarianism were occupying the same
spaces and working with the same populations, they had to address their
relationship. Some imagined them becoming a force multiplier, stronger
together than apart, and with enhanced capacity to protect vulnerable
populations. Each could learn from each other. They could develop
a sequenced division-of-labor, with aid agencies saving lives and then
rights activists protecting them from other harms and injecting the rule
of law into states and societies. One possibly provided support for the
other. The humanitarian concern for refugees and asylum seekers can
open the door to human rights and justice.1 The human rights commu-
nity’s concern for gender-based violence prodded more and specialized
attention from the humanitarian field. Long-standing distinctions
between international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human
rights law (IHRL) began to erode. Traditionally IHL covered armed
conflict and IHRL relations between states and their citizens, but in the
1990s, they began to converge, producing a “humanity’s law.”2
Others rejected the idea that all good things go together, and identified
tensions and warned of conflicts between the two. For example:
On engaging perpetrators: Human rights activists tended to name and shame,
make noise, and heckle rights-violating states to get them to cease their violations;
humanitarian organizations prefer quiet diplomacy.
On the use of drones: Human rights organizations might fly drones to try and
identify where atrocities were occurring and identify the names and faces of the
perpetrators; humanitarian organizations might fly drones in the same area to
identify the location of the victims, their needs, and survey logistical hurdles.
Whereas human rights agencies have relatively little need for the cooperation of
the perpetrators, aid agencies do, and “rights” drones might make the latter’s
operations much more difficult and dangerous because they must now try to
negotiate with much more suspicious armed actors.3
On conditionality: Humanitarian organizations insist that there is a near “right
to relief,” while human rights activists judge this relief in relationship to the
broader goals of human rights protection and justice.4
On construction of the “other”: Humanitarian reason can lead from a politics of
pity to the demonization of refugees, while human rights activism can foster
inclusion.5
On the effects of the discourse of “emergency” and “crisis”: Labeling some-
thing as a humanitarian emergency or crisis can displace attention from the
causes, including a lack of rights.6
On humanitarian intervention: Human rights has tended to favor the idea of
humanitarian intervention whereas humanitarian organizations have been luke-
warm to cold.7

On international criminal justice: The International Criminal Court (ICC)

requires first-hand accounts and evidence for its proceedings, and aid workers
are often eyewitnesses. But if they cooperate with the ICC, or any legal process,
they risk being expelled from the country, or worse. This is exactly what happened
in the Sudan when the ICC indicted Sudanese president Bashir for genocide.8
The search for justice might cost lives.
On pandemics: COVID-19 has demonstrated a series of tensions around
priorities and trade-offs when balancing saving lives and protecting human rights
and privacy. In order to mitigate the spread of the virus, there is considerable need
for data regarding individuals’ actions, whereabouts, movements, and networks.
Without contact tracing and other forms of prevention and mitigation, more
people are at risk and will needlessly die. Human rights and civil liberties groups
are worried that these new surveillance technologies will be appropriated by states
and others to violate human rights and represent a threat. Although human rights
actors want to save lives, and humanitarian actors are worried about the growing
use of biometric data and threats to privacy, they often prioritize lives and rights
differently and are prepared to make the trade-offs between the two in different
places.9
On protection: The concept of protection has expanded considerably since its
earliest days in the beginning of the 1990s. Much of the initial attention emerged
from within the humanitarian system and the need to highlight the physical
threats to civilians. But over time it expanded to include human rights.10 From
one angle, the expansion from protection to prevention is a natural development.
From another, a broader version of protection and the centrality of human rights
law, as Taithe illustrates in this volume, potentially undermines humanitarian’s
notion of protection.11
On gender-based violence: Relief and rights organizations can adopt different
approaches to violence against women in conflict in part because, as Swaine
observes in this volume, they have different objectives: the former treats physical
harms and psychosocial trauma, while the latter interviews victims to collect
stories, information, and first-hand experiences in order to prosecute perpetrators
and seek justice. But interviewing victims of sexual violence can retraumize the
victims.12
Each community has registered wariness of the other, but my reading is
that the field of humanitarianism has been more worried than the field of
human rights (though in Chapter 1 Moyn makes the opposite case). Why?
Humanitarianism stayed closer to home as it remained largely focused on
situations of armed conflict and natural disasters, and exhibited little
interest in the wider world of human rights. Human rights, on the other
hand, was expanding into the known and unknown worlds, penetrating
deep into humanitarian territory, and possibly altering humanitarian
practices in the process.13 For instance, humanitarian agencies have
increasingly defined protection to include advocacy, almost to the point
that advocacy displaces real protection; when women in refugees camps
in Darfur were being raped as they searched for firewood outside the

camps, aid agencies, according to one critic, spent more time calling
attention to their situation than offering the remedy of bring firewood
into the camps.14 One International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
official fatalistically observed that the war between the two bodies of law
was over, and IHL needed to consider the terms of its surrender.15 This
was not a merger but a hostile takeover. The ICRC’s Hugo Slim, who
once wrote sympathetically about the need for humanitarianism to
embrace a rights-based framework, called on humanitarianism to main-
tain its identity in the face of the human rights revolution.16
A similar story of independence followed by debates about boundaries
also occurred in the scholarly fields of human rights and humanitarianism.
Human rights scholarship grew considerably beginning in the 1980s,
appearing in flagship journals and creating a growing number of specialized
outlets. Scholars of international law were examining the mutual influence
and growing overlap between international human rights and humanitarian
law.17 Political scientists were exploring the remarkable spread of contem-
porary human rights, how transnational activists influenced states, and why
states felt compelled to comply with the growing web of nonbinding inter-
national human rights law.18 Historians were debating the origins and
evolution of human rights, and when human rights globalized and became
international human rights.19 Anthropologists were exploring variations in
the meanings of human rights, including how human rights was under-
stood, redefined, vernacularized, and practiced across different societies.20
Sociologists were examining the social movements and combination of
structure, agency, and contingency that propelled human rights from
infancy to maturity.21 Some writings turned human rights on its head,
seeing them not as pathways to emancipation but rather as stealth weapons
of domination and reinforcing a highly unequal global order.22 The totality
of these writings and scholarly activity, both euphoric and critical, was
creating a bona fide human rights field. There were more courses on
human rights. Universities began establishing stand-alone human rights
centers, offering minors and masters programs.
The human rights field was becoming established when the humanitar-
ian field got its start beginning in the 1990s. Prior to then there was
scattered work on the ICRC, international humanitarian law, sacrificing
saviors, and the occasional history of an aid agency. Changes in the world
and academics led to growing interest in the topic. As scholars picked up
the pace, they shifted from angelology toward ponerology, adopting
a much more critical perspective. Historians began digging through
archives, finding a more complicated and profane history rooted in
national, transnational, and international forces.23 Political scientists chal-
lenged the “purity” of humanitarianism, observing how state power and

ﬁnancing shaped the humanitarian sector and caused aid organizations to

compete in ways that shifted their energies from the survival of victims to
organizational survival.24 Anthropologists began exploring how humani-
tarianism’s ethics of care masked the presence of power disparities between
the givers and receivers.25 Foucault and Agamben were important inspira-
tions, as the former offered an alternative way to think about governance
outside the state and the latter states of exception.26 Under their influence,
refugee camps became institutions of internment and imprisonment and
aid workers prison guards. Cultural theorists began excavating the some-
times profane origins and practices of compassion.27 Scholars began creat-
ing genealogies of IHL that excavated gendered, racial, and civilizational
discourses.28 Humanitarianism became Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Like the debates among practitioners in the human rights and huma-
nitarian communities regarding the relationship between them, scholars
began to probe the historical and conceptual boundaries between these
two fields of study.29 And similar to my observation that practitioners of
humanitarianism were more sensitive to intrusions from human rights
than the reverse, scholars of humanitarianism seemed much more con-
cerned about protecting their turf from human rights than the reverse.30
I participated in this search for boundaries, arguing that whereas huma-
nitarianism was constituted by needs, sad stories, and charity, human
rights emphasized rights, law, and justice.31 In this volume Samuel Moyn
criticizes my claim, rightly so, and for reasons that I knew at the time
I offered them, but nevertheless wanted to help make humanitarianism an
autonomous object of study. My critical error was to depart from my
social constructionist position in a direction that inched toward essenti-
alism. Specifically, although I could be interpreted as suggesting that
these social constructs possess some nearly essential or enduring char-
acteristics, my epistemological commitments and narrative of humanitar-
ianism depended on the very opposite.
This volume explores the fluctuating relationship between human
rights and humanitarianism. There are decades when they exhibited
parallel play, with each doing its own thing and without much awareness
of the other. There are instances when they appeared to join forces, not
only collaborating but also developing something of a “we-feeling.”
There are contrasting illustrations, though, when their proximity gener-
ated anxiety, leading to defensive action. Over the decades, human rights
and humanitarianism have resembled an air show, with moments in
which they fly parallel to each other followed quickly by separation, low-
flying dips, high-flying loops, and even the occasional game of chicken.
The reason for these twists and turns is because human rights and
humanitarianism have no fixed meaning, are social constructions, are

historically situated, and have been distant and intimate from each other
over the decades. If this was ever in question, it can no longer be, as scholars
continually plumb the histories of each to discover unknown and poorly
understood events, trends, and configurations. New findings became con-
ventional wisdoms only to be debunked by theoretical interventions and
revisionist historical understandings. But this pliability does not imply that
meaningful and enduring differences and distinctions cannot be located,
a view shared by all the contributors, except for Hopgood who argues that,
at best, there are fleeting differences without a distinction.
The chapters address the question of the differences and the relation-
ship between human rights and humanitarianism from various perspec-
tives. There are philosophical inquiries that attempt to understand
whether and how differences are constructed at the level of ethics,
obligations, and duties. There are historical inquiries that attempt to
locate core differences within and between historical periods and wit-
ness their histories converging and diverging. There are settled and
unsettled periods; the former is associated with identifiable patterns
and the latter with turbulence, and the last three decades have been
quite unsettled. And a major part of the reason for this period’s volati-
lity is because each is working out its identity in relationship to the
other. There are practice-oriented perspectives that suggest how differ-
ences are created and recreated in response to concrete problems and
through different kinds of organized activities with different goals and
meanings. Many of the chapters locate differences in emotions; differ-
ent kinds of suffering can trigger a range of socially organized emotional
responses. The chapters wrestle with whether the differences between
the two are major or minor, trivial or substantial. In many respects, the
significance of these differences is in the eye of the beholder. Is there
a difference or a distinction between a language and a dialectic?32 Is
there a difference or distinction between human rights and humanitar-
ianism? It depends – on granularity, composition, and perspective.
Regardless of whether one discerns differences or distinctions, the
search for similarities and contrasts forces students of human rights
and humanitarianism to clarify what they believe is particular and
core to each, to articulate the characteristics that often form the ideal
types that, in turn, become the basis for comparison, and to consider
whether and how each is sacred in a world of the profane.

What Is at Stake?
This collection probes the possible boundaries and the variety of relation-
ships that exist between human rights and humanitarianism. Because this

exercise can have a clinical feel, it is paramount to recognize that huma-

nitarianism and human rights are ethical projects that can have life and
death consequences for vulnerable and marginalized populations. What
are people talking about when they are talking about human rights and
humanitarianism? Lives, yes. But also a spirit of humanity. Everyday
practices of humanity are tied to the transcendent, and the transcendent
shapes practices of humanity. These practices have worldly and heavenly
aspirations. Human rights and humanitarianism represent a resistance to
a world that can treat others like human waste. They follow Michel
Foucault’s admonition that “the misfortunes of men must never be the
silent leftover of politics.”33 They are advancing not only the material
needs of others, but also their own spiritual needs. Helping others but also
helping themselves – it is through acts of compassion that individuals
enact their humanity. To help others is to be humane, and to be indiffer-
ent inhumane.
Human rights and humanitarianism are expressions of the world that
exists, the world we hope to exist, and our pragmatic calculations about
how to narrow the difference between the world that is and that world that
can be. These themes of global ethics are the background and foreground
of human rights and humanitarianism, but each occupies a different
standpoint. A major branch of global ethics regards what we owe stran-
gers and the ethical significance of boundaries.34 Can we, and on what
basis, treat outsiders different from our compatriots and fellow citizens?
What is the nature of our obligations and duties to others beyond our
borders, and based on what principles? Are our obligations fulfilled by
charity, or do they demand more extensive and long-lasting commit-
ments? Do our duties focus on protection or extend toward empower-
ment? How do these ethics apply in specific circumstances and do they
allow for recognition of difference? What is the balance between the
universal and the particular? How do these philosophical judgements
translate into practice in a world of sovereign states? Do our ethics
become practical and bow to the world that is, or do they aspire to create
a bridge to a better world?
The exchanges during the workshops for this volume occasionally
became quite spirited because of the associated ethical commitments
and ambitions of human rights and humanitarianism. To give a flavor
of that conversation and the connections to global ethics, this section
briefly reviews two foundational questions. Why act to relieve the unne-
cessary suffering of distant strangers? The second question moves from
motives to effects as it questions whether these well-meaning interven-
tions are reforming or reproducing an unjust global order. Human rights
and humanitarianism do not have single answers to these questions, and

often there is considerable overlap between them. But for argument’s sake
and in the spirit of ideal types, the ethics of humanitarianism and human
rights cluster around different responses – with the former organized
around the world as it is and the latter around a vision of the world that
should be. The wager is that what is lost by simplifying and stereotyping is
gained by illuminating some potentially critical points of comparison.

Why Act? Reason, Sentiment, and Humanity

The sources of altruism, compassion, and beneficence have drawn con-
siderable scholarly attention in recent years, traversing disciplines as
diverse as cultural studies, gender studies, neuroscience, sociobiology,
evolutionary theory, religious studies, law, philosophy, psychology,
media and communication studies, political science, geography, history,
political theory, and sociology. The chapters in this volume address two
critical questions. The first is whether individuals are motivated to act
because of reason and rationality or because of sad stories and senti-
mentality, an issue considered at length in Part I. The reason and
rationality approach emphasizes the rational exchange of views and the
search for a better argument, learning, and interest-based motives,
including forms of diffuse reciprocity and principled claims that become
generalized to all members of the community.35 It stands to reason that
we have mutual obligations to each other, or it makes sense for the
preservation of the species and the individual to care about neighbors
and suffering strangers. Some of these appeals to reason, moreover,
are intertwined with utilitarian and consequentialist ethics. Peter
Singer’s highly influential arguments grounds the decision to give on
whether our actions will make a difference in the lives of others and
enhance the world’s welfare without doing appreciable harm to our own
lives.36
But the desire and decision to act, at least according to the chapters and
other research, is driven as much by emotion as by reason.37 Compassion
is often the first feeling mentioned when considering the imperative
to respond to human rights violations and humanitarian emergencies.
When confronted by knowledge or images of unnecessary suffering, we
do not stop to ask: whether the person in need will help me if I am in
a similar situation in the future, perform a utilitarian calculation in
relationship to general welfare or invoke an enlightened rationality.
Instead, feelings, not rationality,; dominate, and not just any feelings
but feelings of compassion, which represent the “better angels of our
nature.” But is it the distress and despair provoked by images of distant
suffering that move us to reach for our wallets? If so, is this compassion, or

something else? Human rights violations often trigger outrage and

anger.38 The demand to end impunity arguably is based less on its
deterrence value than on the grotesque possibility that the bastards
might get away with their crimes. Humanitarianism is about feelings,
but not only compassion. It can also be about pity.39 And pity is often
connected to feelings of guilt. How much of humanitarianism is tied to
feelings of white, liberal, guilt? And which emotions are more likely to
provide a sustained connection to others and commitment to humanity?
Fury or pity?
The other big debate regards the historical development of humanitar-
ianism and human rights. The rationality and sentimentality theses lean
toward different reasons why humans do and should care about distant
others, but agree that societies have varied in terms of their propensity to
respond to unnecessary suffering of strangers. Compassion has always
existed in human history, but has been scattershot and is often the domain
of religion and religious institutions. The current wisdom is that some-
thing extraordinary began to evolve in the mid-eighteen century as cold,
calculating individuals that were historically indifferent to the suffering of
others became “men of feelings” that helped to build states, societies, and
institutions that were organized around the relief of unnecessary suffering
and the betterment of society.40 This was the origin of humanitarian
governance: “the administration of human collectivities in the name of
a higher moral principle of that sees the preservation of life and the
alleviation of suffering as the highest values of action.”41 How and why
these feelings of compassion and care emerged and became institutiona-
lized is a matter of controversy; the safe answer is that there were
a conjunction of religious, economic, political, sociological, and cultural
causes that combined structure, agency, and contingency. For many
scholars, the rise of British abolitionism is Exhibit A in this historical
development because a British society became mobilized to alleviate the
suffering of a dark-skinned people from a different continent that most
had never seen in person. In any event, as Hannah Arendt famously
observed, but with some concern, there was now a “passion for
compassion.”42
The emergence of human rights and humanitarianism is bound up with
the construction of “humanity.” Humanity is a tricky concept. Humanity
is not a fact of nature but rather has a history, and a rather recent one. It
became part of the vocabulary in the 1700s because of Christianity and
the Enlightenment, but its invention did not come with a set meaning.
Instead, humanity has been a work in progress.43 Central to the debate
about and expansion of humanity is: Who is the human? The evolving
concept of humanity was intertwined with debates about what physical

and cognitive qualities an individual must possess to be counted as

a human and whether all humans are truly equal. As Flynn and others
in this volume underscore, distinctions have been made according to race,
culture, religion, gender, and other categories of discrimination, and it is
only recently in human history that those who argue in favor of forms of
discrimination – and that some are more human than others – are on the
defensive. Today, humanity means a belief that: all individuals are
humans are equal, obligated to respect each other’s dignity, and must
“treat fellow humans as family.”44 But who knows what will be tomorrow.
Will humanity extend to animals? Will robots be conferred human-like
qualities and qualify for membership in humanity? Will they have rights
and be deserving of charity?
The world is filled with suffering, but not all suffering matters, or
equally, or becomes a matter of social concern.45 Humanitarianism
and human rights, in this way, operate according to a form of social
triage – distributing attention and resources according to different kinds
of suffering. Humanitarianism operates on the principle of need and with
a bare-bones notion of humanity that is often described as “bare life.” It
concentrates on giving people what they need to survive, and anything
above and beyond these basic needs migrates into wants. Humanitarianism
does not deny that there is something beyond bare existence, but it resists
going beyond the minimum. Human rights, on the other hand, includes
those things that individuals require to flourish. People deserve not just
food in their bellies but the dignity that comes from being treated humanely
and with respect, praying (or not) as they like, speaking their minds, and
living a full and fulfilling life as they define it. Because human rights
imagines an extensive list of rights, there are debates regarding which of
these rights are foundational and universal. But there is no doubt that it
scans for a wider array of suffering than does humanitarianism.
Humanitarianism and human rights also occupy different positions
regarding whether individuals are allowed to choose to act in response
to suffering, a topic explored in the chapter by Beitz. Human rights tends
to adopt the forceful language of obligations and operate with the claim
that many rights are nonderogable. States cannot choose, for instance,
whether to recognize the right of religious liberty or freedom of con-
science. The language of perfect duties observes that states do not have
the right to decide whether to torture or not – they cannot. They must
follow this perfect duty, and if they do not then they are violating the basic
human rights of others. And if rights are being violated, then we, as part of
humanity, have an obligation to help stop it. Humanitarianism, on the
other hand, typically accepts that individuals have discretion over
whether and how to perform their (imperfect) duties. We can choose to

show mercy and be charitable – or not. I get to decide whether to be

a good Samaritan or a by-stander. I might feel shame as a consequence, as
Leebaw observes in her chapter, but I get to decide if I prefer being
ashamed to following my duties.

Palliation or Transformation?
Humanitarianism and human rights exist because we live in a cruel and
unjust world that is drowning in unnecessary suffering. But they differ
with regards to what kind of suffering matters and what should be done
about it. One way of distinguishing the two is by contrasting humanitar-
ianism’s emphasis on palliation and human rights’ concern with transfor-
mation. Humanitarianism deals with the world as it is with the hope of
alleviating the suffering at the moment, whereas human rights hopes to
transform the world so that suffering might become a thing of the past.
Or, in more streetwise language, humanitarianism deals with symptoms
and human rights with root causes.46 Many of the chapters distinguish
humanitarianism and human rights on precisely these grounds. For
instance, Lester argues that a function of humanitarian governance is to
improve human life within an existing political order while human rights
envisions overturning the political order itself. Swaine offers
a comparable contrast between how human rights and humanitarian
organizations approach wartime sexual violence. Similarly, Flynn claims
that humanitarianism is about unnecessary suffering and human rights
about unjustiﬁable status hierarchies. Below I want to suggest how
a humanitarianism concerned with palliation and a human rights with
transformation shapes six critical differences relating to global ethics.

Ethics of Death and Life

Palliation and transformation can be linked to an ethics of death and
ethics of life, respectively. A politics of death is about keeping people alive
by providing them with basic needs such as water, nutrition, shelter,
medical care, and other life-giving assistance. Humanitarians adopt prac-
tices of triage as they place color-coded tags on the toes of casualties to
prioritize treatment. The politics of death also exists in the growing
concern with “end of life” and palliative care.47 When life cannot be
saved, then humanitarianism is reduced to comforting the dying. In his
classic Memory of Solferino, Henry Dunant wrote movingly of his over-
whelming sense of helplessness watching wounded soldiers thrash in pain
and slowly die a miserable and lonely death. He did what he could,
holding their hands, applying compresses to their mouths and foreheads,

offering deathbed prayers, and listening to their last words.48 An ethics of

death provides few reasons to go beyond a moral minimalism.
An ethics of life concerns transforming societies to promote the ability
of individuals to live a flourishing life.49 It aspires to provide individuals
with the capabilities that make it possible for them to choose their best
course. Unlike humanitarianism that helps, human rights promotes self-
help. It is not enough to provide fish to the starving. People must be
taught to fish; they should be given fishing rods, nets, and boats, and legal
access to the shoreline. And people need to include women. Instead of
limiting their role to fishmongers in the market, they must be incorpo-
rated into all facets of fishing and be allowed to keep their earnings.50 An
ethics of life, in this way, can lead to moral maximalism. Some human
rights activists pledge a moral minimalism – they limit themselves to those
rights that they believe are foundational and generative of other rights.
But moral minimalism often leads to a moral maximalism, as one right
leads to another and the attempt to reform and enforce laws leads to
a consideration of all aspects of culture, economics, and politics.51 Even
the dead have rights.52 Human rights has few limits, in this world and the
next.

Politics: Yes or No
It is not just an ethics of death or life that divides humanitarianism and
human rights – it also is their broader stance toward politics.
Humanitarianism famously insists that it is apolitical because it saves
lives – which is part of humanity, and not part of politics – and it has no
ambition to remake the world. This stance is born not from abstract
philosophy but rather pragmatism. Aid workers want access to victims,
and embracing an apolitical stance creates a humanitarian space and gives
assurance to political authorities that they need not fear those bearing
gifts. Yet humanitarianism is very much a form of politics: a politics of
refusal to treat individuals as disposable waste. Human rights, on the
other hand, embraces politics. These are activists that are change agents,
want to teach people about their rights, are willing to speak truth to power
and compel the state to recognize individual rights, and empower indivi-
duals to lead a life of their choosing.53
These different stances toward politics are bound up with the famous
contrast between a humanitarianism that provides charity and a human
rights that aspires to deliver justice. Humanitarianism concerns giving to
others in need out of the goodness of one’s heart. Charity, in this way,
makes limited demands on givers and has very limited aims.54 We give
what we choose to give. It does not ask why people are in need, but instead

responds to these needs.55 It does not attempt to change the unjust

circumstances that led to need, but rather tries to minimize its conse-
quences. This avoidance of justice is not accidental. In his foundational
text on the Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross, the ICRC’s Jean
Pictet argued that charity means that one gives ﬁrst and worries about the
justice second, if ever. As he observed, “One cannot be at one and the
same time a champion of justice and charity. One must choose . . . The
ICRC has long since chosen to be a defender of charity.”56 As one
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) ofﬁcial starkly put it, “We do surgery.
We do medicine. We do clean water. We don’t do justice.”57
Human rights seeks justice. There is no consensus view about what
justice entails, but, from the perspective of the ICRC’s Jean Pictet,
“Justice rewards each person according to his rights,” and to judge is to
“separate the good from the bad, the just from the unjust.”58 When
individuals have their rights violated, they are caused an injustice and
deserve justice.59 If perpetrators go unpunished, then their impunity
constitutes an act of injustice. For states and societies to come to terms
with the past they must complete a process of transitional justice.
Injustice occurs not only when there are human rights violations and an
infringement on liberty, but also when structures of inequality and exclu-
sion persist that reproduce inequalities and limit the ability of individuals
to pursue a free and full life. Human rights wrongs, and by righting
wrongs, human rights advances justice.60

Paternalism
But can either a humanitarianism that provides charity or a human rights
that seeks justice do so in a way that does not create or reinforce existing
inequalities between themselves and those who are supposed to beneﬁt
from their interventions? Not according to many of the chapters, which
point to the presence of paternalism.61 Paternalism is the ability of one
actor to substitute its judgment for another actor claiming it will advance
the latter’s welfare, values, and interests. Importantly, the presumption is
that those who act in the name of human rights and humanitarianism are
genuinely concerned about the welfare of others, but knowingly and
unknowingly exercise power and paternalism in the process. For instance,
human rights activists are in the business of teaching people what sorts of
claims they can and should make and which sorts of cultural practices are
civilized and which are barbaric. Humanitarianism is about meeting the
needs of others in extremis, but what is given is often not what recipients
need – and while agencies have attempted to introduce mechanisms to
allow the recipients to articulate their needs, there is little evidence that

aid organizations listen. Interestingly, several of the chapters speculate

that while both human rights and humanitarianism contain elements of
paternalism, humanitarianism is the more paternalistic of the two. Why?
Because its charity model suggests that the potential recipients are either
incompetent or incapacitated and therefore cannot really know what they
want or how to achieve it. In contrast, human rights contain a strong
egalitarian ethos, desires to empower the dominated, and eliminates
status inequalities and other systems of oppression.

Cosmopolitanism in a World of Sovereignty

Palliation and transformation also shape positions toward an unequal
world order that generates a gush of unnecessary suffering, evident in
contrasting evaluations of cosmopolitanism and the existing system of
sovereign states. Both human rights and humanitarianism are intimately
connected to cosmopolitanism. Closely related to humanity, cosmopoli-
tanism is an equally contested concept.62 Philosophically speaking, cosmo-
politanism can be understood as including and imposing a way of seeing
oneself in relationship to all others. Cosmopolitanism transcends particu-
larism and nurtures a moral vision from the self to the other, and, in doing
so, creates a healthy distance from one’s culture and achieves a more
complex and complete human experience.63 Cosmopolitanism also
demands that our choices incorporate how they affect others, which entails
both negative and positive duties. It obligates us to avoid taking action that
produces unnecessary and foreseeable harm. It also obligates us to try to
prevent human suffering, create the possibility for human empowerment,
and nurture human solidarity. There is a chasm between the world that
exists and the world that cosmopolitans hope to exist, but they believe that
humans have the potential to live their ideals – and that a purpose of
cosmopolitan politics is to encourage individuals to live their ideals to
bring this world into existence.
The cosmopolitanism associated with human rights and humanitarian-
ism is the belief that all individuals are equal because of their humanity
and that individuals are expected to treat others as equal. Humanity
naturally exists, even if people need to be coaxed to acknowledge it.
What prompts and coaxes such feelings? Suffering. Suffering resides at
the core of the meaning and practice of human rights and humanitarian-
ism, and both operate with the assumption that it is the recognition of our
common experience of suffering that shapes conceptions of humanity. In
this way, suffering dissolves differences, making “humanity visible.”64
The implication is that we only recognize the humanity of others when
they are suffering or dead.

This is a cosmopolitanism of suffering. But can suffering produce

a humanity founded on equality? Or, is it more likely to produce a new
form of inequality based on victims and their saviors, each with their own
roles to play, unequal social capacities, and norms? Victims, as Tiktin
notes in her chapter, are expected to have certain characteristics, to be
passive, to be grateful for what they are given, and to demonstrate little
agency. Saviors, on the other hand, will often see themselves as heroic,
compassionate, and good. They will treat victims as inferior, and as
innocent or ignorant and unable to help themselves. Victims cannot be
another more than their suffering. This simpliﬁcation and distortion
means that it is nearly impossible to truly know those who are being
helped, resulting in a humanity that is profoundly unequal.65 This is not
a solidarity based on friendship or even civic equality, but instead is based
on inequities and potentially leads, as Hannah Arendt warned, to
a “politics of pity.”66 But are humanitarianism and human rights equally
susceptible to this form of cosmopolitanism? Some of the chapters sug-
gest that humanitarianism is the more vulnerable of the two, and for the
same reasons that are used to explain why humanitarianism is hypothe-
sized to be more prone to paternalism than is human rights.
Cosmopolitanism has produced a range of political projects and move-
ments that can be measured in relationship to their acquiescence to
a sovereign-states system. Some versions imagine nation-states melting
into a global federation of peoples. Others visualize a state-friendly ver-
sion, one that consecrates universal values but nevertheless respects state
sovereignty. An even milder version resembles forms of internationalism,
in which states are expected to incorporate the interests of other states,
not only because of principles but also because of pragmatism. To the
extent that they challenge the state’s authority, and especially its core
competences, then states are quite likely to take defensive action. During
the nineteenth century and the rise of the nation-states, cosmopolitanism
was often treated as a threat to the nation-state, a disease carried by
rootless people such as the Jews that had designs on the world. In the post-
World War II period, milder forms of cosmopolitanism became cele-
brated precisely because they were thought to be an antidote to a toxic
nationalism and sustenance for an enlightened sovereignty.67 At this
moment cosmopolitanism seems to have run into strong headwinds and
resemble the nineteenth-century challenges.
The cosmopolitanism of human rights and humanitarianism poten-
tially lead to different stances toward sovereignty. Human rights has
tended to treat humanity as the ultimate source of authority, transcending
state sovereignty. It does not necessarily seek the destruction of the
sovereign-states system, but states are expected to conform to universal

ethics and human rights norms and law. Humanitarians, though, avoid
directly challenging the sovereignty and authority of the state. States
created the Geneva Conventions and the ICRC. ICRC is highly cogni-
zant that its ability to act depends on the cooperation of states. When aid
organizations want to help they ﬁrst ask for permission and the proper
permits from state ofﬁcials. If they are denied, they remain on the other
side of the border. And if they are invited in and then asked to leave, they
go. In general, while human rights is populated by activists that often
speak of a human rights revolution, humanitarians seem much quicker to
accommodate themselves to state authority.

Can We Talk about Progress?

Discussions about cosmopolitanism and its promise often segue into
ideas of progress. Progress is not a fashionable concept these days. It is
closely associated with nineteenth-century civilizing missions,
Eurocentrism, vainglorious confidence in the superiority of the West,
and the general belief that the West represents the “end of history” and
shows the rest of the world its future. The meaning of progress is generally
in the eye of the beholder, and those with the power usually define its
meaning. Those who continue to insist on the possibility of progress can
often airbrush a twentieth century defined by horrific episodes of mass
killing, often engineered by those who claimed to be the paragons of
civilization. Currently in this moment of high anxiety, talk of progress is
frequently dismissed as foolishness or Polyannishness.
Despite the baggage associated with progress, it is an idea that is never
far away, either from the practices or the studies of human rights and
humanitarianism. Indeed, the very notion of the idea of progress was born
with the Enlightenment, and thus shares bloodlines with the concepts of
human rights and humanitarianism. Ever since, the existence and defini-
tion of progress have been in dispute, but those who entertain the possi-
bility typically divide progress into two: material and moral progress.68
Material progress regards whether there is an improvement in human
welfare and betterment, generally measured in terms of wealth and
health. Moral progress concerns the depth and breadth of compassion,
kindness, and acceptance, and the extension of humanity to those once
considered outsiders or others. Human rights and humanitarianism differ
in terms of not only how they define progress, but also whether they
choose to think about it at all.
Human rights is tethered to the idea of progress.69 Deriving from the
Enlightenment tradition and the role that reason and liberty can play in
the creation of a better world, human rights almost always contains

a vision of the destination and the belief that society is undergoing

a constant process of perfection.70 Justice is not an afterthought but an
integral part of progress. There has been an explosion of human rights
law, a “human rights revolution” and a “justice cascade” that has led to
a marked advance in humanity.71 These accounts of progress have come
under considerable criticism in recent years. They are accused of having
a Whiggish quality as they start their version of history with the present
and then work backwards, cherry picking the achievements and over-
looking the inhumanity. While human rights scholars and activists insist
that human rights are not imposed but rather are achieved by reason,
human agreement, or an overlapping consensus, this is a charitable and
convenient version of how human rights have ascended and which
human rights have been legitimated. While recognizing in principle
cultural diversity, the human rights community will often operate
under the influence of universalism. While human rights advocates
deny that they have a predetermined view about where history is headed,
many confidently articulate values, principles, and laws that overlap
considerably with liberalism. A full and flourishing life can often be
defined in ways that emphasize the individual over the community,
perhaps shredding the collective basis for what counts as good and
just. There are many meanings of justice, but the human rights com-
munity has tended to lean on a carceral justice to the neglect of dis-
tributive justice. While human rights scholars and activists have
accepted many of these criticisms, there nevertheless remains the stead-
fast belief that the world can be made into a better place, human rights is
both a measure and deliverer of this progress, and human rights narra-
tives operate with a vision of the “better” defined by standards set by
a Western-influenced version of human rights, justice, and human
flourishing.72
Humanitarianism offers a contrasting story of precarity and the belief
that “things fall apart, again.”73 Before I elaborate, scholars of humani-
tarianism have advanced that moral progress depends on the expansion of
the circle of humans that are viewed as worthy of compassion.74
Benevolence is the surest sign of a moral community, and the expansion
of benevolence to incorporate those who were once considered outside
that community is the surest indicator of progress. This is as good as
progress gets. Within the humanitarian community, aid workers will talk
about improvement defined by greater efficiency at alleviating suffering
and reducing the number of corpses. Yet even here they refuse to let
themselves off the hook as the field has become consumed by their short-
comings and unintended consequences. Instead of recording achieve-
ments they pledge to “do no harm.”75

Humanitarians resist any notion of progress with a capital P and

instead just focus on small achievements in the here and now.
Humanitarians imagine no Spielberg-esque happy ending. Many
books on humanitarianism wear their misery, shortcomings, and
precarity in their titles: Hope in Hell; Chasing Chaos; Humanitarian
Quest, Impossible Dreams; Bed for the Night; An Imperfect Offering;
Mountains Beyond Mountains; The Big Truck Went By; and on and
on. MSF’s Jean-Hervé Bradol argues that all world orders are inter-
national sacrificial orders.76 Some sacrificial orders might be better
than others to the extent that they have different levels of tolerance
toward the sacrifices, but these preventable deaths are treated as
acceptable sacrifices. Humanitarianism does not advocate for alter-
native world orders that might abolish such sacrifices but instead
limits itself to the goal of reducing the number of sacrifices in the
existing order. Peter Redfield’s detailed account of MSF illuminates
how aid workers refuse to be seduced by thoughts of hope or
progress.77 “We are not prepared for any radiant or bright future,”
observes MSF’s Rony Brauman. “We can only focus on what we do
now, in the present, with those in front of us. Our success can only
be in the moment.”78 As another MSF worker reflected, “We are the
world’s gravediggers, finding our happiness amidst the growing num-
bers of massacres and battlefields.”79 Another veteran of the aid
community remarked that humanitarianism is “an effort to snatch
a small locus of mercy in the middle of the horrors of organized death
and destruction.”80 Whereas human rights looks to the heavens,
humanitarianism struggles to avoid hell.

Useful Idiots?
Do human rights and humanitarianism provide just the appearance of
progress or the real thing? Are they outside the existing international
order or its creature? Do their actions help to reduce inequality and
injustice or reproduce it? In many respects it depends on whether we
treat human rights and humanitarianism as: entities that are outside
the existing order armed with their humanity-driven ethics; or crea-
tures of the existing order whose ethics are themselves products of
power and politics. Many of the chapters reference global structures
such as geopolitics, liberalism, capitalism, Christianity, and civiliza-
tion as the origins of the ethics and practices of humanitarianism and
human rights, with the possible consequence that they are not part of
the resistance but rather are part of the custodians of the existing
order. In the context of criticizing reform organizations in a capitalist

society, Marx and Engels offered a classic statement regarding how

ethical projects can be imprinted by and help to reproduce existing
orders:
A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to
secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belongs
economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the
working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of
cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every ima-
ginable kind.81

In their view, do-gooders are operating under false consciousness and

self-soothing ideologies, oblivious to how their interventions provide
comfort to an unjust order. They think that they are challenging the
order, but instead they are its silent partner.
A standard critique of humanitarianism is that it addresses suffering
while leaving the sources untouched, which owes partly to humanitarian-
ism’s indebtedness to the charity model. But humanitarianism can also be
a way to self-medicate, to make us feel like we are doing something even if
that something is not doing very much.82 And sometimes these humani-
tarian “gifts” are conditional on surrendering capital and capabilities that
are subsequently used for the benefits of the economic and political
elite.83 A standard critique of human rights is that it focuses on political
and civil rights to the neglect of economic rights; and the morals of
neoliberalism have imprinted contemporary human rights.84 And when
it does address economic rights, it often wants to help individuals gain
access to markets, thus introducing new sources of dependence and
exploitation.85
While humanitarianism and human rights cast themselves as fight-
ing for the oppressed, the powerful are the real beneficiaries of their
actions. The human rights and humanitarian communities were lar-
gely formed by educated, relatively well-off elite from the West,
especially when compared with those they wanted to help outside
the West. At times, and perhaps increasingly so in today’s world of
a globalized elite in contemporary capitalism, it is the very individuals
that are partly responsible for the causes of inequality and domination
that have become the agents of change. Accordingly, they will never
advocate for change that potentially threatens their power and privi-
leges. For instance, change through markets rather than through
political power. And in doing so, the privileged might be more
generous than ever before, but also more predatory than ever before –
as they provide philanthropy with one hand but haul away truckloads
of resources with the other. The powerful can feel self-satisfied and

sleep well at night because they have made the system a little less
miserable and forestalled the possibility of revolution.86 This pattern
existed from the very start of humanitarianism. The abolitionists were
intent on freeing the slaves, but could not imagine that these primi-
tive and Godless people should be left to their own devices. Instead
of imagining them having rights and autonomy, many of the aboli-
tionists were advocates of colonialism and missionaries who wanted
to civilize the ignorant and backward heathens.
There is one other way that the discourses of humanitarianism and
human rights tend to operate in a way that reinforce existing patterns
of inequality: they often advocate action on behalf of others because
of our moral responsibilities. We should give because of our felt
connections and duties that exist because of our humanity. An alter-
native form of responsibility is causal responsibility, and argues that
we should give because our prior actions are responsible for the
suffering others, and perhaps have even indirectly beneﬁted from
those actions.87 The dominance of moral responsibility over causal
responsibility also guides the powerful to identify the sources of
suffering as home-grown rather than international. But local suffering
and injustices often have international roots – legacies of colonialism,
globalization that generates inequalities, Western support for auto-
cratic regimes, unfair international property rights and trade policies
that disadvantage the most marginal. Contemporary conversations in
the United States about how to deal migration from Central America
rarely extend into a sober realization that American policies contrib-
uted to the misery that are forcing these refugees and migrants to ﬂee
their homes. Humanitarianism can contribute to the belief that all
causes are local because it tends to focus on symptoms and black box
the causes. Human rights advocates can sometimes unknowingly
adopt language for mobilization that reinforces stereotypes and
racism. For instance, calling the Congo the “rape capital” of the
world might bring greater attention to the problem of sexual violence
but at the cost of playing into racist images of the sexually rapacious
African male.
But humanitarian and human rights organizations are not necessa-
rily the “useful idiots” presented by Marx, Engels, and their unfor-
giving critics. They might be useful to those in power because they
help to maintain the existing order by containing the possibility of
more radical resistance, but they are hardly idiots because they are
often quite aware of the compromises they are making. Compromises
must be made, and not all compromises are rotten compromises.
Human right organizations often choose to focus on some rights

rather than others because they believe them to be necessary for other
rights; voting rights, for instance, might be a prerequisite to economic
justice. They also might recognize the centrality of economic rights,
but nevertheless strategize and make pragmatic decisions which are
most likely to gain the most traction – and in liberal societies this is
often in the areas of political and civil rights. Aid organizations
know that they are always in danger of being instrumentalized: they
gain access to victims not because those who might be responsible for
the suffering have remorse and guilt, but rather because they calcu-
late that humanitarian action can further their goals, including
a share of the aid, legitimacy, popular support, and even battlefield
advantage.88 Consequently, the choice is often not between being
instrumentalized or not at all, but rather between what is acceptable
and unacceptable instrumentalization in relationship to the goal of
saving lives. Humanitarian organizations know that they can be a “fig
leaf” for states that use aid as a substitute for costlier and more
consequential action, and that there are no humanitarianism solu-
tions to humanitarian problems. From the moment of its birth, there
were those who criticized the ICRC for offering an olive branch to
the excesses of war rather than advocating for pacifism and peaceful
change. Its standard response is that abandoning victims of war in
the utopian hope that it might produce pacificism treats the victims
as necessary sacrifices.

Organization of the Volume

The volume is divided in two. Part I comprises chapters 1 to 4 and offers
four historically informed analyses regarding the relationship between
human rights, humanitarianism, their changing boundaries, and whether
these are differences without a distinction. There is broad agreement that
the two are distinct and that many of the participants have a stake in
keeping them that way, though Hopgood insists that while there are
differences, they are trivial. And those who agree on the existence of
differences nevertheless offer alternatives views regarding the character-
istics that justify the boundaries, where to draw them, when and why they
have been redrawn, and who has been most involved in the process of
boundary drawing. Part II probes and complicates the accepted view of
many of the rationalities and emotions that are associated with each, and
examines the practices that have helped to shape and deﬁne what it means
to do humanitarianism and human rights. Together these chapters pro-
vide grounds for looking for boundaries between human rights and
humanitarianism, but also cautions against presuming that these

boundaries are stable or that the practices that are used to distinguish the
two are fixed.
In Chapter 1, Samuel Moyn argues that human rights and humani-
tarianism have historically been distinct, have become less so, and that
human rights is worse off because of it. He opens by observing that
human rights and humanitarianism began their lives apart because of
the former’s interest in citizenship and state-society relations and the
latter with life-saving relief. It is only beginning in the 1990s that human
rights and humanitarianism truly began to converge. Many of those
writing from a humanitarian perspective observe that human rights
consumed humanitarianism, but Moyn argues that the reverse hap-
pened. Human rights used to be concerned with the conditions of
citizenship and ensuring that individuals possessed rights that they
could make claims on the state. But the more it became involved
in situations of armed conflict and other areas of a traditional humani-
tarian concern, it lost sight of the standard rights concerns in favor of
protection and keeping people alive. Moyn, in this respect, makes the
provocative claim that an expanding human rights discourse went
through a process of humanitarianization. This is an empirical and
historical argument – and a highly normative one. Moyn suggests that
this process of humanitarization altered the kind of cosmopolitan poli-
tics once imagined and practiced by human rights, as it became much
more status quo oriented and much less concerned with issues of justice.
Moyn implies, in other words, that humanitarianism has pulled human
rights down to its level, hinting that human rights, at least the human
rights of old, was ethically superior to humanitarianism. Neither human
rights nor humanitarianism can offer much hope, but they are not quite
hope-less. At least not quite.
In Chapter 2, Jeffrey Flynn grapples with the relation between human
rights and humanitarianism by tracing relations of both to two forms of
the “politics of humanity” that arose in eighteenth-century Western
societies: a “politics of suffering” aimed at mitigating unnecessary suffer-
ing and a “politics of status” aimed at eliminating unjustifiable status
hierarchies. Setting things up this way allows Flynn to identify points at
which human rights focused mainly on status and humanitarianism on
suffering – particularly in the eighteenth century – while also analyzing
how subsequent developments have brought claims to equal status into
humanitarianism and appeals to suffering into human rights practice.
This boundary crossing can pose challenges to both, especially when
the status egalitarian dimension of human rights confronts the hierarch-
ical giver–recipient relationship in humanitarianism, or when appeals to
suffering lead to a “humanitarianization” of human rights in which pity

takes the place of genuine solidarity among equals. Flynn also poses
crucial questions about how equal status gets instantiated differently
within human rights and humanitarianism, and whether narratives that
appeal to suffering can avoid falling into a politics of pity. The ultimate
challenge he identifies for both humanitarianism and human rights is
whether either can fulfill the more radical potential of a politics of suffer-
ing or a politics of status.
A common way to differentiate human rights and humanitarianism
is to associate the former with justice and the latter with charity. This
distinction runs deep in international law and transnational social
action, but what about practice? In Chapter 3, Beitz opens by laying
out his understanding of practice and how it applies to humanitarian
and human rights practice. In rhetoric and presentation, human rights
activists are committed to righting wrongs, while humanitarians to
relieving suffering. Although these distinctions might have mapped
onto practice at one point, Beitz argues they no longer do. What
happened? Like others in the volume, he points to changes in armed
conflict and jurisprudence. Accordingly, while those who identify with
humanitarianism and human rights will often offer distinctions based
on harms alleviation and injustice, they nevertheless work in both
domains. And if they have converged, then what is the point of
maintaining the distinction? Is there ethical significance for doing so?
Beitz turns to the presence of different kinds of duties: perfect duties
are those in which we have no choice but to honor, such as no torture,
whereas imperfect duties allow discretion, such as helping those in
need. Beitz then observes that duties of the first kind (perfect) tend to
map onto demands of justice whereas duties of the second kind
(imperfect) map onto beneficence. This mapping seemingly parallels
common understanding of human rights and humanitarianism. But
not completely, at least not today where there are shifting shades. But
the continued use of human rights and humanitarianism as distinctive
categories possibly reveals how we understand moral demands, how
much discretion we have in avoiding these demands, the priorities we
assign to them, and where to invest scarce resources. The problem,
though, is that misnomers do our thinking for us.
In Chapter 4, Stephen Hopgood argues that there is no bright line that
separates humanitarianism and human rights – not conceptually and not
historically. They were always dancing around the same flame. There
are two foundational reasons for the lack of distinction. Fundamental to
both is humanism. And neither community has ever agreed on what are
its core or boundaries. There are no loyalty oaths or mechanisms for
excommunicating heretics. The only point of divergence, according to

Hopgood, is institutional, that is, their business models and mental and
material technologies. When Hopgood addresses the future, though, he
suggests that humanitarianism will have more resilience than human
rights. The values, ideologies, and discourses that have sustained the
humanist project are crumbling. But Hopgood suggests that the
minimalist and muted practices of humanitarianism will have an advan-
tage over the maximalist and noisy practices of human rights.
Humanitarianism, Hopgood concludes, will have to carry the torch of
humanism into the long, dark, night.
Looking at the nineteenth-century British Empire, in Chapter 5 Alan
Lester argues that there was a relationship between human rights and
humanitarianism – antagonistic. He does not contest the general claim
that human rights and humanitarianism were largely independent of
each other until the late twentieth century, but he does insist that
government ofﬁcials were more inclined to favor one over the other
because it ﬁtted their political interests. Similar to Moyn and Flynn,
he locates human rights and humanitarianism in relationship to the
prevailing political order. Lester argues that human rights was part of
a revolutionary tradition designed to level privileges and status cate-
gories in favor of new forms of equality tied to citizenship.
Humanitarianism, on the other hand, was part of a conservative politics
because it was designed to ameliorate the harms caused by inequality,
not remove them. Humanitarianism, in this respect, was not just
a discrete intervention but rather was part of a structure of governance,
which he calls humanitarian governance. But humanitarianism, and
humanitarian governance, were not coherent things, but rather had
different branches. Using the careers of two British colonial authorities,
George Arthur and George Grey, Lester charts two different versions of
humanitarianism as it related to British imperialism. George Arthur
pioneered a form of colonial humanitarian governance rooted in the
amelioration of slavery and designed to protect Indigenous peoples from
the rapacious and exploitative practices of settler communities. Existing
Indigenous communities should be protected from harm and enjoy
some degree of autonomy. In other words, his understanding of huma-
nitarianism created room for difference and diversity. But this was not
equality. Instead, George Grey practiced a form of colonial humanitar-
ian governance that imagined that the best form of protection was
assimilation. Engaging in what Lester calls a form of cultural genocide,
the goal was to use various governance techniques to slowly bring about
the cultural extinction of local populations. In order to turn aboriginal
populations into tea-drinking English, Grey intervened in all aspects of
their lives.

Humanitarian intervention is a contemporary practice that seems to

integrate humanitarianism and human rights. Indeed, for many scholars
and practitioners humanitarian intervention is the perfect blend. It is
humanitarian because it is designed to save lives that hang in the balance.
But it also is often referred to as the use of force to protect the funda-
mental right of all individuals – the right to life. In Chapter 6, Fabian
Klose asks: should we think of humanitarian intervention as part of the
history of human rights or humanitarianism? Or both? And if both, how
do they connect? But the story requires more historical nuance because,
as Klose contends, humanitarian intervention began in the nineteenth
century once there was intervention not in the defense of a particular
religious community but rather the “human.” It was not until the early
twentieth century that humanitarian intervention became more fully
lodged in the “human,” and humanitarian intervention became more
fully inscribed in humanitarian norms in international law. But, Klose
emphasizes, humanitarian intervention did not include human rights in
its modern usage. Klose surveys several eminent jurists and legal scholars
to see how they linked humanitarian intervention and the emerging body
of international human rights law. It was not until the late twentieth
century that humanitarian intervention became more fully located in
international law with a solid footing in human rights law. But, Klose
observes, it would probably be more accurate to call humanitarian inter-
vention human rights intervention beginning in the twentieth century.
In Chapter 7, Bronwyn Leebaw examines how the concept of shame is
employed as a strategy by rights and humanitarian actors. Similar to
other contributions, she notes the importance of emotions for under-
standing various aspects of each. As she explains, shame differs from
other emotional responses to suffering and injustice because the feeling
can be experienced as a punishment for failing to conform. But feelings
of shame can originate from outside or inside. Human rights is famously
associated with “name and shame” that depends on what others say,
whereas the shame associated with humanitarianism comes from an
inner voice. Of the two possibilities and mechanisms, shame is most
powerful when it is internally generated. Humanitarians, she argues,
generate shame when they appeal to how people should feel. If they do
not respond in the right way to suffering, they should be ashamed. There
are several potential consequences of this strategy. It can reinforce the
emphasis on the needs of the giver. Moreover, Leebaw asks, why should
such feelings of shame be limited to those who are close to death? Such
feelings are not so easily compartmentalized. Mobilizing these images to
shame people into giving can reinforce stereotypes of the “other.” The
human rights use of shaming tactics often begin with images of the

victim. In contrast to the humanitarian image of helplessness, human

rights portrays the victim as innocent because they did nothing to
deserve their suffering. After noting that these two shaming strategies
might conflict, Leebaw turns to the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois to move
from the individual to the collective. Shame is experienced by indivi-
duals and not institutions, but as individuals become part of systems of
rule they tend to shift responsibility and accountability from themselves
to the institution; this move can leave them beyond shame, and even
when the institutions they serve normalize and rationalize abuse that
they privately see as unjust. The challenge, then, is get individuals to feel
shame for supporting these taken-for-granted systems of rule that pro-
duce violence and inequalities; to recognize the system-wide pattern of
abuse; and to acknowledge that they are the beneficiaries of the system.
Human rights and not humanitarian discourse might be a better reality
check.
In Chapter 8, Aisling Swaine examines how human rights and humani-
tarianism respond to conflict-related violence against women. Her chapter
offers several important observations. To begin, neither field exhibited
much interest in gender-based violence (GBV) prior to the mid-1990s.
Human rights began to do so in the last quarter of the twentieth century,
but it focused on traditional issues regarding women’s status in the domes-
tic realm. Many of the premier aid agencies, such as ICRC, were focused
on keeping people alive, and while victims of rape suffered greatly, their
injuries were not necessarily life-threatening. But several of the conflicts of
the 1990s featured mass rape, and rape as a strategy of war, which grabbed
the attention of human rights activists; humanitarian organizations lagged
behind. Critically, according to Swaine, the fields differed in how they
responded to GBV, with each drawing from its existing practices and
strategies. Human rights organizations have treated violence against
women as part of a discourse of “discrimination” that should be remedied
through legal mechanisms that would prosecute perpetrators, promote the
rule of law, and produce justice. Humanitarian organizations, on the other
hand, have used a reproductive health lens to respond to the physical and
psychosocial consequences. In short, the foundational boundaries of
human rights led to a legalized response whereas that of humanitarianism
led to a medicalized response. This divergence in programming also can
produce a tension between the two. Health providers are most concerned
with providing the right medical and psychosocial treatment whereas
human rights actors often focus on collecting the evidence for legal redress.
However, the kinds of interventions required for individual healing might
be inconsistent with the kind of data collection required for legal account-
ability. Another divergence is that the human rights field sees GBV as part

of broader patterns of discrimination that require a “public” remedy for

“private” harms, whereas aid agencies prefer a response that is “apolitical”
and, consequently, tends to erase gender. Humanitarianism and human
rights also constitute the kinds of harms against women that are a matter of
concern. For the former it is about violence directly caused by conﬂict,
whereas for human rights it the violation of rights.
In Chapter 9, Miriam Ticktin examines how innocence and humanity
separate and bind contemporary practices of human rights and humani-
tarianism. What does innocence suggest about how humanity is prac-
ticed, and practiced differently, by these movements? Humanity is often
understood as an equalizing principle. All are human. Yet innocence
plays a complicated role here. On the one hand, it promises equality by
giving everyone the beneﬁt of the doubt. On the other hand, in practice it
inexorably constitutes hierarchies, distinguishing between deserving and
undeserving. Ticktin is interested in exploring how far innocence goes to
further the recognition of universality (whether as shared suffering, or as
rights), and when it works instead to institute moral hierarchies. She
argues that humanitarianism and human rights both work to buffer the
tendency to use innocence to create moral distinctions, albeit differently
so – one through the concept of life, the other through the practice of law.
Nevertheless, she suggests that innocence primarily works to divide
humanity, rather than to unify it as an affective, ethical, or political
collectivity. Ultimately, innocence cannot escape its conceptual history
as the limit of humanity and the creation of moral distinction. Given these
observations, is it possible to imagine humanity without innocence?
In Chapter 10, Ilana Feldman examines how temporalities conceived
by Palestinian refugees, and especially the relationship between past,
present, and future, led them to blur conventional boundaries between
human rights and humanitarianism. Humanitarianism tends to operate
with a sense that there is an urgent present. Emergencies require
immediate action to save lives, and the longer action is delayed, the
more lives will be lost. Yet what happens when the emergency ends but
lives are still in limbo, as is the case for millions of refugees who are
warehoused in camps and linger in a legal and political no-man’s-land?
For them, the issue is often no longer about needs, as conceived by aid
workers, but rather about rights: access to education and work, protec-
tion from political authorities, ability to assemble, religious freedom,
and so on. Indeed, Feldman argues that the insistence on calling such
protracted situations “emergencies” distracts from the fundamental
importance of rights. The Palestinians’ current condition and lingering
memories also can reshape the boundaries between human rights and
humanitarianism. There were wrongs committed in the past that must

be addressed and demand justice. This is traditionally a demand for

human rights, but in the case of the Palestinians it is evoked in
a humanitarian condition. The bending and blurring of human rights
and humanitarianism can create something that many observers might
consider an oxymoron: humanitarian rights.
In Chapter 11, Bertrand Taithe goes to the Cambodian-Thai border
between 1979 and 1999 to examine how humanitarian workers nego-
tiated the changing security and political challenges – and ﬁnds that they
answered those challenges in part by developing protection practices that
assimilated a rights-based approach to humanitarian relief. The initial
challenge on the border was keeping people alive. Splayed across various
camps, Cambodian survivors of the genocide and the Vietnamese inva-
sion huddled on both sides of the border. Aid organizations began deli-
vering life-saving relief, and this demand continued for more than
a decade. In these circumstances, they began to refer to their programs
as protection practices. But protection slowly began to incorporate
a rights dimension. These refugees were ﬂeeing a situation in Cambodia
because of mass violations of human rights. And as refugees languished in
camps, with the threat of refoulement dangling over them, the more
important rights became for their protection. In response, aid workers
began to incorporate a rights dimension into their work. But, Taithe
argues, the incorporation of rights into humanitarianism did not necessa-
rily lead to an emancipatory view of human rights. Instead, it led to
a paternalistic and neocolonial positioning. Rights were things that were
given, and not something claimed.
A major change occurred with the successful conclusion of the
Cambodian peace negotiations in 1992. The refugees were coming
home, and aid workers were going with them. Aid and rights agencies
now had to position themselves in relationship to this new political
environment and transitional government. Taithe argues that they
began to adopt rights discourse and align themselves with a Hun Sen
government that they had previously denounced. This was a critical
moment: international agencies were now working with the same
Cambodian leaders who had been accused of mass violations of human
rights to create the rule of law. International NGOs, in short, had been
coopted. Eventually alert to what had happened, aid organizations began
to separate themselves from the rights community. Taithe concludes that
humanitarian organizations must maintain their distance from human
rights if they are to provide protection.
The Conclusion returns to the question of the differences between
human rights and humanitarianism. There are no permanent differences
and thus there cannot be eternal distinctions. But all of the chapters,

including Hopgood’s that claimed differences without a distinction,

found differences between the two. And if the chapters are a good
guide, these differences became more contested, unsettled, inflamed,
and moved from the background to the foreground after the 1990s. The
Conclusion picks up on the theme of difference in three ways. It empha-
sizes that these differences that appear and disappear, migrate and settle,
are social constructions – but that does not make them any less real or
significant. These differences are not trivial but often refer to what counts
as the core of each – what it means to do human rights or humanitarian-
ism. This emphasis on “doing” points to the importance of practices,
the second point. The differences between their practices were produced
by the interplay between the definition of the problem to be solved, the
kinds of material and mental technologies that were viewed as the indus-
try standard for solving them, the background knowledge that shaped
implicit understanding of the contours and core aspects of each field, and
the meanings these actions had for the members of the field. One of the
defining features of this historical period is not only the contestation of the
boundaries between the two but also the institutionalization of both fields
in ways that helped to stabilize these boundaries. But whatever differ-
ences and even distinctions that might exist, they might be trivial when
situated in the contemporary world-historical moment that is just as likely
to see humanity as a threat as it is part of the sacred. The third and final
thought, then, speculates about their possible futures given what we think
we know about contemporary global trends.

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Part I

Differences or Distinctions?

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1 Human Rights and Humanitarianization

Samuel Moyn

In this chapter, I will offer two suggestions about the relationship of

human rights and humanitarianism. First, I will contend that they have
mostly traveled separate paths through modern history, whether consid-
ered in their intellectual premises, spiritual postures, or political implica-
tions. To a very great extent, in Jeffrey Flynn’s terms, status was reserved
for citizenship politics, while a politics of suffering operated abroad.1
Second, the two converged in living memory. And this convergence
occurred on humanitarianism’s terms: the recent history of human rights
is the history of their humanitarianization through internationalization.
For a long time, it seemed as if the unerring rule for humanitarianism
and human rights was: never the twain shall meet. To say so, of course, is
a generalization; like any generalization in human affairs, it is not an
invariant natural law that one counterexample refutes, but an overall
trend that prevailed and predominated. With some notable exceptions,
identiﬁcation with suffering almost never involved the attribution of
moral rights to others. And no wonder: what has been defended in
humanitarianism, past and present, is not citizenship but life. To the
extent the two interacted, it was in domestic settings that could some-
times lead to status claims, which often took the forms of demands for
rights. But the same did not happen for a long time in global politics;
when it did, it was as part of a politics of global suffering rather than one of
global status – other than in the provision of a new kind of succor in the
form of a nominal rhetoric of global rights enjoyment that differed little in
practice from an older imperial and transnational humanitarianism.
The separation of humanitarianism and human rights was so powerful
that, even at the level of scholarly investigation, professional historiogra-
phies of humanitarianism and human rights were separately initiated – by
different people at different times. For this reason, it is useful to take up
the historiographies of humanitarianism and human rights alongside their
histories. Writing about their trajectories is now popular; and both their

early development and current golden age are as revealing about the
changing assumptions of the last few decades across which, once investi-
gated separately, humanitarianism and human rights are often concep-
tualized together. Most of what follows therefore illustrates the long
separation of humanitarianism and human rights both historically and
historiographically, whatever the minor simplifications such separation
has sometimes involved. I want to defend, then, the default though not
universal view among historians that these are different topics and that
less is gained than lost by muddying the line between them – until recently
when the very temptation to muddy the line arose.
Failure to appreciate how distinct the two phenomena were in the more
remote past leads directly to an even worse mistake: failure to appreciate
their contingent and unprecedented intersection in our time. And more is
at stake than merely a historical error: it leads to, except to the extent it is
often motivated by, ethical and political error. Briefly put, I will argue that
the convergence of humanitarian and human rights today is bound up
with the mainstream abandonment of a more believable and effective
cosmopolitan language and practice of structural justice, as morality in
global affairs of all kinds generally becomes defined and shaped as
a humanitarian ethics of care and succor.2 Humanitarianism did not
“swallow” human rights but did affect them in strong and unprecedented
respects. Once comprising an anti-hierarchical language of egalitarian
citizenship, human rights have frequently been humanitarianized, and
their defenders are themselves victims of the repetitious confirmation of
hierarchical relations which has been the central truth of humanitarian
ethics for much longer.

Separation: Historiographical Origins

Among professional historians, there was a fascinating historiography of
humanitarianism long before there really was one concerning human
rights.3 The initial driver of the literature was the search to explain the
rise of transnational anti-slavery sentiment. In his classic The Problem of
Slavery in Western Culture, David Brion Davis drew on early scholarship in
literary history to assign the lion’s share of credit for this development to
the emergence of “the man of feeling.”4 The secularization of an origin-
ally religious impulse to heal suffering as one of the highest types of good
works was perhaps the most pivotal source of change in attitudes toward
human bondage after a millennia of (occasionally glum) acceptance of the
practice.
Some have speculated that the deep origin of this constitutive specta-
torial relation of the humanitarian imagination to the body in pain

stretched back to medieval reinterpretations of the meaning of Jesus

Christ on the cross – since the centrality of his suffering had to be learned –
and the rise of a then-novel imperative of compassion.5 But the new
sympathetic culture of the eighteenth century let loose this identification
with one man for the sake of all men – and even more commonly, women,
and even sometimes even nonhuman animals. (The striking paradox is
that animal protection movements originate from the rise of
humanitarianism.)
In the reconstitution of this epoch-making moral departure, the very
centrality of anti-slavery to the origins of the professional historiography
of humanitarianism was as much an interference as an engine. Observers
of the Enlightenment knew that anti-slavery was a just instance of the rise
of a new culture of feeling in the eighteenth century – one with many other
ramifications. Davis had relied on famed literary scholar R. S. Crane in
developing his original account, and it was other literary critics who
continued for a long time to do most to illuminate the relevance of feeling
in the “age of reason.”6 The rise of a culture of sentiment also had
philosophical dimensions, mostly taken up by students of moral philoso-
phy (especially Scottish moral sense philosophy). A broader account
awaited the cultural historian Thomas Laqueur, in one of the most
historiographically influential and innovative essays of the 1980s, to
demonstrate that the new novel and philosophy of feeling were part of
a whole cultural revolution.7 The “humanitarian narrative” that resulted
from this departure in thinking and action presented the violation of
individual bodies before a new kind of fellow-feeling spectator, and new
media of the period schooled him in a new cultural program in regarding
the pain of others. The last remnants of a millennial ethic of martial glory
were extinguished; emulation of those who sympathized with injury
triumphed.
Historians thus discovered and elaborated what Hannah Arendt and,
before her, Friedrich Nietzsche had known: “It is by no means a matter of
course for the spectacle of misery to move men to pity. . . . [In] the eight-
eenth century . . . this age old indifference was about to disappear.”8 Yet
not one of the founders of the recent historiography of humanitarianism
mentioned human rights in framing his topic. (Nor, for that matter, did
Arendt in her acid portrait of Jacobin politics of misery or, before her,
Nietzsche in his angry denunciation of the rise of sentimental philoso-
phy.) Indeed, most of its historians, who tended to be skeptics of bour-
geois and Christian morality alike, were not set on celebrating what
enthusiastic psychologist Steven Pinker, later reading this literature selec-
tively and triumphalistically in search of human progress, called “the
humanitarian revolution.”9 Their goal, instead, was to try to understand

the causal origins, characteristic limits, and common perversions of a new

moral culture beginning in the eighteenth century.
Was humanitarianism best understood as the obverse of the invention
of sadism, as Nietzschean Michel Foucault contended in passing (and as
several historians followed up to explore)?10 Was the rise of humanitar-
ianism part of the establishment of the “hegemony” of capitalism, as
Davis went on to speculate, sparking a once touchstone debate about
precisely how to explain the elective affinity between the rise of new
globalized commercial relations and the characteristic emotional lives of
modern Western citizens?11 Or was humanitarianism most of all, as more
recent historians have begun to contend, a trademark stance of that
political form called empire? More specifically, did it find its natural
home among those leaders and followers of modern progressive empires
who needed their own hierarchy to be “moral,” taking up a deterritor-
alized sympathetic ethics primarily to critique the empire of benighted
rivals for inflicting too much pain or (rather more rarely) stigmatizing the
most egregious practices of their own empire for the sake of its
improvement?12 Such questions never disturbed a more popular consen-
sus that humanitarianism was something to celebrate – but they were
disquieting and they were utterly central to the inception of the profes-
sional historiography of the humanitarian phenomenon.
That nobody writing foundational histories of the rise of humanitar-
ianism mentioned human rights, let alone regarded the one as the source
of the other, is easy to explain. For there simply was no (or not much) of
a historiography of human rights, even as that around humanitarianism
accelerated. Outside history, there were arguments about Stoic and
Christian origins of natural law and the rise of early modern natural
rights – with their anticipation of John Rawls’s rehabilitation of the
concept for our time. In France, during the 1989 bicentennial of the
French Revolution’s outbreak, there was meditation on the ideological
origins of its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Even as
a historiography of humanitarianism burgeoned in the 1970s and espe-
cially in the 1980s, however, no historiography of human rights – for
example, one making the birth of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (1948) central or focusing on claimants on its legacy since –
followed. That literature required the millennial hype around human
rights in the 1990s to appear – even as the interdisciplinary study of
humanitarianism exploded, too, in the post-Cold War world. As if to
return the favor, early histories of “human rights” did not mention
humanitarianism, even when they canonized anti-slavery as an early
human rights movement, before going on to give attention to the twen-
tieth-century history of international politics.13

I want to defend the proposition that it was not merely a matter of

contingent separate origins that these literatures did not initially intersect;
it was substantively correct since they were dealing with genuinely sepa-
rate phenomena. It is increasingly popular to claim that some master
concept – the recent candidate is human dignity – lies in the background
of both; but whether plausible or not to say so after the fact of their
increasing overlap in our time, the historical truth is their separation for
the longest time both conceptually and institutionally.
One proposal to the contrary, of course, came in historian Lynn Hunt’s
revolutionary intervention that singlehandedly refounded the historiogra-
phy of human rights ten years ago now, and remains the most important
work so far published in its field. But to cast a glance back at her
trendsetting Inventing Human Rights confirms that it was far more than
a counterexample in staging a historiographical intersection of human
rights and humanitarianism – which nobody in either camp had done
before her. It reflected our contemporary experience of the intersection of
humanitarianism and human rights, anachronistically projecting it onto
a past in which such intersection had not yet occurred.14
On Hunt’s argument, a culture of humanitarianism, which she
depicted in the first half of the book, led to a politics of human rights,
sketched in the second half of the book, on declarations of rights in
Atlantic revolutionary experiences. Historiographically speaking, Hunt
simply updated Laqueur for the sake of a new historiography of human
rights, drawing on the “new cultural history” they had together elaborated
as fellow Berkeley professors in the 1980s but that one had applied to
humanitarianism two decades before the other rehabilitated it to explain
human rights. Even in Hunt’s essay, of course, the two phenomena of
humanitarianism and human rights are partly dissociated at the start:
identification with bodily suffering thanks to new media comes first and
separately. But then a tight causal linkage is suggested between the two,
such that humanitarianism transforms into human rights more or less
automatically.
As Hunt’s many critics have pointed out, however, there are serious
troubles with this scheme. The minor one, however significant within the
boundaries of her book itself, is that it offers little to no argument for how
humanitarianism powered the annunciation of human rights; the connec-
tion is just asserted as if post hoc ergo propter hoc. What really follows from
Hunt’s argument is how unrelated humanitarianism and human rights
were in their Enlightenment co-emergence. Worse, to suggest that one
sparked the other leaves a fateful rise in public salience in the appeal of
natural rights and les droits de l’homme and their eventual relation to
emancipatory political revolution unexplained (which it still is).15 The

political mobilization of the moral claim that individuals have rights on

the basis of their humanity in the Atlantic revolutions was for a long time
allied to the invention of citizenship among equals in a sovereign polity
through their own agency – associations all radically distinct from the
apolitical, deterritorialized, hierarchical, and passive implications of
humanitarianism past and present.
Hunt herself insisted, furthermore, that human rights were secular. But
while (following Laqueur) Hunt is absolutely correct that a new “secular”
culture of humanitarianism burgeoned in the eighteenth century, its
content was incubated in reformist Christian circles and has never strayed
all that far from reformist Christianity’s ethical maxim – even or especially
among certain kinds of Protestants – to do good works. (To which one
must add that its secular forms have always paled beside the constant
prevalence of religious piety as the driver of the majority of forms of
modern humanitarianism.)16 Precisely to the extent “human rights”
have been about secular citizenship, something else was afoot in them.17
But the major trouble, beyond the chronological and especially geo-
graphical boundaries of Hunt’s book on the eighteenth century, is that
subsequent history shows that nobody can rely on the direct or necessary
transformation of humanitarian relations into human rights relations. Just
to the contrary, in fact. For a long time, the human rights politics of the
transatlantic eighteenth century primarily portended revolutionary
nationalism and the search for post-imperial sovereignty through modern
history. It was almost always a language for fellow insiders. Meanwhile,
humanitarianism was multiscalar from the beginning or very early, travel-
ing the wings of “new media” to allow local empathy to be globalized.
Indeed, insofar as humanitarianism has had a politics, it is hard to avoid
the impression that, long into the twentieth century (and perhaps the
twenty-ﬁrst), it is a global imperial politics of fellow-feeling across massive
gradients of power and wealth. Even when people were brought within
the circle of care locally or globally, they were not elevated to the rank of
citizen equals at a national scale.
According to many observers of the past (and the present), humanitar-
ianism characteristically humanizes empire, forestalling its overthrow.
For two centuries, by contrast, the characteristic cause the slogan of
human rights served was the achievement and reform of citizenship in
the nation-state. Not just during but also after the Atlantic revolutions, it
ﬁtted snugly in the ideological atmosphere of the egalitarian relations of
citizenship in a state and especially nation-state; humanitarianism pros-
pered in the long-standing ambiance of diverse empires that advertised
their moral superiority to one another – hence the centrality of Britain in
the history of imperial humanitarianism – and maintained diverse status

relations internally that were themselves unchallengeable, though they

were open to humanitarian prettiﬁcation.18 One might also want to
suggest that, according to the gender norms of the time, rights were
associated with masculine self-assertion and humanitarianism with fem-
inine care.
For such reasons, when I wrote The Last Utopia: Human Rights in
History (2010), I recommended near-absolute prophylactic separation
of the two.19 Such a prophylactic separation, of course, comes with the
risk of error; but, as with all historical generalizations, the question is what
bigger risks one courts with messier categories or none.

Separation: The Nineteenth Century and Beyond

As Abigail Green has most compellingly argued, nineteenth-century
humanitarianism, though largely a Christian project, was also often
a liberal one, and thus regularly associated with the propagation of liberal
norms abroad – so that there was no absolute and watertight separation
between rights at home and an early history of rights abroad.20 And fair
enough, up to a point – and, on reflection, to a very limited extent. This is,
of course, not to say that humanitarianism was always a liberal project.
But to the extent it was, it is important to chart how much liberals pursued
rights transnationally whether in a humanitarian guise or not.
Citizenship at home, as all historians of the nineteenth century know,
was moving away from the centrality of claims to human rights in disputes
around the nature of citizenship (and, in particular, the role of the state it
securing its perquisites, notably on the long road to social citizenship).
More important, the truth was that liberalism fighting oppression abroad
was primarily focused on the fortunes of white male Christians, and
debates about interference for their sake – almost exclusively with the
Ottoman Empire – really meant helping them help themselves through
revolution. As a result, to note the association of liberal politics at home
with humanitarian ones abroad really suggests how far away from any
recognizable commitment liberals were during the period from either
a universal understanding of “humanity” or rights as the premier lan-
guage to frame and pursue its entitlements.
More glaringly, of course, liberals did not pursue liberalism abroad for
non-Christians or nonwhites, except insofar as liberalism justified imper-
ial conquest and rule in the name of a “civilization” that might lead
backwards people to modernity at some unspecified later time. Even
when Christians agitating for better perquisites under Ottoman rule or
engaging in outright nationalist revolt incited counterinsurgency to the
occasional point of genocide, early liberal identification with victims of

atrocity and “humanitarian intervention” on their behalf did not take

place in the name of universal rights. Indeed, historians have recovered
widespread appeals to “humanity” in nineteenth-century international
politics, but next to none to human rights.21 For most liberals, then, the
language of human rights – to the extent used at all in the century when it
stagnated even as humanitarianism exploded – was still tethered to its
revolutionary origins. If foreigners had a right, it was primarily the entitle-
ment to revolt, at least if they were the right kind (and their rulers the
wrong kind) of people. Humanitarianism was largely for fellow white
Christian and liberals beyond borders whose search for their own national
citizenship failed, and mass victimhood resulted.
The record of the transnational plight of slaves and women in the
humanitarian century tells a similar truth. When it came to slavery,
rights were much more likely to be invoked when debating the entitle-
ments of those within one’s state or empire, especially by Americans
before the Civil War (as well as when they argued for better outcomes
for blacks after), or in France in the arguments around the end of
slavery in 1848.22 Slavery abroad was, instead, a humanitarian cause
and pretext for imperial conquest and displacement – notably but not
exclusively in the famous “scramble for Africa” as well as in sequels to it
like the reallocation of King Leopold’s Congo to Belgian superinten-
dence and substitution for atrociously with merely outrageously brutal
mismanagement. Similarly, even to the extent there was supranational
liberal concern, there was not a comparable transnational liberal politics
of women’s rights, though there certainly was a humanitarian campaign
around (once again, white Christian) women’s suffering – especially
when it threatened gendered virtue, as in campaigns against “white
slavery” of sex trafﬁcking.23
Finally, the frequently cited “humanization of the laws of war” starting
in the same century forces parallel conclusions. The boom in the histor-
iography of the laws of war occurred independently of that of either
humanitarianism or human rights – not so much as a result of the end
of the Cold War as thanks to the return of direct great power intervention
in world affairs after the September 11 attacks; and given this belated
timing, it became tempting to regard the milestones in the evolution of the
law of war as coinciding with an emergent historiography of human rights.
But further inspection of their trajectory through the nineteenth and even
long into the twentieth century suggested other conclusions. For one
thing, the early phases of the laws of war stretched very clearly back to
medieval times if not long before. In modern times, given that most
legalization then and now occurs because of interstate coordination,
humanitarianism was an important factor in its path but not the most

vital one. Indeed, the laws of war were only rebranded “international
humanitarian law” in our time, and the bulk of their modern history may
fit better within other explanatory frameworks.
It is certainly fair to observe that the sort of internationalism that
Swiss Red Cross founder Henry Dunant called for, in his A Memory of
Solferino, involved a classic “humanitarian narrative” (in Laqueur’s
phrase) featuring the spectacle of violated bodies and the evocation of
pity for the sake of virtuous reform. And Florence Nightingale really
existed before she became a myth. But legally speaking, the law of war
was about providing aid to and later controlling forces, not investing
civilian victims with rights (certainly not justiciable ones). More deeply,
premature conflation mistakes that the project of humanizing warfare –
initially restricted to soldiers – operated within a framework of compas-
sionate succor and evil abatement, especially when in the twentieth
century publics and their states finally began to take seriously not the
plight of their own soldiers but that of foreign civilians. Long into the
twentieth century, humanization of warfare was separate (eventually,
intentionally kept separate) from the newfangled idea of internationa-
lizing rights, until the two began to be connected – in the late 1960s at
the very earliest.24
Ideologically and practically, in summary, none of transnational anti-
slavery, humanitarian intervention, or law of war in their long-standing
forms was trying to export citizenship or some internationalized func-
tional equivalent of aspects of it, the project for which “human rights” had
been invented and were largely reserved – even when (as in the unusual
case of the law of war) there were novel uses of international law as
a central humanitarian device. Unsurprisingly, none even rhetorically
scaled human rights up from the domestic citizen experience where they
remained locked up.

Intersection: The (Late) Twentieth-Century

Humanitarianization of Rights
In the late twentieth century, human rights and humanitarianism drifted
much more into one another’s orbits – and humanitarianism proved to
have the much bigger gravitational pull of the two. Humanitarianism
came close to annexing and redeﬁning human rights as they were incor-
porated in the familiar script of empathy in the face of the spectacle of the
body in pain as viewed across gradients of wealth and power – a script that
still deﬁnes humanitarianism today. Not only did this not happen all at
once, but it also did not happen comprehensively. Human rights retained
their power as a citizenship language, and much of humanitarianism went

on as before. But relative to the past, the most striking phenomenon was
their intersection, which most often took place on humanitarianism’s
terms.
Above all, the internationalization of rights did not occur as an expan-
sion of the experience of territorial citizenship that had previously
defined the language. It retreated to the search for a minimal baseline
of protection to be secured, and astonishingly often the protection of life
itself. How could it have been otherwise, when lots of people eventually
committed to internationalizing the concept of human rights, while
practically nobody dreamed of scaling citizenship up beyond its original
limitations? No wonder, then, that the internationalization of rights
transformed the language so that it both sounded and worked in an
increasingly humanitarian mode. It is interesting to think about
whether, in the process, humanitarianism was compelled or invited to
shift away from the language and practice of benevolence across hier-
archy to be infused by justice. But arguably, this transformation hap-
pened much less than the redefinition of justice itself in the image of
humanitarian ethics.
Historians can quibble among themselves about when precisely this
major development occurred in the twentieth century.25 Much depends
on the details of the historiography of humanitarianism as its forms and
institutions expanded rapidly across the time period, a massive phenom-
enon that historians – after giving more attention to humanitarianism’s
founding centuries for a long time – are now dutifully reconstructing.26
In my opinion, the evidence for now that a powerful intersection with
human rights began to occur earlier than the 1970s and 1980s is weak.
Humanitarian initiatives were reactivated right away after World War II,
for sure, as histories of the sector in the period prove (with the founding
of Oxfam the exemplary moment); but the annunciation of international
human rights remained an essentially separate – not to mention much
smaller – story. The broader history of international organization
tracked this separation as a matter of institutional design. The humani-
tarian causes begun under the League of Nations were significantly
broadened under the new United Nations, but the latter’s human rights
commission remained an almost entirely distinct enterprise organiza-
tionally – and for many decades, a dead end.27
For those who could assert them, human rights remained in the
tradition of citizenship. As recently as the 1940s, the creation or renova-
tion of egalitarian citizenship in a social direction afforded rights their
predominant ambiance – weighted more heavily than ever before toward
distributive and not simply political egalitarianism, in the presence of
the frightening geopolitics of communism’s own vision of “humanity.”

In the face of the postwar spectacle of mass displacement of Jews, the

biggest immediate humanitarian problem after World War II, the world
responded with some care but no serious international human rights for
refugees then (as Arendt complained) or later (as contemporary politics
illustrates).28 Now that people are far less sure that the international
declaration of human rights in the 1940s must have been propelled by
the victimological concern with Jewish suffering during World War II,
with other causal settings like the rise of the social democratic welfare
state and the stabilization of conservative Christian Democracy in
Western Europe of far greater importance, it is easier to properly date
their intersection with humanitarianism to a later time. In their initial
internationalization, rights were offered essentially as a template for
welfare states for those already in them, or for those who got the chance
to try to build them in a still formally imperial world. Like other refu-
gees, Palestinians were allocated to ongoing humanitarian management
even as Jews who made it to the area succeeded in capturing “the right to
have rights” of founding their own nation-state – wanting social(ist)
citizenship most of all, like other peoples that already had citizenship
or could get it.
In the law of war, the new Geneva Conventions (1949) were pro-
pounded in the shadow of the Universal Declaration but kept apart from
its premises. Even experimental invocations of the law of war during the
1950s and 1960s wars of late empire did not venture to integrate human
rights within evolving rules for “humane” war. Decolonization was the
globalization through nationalism of citizenship, except that – since it
was conducted by nonwhites – liberals were far less likely to sympathize
with it than they had been in the nineteenth century. After all, it involved
the breakup of their own empires rather than a “backwards” Muslim
one. Anti-colonialism aimed higher than the promise of entitlement to
bare life itself that it has always been the humanitarian agenda to safe-
guard. Anti-colonialism engaged the law of war as an instrument to its
high end of a social(ist) welfare state for citizens, not mainly for the sake
of the independent goal of making war humane. “Lawfare” – strategic
invocation of the Geneva Conventions by subaltern actors under threat
of counterinsurgent imperial violence – was born as a tool to achieve the
postcolonial state. Unlike the law of war, international human rights
were rarely invoked in such struggles, even instrumentally. For such
reasons, the era of decolonization is the last in which a warning against
the historiographical “premature conﬂation” of human rights and
humanitarianism seems of critical importance.29
Like the nineteenth century, then, the two decades after 1945 were
still in radical contrast with our time. Now, many think

humanitarianism and human rights are close enough to strive to con-

nect more fundamentally or even speak about in public settings (and
histories of various times and places) interchangeably. What happened
in the meantime? In The Last Utopia, I referred to “the slow amalgama-
tion of humanitarian concern for suffering with human rights.”30
I contended, to excess I now think, that the earliest self-styled human
rights movements in the 1970s were directed at stigmatizing author-
itarianism and totalitarianism, and most of all political imprisonment,
rather than atrocity or catastrophe or hunger that have afforded the
classic occasions for humanitarian concern. Even on the brink of a later
moment of combination, in the 1970s the prominent causes through
which international human rights became famous were specifically not
ones establishing humanitarian care as the vital emotional relation or
political crucible. I think that this contrast remains true and valuable –
after all, there is no gainsaying the authoritarian and totalitarian targets
of the human rights revolution – but recent argument and research
certainly proves that the picture is considerably messier than
I originally suggested.
The details are still rather unclear, however, simply because far less
research has been done on the conflationary period of the 1970s
through 1990s than on the nineteenth century or 1940s when no inter-
section really occurred. At least as of Amnesty International’s
Campaign against Torture in the early 1970s, a clear humanitarian
logic applied near the start, dramatizing the body in pain and eliciting
transnational sympathy (indeed, if one historian is correct, a kind of
“moral panic” sensationalizing the violation of female bodies in
particular).31 Amnesty’s style during and beyond that campaign
rejoined many strands of the history of humanitarianism, from its
“bourgeois” mode of activism to its pseudo- or post-Christian accou-
trements. The same is true in philosophy: the earliest serious theory of
global basic rights, developed by Henry Shue in his case for worldwide
entitlements to subsistence, is explicitly developed in terms of
a minimalist healer’s ethic of palliation in the face of implacable disease.
Human rights were going to be about justice, not philanthropy, but first
of all and for an indefinite period the “basic” achievement of keeping
everyone alive.32 More broadly, the explosion of post-ideological infor-
mational politics within burgeoning human rights movements of the
age – going beyond lighting candles and writing letters – reactivated
naming and shaming practices of nineteenth-century humanitarianism,
including versions of “ethical consumption.”
And new studies of the reception of humanitarian tragedies from
Biafra to Cambodia indicate the rising salience of international human

rights frameworks applied to atrocity and genocide roughly in the same

time period.33 If Holocaust consciousness was far more absent in the
1940s (including as a motivation for declaring human rights) than
people have wanted to admit, the vagaries of the definite explosion of
Holocaust memory from the 1960s through 1980s so far permit no
absolute caesura to be located – as if from one day to the next the
invocation of human rights suddenly conjured up to most people violent
depredations abroad. For sure, the notion of human rights had never
been singularly focused on the phenomenon of foreign atrocity in any
prior era, but when precisely the association crystallized after the 1970s
is either not yet known or a matter of a surreptitious conversion.34
Finally, both humanitarianism and human rights were brought into
proximity because the trajectory of each was profoundly inflected by
crisis and reorientation of the international left between the 1960s and
1980s – which itself occurred in complex stages, not all at once.35
Whatever the precise chronology of the partial merger of human rights
into a humanitarian ambiance, I do still think it is correct to say that, at
some point, “human rights and humanitarianism [became] fused enter-
prises, with the former incorporating the latter and the latter justified in
terms of the former.”36 They both became part of the moral cosmetology
of a neoliberal epoch (which is not to say either is reducible to the
neoliberalism that has done most to define the age of their intersection).
True card-carriers in both professionalizing fields in the era learned and
now know well how to draw distinctions. The bigger event was not this
ordinary expert boundary work, however, but the historic intersection of
humanitarianism and human rights in the first place.
And as human rights became not merely a language of local citizen-
ship they sometimes remain but rather a rhetoric of global care, they
accommodated to the global hierarchy that has always defined humani-
tarianism in theory and practice. Not always, of course. Not only alter-
native cosmopolitanisms to human rights were in contention for human
allegiance for most of modern history, but also alternative versions of
human rights that placed greater stress on local agency. But there is no
denying that for several decades a human rights revolution swept the
world that favored a narrow set of norms, pursued by transnational
elites, funded in rich capitals, with little grassroots traction, and huma-
nitarian concern occupying the heart of the human rights imaginary.
Morality was redefined to revolve around “the secular value of life,”
a kind of tragic vocation in its defense, and ethical witnessing of the
remainder of horror, with appeals to humanity mostly functioning as
a gesture toward unavailable justice – though perhaps the moral arc of
history would bend toward it someday.37

Conclusion: Contingent Histories versus Categorical

Opposition
I close this chapter contrasting my historical account of the evolving
relations of human rights and humanitarianism from separation to inter-
section with stories developed elsewhere, notably in the anthropology and
international relations of humanitarianism. Both have relied on strong
contrasts between humanitarianism and human rights, which fail to
recognize the basis of their past distinction and therefore the signiﬁcance –
analytically and politically – of their present conﬂation.
In the main synthetic account of the history of humanitarianism, based
on an important periodization of the phenomenon, international relations
scholar Michael Barnett offers three grounds for avoiding human rights
altogether. First, he writes, the humanitarian “discourse of needs” is
separate from a rights-based language of entitlements. Second, “human
rights relies on legal discourses and frameworks, whereas humanitarian-
ism shifts attention to moral codes and sentiments.” Third, “human
rights typically focuses on the long-term goal of eliminating the causes
of suffering, humanitarianism on the urgent goal of keeping people
alive.”38
But the fact that a series of contingent reasons established separate
imaginaries and practices cannot possibly mean that they remain distinct
today. And their intersection is precisely on the terrain of humanitarian-
ism and need – leaving the law and politics of international human rights
equally open to the worry that they have lacked the structural imagina-
tion, and often share in the sentimental interest in the immediate and
spectacular, that Barnett thinks distinguishes humanitarianism.39 In light
of this reality, it is a mistake to retrospectively erect a long-term separation
into a theory of permanent essences. Brutally put, for a long time it was
unnecessary to distinguish international humanitarianism from interna-
tional human rights: the latter did not exist. And after recent develop-
ments, not one of Barnett’s distinctions works, because human rights
have been humanitarianized. Offered in terms of ideal-typical categories,
Barnett’s separation misses the lasting reasons the two were distinct in the
beginning as well as the fact that they converged recently.
Similarly, anthropologists of humanitarianism skilled at contemporary
and synchronic analysis frequently fail to dramatize the same transforma-
tions because they do not acknowledge the extent to which human rights
have themselves become humanitarianized. In the tracks of Didier
Fassin’s “critique of humanitarian reason,” it is now common to analyze
humanitarianism through the juxtaposition to human rights – as if it
tracked a juxtaposition of humanitarian care with entitled justice. But

what if global justice itself – in its dominant imaginative and practical

forms – has become humanitarian?40
Thus Miriam Ticktin, in a useful recent summation of the state of the
field and application of its insights to contemporary migration crisis,
contends that charity and humanitarianism are not enough relative to
rights-based entitlements.41 But a historical view of the shifting relations
of these categories might well conclude that – at least to a startling extent –
humanitarianism has helped redefined human rights as a global response
to hierarchy and the organized misery at its nether pole. As Ticktin points
out, agitation for human rights can promisingly indict the limits of huma-
nitarian compassion; but it will not do, in calling for a “political” alter-
native to care and pity, to surmise that human rights as we have known
them in our time already provide it, even in theory. (Among other things,
international human rights have not been defined as a distributively ega-
litarian language.)42 Indeed, the overall truth is that they have come to
share many of the defects of humanitarianism, which makes them
a dubious candidate to provide a strong or viable contrast to it.
In any event, there is no way to reach any conclusion without conduct-
ing an ethnography in situ of the specific forms of both human rights
activism and humanitarian care. I do not know of ethnographies that do
so. I would speculate that, precisely to the extent the frame of human
rights allows more appeals to justice, it makes less profound effects in the
world; it does not, one might worry, provide even care to the suffering,
which is at least something to reckon against the ancillary effects that
humanitarian “management” of misery certainly involves. Consider, for
example, the Palestinian case, as one that has been studied by separate
anthropologists, each interested one of the two categories. Ilana Feldman
has shown that “the humanitarian condition” many decades after
Palestinians were initially allocated to it is grim. But Lori Allen has
documented that their own turn to human rights since 1980 – along
with an increasing number of external advocates – has not even made
the difference humanitarianism does.43
I do not mean to imply that total conflation of human rights into
humanitarianism ever occurred.44 Rights remain available as
a potentially transformative citizenship language and mobilizing for
their sake sometimes brings about more just outcomes. Beth Simmons
has even contended that the main if not sole significance of internatio-
nalizing human rights in our time (in treaty law, at least) has been to
provide new tools of domestic citizenship in the highly specific circum-
stances that such tools can make such difference.45 Before the continent
entered crisis, Europeans brought about an unprecedented regionaliza-
tion of citizenship through rights law, whatever its faults of substance

and process. In transnational settings, rights activism has sometimes

delivered improvement, or at least allowed for the allocation of stigma
by global outsiders to local politics. But on balance over time, humani-
tarianization has been visited to a significant extent on human rights in
global affairs, leaving them imaginatively and practically close to huma-
nitarianism like never before. Their vocation, for most observers and
participants in the enterprise, is a weak solidarity with the wretched of
the earth – whether the latter are fighting for life itself or, in an age of
triumphant global anti-poverty amidst exploding national inequality
almost everywhere, claiming entitlements to the basics of a tolerable
human existence.
It is not immoral in the face of continuing world hierarchy, in my view,
to have an ascendant moral language of human rights to indict the
illegitimacy of global misery. For its harshest critics, such weak humani-
tarianism helps entrench the hierarchies it merely struggles to make less
flagrant and violent – or even worsens them in doing so.46 On another
detailed powerful account, the glitzy mediatization of humanitarianism
(or “post-humanitarianism”) is what really matters about it today.47
I suspect that neither disturbing allegation is broadly true. No doubt,
some part of humanitarianism and human rights alike functions to dis-
tract from pursuing justice and launder shame among those with a bad
conscience that they are powerful where others are weak. But there is no
reason to doubt the moral bona fides of humanitarianism and human
rights and grant them credit for their modest effects.
From my perspective, it is not so much that the contemporary modes of
identification that human rights and humanitarianism both involve
almost never lead to improvement, as that even their rare successes
leave the selected beneficiaries only a little better off. As long as domina-
tion is the way of the world, it is better for it to be humane than not, and it
is excellent that a few at the top struggle to help those at the bottom in the
name of humanitarianism and human rights, separately or (more and
more often) together. But many will still find the vision of humanity of
both optics morally insufficient, if their prime credential is merely that
they are better to have around to define our time than no morality at all.

Jeffrey Flynn

Neither human rights nor humanitarianism are static constructs.

Exploring the relations between them requires attention to history. The
guiding idea of this chapter is that a complete story about the relation
between human rights and humanitarianism must account for their con-
nections to two powerful modern ideals: the commitment to alleviating
avoidable human suffering and the commitment to eliminating unjustifi-
able status hierarchies. It is tempting to identify the former with humani-
tarianism and the latter with human rights. That way of carving things up
makes some sense when referring to developments within Western socie-
ties in the eighteenth century, a century that witnessed both the rise of
a sentimental mode of humanitarianism focused on alleviating suffering
and the revolutionary overturning of social and political hierarchies in the
name of the Rights of Man. This chapter takes that period as its starting
point. But things get more complicated when moving beyond those eight-
eenth-century developments. One aim here is to step back and gain
critical distance from preconceptions about what “human rights” or
“humanitarianism” are all about by seeing various ways in which both
have incorporated claims to equal status or relied on appeals to suffering.
That is not to say that the politics of suffering or the politics of status are
themselves static; each has a broader history of its own.1 The point is to
see how both have provided rich resources from which human rights and
humanitarian practice have drawn. This also makes it possible to high-
light how more radical versions of both the politics of equal status and the
politics of suffering have gone unrealized in particular instantiations of
human rights and humanitarian practice.
I am a philosopher, not a historian. Philosophers sometimes fly high
above the contingencies of history when defining concepts. Historians
often develop detailed depictions of particular eras and events. I take
a middle path, drawing selectively from historical instantiations of
human rights and humanitarianism with the aim of bringing conceptual
clarity to some issues and positing what I hope are useful distinctions.
Rather than start with a fixed definition of either human rights or

humanitarianism, I note my historical starting points. Scholars of huma-

nitarianism sometimes distinguish the long history dating to the rise of
a humanitarian culture in eighteenth-century Western societies from
a shorter history dating to the latter half of the twentieth century.
Michael Barnett refers to the former as “The Humanitarian Big Bang”
and, of the latter, maintains that the 1968 response to the civil war and
famine in Biafra is “rightly credited with opening a new chapter in
humanitarian action.”2 A parallel distinction and fault line for debate
exists in the history of human rights, with some focusing on the eighteenth
century as the era in which human rights were “invented” while others
stress the 1970s as the “breakthrough” era.3 I focus primarily on devel-
opments in the eighteenth century and the latter half of the twentieth
century not because that is all there is to the history of human rights or
humanitarianism, but because we continue to grapple with challenges
that are vividly manifest in those historical moments.
In the section “Eighteenth-Century Encounters,” I identify four para-
digmatic ways in which a politics of suffering and a politics of equal status
intersected, or failed to, in the eighteenth century. In the sections “Rights
and Status” and “Stories of Suffering,” I draw distinctions I take to be
crucial in thinking about status and suffering in relation to human rights
and humanitarianism. One aim here is to identify more and less ambitious
versions of the politics of status and the politics of suffering. Speciﬁcally,
the section “Rights and Status” distinguishes the way humanitarianism
has incorporated the idea of equal human value from the more radical
status-elevating function of human rights. The section “Stories of
Suffering” distinguishes the prevailing type of “humanitarian narrative”
from forms that have more powerful political potential. The politics of
suffering is particularly relevant to twentieth-century encounters between
human rights and humanitarianism as each took on novel forms – the
focus of the section “Twentieth-Century Iterations.” An enduring chal-
lenge is whether the contemporary politics of human rights and humani-
tarianism can achieve the aims of more robust versions of either a politics
of status or a politics of suffering.

Eighteenth-Century Encounters
Two eighteenth-century developments that have indelibly shaped mod-
ern moral and political life in the West are the degree to which avoidable
(particularly physical) suffering increasingly came to be viewed as intol-
erable, and status hierarchies increasingly came to be viewed as
unjustifiable.4 The first development is often identified as the very heart
of humanitarianism. Historian Norman Fiering is surely on to something

when he deﬁnes “modern humanitarianism” in just this way, as “the

widespread inclination to protest against obvious and pointless physical
suffering.”5 Something similar can be said about human rights in relation
to status hierarchies: challenging them has been at the heart of what
human rights are about.
These two developments are central elements of the modern “social
imaginary,” as the philosopher Charles Taylor uses the term to capture
something “broader and deeper” than ideas or intellectual schemes. He
uses the term to describe “the ways people imagine their social existence,
how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and
their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper
normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”6 In this
sense, various narrative forms, types of imagery, and repertoires for
mobilizing collective action to alleviate suffering or to challenge status
hierarchies can be viewed as key parts of the modern Western social
imaginary.
Before considering the relations between the two developments, more
substance must be given to each. Elements of the first included increasing
philosophical attention to moral sentiments like compassion and sympa-
thy, which was part of the spreading notion that human beings are
naturally, perhaps irresistibly, moved to alleviate the suffering of others –
a central character trait of the “man of feeling,” who was such
a prominent figure in eighteenth-century philosophy and literature.7
There were also changing views of the individual body and its pains,
and the rise of naturalistic as opposed to theistic accounts of suffering.8
Beyond changing ideas, moral sentiment was mobilized in the form of
“organized compassion,” in social movements whose expressed aim was
to reduce misery: from abolitionism to prison reform, to changing policies
regarding poverty and mental illness, to campaigns against judicial
torture.9 The kind of sentimental narratives developed in the eighteenth
century also made possible the powerful influence of Henry Dunant’s
passionate call to aid suffering soldiers in A Memory of Solferino (1862),
the springboard for the founding of the Red Cross and the campaign to
make war more humane. If there is a single thread running through these
developments, it is how compassion has been socially mobilized in mov-
ing people to act, individually and in concert, to alleviate suffering. In this
way, we can characterize a whole range of collective mobilizations under
the heading of a “politics of suffering.”
The best starting point for describing the second development is the
status-leveling aims of the French Revolution. The philosopher Joel
Feinberg describes precisely how “revolutionary the idea of equal
human rights was” by contrasting it with European society prior to the

French Revolution, in which the “rights men had as a matter of status

were theirs as royalty, nobility, clergy, serfs, and so on.”10 By contrast,
“human rights, as a revolutionary idea, were associated with the idea of
a single status society, where the powers of the high and mighty were
limited everywhere by the rights of all persons derived from their ‘status’
as human beings.”11 In this sense, the French Revolution represents
a sweeping break in its attempt to remake a modern social order without
any status hierarchies. Other efforts have been less revolutionary, though
typically quite radical. A “politics of status” is manifest whenever causes
or campaigns reject inferior treatment, when the claims at stake are that
the excluded be included, the oppressed liberated, or that those being
ignored must count. If there is a single thread running through these
developments, it is the way in which various social and political move-
ments have mobilized the demand that no human being innately deserves
a higher status than any other in the basic structures of a social or political
order.
To capture the dynamism in these developments – that this is about
ideals advanced by movements, not just intellectual debates about the
nature of suffering or status – I refer to them as two forms of a “politics of
humanity.” A politics of suffering aims at alleviating human suffering,
while a politics of equal status aims at elevating all human beings to the
same status. But history is complicated; it is not always easy to place
a single label on any particular movement. For example, some strands of
anti-slavery activism sought to end abject misery while more radical
strands aimed at abolishing status distinctions by making equal citizens
out of former slaves. In fact, this difference is where I start in sketching
four encounters, or in some cases missed encounters, between a politics of
suffering and a politics of status.

Suffering without Status

The shared origins of humanitarianism and human rights, it is commonly
said, can be grasped in eighteenth-century invocations of humanity. But
starting there raises an immediate complication. While “humanity” could
refer to a shared species category in that period, this was only one possible
meaning. Another, dominant connotation was the humanity of the person
who could feel for another, to humanity as a feeling of benevolence or
sympathy for distress in some other being. This meant that appeals to
humanity were often more about displaying and conﬁrming one’s own
humanity than that of the other, and in a way that did not always challenge
the belief that the creatures eliciting feelings of humanity were lesser
beings.

In a brilliant essay, Lynn Festa analyzes how “most abolitionist writers”

could slip almost indiscernibly between the two senses.12 Not only were
appeals to humanity ambiguous, but also the sentimental form they often
took made such appeals doubly ambivalent. Although sentimental narra-
tives could inspire readers to imagine new possibilities for alleviating the
suffering of distant strangers, the structure of identification generated by
sentimental sympathy often failed to support a stable definition of
humanity. This weakness in the sentimental form of humanitarian sensi-
bility – that it operates without a clear definition of humanity – was, as
a practical matter, often a source of great strength. Being indiscriminate
about content opened up the possibility for including all manner of
populations – the impoverished, the disenfranchised, the enslaved – as
worthy of sympathy, which could generate ameliorative action, without
having to answer more difficult questions about moral status. The weak-
ness in this mode of appeal is that without a categorical definition, specific
individuals and groups can all too easily be “yo-yoed in and out of the
human purview on a case-by-case basis.”13 In short, this way of deploying
humanitarian sentiment provided a way of recognizing the needs of others
while maintaining a hierarchy between a proximate community of affec-
tively moved individuals and distant others who were often viewed more
like sentimental objects. Sentimental appeals were not the only tool
available to abolitionists. But Festa’s work shows how powerful senti-
mental appeals were not always egalitarian, while more egalitarian status
claims were often less influential. She rightly maintains that there is
a “critical discontinuity between the sentimental basis of eighteenth-
century humanitarian sensibility” and the more “categorical imperative
of modern humanitarianism: its enjoinder to alleviate suffering based on”
the equal value of all human beings.14

Imagining Equality
An altogether different tale about the power of sentimental stories is told
by historian Lynn Hunt, who argues that mid-eighteenth-century senti-
mental literature is precisely what laid the groundwork for late eight-
eenth-century commitment to the Rights of Man. According to Hunt,
a variety of cultural practices – in particular, reading immensely popular
epistolary novels – led to new kinds of experience that ultimately led to
radical social change. Such novels
made the point that all people are fundamentally similar because of their inner
feelings, and many novels showcased in particular the desire for autonomy. In this
way, reading novels created a sense of equality and empathy through passionate

involvement in the narrative . . . Epistolary novels taught their readers nothing less
than a new psychology and in the process laid the foundations for a new social and
political order.15
Hunt is rightly attentive to the degree to which the idea of equal rights
“could only ﬂourish when people learned to think of others as their
equals, as like them in some fundamental fashion.”16 In effect, Hunt
brings out the affective dimension of recognizing others as equals:
“Equality was not just an abstract concept or a political slogan. It had to
be internalized in some fashion.”17 She vividly captures the way in which
various cultural practices transformed people’s embodied and affective
relations to one another through the experience of individual autonomy
(“an increasing sense of the separation and sacredness of human bodies:
your body is yours and my body is mine, and we should both respect the
boundaries between each other’s bodies”) and empathy (“the recognition
that others think and feel as we do, that our inner feelings are alike in some
fundamental fashion”).18
There is much worth exploring here in the idea that such cultural prac-
tices can enable people to imagine equality across various divides. But Hunt
is on less stable ground in positing the historical link the way she does,
between the rise of these practices and the later French Declaration of the
Rights of Man (let alone the American Declaration of Independence) and
subsequent struggles for equal rights. She concludes her book by provoca-
tively maintaining that “the history of human rights shows that rights are
best defended in the end by the feelings, convictions, and actions of multi-
tudes of individuals, who demand responses that accord with their inner
sense of outrage.”19 But the ways in which affective resources like outrage
and indignation can be mobilized in struggles for rights is not a story Hunt’s
book actually tells. She leaves a gap between the practices she does analyze,
which mobilize affect and rely on empathy in particular ways, and practices
like social movements and struggles for rights, which may do similar things
but in a way that the book fails to analyze.
Perhaps the most we can say is that Hunt uncovers a possible pathway
from sentimental appeal to equal status. But Festa demonstrates just how
unreliable such pathways can be. Indeed, even in the aftermath of the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, as the next encounter shows, appeals to
suffering could undermine the very equality that Hunt says they fostered.

The Politics of Pity

Hannah Arendt was the ﬁrst critic to analyze the dangers posed to a politics
of equal status by a politics of suffering – a kind of humanitarianization.

This critique, in On Revolution, is part of a larger worry about how public

discourse on suffering in the eighteenth century undermined the political
equality posited by the Rights of Man. Arendt was not just concerned about
the pernicious aspects of a politics of suffering; she was deeply skeptical
about the possibility of a genuine “politics” of suffering at all.20 The
argument depended on her distinction between compassion and pity, and
on her understanding of the nature of democratic politics. Compassion,
according to Arendt, is an affective response to particular individuals; it is
“to be stricken with the suffering of someone else as though it were
contagious.”21 Pity, on the other hand, is a more remote sentiment directed
at an abstract suffering population – “it can reach out to the multitude.”22
Neither emotional response, Arendt argues, has a proper place within the
politics of a democratic society of equal citizens.23
The philosopher Elizabeth Spelman aptly sums up Arendt’s worry in
terms of several related concerns: “One is that professions of compassion
all too often are barely disguised forms of pity, that what is presented as an
authentic and spontaneous concern for another human being is actually
a selfish and cruel wallowing in the misfortune of others.”24 Second, while
genuine compassion is both possible and superior to pity, compassion as
defined by Arendt is apolitical. Its mode of directly sharing in the suffering
of another is at odds with the kind of public debate and discussion she
associates with shared political life. Finally, Arendt uses Robespierre’s
speaking and acting in the name of the suffering of le peuple to display the
many dangers of public proclamations about others’ suffering: it can be
a way of declaring one’s own virtue, it amplifies the distance between
those who are not suffering and those who are, and it precludes the latter’s
participation in public discourse on their suffering by speaking in their
name. The issue, Spelman rightly points out, is not whether Arendt’s
definitions of compassion, pity, or politics are decisive; rather, Arendt
draws attention to perennial risks revolving around appeals to suffering
and sentiment in politics.25
Arendt contrasts both compassion and pity with the kind of solidarity
through which a group of individuals can potentially establish “a com-
munity of interest with the oppressed and exploited.”26 Rather than
establish an inclusive community with the poor, the revolutionaries con-
nected with them through pity. The political theorist Ayten Gündogdu
maintains that “Arendt’s critique suggests that the Jacobins took
a profoundly anti-political approach to the Rights of Man . . . Turning
the poor into an undifferentiated mass of suffering victims, they under-
mined any possibility of organizing a politics centered on solidarity and
equality.”27 If Festa’s work shows how sentimental appeals to suffering
can sustain hierarchy, Arendt raises the possibility that even the founding

of a single-status society may not sufﬁce in trying to avoid the pernicious

effects of a politics of pity.28 Nevertheless, a fourth case illuminates how
new ways of mobilizing appeals to suffering can arise within such a single-
status society.

The Politics of Dignity

The basic idea for this fourth encounter is that within the context of
a social order in which the ideal of overcoming status hierarchies has
taken root, certain forms of suffering that are integrally related to status
take on a new salience – as experiences of “social suffering” that can be
mobilized in struggles for equal status. The core of this dynamic is
sketched by Jürgen Habermas in an essay exploring the connection
between human dignity and human rights.29 The rise in the eighteenth
century of a modern single-status society, according to Habermas, gave
rise to a transformation in the concept of dignity. While traditional forms
of social dignity distinguish between higher and lower ranks, the new idea
is that of human beings all having the same, very high rank.30 This
resulted from a fusion of three elements: the idea of dignity as
a concrete social status was combined with a second, moral element –
the moral idea of equal respect for all human beings – and a third, legal
element – the idea of a legal person as a bearer of rights. The point is to see
how equal dignity became a modern legal concept associated with the
status citizens are accorded in a political order of subjects with equal
rights.
Once this status is instantiated it can give rise, Habermas argues, to
a dynamic social process in which experiences of violated dignity give
rise to further claims of two basic types: claims for extending equal
status to all and demands for expanding the content of the rights
accorded to all. As T. H. Marshall put this in a classic essay, the
“urge toward a fuller measure of equality” took the form of “an enrich-
ment of the stuff of which the status is made and an increase in the
number of those on whom the status is bestowed.”31 However fused
these two moves may be in practice, for analytical purposes we can refer
to struggles for equal status and struggles over what equal status entails.
Habermas stresses that the specific meaning of human dignity, and so
the need for particular basic rights, only becomes apparent through
specific violations of dignity, as experienced by, for instance, margin-
alized social classes, disparaged minorities, undocumented immigrants
and asylum seekers, and so forth. He refers to “historical experiences of
humiliation and degradation” and how such “political outrage could
find expression in the language of positive law.”32 The main point is

that, in the context of an ostensibly single-status society, the appeal to

social suffering can become a mobilizing force – by those suffering, and
in generating solidarity from others – around equal status. Habermas
merely provides an initial sketch. One way of ﬁlling it in would be to
analyze various social movements against inferior treatment and forms
of “social cruelty.”33
To sum this up in relation to the other positive encounter between
suffering and status: Hunt identiﬁes a possible pathway from sentimental
stories of suffering to imagining equality, while Habermas detects an
ongoing role for appeals to social suffering in struggles to achieve equal
status. The two critical takes, on the other hand, warn that the possible
pathway is unreliable (Festa) and that the promise of equality can be
undermined by a politics of pity (Arendt).
These four cases are not the only possible ways in which appeals to
suffering and claims to status have intersected. But they are crucial cases
for analyzing the relations between human rights and humanitarianism
against the background of the relation between suffering and status, from
the eighteenth century up to the present.

Rights and Status

The full story of how humanitarian discourse incorporated equal status –
the shift from the sentimental to the categorical, as Festa puts it – remains
to be told. This is one case in which asking whether the term “human
rights” was literally invoked as part of an earlier discourse of “humanity”
can distract from the equally important task of identifying precisely when,
where, and to what ends the discourse of humanity has invoked concep-
tions of equal human status. The latter is evident, for example, in
Dunant’s aim of caring for injured soldiers on both sides of battle. It is
surely evident in the early twentieth-century shift by aid organizations
from focusing on “identity” (e.g., concern for co-religionists) to “need” in
deciding who was worthy of their relief efforts.34 Today, a “principle of
humanity” is widely acknowledged to be a core tenet of humanitarian
organizations, as evident in Jean Pictet’s formulation of a central aim of
the ICRC: “To prevent and alleviate human suffering wherever it may be
found.”35 In this sense, the equal value of humanity is now widely con-
sidered a core norm of humanitarian practice.
Nonetheless, it is crucial to distinguish this important advance within
the sphere of humanitarianism from the more radical version of status
egalitarianism found in human rights practice. In a humanitarian context,
the notion of equal status means that the only legitimate response to the
question “Whose suffering matters?” is “Every human being’s.” As

a principle of universal inclusion, it forbids discrimination when respond-

ing to suffering. When it comes to human rights, however, the notion of
equal status not only signals that everyone matters, but also brings with it
a particularly robust way of saying how everyone counts – as a subject of
rights – that has sweeping implications for how societies are organized. In
short, when thinking about equal status it is important to keep in view the
difference between saying the suffering of all human beings matters and
saying the equal status of all human beings as rights-bearers must be respected
within every social and political order. Here I want to focus on some of the
implications of the latter claim.
There are different ways in which the equal status of rights-bearers gets
instantiated. The primary site for the politics of equal dignity sketched above
has been the politics of equal citizenship carried out over the last 200 years
within the nation-state. But one way of thinking about developments in
international human rights practice since the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948) is that the aim has been to secure this status for the
individual both within each state and to some extent beyond states.
Certainly nobody would claim that international human rights practice
creates a single-status world society along the lines of a democratic nation-
state. But there is a sense in which a clear aim (or effect, insofar as it is
effective) of contemporary human rights practice is to elevate the status of
certain types of claims to the international level and thereby elevate the
status of each person. In his account of contemporary human rights practice,
the political philosopher Charles Beitz maintains that “the doctrine of
human rights is the articulation in the public morality of world politics of
the idea that each person is a subject of global concern.”36 This global
concern is expressed in practice by articulating a set of urgent individual
interests that must be protected, and establishing a set of formal and infor-
mal mechanisms for doing so at both domestic and international levels.
The philosopher Allen Buchanan argues that one of the most striking
features of the international system of human rights is “the fact that, taken
as a whole, this system of rights expresses a strong commitment to equal-
ity of basic status for all people.”37 He calls this “status egalitarian func-
tion” one of the primary functions of international legal human rights.
The point of calling it “status” equality is to capture the idea of “equal
standing” and distinguish it from distributive equality (regarding the
distribution of resources, opportunities, or outcomes).38 Buchanan cites
ﬁve aspects of the international human rights system that are key to its
performing the function of protecting equal status. These features display
two aspects of the radical nature of the human rights system, and its
commitment to the equal status of each person along with a long sub-
stantive list of rights guaranteed to each person:

1. Inclusive (or universal) ascription of rights (international legal rights

are ascribed not just to men, or whites, or so-called civilized peoples,
but to all people).
2. Equality of rights for all (the same rights are ascribed to all in a very
strong sense: they are understood to have (a) the same content (includ-
ing the same correlative duties), (b) the same weight, and (c) the same
conditions of abrogation, that is, the factors that allow abrogation do
not discriminate among persons.
3. States are obligated to make everyone’s rights effective, that is, they are
not allowed to make any distinctions among persons that would dis-
advantage anyone with regard to the effectiveness of their rights.
4. Robust equality before the law (including an extensive set of equal due
process rights and the requirement that governments are to ensure that
domestic legal systems provide effective legal remedies for all when the
rights are violated, with no allowance for discrimination among per-
sons as to the legal remedies to be made available).
5. The inclusion of strong rights against discrimination on grounds of
race or gender (where this includes both formal legal discrimination
and informal practices of discrimination in the public and private
sectors).39
It is certainly worth stressing the many ways in which that system still does
not, as a matter of principle or practice, strive to overcome the material
inequality that plagues the world today.40 Nonetheless, in the context of
comparing human rights and humanitarianism, we should not lose sight
of how radical it is to posit that every human being must be respected as
having equal standing to press their claims.
Even when humanitarian and human rights overlap in practice on some
particularly important human interest or need, there is still a difference in
the work each typically tries to do. Humanitarian action often provides
what someone needs (and can use the language of rights in doing so), but
human rights work, at its best, attempts to put one in a better position to
stand up and effectively demand what one needs. In meeting needs,
humanitarian actors typically try to carve out a “humanitarian space”
from the surrounding context of social and political conﬂict – a kind of
moral space, metaphorically and in reality, in which the humanitarian
agent can come to the aid of the beneﬁciary.41 Human rights work, on the
other hand, tries to alter the social and political context itself, transform-
ing it into one in which each individual can effectively make claims. This
is the core of its status-elevating function.
Philosophers like Joel Feinberg have long stressed the kind of self-
respect and respect for others that is constituted in this way among
equal rights-bearers. “Having rights,” he argues, “enables us to . . . look

others in the eye, and to feel in some fundamental way the equal of
anyone.”42 Of course, having equal rights is not the only way to constitute
equality, but struggles to attain the status of rights-bearers are paradig-
matic struggles for equality in modern societies.43 When people struggle
to become bearers of equal rights, they struggle to elevate their status.
This practical political relation between human rights and status is evi-
dent in the work rights can do, or more precisely, what people do with
them: they claim them. By positing that anyone anywhere can make such
claims, the status-elevating features of the international human rights
system can be empowering. As Beitz puts it:
This empowerment is in part a result of the change in self-conception that the
practice of human rights can induce among those who participate in it: they are
encouraged to conceive of themselves, and to act, as “makers of claims.” This is
most obvious when legal enforcement is possible, but there is also a reﬂection of it
in the political practice of human rights.44
Individuals who encounter human rights practice in this way “learn to act
with the dignity of persons who can stand on their own feet.”45
This is a refrain often heard in accounts of rights education and the role
of rights consciousness. For example, in her ethnographic work on the
“vernacularization” of human rights around the world, particularly in the
area of combatting violence against women, the anthropologist Sally
Engle Merry notes how, as local activists “promote the ideology of
human rights, some women say they have learned to stand up for
themselves.”46 It is important to distinguish this powerful status-
elevating function of human rights, related to the activity of claiming
them, from other, pernicious effects of human rights practice brought to
the fore in recent ethnographic work on human rights. For instance, the
anthropologist Lori Allen has developed a compelling critique of the role
of the “human rights industry” in the rise of cynicism toward human
rights in occupied Palestine. Nevertheless, she also carves out space for
a positive conception of human rights as the basis for claiming and making
demands: “Every protest against occupation, every objection to the indig-
nities it inﬂicts, every effort to free political prisoners, and every vote cast
is an assertion of dignity and, in some way, a demand for human rights.”47
This aspect of the political character of human rights tends to come out in
approaches that contrast concrete political struggles for rights with
bureaucratic or legalistic aspects of the global human rights system.48
Ethnographic work can bring out the emancipatory potential of
human rights practice by showing how it poses a radical challenge
to status hierarchies around the globe. A similar point can be made in
relation to historical work. For this status-elevating function of

human rights practice provides a salient point of continuity between

post-1948 international human rights and the longer tradition of
claiming rights within nation-states. For some purposes, such as
trying to explain the sudden rise of human rights rhetoric in the
1970s, stressing discontinuities in the history of human rights is
essential.49 But there are also continuities, and they are not always
found in the concept or content of human rights being used in
a particular context, but in the common function of rights practices
more generally. When a practice posits equal status for all as rights-
bearers – as the French Declaration and the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights did – it poses a direct challenge to status hierarchies,
at least to the extent to which social movements or legal institutions
put some force behind those claims. In this way, there are continu-
ities in the status-elevating function of human rights practice from
late eighteenth-century struggles for rights within nation-states up to
contemporary human rights.50 This radical promise of a politics of
equal status animates human rights practice at its best, even if – as
Arendt pointed out long ago, and contemporary critics continue to
demonstrate – it can be undermined by a politics of pity.

Stories of Suffering
Just as it is important to distinguish equal value as instantiated in
humanitarian practice from the more robust status-elevating function
of human rights practice, it is important to distinguish different ways of
telling tales about suffering. In short, the politics of suffering should not
be reduced to a politics of pity. The standard view of humanitarian
narratives is that they mobilize compassion in order to motivate action
to alleviate the suffering of distant strangers. This picture needs to be
expanded by noting two other kinds of story about suffering, both of
which aim to move addressees beyond compassion: the ﬁrst does so by
drawing attention not only to distant suffering but also to distant
perpetrators;51 the second more radically challenges addressees by
directly implicating them in the suffering. By not stopping at compas-
sion, these types of narratives at least have the potential to move beyond
a politics of pity.
Regarding the ﬁrst alternative form, in his classic study on distant
suffering, the sociologist Luc Boltanski traces eighteenth-century devel-
opments in various discourses about suffering – in pamphlets, political
essays, and novels – that challenged spectators to take a committed stance
on the spectacle of distant suffering. Boltanski pays particular attention to
different ways in which emotional commitments are structured and

organized in the face of distant suffering, distinguishing two directions

moral sentiment can be channeled:
Tender-heartedness brings into the political world, that is to say into the world of
considerations and actions at a distance, resources drawn from compassion, it
extends over a range of sentiments and it points toward beneﬁcent action.
Indignation is supported by justice and, more precisely by political constructions
which establish the possibility of a just world and, in a style which can be called
pamphleteering . . . it points toward denunciation and accusation.52

The spectator may be drawn to one or another emotional response in part

depending on the content of the image or “proposal” made by some form of
media. Of course one can reject the proposal. But if the spectator accepts it,
the content may move her in one of two directions. Drawing on two con-
temporary examples, Boltanski maintains one can “be indignant at the sight
of children in tears being herded by armed soldiers” or “be moved by the
effort of this nurse whose hands are held out to someone who is starving.”53
The key is that the initial moment of concern for the fate of a suffering
stranger can go in different ways. It can remain within the register of
compassion, with its pull toward beneﬁcent action, or it can shift toward
indignation at the sight of a perpetrator, pulling more toward denuncia-
tion and action oriented toward stopping the one causing the harm.
A second form of humanitarian narrative directly implicates addressees
as part of the cause of suffering. Instead of simply saying “we must help
them,” it says “we must stop causing them harm.” Quaker abolitionist John
Woolman was an early innovator here. A primary aim of his work, as
historian Thomas Haskell illuminates in a classic essay, was to convince
slaveholders of the distant consequences of their conduct by getting them
to see that the “geographical remoteness of the scene of initial enslave-
ment” could not provide a defense even for benevolent slaveholders.54 As
Woolman wrote in a 1746 essay: “To willingly join with unrighteousness
to the injury of men who live some thousands of miles off is the same in
substance as joining with it to the injury of our neighbours.”55 According
to Haskell, Woolman and other early abolitionists were not necessarily
more morally sensitive to others’ suffering than earlier human beings had
been. Rather, a shift in their cognitive ability to discern the kind of causal
chains that had not been evident in the past enhanced their sense of moral
responsibility for suffering at a distance. Haskell’s explanatory story is
that modern market relations brought about this transformation.
Woolman, for instance, clearly saw how supply and demand worked:
“The idea that by owning a slave (or even a product of slave labor),” as
Haskell puts it, “one helped constitute the demand without which sup-
pliers of slave labor could not stay in business gained plausibility in the

decades ahead[.]”56 Indeed, Adam Hochschild aptly captures this aspect

of British abolitionism in saying that their “ﬁrst job was to make Britons
understand what lay behind the sugar they ate, the tobacco they smoked,
the coffee they drank.”57 These humanitarian narratives do not simply
draw on sentiment, but also point to causal connections that implicate
addressees as sharing the responsibility for the suffering.
To take another example, consider the iconic image of the nameless
starving child – rightly critiqued for attempting to elicit sympathy without
providing any political or historical context. Even this imagery has, in
classic cases, been combined with causal stories that make it function
quite differently. For example, the founder of Save the Children,
Eglantyne Jebb, no stranger to using images of starving children, was
arrested in 1919 for distributing a pamphlet in Trafalgar Square entitled,
“A Starving Baby and Our Blockade has Caused This.”58 This was
around the time she formed the Famine Council, whose aim was to end
the British blockade that was a contributing cause to postwar famine in
Europe. In this case, it is the appeal to politics and collective action – the
call to work together to stop this – that moves attention to suffering
beyond just compassion for the suffering stranger.
These are just a few examples. More work needs to be done to excavate
this theme in the history of humanitarianism. Bruce Robbins has recently
proposed a “revisionist view” of the history of humanitarianism that
would focus less on the “appeal to empathy” and more on “a somewhat
more rareﬁed feeling: that your fate is causally linked, however obscurely,
with the fates of distant and sometimes suffering others.” Robbins main-
tains that “the idea that I am causally responsible for someone’s suffering
appeals to something in me that is stronger than fairness or empathy.”59
Even if it is stronger, it is arguably some combination of empathy and
a causal link that does the work in these narratives. The causal story would
only work if at one end of the causal chain there is someone suffering and
at the other end there is someone sympathetic to the suffering.
It is often forgotten how the historian Thomas Laqueur, in his classic
essay on humanitarian narratives, linked the two.60 Laqueur was
a forerunner in identifying core elements of eighteenth-century humani-
tarian narratives, and is often cited for stressing how they relied on details
about suffering bodies to engender compassion. But he also explicitly
builds on Haskell’s classic study in analyzing how these stories display
causal chains connecting readers to suffering bodies.61 As Laqeuer put it:
most importantly for the actual politics of reform, humanitarian narrative exposes
the lineaments of causality and of human agency: ameliorative action is repre-
sented as possible, effective, and therefore morally imperative. Someone or

something did something that causes pain, suffering, or death and that could,
under certain circumstances, have been avoided or mitigated.62
This narrative form was found in a range of genres including novels,
autopsy reports and other clinical reports, all of which created “sympa-
thetic passions” that “bridged the gulf between facts, compassion, and
action.”63 What is less often stressed about Laqueur’s account, perhaps
because it is at odds with the dominant way of construing humanitarian
narratives today, is that one of his primary examples was the new genre of
“social inquiry” exempliﬁed by parliamentary commissions and reports:
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, variously constituted committees and
commissions produced an extraordinary number of hitherto untold stories of
human suffering . . . Like novels and medical case histories, the parliamentary
inquiry is characterized by rich layers of detail and by a more or less explicit
commitment to expose the naturalistic origins of suffering.64
Laqueur focuses speciﬁcally on an 1835 parliamentary committee that
began the process of turning mining deaths into a public issue and cause
for reform. Prior to such inquiries, little was known about the dangers of
mining. But as the genre developed, what had earlier been considered
“God’s work and outside the bounds of human agency” would later be
attributed to human causes: “improper ventilation” and the “greed of
mine owners.”65 The upshot is that these narratives “locate the lives and
sufferings of others in a social context, making them intelligible to readers
of other places and periods. [They] are the product, and in some measure
the creator, of a mass public that feels implicated in the particular evils
that befall others and able to control these evils by incorporating them
into narrative and action.”66 In short, there is an entire genre of “social
inquiry” – focused on tracing social causes of suffering and implicating
a responsible public – that should not be ignored when we talk of “huma-
nitarian narratives” and the politics of suffering.67
Such causal stories have the potential to challenge addressees and make
it harder for them to wallow in pity. As Susan Sontag provocatively wrote,
“so far as we feel sympathy, we feel we are not accomplices to what caused
the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impo-
tence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent –
if not inappropriate – response.”68 She rightly indicates that our feelings of
sympathy or compassion are criticizable in those cases in which they reveal
a false judgment about either the social causes of suffering or one’s blame-
less relation to those causes.69 One can feel compassion for famine victims,
but if one knows the truth – famines have political causes; there are always
responsible parties – then indignation at an injustice is the proper response.
To go one step further: denouncing distant perpetrators can be easy

enough, but pity can ﬁnd a home here too if one still sees oneself only in the
superior position of potential helper. That position collapses, and with it
pity as primary affect, when one is implicated not only in not helping, but
also in contributing to a harm. In short, the toolbox for mobilizing concern
for distant suffering has long included tools that go beyond mobilizing
compassion, some of which have the potential to take a politics of suffering
beyond a politics of pity.

Twentieth-Century Iterations
The radical potential of both a politics of equal status and a politics of
suffering often goes unrealized. That this has turned out to be the case
when the two have intersected within contemporary iterations of human
rights and humanitarianism is no surprise. Diagnosing why, or how this
potential might be actualized, are important, though far from simple, tasks.
One obstacle has been that, until recently, academic study of humanitar-
ianism and human rights largely proceeded on parallel tracks. Even pro-
minent promoters of the view that a signiﬁcant shift in the politics of
Western societies occurred in the latter half of the twentieth century,
a shift embodied in the rise of either the international human rights move-
ment (Moyn) or a form of humanitarian government (Fassin), had little to
say about the other phenomenon in their ground-breaking works.70 This is
now changing, and provides the impetus for the current volume.
In this concluding section, I sketch some aspects of the shared politics of
suffering that animated the work of humanitarian and human rights
organizations at a key turning point in the 1960s and 1970s. This politics
of suffering embodied core features of what Laqueur identiﬁed as huma-
nitarian narratives: attention to suffering bodies – in this case victims of
famine and torture – and causal connections to suffering. To the extent
that it is still a compelling force today, this politics of suffering leave us
with considerable challenges: Can causal narratives effectively draw
attention to the larger structures that cause suffering? Could a more
robust global politics of equal status get a foothold without being under-
mined by attenuated forms of the politics of suffering?
Historians have begun exploring ways in which the human rights break-
through of the 1970s drew heavily on a politics of suffering. As Daniel
Sargent puts it:
while human rights are not commensurate with humanitarianism, their rise
depended on engagement with suffering human beings, from Biafran infants to
Soviet political prisoners. Seeking to redress distant misery in the name of natural
rights, human rights advocates plumbed deep historical wells.71

This suggests that an upsurge in concern for distant suffering bodies laid
the groundwork for the rise of the international human rights
movement.72 The explanatory move here is reminiscent of Hunt’s thesis
that an eighteenth-century humanitarian culture laid the ground for the
rise of the Rights of Man. If Hunt is right about the eighteenth century,
does the latter half of the twentieth century reveal a similar pattern? More
critically, one could situate Hunt’s project within the aftermath of the
twentieth-century breakthrough of human rights itself.73 Perhaps
a politics of suffering, which saw a dramatic boost in the late 1960s, was
indeed crucial to the breakthrough of human rights in the 1970s, and this
in turn influenced Hunt’s search for a similar catalyst for the Rights
of Man.
I leave this question to historians of both periods. But it does not seem
incidental that anti-torture politics played a key part in both Hunt’s story
about the Rights of Man and the rise of an international human rights
movement in the 1970s. In fact, a key episode in the rise of the contem-
porary anti-torture movement can be traced to 1968. This was the
same year that the response to the civil war and famine in Biafra initiated
a turning point in the history of humanitarianism. Rather than positing
a “humanitarian” catalyst for the rise of “human rights,” however, it is
more apt to note how fluid things were during that period. Various past
campaigns, movements, and organizations that mobilized around
responding to distant suffering had made certain kinds of narratives
available, even as the new dispensations – what it would eventually
mean to be a “humanitarian NGO” or part of “the human rights move-
ment” – had not yet crystallized. Here I want to juxtapose two episodes –
campaigns on behalf of torture victims in Greece and starving Biafrans –
to illuminate the politics of suffering that they share, and then stress how
Amnesty International and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) were hybrid
organizations from the start.
The historian Barbara Keys sheds light on the early work of Amnesty,
arguing that their anti-torture activism in the wake of the 1967 coup in
Greece “helped lay the groundwork for the worldwide ‘human rights
boom’ of the 1970s.”74 Amnesty was little known in the United States at
the time. Its two reports on torture in Greece were the first of their kind
and, coming out in January and April 1968, they could hardly compete for
news coverage with the Vietnam War or student protests, let alone the
avalanche of coverage soon to come out on Biafra. But Keys maintains that,
Greece generated enough attention in the United States to offer a testing ground
for new strategies of political mobilization . . . By the mid-1970s, condemnations
of torture, tested in the context of opposition to the colonels’ regime in Greece,

had become a critical catalyst for surging interest in human rights. In the public
mind, torture attained the status of the most recognized and most reviled of all
human rights abuses.75
Holocaust consciousness provided a new urgency to the long-standing
use of causal narratives to invoke a sense of responsibility: “A new sense of
moral responsibility for crimes committed by U.S. allies coincided with
rising public consciousness of the Holocaust, the central lesson of which
equated silence with complicity.”76 The campaign challenged Americans
to consider why their tax money should support governments that relied
on torture. The solution: cut off US military aid to Greece, which the US
House of Representatives would do in 1971.
Similarly, many British campaigners on behalf of Biafra, during
a period in which starving “Biafra babies” plastered the covers of news-
papers and magazines in the summer of 1968, were critical of the British
government for providing support to the Nigerian federal government.
The book Biafra Story, in which pro-Biafran journalist Frederick Forsyth
likened British support of the Nigerians in their treatment of Biafra to the
treatment of Jews in World War II, sold out in a matter of weeks in
1969.77 Historian Lasse Heerten has argued that the language of geno-
cide used to draw attention to Biafra – some worried about an “African
Auschwitz” – helped constitute the meanings and public understandings
of both events, in a way that summoned the imperative to act.
Indeed, a common theme in this period – from protesting US support
of Greek torture or British support for Nigeria’s alleged genocidal aims –
was a worry about complicity with distant suffering.78 This worry is
central to the origin story of MSF, an organization as innovative for
humanitarian practice as Amnesty International (AI) was for human
rights advocacy. The now-familiar story is that some Red Cross doctors
working in Biafra decided not to uphold the traditional International
Committee of the Red Cross mandate of remaining neutral. Among
those who decided to break with protocol and speak out was Bernard
Kouchner who, upon returning to France, helped organize public events
to raise awareness and founded a pro-Biafra committee. As Kouchner
later wrote, “by keeping silent, we doctors were accomplices in the
systematic massacre of a population.”79 He would ultimately go on to
help found MSF in 1971. Even if there is some myth-making involved in
the story, the salient point is that “witnessing” came to be an important
part of MSF’s modiﬁed version of humanitarian practice.80 In taking up
the latter as part of their mandate, MSF injected the kind of activism now
viewed as central to human rights advocacy into a decidedly humanitarian
context.

If MSF’s innovation was to combine the politics of denunciation

with the mandate of direct care for suffering individuals, Amnesty’s
innovation was to bring a kind of direct connection with suffering
individuals into an organization whose mandate was advocacy. “What
made Amnesty unique,” Keys argues, “was that it focused on indivi-
dual victims and involved its members directly in helping them.”81
This is evident in the letter-writing campaigns for prisoners of con-
science that Amnesty International pioneered in the 1960s. Consider
Stephen Hopgood’s vivid reﬂections on their power:
One early Mexican evening in August 2003, walking up the stone steps into a large
meeting hall, I along with the gathered leaders of Amnesty was confronted by an
ex-brigadier-general, Jose Gallardo, and his family, surrounded by 35,000 letters.
These were the messages he had received in prison from Amnesty members. They
spilled out across the ﬂoor . . . Letter after letter expressed the same sentiment: you
are not alone; don’t give up hope. Here was an almost tangible kind of moral force.
No wonder released prisoners talk with such wonder about receiving these
letters.82

Here we see a form of solidarity with suffering that was forged by a direct
connection to suffering individuals – a mode of humanitarian action at the
heart of human rights activism. In short, stories connecting people with
distant suffering and concerns about complicity with the causes of that
suffering – central elements of at least some strands of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century “humanitarian narratives” – were crucial during this
breakthrough period and inspired innovations in both humanitarian and
human rights practice. Focusing on suffering individuals did not turn
Amnesty into a “humanitarian organization,” nor did the practice of
witnessing transform MSF into a “human rights organization.”
Analyzing the shared politics of suffering animating their practice in
that period may tell us more about them and that historical moment
than if we insist on categorizing these organizations solely in terms of
human rights or humanitarianism.
Turning from suffering to status, we can see the shared politics of status
embodied in both the witnessing practiced by MSF and the aim of much
human rights advocacy and activism – the demand that victims not be
ignored. This as one of the core status-elevating elements of the politics of
humanity today. Speaking out by, and on behalf of, the suffering and the
oppressed can raise their status by making them into subjects of global
concern. “We matter” or “These people matter” – that is the base level of
public recognition of equal status called for in such campaigns. But how
people come to matter also matters – an eighteenth-century lesson that is
still relevant. A common critique of humanitarian discourse and practice

today is that it can reduce those who are suffering into speechless objects –
mere victims as opposed to subjects capable of speaking and acting.83
Many critics draw on the philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “bare
life” to criticize a range of humanitarian practices that only sustain the
barest form of survival rather than supporting the social and political lives
of human beings. Contemporary humanitarian practice is infused with
references to human dignity, but too often it merely preserves “existence
while deferring the very dignity . . . it seeks.”84 Equal status can lack
a foothold in such contexts, in part because the aim of alleviating suffering
always embodies some degree of hierarchy: someone is suffering and
someone else is in a position to help. In practice the hierarchy is not
always pernicious, and can be mitigated, but it is hard to eliminate it
entirely.85
Human rights might be thought to be inherently immune to this dan-
ger, for the status-elevating features of human rights practice work against
this asymmetry in self-other relations and pose a challenge to hierarchical
relations. While humanitarian work always requires a needy beneficiary,
human rights work can provide tools to those protesting their own treat-
ment. Those whose status is at stake may become an object of concern for
others, but they can also (ideally always) actively take part as subjects in
struggles to enhance their own status. That is how human rights practice
at its best should function. But reality often falls short. Echoing Arendt’s
worry that a narrow focus on suffering undermines the political force of
the Rights of Man, critics today worry about the anti-political effect
a humanitarian lens has on the contemporary politics of human rights.86
The core worry can be described in terms of suffering and status. When
the focus is on suffering, particularly suffering bodies, subjects of human
rights violations tend to be viewed, and sometimes treated, merely as
passive victims or objects rather than as active subjects of rights.87
Keeping such pathologies in view is essential. Equally important is that
ideals not be reduced to practical pathologies.88 Overcoming them in
practice is no simple task, but there are ways forward. For instance,
sympathetic critics of humanitarian practice like political theorist Jennifer
Rubenstein have mapped out ways in which humanitarian international
nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) can ensure that their commit-
ments to saving lives and alleviating suffering do not undermine norms of
justice and the equal dignity of beneficiaries.89 Importantly, Rubenstein
maintains that such INGOs must take greater responsibility for both the
contributions they make to the global system of which they are a part and
the influence they have on the public’s understanding of the nature and
causes of crises, poverty, and suffering more generally. The general lesson
here is perhaps that the more robust causal stories – focusing on systems

and structures – that have played a smaller part in the history of humani-
tarianism need a larger role in the politics of humanity today. As Sontag
puts it, regarding ubiquitous images of suffering:
To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous
politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as
their suffering, and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to
their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task
for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.90
Such reflection is crucial, and is the kind that takes humanitarian and
human rights practice beyond drawing attention to distant suffering,
beyond inspiring compassion for victims or indignation at perpetrators,
to implicate all of us in the larger structures for which we share respon-
sibility – structures that cause suffering and oppression and from which
many of us benefit.91 Much of the unrealized radical potential of both
a politics of equal status and a politics of suffering may lie here.
Of course much more needs to be said in telling the story of how human
rights and humanitarianism relate. My aim has been to show how that
story must include the rise of and relation between two explosive ideals
that coalesced in eighteenth-century Western societies, have had a deep
and lasting impact on modern life, and whose radical potential has yet to
be realized. Whatever the future holds for human rights and humanitar-
ianism, it is hard to imagine a world in which the desire to eliminate
needless human suffering dies or struggles against status hierarchies
disappear.

Charles R. Beitz

My starting point is the conjunction of two observations. First, the

portion of public international law that takes the individual human
person as its subject conventionally divides into two branches: interna-
tional humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law
(IHRL), each with its own founding documents, scope of application,
and institutional structure. Canonically the domain of IHL is the con-
duct of armed conflict whereas the domain of IHRL is (or, anyway, was
initially imagined to be) governments’ treatment of their people in
peacetime. Second, within what we might call the world of transna-
tional social action, we find what seems at least superficially to be the
same distinction, between humanitarian action and action to protect
human rights, each with its own organizational networks and culture.
Humanitarian action tends to be regarded as a more-or-less immediate
and politically neutral response to suffering whereas human rights
action typically presents itself as a longer-term and inevitably political
response to various kinds of harms brought about by the actions or
omissions of governments and, occasionally, of other agents. The dis-
tinction has come under stress in both domains for some practical
reasons we shall come to.
For the purposes of this chapter, I shall consider humanitarianism and
human rights as the subjects of distinct normative practices expressed in
both international law and transnational social action. My question is
whether the distinction as we find it in practice can accurately be seen as
grounded on a moral distinction – the familiar and deeply rooted one
between beneficence and justice. The question arises because something
like the latter distinction seems to be embedded in the norms of these
practices and in much of the public discourse surrounding them. This
should not be surprising. Beneficence and justice are the two principal
other-regarding virtues, or classes of duty, found in the history of ethics in
the West and in the moral senses of many people today. Some philoso-
phers consider the distinction between them to run deep. It is natural – for
a political theorist, at any rate – to wonder whether the mapping of these

two practices onto two distinct social virtues might illuminate in some
way the corresponding divisions in law and practice.
I begin, by way of introduction, by saying more about the idea of
a practice in general and about the practices of humanitarianism and
human rights as I understand them. In that context I say briefly why
one might be tempted to interpret these practices as manifestations of the
distinction between beneficence and justice, or doing good and doing
right (or, more exactly, relieving harms and remedying injustices). As
I then observe, there has been some blurring of the lines between these
practices in the last few decades even though there has been a tendency
within each practice to maintain its normative self-understanding. In the
third section, I turn to the distinction between beneficence and justice
considered as distinct moral virtues and try to describe briefly how phi-
losophers who have thought the distinction basic to our moral sense have
understood it. This is important because one line of philosophical
thought about the distinction has penetrated deeply into what we might
call common-sense morality. I also note some respects in which the
philosophical distinction might seem to be problematic. With this as
background we can ask how well the philosophical distinction fits the
distinction as we observe it in law and practice. To anticipate, the answer
is: not well. In the final section I ask what we might learn from this about
the nature of the difference between humanitarianism and human rights,
understood as social practices, and about the idea of social practice itself.

Two Sets of Norms, Two Social Practices

The aims and motivation of contemporary humanitarian practice are
conventionally presented as deriving from the origins of IHL in the ﬁrst
Geneva Convention of 1864 and the founding of the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The conventional presentation is
not wrong but it is incomplete. It neglects to take into account the growth
of interest in ideas of sympathy, humanity, and beneﬁcence in the philo-
sophy and literature of the previous hundred years. It also fails to recog-
nize various elements of what we might classify as humanitarian action in
the earlier nineteenth century – for example, in the anti-slavery move-
ment’s objections to slavery as cruel and inhumane.1 Nevertheless, the
conventional story is correct that the circumstances of the origins of IHL
were critical for the subsequent development of the culture and practice
of humanitarianism. At the center of the story is the response to the
terrible suffering of soldiers at the Battle of Solferino, famously described
by Henry Dunant in A Memory of Solferino.2 Dunant was instrumental in
both the founding of the predecessor organization of the ICRC in 1863

and the movement for an international agreement relating to the relief of

wounded soldiers that produced the first Geneva Convention.3 At the
outset IHL consisted of a set of rules for the protection of sick and
wounded soldiers on the battlefield. It was revised and extended in the
Geneva Conventions of 1906 and 1929 and comprehensively reframed in
the Geneva Conventions of 1949 in light of the experience of World War
II. Today IHL extends protection mainly to four categories of persons
affected by armed conflict: sick and wounded soldiers in the field,
wounded sailors at sea, prisoners of war, and noncombatants in war
zones. The reformulation of these protections in the 1949 conventions
shifts the characterization of the protections from duties of states to rights
of individuals.4
Today, the idea of “humanitarianism” in international life has
a broader range of reference than its embodiment in international law
might suggest. It applies to at least two other realms of action in addition
to IHL. One is the expanding sphere of international and transnational
action in response to various kinds of emergencies, ranging from those
brought about by armed conflict to those brought about by natural and
human-induced disasters – “emergency humanitarianism,” as Michael
Barnett calls it.5 The other is action in response to what are perceived as
the causes of suffering and harm. Barnett calls this “alchemical” huma-
nitarianism (“structural” might be more neutral). He gives development,
peace building, and community empowerment as examples.6 The dis-
tinction between these referents is blurred by several facts; for example,
some of the agents involved in monitoring and responding to violations of
international humanitarian law are also involved in peacetime humani-
tarian action (e.g., Red Cross/Red Crescent); some humanitarian emer-
gencies (e.g., refugees and migrants) are caused by armed conflict even if
some of their victims can only be considered “victims of armed conflict”
by a stretch; the application of international humanitarian law to non-
international armed conflict is unsettled; and emergency relief in some
circumstances cannot be separated from structural assistance.
Notwithstanding the blurred lines, each of the three branches of huma-
nitarian law and practice very clearly has distinct core concerns. This is
especially pronounced for what I have labeled structural humanitarian-
ism, which is not plausibly seen historically as an outgrowth of IHL or of
the culture surrounding it. This diversity within humanitarian practice is
something we shall return to. For the moment, the point I want to
emphasize is that many people, including many practitioners, regard all
three branches as expressions of a single, common normative posture,
typically seen as a desire to reduce avoidable suffering to the human
person and to remedy its effects.7

The history of human rights is more complicated.8 Arguably something

like human rights can be found in the history of international thought as
early as Grotius, if not earlier. In more modern times the idea of interna-
tional protection of human rights emerged in the negotiations for the
Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. A human rights movement
developed between the wars. Franklin Roosevelt included protection of
“four freedoms” in his declaration of war aims early in World War II. All
of this framed the effort to draft the 1948 Universal Declaration and the
two international covenants – on Civil and Political Rights and on
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, finally completed in 1966 but
begun in the late 1940s. Several human rights conventions came after –
for example, against discrimination, on the human rights of women and of
children, and others. For each treaty there is an international “treaty
body” that monitors compliance. The human rights treaties specify
a long list of protections of important individual interests ranging from
core interests in life and bodily integrity to interests in civil rights and
liberties, health and wellbeing, and much else.
For our purposes, three points should be underscored. First, interna-
tional human rights law purports to establish in-principle enforceable
standards suitable to serve as bases of claims by individuals against their
governments (and, increasingly, other agents). Second, the protected
interests are diverse and the protections, taken seriously, are quite
demanding. Third, in its structure international human rights law antici-
pates that failures of commission or omission by a government will
become matters of international concern, a fact reflected most clearly in
the establishment of “treaty bodies” to monitor compliance.
At the beginning I characterized IHRL as the law of peacetime, but this
of course is only partly accurate. The threats that human rights are
supposed to protect against can also occur in both international and
noninternational war. This fact raises the question of how the two bodies
of law are related to each other in cases of armed conflict. The question is
controversial for reasons that are tangential to our concerns here.9 But the
issue is worth noting because, as we shall see, it has been one source of
a blurring of the distinction.
As in the case of humanitarianism, a social practice has developed from
the central norms of IHRL extending into the realm of political and social
action. Particularly since the Helsinki Accords (1975), we have seen the
elaboration of a transnational politics of human rights in which a variety of
agents (e.g., states, international organizations, nongovernmental orga-
nizations, business firms) play differing roles either directly or indirectly
in bringing pressure on governments for remediation of human rights
failures. The significance of the legal background varies among these

efforts: in some cases, IHRL serves mainly as a kind of political-moral

authority for essentially political claims, whereas in others, political action
aims to bring legal pressure on governments to adhere to their treaty
commitments. Moreover, the legal/political distinction is permeable; for
example, NGOs regularly play a supporting role in the work of the treaty
bodies.10
Both of these practices are normative: they consist of sets of public
norms that apply to a class of agents, a more-or-less widespread belief that
these norms ought to be complied with, and some formal and informal
processes for their propagation and enforcement.11 I do not have a well-
worked-out theory of normative practices but it seems clear that the main
idea is of a system of public norms that people accept, and know that
others accept, as providing at least pro tanto reasons for action. It also
seems clear that within public normative practices, agents tend to develop
shared understandings of the purposes of the norms as well as beliefs
about how these purposes are best accomplished, and these develop into
distinctive cultures. In comprehending the practices of humanitarianism
and human rights, we should aim not only for a grasp of their contents,
considered as sets of norms, but also for an understanding of the beliefs
about the basis and significance of these norms typically shared by their
participants.
At this fairly abstract level, the main difference between the two prac-
tices’ normative cultures may seem obvious from what I have said.
Humanitarian action is self-consciously concerned with protecting
against or relieving immediate suffering or responding to immediate
need, whereas human rights practice aims to bring it about that states
(and sometimes other agents) satisfy the standards that compose inter-
national human rights doctrine. Corresponding to this contrast, the dis-
course of humanitarianism is typically a discourse of beneficence,
humanity, or charity. As Barnett puts it, humanitarianism is fundamen-
tally an “international ethic of care” that expresses itself in an expansion
of benevolence (“a readiness to come to the assistance of those in need”)
beyond borders: it might thus be said that “humanitarianism implies
going beyond the call of duty.” On the other hand, the requirements of
human rights are not “beyond the call of duty”; they are more like duties.
Barnett writes that in contrast to humanitarianism, human rights are not
occasions for benevolence but rely instead “on a discourse of rights.”12 In
philosophy we associate rights with justice, and it is not uncommon
(although it might be an overstatement) to conceive of human rights as
norms of global justice. One might almost say that the interpretive map-
ping of IHL and IHRL onto traditional ideas of beneficence and justice is
baked into the social practices surrounding these bodies of law. I will not

devote more time to documenting this claim, but let me mention one
influential and familiar source. He is Jean Pictet, probably the most
important contributor to the development of IHL in the postwar period
and the most prominent theorist of the ICRC’s mission. In a passage
frequently quoted in the literature of humanitarianism, Pictet wrote that
“modern humanitarianism” is a “form of charity and justice” but that in
practice it is difficult to pursue both. “One cannot be at one and the same
time the champion of justice and of charity. One must choose, and the
ICRC has long since chosen to be a defender of charity.”13
I have described the association of the distinction between humanitar-
ianism and human rights with that between beneficence and justice as an
“interpretive mapping.” To say this is to suggest that the best or most
fitting account of the moral basis of the protections contained in each
normative practice, as understood within the practice, makes essential
reference to the values of beneficence in the case of humanitarianism and
justice in the case of human rights. Some practice theorists might regard
such an account as part of the “meaning” of a practice.14 The phrase “best
or most fitting account” is obviously a gesture at a theory of interpretation
of normative practices of the general kind advanced by Ronald Dworkin,
though it need not be Dworkin’s theory.15 The role of such a theory
would be to set out a method for understanding or making sense of
a normative practice in terms of one or a few fundamental values or ideals
that the practice seeks to respect or advance. A theoretical account of
interpretation is well beyond my present scope so I simply assume that we
have a pre-theoretical notion that normative practices can be understood
as collective efforts to respect or advance certain values. When I refer to
moral values as “underlying” a practice, I mean to say that they have this
kind of an interpretive relation to it.

Changing Contexts of Law and Social Action

Developments of the last several decades have blurred the distinction
between these practices. I anticipate these here in order to motivate
what I shall say later, beginning with the realm of international law,
where the blurring is more evident. Here there are two important devel-
opments: the changing nature of armed conﬂict, which clouds the dis-
tinction between war and peace presupposed by existing law; and the
jurisprudence of the various courts and agencies charged with applying
the law, which have increasingly drawn on both bodies of law to settle
disputes.
First, the changing nature of war. The original distinction between IHL
and IHRL supposes that we can distinguish between war and peace. The

paradigm of war, as the main body of IHL understands it, is armed

conflict between territorial states that have regular military forces under
a command apparatus. The paradigm of peace is the absence of war in
that understanding. This distinction may have been workable when the
founding documents were written after World War II, but today it is
clearly problematic. Most of the organized political violence in the last
several decades falls outside the category of armed conflict between
states.16 Some of it consists of insurgencies and civil wars in which at
least one party is a non-state actor and the contest is for control of part or
all of a state’s territory. This is what IHL refers to as “armed conflict not
of an international character.” Common Article 3 of the four Geneva
Conventions, explicated by a 1977 additional protocol, applies to this
category of war. Of course, although these standards are supposed to
apply to all parties to a conflict, non-state actors have not subscribed to
the conventions, so the legal basis of their obligation to comply is
controversial.17
Some cases of armed conflict, however, are not obviously either inter-
national war or “conflict not of an international character.” The following
are some examples: civil war with foreign participation other than the
sending of troops; terrorist violence where the issue is not control of
territory at all; military occupation of a foreign territory for an indefinite
period; or tactics like targeted killing by drones outside of areas where
there are active hostilities on the ground.18 We might add to these
examples the use of violence by states in response to armed, transnational
criminal activity like drug cartels. Since all of these cases fall outside the
law’s understanding of international war and conflicts “not of an inter-
national character,” it is arguable whether IHL applies at all. This raises
the possibility (exploited during the George W. Bush administration in
the United States) that only a more permissive law of “self-defense” might
govern some types of armed conflict.19
This is a problem within the law for the obvious reason that we cannot
apply law without knowing which body of law is applicable. For our
purposes, however, the more important point is that the kinds of violent
conflict that fall outside the models of war between states and conflicts
“not of an international character” represent different forms of interac-
tion between different kinds of agents in different kinds of surroundings
than conflicts within the models. These differences can be relevant to
judgments about the moral status and rights of those affected by
a conflict. For example, the moral status of bystanders in conflicts outside
the two models might be different than that of noncombatants within the
territory of a belligerent in conventional war. This is not an original point:
it generalizes a problem that arises in connection with drones and targeted

killing. This is the question whether to construe the typical circumstances

of targeted killing according to a “paradigm of war” or a “paradigm of law
enforcement.”20 The latter is, in effect, a paradigm of human rights. And,
indeed, some commentators and practitioners believe that in cases like
this the appropriate norms are those of IHRL instead of IHL. Since IHRL
is generally understood to be more demanding, this matters.21
The second point concerns the jurisprudence of IHL and IHRL – that
is, the “case law” of international and regional courts and tribunals,
determinations of HR treaty bodies, declarations of UN agencies, and
so on. On this point, only one brief comment. Courts and other autho-
rities responsible for resolving legal claims about the use of force, pre-
sumably the domain of IHL, have increasingly been willing to import
concepts from IHRL – a development that is incontestable.22 The 1977
Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions acknowledge that legal
protections of fundamental human rights apply in armed conflict
(although the text is not as helpful as it might be about which rights
apply in conflict situations, and how).23 More recently both the Human
Rights Commission and the International Court of Justice have accepted
the point. The picture that emerges from ICJ jurisprudence is that IHRL
is a body of fundamental norms that apply in both war and peace and IHL
is an interpretation of these norms for (at least some) cases of armed
conflict. This picture might be problematic for some doctrinal reasons
but there is no question as a matter of fact that the distinction between
these bodies of law is more eroded in legal practice than in black-letter
treaty law. This makes my central question inevitable: if these two bodies
of law are increasingly entangled in practice, at least partly because we
face practical challenges that the basic architecture of the law of armed
conflict did not anticipate very clearly, is there any underlying reason of
moral and political theory for continuing to regard the distinction
between them as having ethical significance?
A similar question arises in the realm of political and social action.
Social action being what it is, a distinction between humanitarianism and
human rights action could never have been drawn as crisply as in inter-
national law. Still, some markers of distinction are easily recognizable.
Consider, for example, the contrasting cases of the postures of the ICRC
and Amnesty International at least since the early 2000s with respect to
political conflict.24 The ICRC has historically maintained that humani-
tarian action should be politically neutral in order to minimize the extent
to which governments might be tempted to deny humanitarian actors
access to those in need of their services.25 Amnesty, by contrast, has
devoted considerable ingenuity to finding ways to hold governments
accountable for failures to protect or respect various human rights.

Leebaw observes that Amnesty, like other human rights organizations,

has sought to “transform the language of human rights into a set of
impartial legal norms” yet, at the same time, has not hesitated to engage
in public criticism of governments’ internal conduct when it judges the
norms to be violated.26
Notwithstanding the contrast at the level of what we might call proce-
dural values, for various reasons it is difficult to maintain that these
organizations stand for clearly distinct ethical-political postures. For one
thing, in practice, each organization has borrowed strategic ideas from the
other when necessary to attain political or social goals even while profes-
sing distinct identities. There is also a deeper point best illustrated by
Amnesty. It was founded to draw attention to a particularly odious viola-
tion of human rights – the detention of persons on grounds of political
belief and conscience. It has broadened its remit considerably since then
but still identifies as a human rights organization. Yet from the outset
volunteer participation in its activities relied for motivation on the idea of
the suffering prisoner evoked by the image of a candle bound in barbed
wire, a logo that has been maintained to the present.
The observation generalizes. Transitional justice institutions, for
example, which aim, broadly speaking, to restore respect for human
rights, occasionally turn to humanitarian tropes (e.g., relieving suffering)
and procedural norms (neutrality) to win support for their missions.27
Similarly, in the evolution of humanitarian action, in particular, there has
been an increasing resort to ideas characteristic of the human rights
movement to articulate the aims of humanitarianism and to shift empha-
sis away from the historical association of humanitarianism with senti-
ments of pity or sympathy (though it must be said that here, too, the range
of human rights in question is narrow considered in relation to the
normative breadth of human rights practice).28 A striking illustration
can be found in the “Humanitarian Charter” of the Sphere Project,
which presents the “humanitarian imperative” to “prevent or alleviate
human suffering” from disaster or conflict as based on the principle that
“all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”29 As
with the convergence of IHL and IHRL, what might appear to be a partial
convergence in the normative discourses of humanitarian and human
rights practices raises the question whether there is any stable moral
basis for the distinction.

Justice and Beneﬁcence

The received view maps the difference in law and practice onto the
traditional philosophical distinction between the virtues, or duties, of

beneﬁcence or humanity and of justice or right. Is this mapping any help

in understanding these practices?
Those who think so tend not to say very much about their understand-
ing of the moral contents of these virtues or about the nature of the
requirements they impose on action. So I would like to comment briefly
about justice and beneficence in the history of moral philosophy and its
meaning in common-sense morality today.
The distinction between justice and beneficence is fundamental in
modern moral and political thought but it has ancient roots. Its best-
known classical expression occurs in Cicero’s On Duties (De Officiis),
a work that exercised enormous influence on the thought of moral and
political philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
including the early modern authors of classical international law – much
greater influence than contemporary readers of those philosophers often
realize. Early in On Duties, Cicero gives a catalog of four dimensions of
honorable conduct. They track the four cardinal virtues of Greek moral
thought, although Cicero does not name them as the Greeks did. The
most straightforwardly social of these is the virtue by which “the common
life [is] held together.” He only once refers to this virtue as “justice,” but it
occupies the place in the catalog that is inhabited by justice among the
cardinal virtues. Cicero goes on immediately to say that social virtue has
two parts. The first is justice in a specific sense, whose content I shall
come to shortly; the second is “the beneficence connected with it, which
may be called either kindness or liberality.”30
Cicero’s distinction was the source of a distinction made by Grotius
between “perfect” and “imperfect” right that was, in turn, restated by
Pufendorf as a distinction between “perfect” and “imperfect” duties.
Most of the main contributors to moral and political philosophy from
Locke to Hume, Adam Smith and Kant read both writers and considered
the distinction to be a basic feature of common-sense morality that
needed to be explained.31
Here is a crude, broad-brush summary of the distinction, patching over
disagreements in the tradition, and with apologies for rehearsing ideas
that may be familiar.32 A central part of common morality consists of
norms defining what we owe to each other. Suppose we formulate what
we owe to others as duties. (With some adjustments we might also speak
of virtues, dispositions, or kinds of reasons for action.) The traditional
view is that when we take inventory of our duties to others, we see that
they fall into two categories. These are Cicero’s duties (officia) of justice
and of beneficence and Pufendorf’s perfect and imperfect duties.
Generally speaking, according to the Ciceronian view, duties of the first
kind include not threatening bodily harm to others, respecting their

property, keeping faith with promises and contracts, and, for some wri-
ters, defending others against violations of these duties by third parties.
(This is conspicuously narrow, compared to some contemporary ideas of
justice, a fact we shall return to.) Duties of the second kind include
helping to satisfy the needs of people unable do so themselves, doing
good for those close to us, reciprocating when others have helped us, and
acting as we can to protect those who are vulnerable to various kinds of
harm. Most writers have held that the strength of our duties of benefi-
cence is related to the closeness of our relationships to potential benefi-
ciaries. Most have also held that we have duties of beneficence to
strangers (i.e., those with whom we have no preexisting relationship),
but for the most part they did not believe these duties could impose
significant costs on us, the duty-bearers. (Of course, not everybody
agrees.33) The exception to this generalization is that, on some views,
we have more demanding duties to help those in deep distress or urgent
need; as Sidgwick says, they “have a claim on us for special kindness.”34
Although I will have to leave aside the interpretation of the distinction in
Christian moral thought, what I have just said about beneficence in
common-sense morality substantially applies also to the theological virtue
of charity (caritas) as it was understood, for example, by Aquinas.35
These categories of duties appear to differ in characteristic ways. Some
duties (say, the duty not to harm the innocent) seem to have a kind of
precision that other duties lack (say, the duty to help those in need). My
duty not to harm the innocent applies to every innocent person on every
occasion when I am in a position to harm them36 – it is “perfect” in the
sense that I can know reasonably clearly what it requires of me and to
whom it is owed. My duty to help those in need is not comparably precise
because I have some discretion in deciding when and how to carry it out –
it is “imperfect” in the sense that I am not obligated to help everyone who
is in need on every occasion when I could do so. I have latitude to make
choices about whom to help, when, and by how much. That discretion is
contextual – there may be cases, like the philosopher’s case of the child
drowning in a pond, in which there is no question what beneficence
requires of me – but on the whole duties of beneficence seem to be
more open-textured than duties of justice.
The two kinds of duties also seem to operate differently in moral life.
Duties of justice (or of “right”) can be the basis of demands for perfor-
mance by those to whom they are owed, whereas duties of beneficence
generally cannot be (in most cases, because each of us gets to decide who
should be the beneficiaries of our beneficence). This means that a certain
kind of response to failures of duty is appropriate in the first case that is
not appropriate in the second: I would be justified in resenting someone’s

treating me unjustly or violating my rights, whereas except in extraordin-

ary circumstances I would not be if someone failed to help when I needed
it. In that case disappointment (or, perhaps, hurt, if I have some relation-
ship to the other) would be more appropriate. To put the general point
another way, one has a status as the object of a duty of justice that one
generally does not have as a potential object of someone else’s benefi-
cence. Joel Feinberg described this as having “the recognizable capacity
to assert claims,” that is, as being entitled to insist on a certain kind of
treatment by others.37 Being a potential object of beneficence confers
a different status, roughly that of an agent whose needs, just because they
are the needs of a human person, ought to be taken into account by others
whose actions could possibly benefit that person. Some describe this as
the status of a “patient,” though it seems to me that the medical allusion
risks being distorting. In any case, to have this status is not necessarily
a bad thing: it is possible to be the object of someone else’s beneficence
without being either subordinated or shamed. But it is not the same as the
status of an agent with “the recognizable capacity to assert claims.”
In this section I have been trying to describe a common understanding
of the ethical distinction. In calling this understanding “common,” I do
not mean to suggest that the distinction itself is either unproblematic or
uncontroversial.38 This is not the place for an extended critique, but it is
worth noting two complications in the common view that will be perti-
nent below. First, as I observed earlier, the traditional idea of the scope of
justice is narrow considered in comparison with conceptions of social
justice that have developed since the end of the eighteenth century. This
enlargement of scope puts pressure on the notion that all duties of justice
are perfect.39 Suppose, for example, that we believe that the reduction of
inequalities of social status is a requirement of social justice and that we
have (perhaps “natural”) duties to act where possible to reduce injustices
of this kind.40 These duties appear more like imperfect than perfect duties
because they afford some discretion in deciding how and when to act. So
it may seem that not all duties of justice are perfect. What has happened in
this case is that a historical change in the range of a moral concept has
destabilized the traditional understanding of some of its attributes, yet
that understanding has persisted, as it were, by a kind of inertia. But the
problems in the common view are not limited to those arising from
conceptual change. Consider, for example, the duties of parents to their
children, which have tended to be classified as duties of beneficence.
These duties have a peculiar, intermediate form: although in some cir-
cumstances parents have discretion about how to carry them out, there is
no question to whom the duties are owed and in some circumstances no
question what they require. Something similar might be said about duties

of gratitude, also traditionally considered to be duties of beneﬁcence. So

duties of beneﬁcence do not seem to be uniformly imperfect. As we shall
see, parallels to these complications in the traditional distinction arise
when we return to the mapping of the distinction onto that between
humanitarian and human rights practices.

Humanitarianism/Beneﬁcence, Human Rights/Justice?

We are working with a rough notion of a normative social practice as
a system of public norms that people accept, and know that others accept,
as providing pro tanto reasons for action. And we assume that within
a public normative practice, agents tend to develop shared understand-
ings of the purposes of the practice as well as beliefs about how these
purposes are best accomplished, and that these develop into distinctive
cultures. There are at least two normative questions that we might ask
about such a practice: first, about whether and why the practice is a good
thing to have – for short, about its value; second, about the kinds of
reasons people might have to participate in the practice by filling the
roles it defines and making themselves subject to its norms – for short,
about the reasons that motivate participation. These are distinct ques-
tions even though it is possible, at least from some perspectives, that the
answers will overlap.
The interpretive mapping of the distinction between the practices of
humanitarianism and human rights onto the distinction between the
virtues of beneficence and justice might suggest answers to both ques-
tions. Perhaps the value of humanitarian practice is that it serves the
desirable social aim of reducing avoidable human suffering and relieving
suffering that is not avoidable (or anyway was not avoided). The disposi-
tion to contribute to avoiding and relieving suffering is paradigmatic of
beneficence as I have described it. At the limit, it is a disposition to
respond to the needs of another agent that arises from recognizing that
agent as relevantly similar to oneself – as we might say (though it is
imprecise), from a recognition of common humanity. The exercise of
this disposition might also explain how people can be motivated to
participate in the practice. Similarly, we might think that the value of
human rights practice is that it reduces the incidence of harms perpe-
trated by governments and other collective agents to the interests pro-
tected by human rights, both by bringing pressure on governments and by
contributing to processes of institutional change. Resentment of injus-
tices done, both to self and to others, might also be the most likely source
of the motivation to participate in human rights practice. This is clearly
painting with a broad brush, but something like it seems to me to be how

the interpretive mapping I have described might seem to answer the

questions of value and motivation. If accurate, this picture illustrates
how the practices we observe in the social world might be connected to
the distinct underlying virtues of beneficence and justice.
Is this picture accurate? Let me make three observations. The most general
point is that when we look at the actual conduct of these practices (as
opposed to the discourse of participants), the association of one with
beneficence and of the other with justice is implausible on its face – not
wrong, but at minimum excessively simple and in some respects
a misrepresentation. It is true, as a historical matter, that IHL originated
in something like beneficent or humanitarian concern about other peo-
ple’s suffering. That is what the response to Solferino was about and not
a bad interpretation of the moral basis of the first Geneva Convention,
which was concerned with treatment of vulnerable wounded and sick
soldiers on the battlefield. However, as I noted earlier, IHL has changed
significantly since the 1860s. It now covers several “protected classes.”
These include noncombatants. It also applies at least to some armed
conflicts “not of an international character” in which it is plausible to
think that many of those affected are entirely innocent of any involvement
in the conflict. To the extent that IHL has legalized the traditional jus in
bello principles of discrimination and proportionality, it is difficult to see it
as devoted only to relieving or preventing suffering. The principle of
discrimination, for example, says that it is not permissible to target non-
combatants intentionally. In my view, the most natural interpretation of
the moral basis of this principle is that the category of noncombatants
includes large numbers of people who are innocent of contributing to the
war effort and who have what, in human rights language, would be called
a “right to life” – that is to say, a right not to be deliberately threatened
with death without cause. According to the traditional view, this is
a matter of justice, not beneficence.
Parenthetically, although we are not concerned here directly with the
law of the UN Charter, it is worth observing that although the Charter
prohibits intervention by states in the internal affairs of other states, many
people believe that “humanitarian” intervention may be legitimate under
some circumstances even if not strictly legal. In the aftermath of the
Kosovo intervention (1999) this idea was formulated as the “responsi-
bility to protect” (“RtoP”).41 A constrained form of the doctrine was
adopted by the General Assembly in 2005 and some people now regard
it as part of, or in process of becoming, customary international law. I do
not wish to defend that position here, only to observe that its advocates
(plausibly) defend it as a human rights norm. But this means that, strictly
speaking, on this view it would be a misnomer to describe “humanitarian

intervention” as humanitarian. It is intervention to protect human rights,

and thus an effort to redress injustice.42 (It is contested, however, whether
intervention “to protect” is obligatory on every occasion on which it
would be justified – that is, is a perfect duty. The majority view seems to
be that it is not.)
If we turn to areas of humanitarian practice beyond IHL, we find
a parallel incongruity. Certainly some elements of the practice can be
seen as expressions of beneficence with respect to both their value and
their motivations – relief of natural disaster, for example. However, as
I observed earlier, humanitarian practice has grown increasingly diverse
and today some elements are difficult to distinguish in their social and
political goals (if not always in the motivations of practitioners) from
action to protect human rights. This is most obviously true of what
I called “structural” (and Barnett calls “alchemical”) humanitarianism
but the same might be said, for example, of action to provide health care
in war zones. Of course, one might simply rule that in this respect the
practice misunderstands itself, as perhaps it does. But we are interested
here in the self-understandings of complicated social enterprises, so elim-
inating apparent incongruity by interpretive fiat would not be especially
constructive.
A second point concerns human rights doctrine in its primary applica-
tion to domestic-level societies at peace. The main function of interna-
tional human rights practice is to make certain aspects of a government’s
treatment of persons under its jurisdiction matters of international con-
cern. It represents an international and, increasingly, a transnational
commitment to monitor, promote, and sometimes to enforce human
rights standards within states. So one of the questions we must answer
about human rights is why these rights ought to be treated as matters of
international concern. I believe that how we answer this question depends
on the nature of the right in question.43 Some human rights – for example,
the central “civil and political rights” like the right to life, right to due
process, and rights to freedom of religion and association – fit naturally
within a “justice” framework. They protect fundamental interests in what
we might call the integrity of the person and the importance of that value
across a wide range of lives helps to explain why the rights should qualify
as matters of international concern. But what about social and economic
rights – for example, the right to an “adequate standard of living,” to
health care, and to rest and leisure? Why should these be matters of
international concern? As a matter of political theory, this is
a complicated question. It can be argued that they are matters of social
justice. But if we are to work with the traditional distinction, it seems to
me more natural to regard them as high priority considerations of

beneﬁcence, addressed to improving wellbeing or meeting needs rather

than protecting the integrity of the person.44 This suggests that we need
considerations related to both justice and beneficence to explain the
moral importance of the wide range of protections that count as human
rights within the practice, and thus the value of the practice taken as
a whole.
Finally, a third observation. As I mentioned, traditionally justice and
beneficence are associated respectively with perfect and imperfect duties.
However, if we try to apply this distinction to human rights and humani-
tarianism, then for reasons we have already seen we quickly run into
trouble. Beginning with human rights: as I have said, international
human rights doctrine is normatively diverse. There are some rights
about which it is plausible to think that the corresponding duties are
perfect – for example, the right against torture. But there are many
cases in which agents like governments, international organizations and
non-state actors face choices bearing on human rights across large popu-
lations. Given the scarcity of resources, decisions must be made about
who should act and for what ends. This is clearly the case for some
economic and social rights, which may not be immediately satisfiable
for everyone and may require long-term policy interventions. It would
be hard to argue that there are perfect duties to satisfy these rights for each
person today. The duties they imply look more imperfect than perfect;
they are duties to adopt a certain end – namely, the good of others – rather
than to perform a specific action. Although it is hardly unlimited, there is
some latitude to decide the level of resources to devote to this end and
how best to pursue it.
The reverse point applies to parts of IHL. For example, the duty not to
deliberately target civilians is not “imperfect.” It is clear from the Fourth
Geneva Convention and its protocols that every protected civilian has
a right not to be intentionally targeted. Conceivably that right might be
overridden in some cases of military necessity, but it is still a right.
Attackers do not have discretion about when to respect it and when not.
So not only does this feature of what is called “humanitarian” law repre-
sent a concern for justice rather than beneficence, but it also expresses
itself in a perfect rather than an imperfect duty. This is clearly at odds with
the mapping of IHL onto the virtue of beneficence.
Where does this leave us? These points show that the distinctions
between humanitarianism and human rights, on the one hand, and ben-
eficence and justice, on the other, are orthogonal to each other. They are
not parallel. To interpret the moral distinction as underlying the practical
distinction invites misunderstanding the differences in practice. So, for
example, members of protected classes under IHL have perfect rights and

agents have perfect duties to respect them. Respecting these rights is not
“beyond the call.” Similarly, within some humanitarian aid operations,
such as those occurring after armed conflict, it may be more accurate to
regard the displaced as having claims in justice for relief than as suffering
victims with claims to beneficence.
More generally, the evolving contents of each body of practice are not
in any obvious way expressions of fundamentally distinct moral values
and certainly not of an exclusive concern to relieve suffering on the one
hand and to redress injustice or violations of basic rights on the other.
Both practices aim to protect urgent individual human interests against
predictable kinds of neglect or abuse. They differ in the contexts to which
they centrally apply – their “target circumstances,” as we might put it. In
both cases these protections can take varying forms – sometimes as rights
conceived as bases of claims, sometimes as rights conceived as priority
goals of political action, sometimes as claims to help when resources and
circumstances make it possible. Differences in the content and range of
the protections must be explained by differences in the circumstances in
which the urgent interests are subject to threat and in the forms of
protection that are feasible. To look at the relationship of IHL and
IHRL in this way is to think of them as continuous and sharing
a common basis that takes predictable threats to urgent human interests
as sources of reasons to act in ways that would protect against the threats.
Similarly, to understand the humanitarian norm of political neutrality in
this broader context is to see it as instrumentally necessary in circum-
stances of conflict for achieving ends that might also be formulated in
terms of human rights.45
What I have just presented presupposes a view about the justification of
human rights that I have defended elsewhere but do not have space to
reiterate here.46 So I will just suggest as a hypothesis that if we could begin
to think this way, we might be able see our way past some of the dilemmas
that the binary distinction of humanitarianism and human rights leads to.
For example, we might be able to conceptualize norms for the conduct of
armed conflict in contexts different from the target circumstances of IHL
within the same paradigm of justification as IHRL. Earlier I noted the
controversy about whether (or when) “targeted killing” should be judged
as an act of war or of law enforcement. The present point suggests that we
might instead conceptualize law (or rights) enforcement as the genus and
international war as one species of it. This makes room for the thought
that the circumstances of asymmetrical conflict might be another species.
I have been concerned in this chapter with what now appears to be
a lack of fit between the way participants in (and some observers of) these
practices often describe the moral ideals that motivate them and

condition their understanding of the aims of the practices, and the way
these ideals and aims have been understood in an influential part of the
history of moral philosophy and in contemporary, common-sense mor-
ality in the West. So one might think that the interest, if any, in these
remarks is primarily descriptive or sociological. But this might be myopic.
The way we describe the moral requirements that apply to us as indivi-
duals and as participants in our shared practices can influence the way in
which we understand the stringency of these requirements and the prio-
rities we assign to them when they conflict with one another and
with other claims on scarce resources. When our practices classify
these requirements using categories that have independent significance
in common-sense morality, descriptive distortions could warp practical
judgments about how to act and how to allocate scarce resources when we
cannot do all that we have reason to do. To put it more directly, inaccu-
rate labels can encourage faulty choices.
Finally, a speculation perhaps worth considering elsewhere. I have
maintained that humanitarianism and human rights are each the subjects
of a normative social practice. There is no question that the “procedural
norms” of these practices differ. As I have observed, for example, within
the culture of humanitarianism, humanitarian action strives to be neutral
between competing political forces whereas human rights culture tends to
be explicitly partisan. This contrast is related to another. Humanitarian
practice typically gives priority to the relief of urgent suffering and has less
if any concern to bring about systematic change in the longer term.
Human rights practice, on the other hand, takes a longer view and often
aims explicitly at inducing legal and political change. These differences in
“procedural norms” make sense in light of the practical differences in the
“target circumstances” of the activities characteristic of each practice and
may explain why participants in these practices are tempted to miscon-
ceive of the practices’ underlying moral values. They call attention to
a possibility that philosophers do not often recognize – that the functional
needs of our social roles may encourage us to adopt beliefs about the
values that we protect or advance in those roles that are unsound and
might possibly distort our judgment as practitioners. I wonder (I have not
said enough to do more) whether the cultures of humanitarianism and of
human rights might be cases in point. If there is such a thing as a theory of
normative practices, this is a possibility it should take on board.

Stephen Hopgood

To say that there is a fundamental difference between human rights and

humanitarianism, we need to be able to point to something that will allow
us to say “that’s human rights” and “that’s humanitarianism.” Some core
to each that the other cannot replicate; some red line that signals an
uncrossable boundary between the two. Even in the empirical case,
where we simply describe the modern institutional manifestation of
each, there is nothing, I argue, that meets these criteria. They are inex-
tricably intertwined.1 To take an obvious example: what humanitarians
mean by “protection” is what human rights activists actually do on a daily
basis. If we look at them conceptually, in their grounding principles,
logics, and moral architecture, we ﬁnd little to distinguish them.
Indeed, they are social practices that might have developed in a variety
of different ways such that we could call what each does as its signature
form of action by the same name. Some already do. Hence, the forlorn
nature of scholarly efforts to insist that X is properly “human rights” and
Y is properly “humanitarianism” or “international humanitarian law.”2
Both human rights and humanitarianism are branches of the same broad
humanist tree with its distinctive commitment to the life of the human
person and her/his/their basic needs and desires. That is, a commitment
in principle to the equal moral value of all individual human lives regard-
less of any aspect of identity or behavior. This is the cornerstone of
liberalism.
After elaborating in part one of this chapter on the fruitlessness of
a search for conceptual distinctiveness between the two major secular
universal normative social practices of our time, the second part looks at
their empirical similarities, going as far as to suggest that in our era of
rapid transformation in global politics there is a case for strategic partner-
ship, and perhaps even for merger between human rights and humanitar-
ian organizations. That this would, in principle, be easy enough to effect
at the level of ethos (less so organizational culture) tells us much.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) plus Amnesty working in prisons,
Amnesty plus the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)

working on torture, Human Rights Watch and the International Rescue

Committee working on refugees? No problem – indeed, they are all
already working on these issues in broadly similar terms just not as parts
of the same organization. What will make merger hard is not any core
ethical incompatibility but cultural differences – human rights advocates
tend to be less ﬂexible (they are often lawyers) and more hubristic (or,
more generously, optimistic) than humanitarians – and competing fund-
ing models, along with the more contested politics of human rights
demands compared with those of humanitarians who can (and do)
trade categorical principles for access.3
In part three, I will argue that for both humanitarians and human rights
advocates the nature of the transformation of the international system we
are witnessing condemns both to an uncertain and potentially less rele-
vant future. Both can survive, as well-funded, highly esteemed symbolic
institutions tend to do. But only through a kind of inertia. Whether or not
they can do much good in the new world is less clear. Of the two,
humanitarians have the better chance because in the end they can yield
to the demands of even venal states in order to provide a very minimal
form of aid to those who suffer terribly at the hands of their tormentors.
Which will be, paradoxically, an argument against merger. This might
give the impression that there are distinct differences between the two.
More accurately, human rights are a form of overreach beyond their
humanitarian origins. It is not clear that human rights bring any systemic
beneﬁt to states – being at best an occasional ally and at worst an impedi-
ment – whereas humanitarians help in situations of dire suffering to
contain and stabilize the mess that states themselves have all too often
caused. This is not evidence of any deep-seated empirical, ethical or
conceptual distinction. It tells us one thing only – that a rhetorical com-
mitment to the importance of all human life occasionally has functional
value for states. The vast panoply of rights and mechanisms to promul-
gate and enforce them that human rights advocates have built is balanced
on this one thin thread, the signature contribution of humanism to world
affairs.

Humanist Origins
There are, broadly, two nonreligious origins – reason, and nature – given
as transcendent sources for human rights and humanitarianism. These
are groundings, anchors, beyond the caprice of human social invention
and contingency. Here, it is the idea or concept, the intellectual and moral
substructure, and its logical unfolding, that drives humans forward, not
any choice we as a species or as individuals might somehow make about

how we ought to act. We did not find our way to these universal moral
prescriptions, they lay latent in our minds until we discovered them and
put them into practice. There have always been a few far-sighted prophets
who made universalist arguments of this sort, but it took until the
Enlightenment for humanity as a species to begin to consider all human
persons (only potentially, obviously, and dependent on who qualified as
fully “human”) as morally worthy and morally equal (for more on these
and other cognate developments, see Flynn, this volume). A third option,
God, has been a more popular answer to questions about what gives rights
and organized compassion their ahistorical, transcendent moorings, but
I take it as a given that under modernity such an answer is now too
contested to command universal support even in theory (which God?
which strain of which religion?).4
What reason tells us is that moral laws, like “thou shalt not kill,” or
“treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself” (the golden rule),
are exactly the laws we would give ourselves if we only thought about it
properly. The fact that the majority of human beings have not treated
each other with such reciprocal respect is because we do not successfully
listen to reason’s voice. The natural origin claim, by contrast, sees us all
having within us some shared moral sense, some capacity for empathy
and compassion, which when effectively activated creates a more or less
identical response to human suffering and urges us to help, to do some-
thing, to act ethically. Even if it took until the 1700s for this button to be
pushed on a large scale, it was always there within us, waiting to be
triggered. And so, the global ethical projects we call “human rights” and
“humanitarianism” are simply the latest stage of our evolution toward
being more civilized, moral, and thoughtful human beings.
If we accept either of these accounts, we can then ask what the core
distinction is between “humanitarianism” and “human rights” in
a different way. If each is somehow a “natural kind,” then do they
represent the unfolding of two different logics? Is one the “law” (human
rights) and the other “love” (compassion for fellow humans in distress)?
Perhaps these are Platonic categories that structure our world? But this
does not get us very far. Identifying exactly what the natural kind is would
be an exercise in anachronism unless we think that there are concepts, like
“law,” “love,” “justice,” and “freedom,” that stand outside social time
and are meaningfully definable in the abstract, even in some vague sense
“pre-linguistically” (a deeply problematic notion), concepts that in some
way were latent in the universe and existed before we did.
This requires us to hold that abstract conceptual parameters create
limits to human social action. That what freedom is, or love, or justice,
has limits that were set down for us, or in us, long before we roamed the

earth and that no matter what we decide freedom to be, reason and/or
nature has beaten us to it. The diversity of human social forms refutes this
empirically. By what authority do any transcendent sources tell us that we
are wrong, that we have made a mess of things? In whose voice could they
speak if not in that of an embodied God? And even if this account is true, if
it cannot be made to seem true to enough people to make it true, then we
will always live in a world we define and make for ourselves, even if we
have long since departed from the one true moral path.
Of what practical use is it to claim, therefore, that there is some kind of
essence, “humanity,” whether as a collective noun or an adjective, that
persists beneath all and any of the various forms of human development?
It helps bolster the courage of the faithful but does nothing to resolve the
problem of counter-claims and heretical dissent, let alone the difficulty of
defining concepts in terms of other concepts whose meaning can only be
found in other concepts and so on. This is not to say that human rights
advocates and humanitarians do not make origin claims. They use argu-
ments for transcendent moral truth to bolster their here-and-now political
claims. We should see this as socially constructed myth-making, neces-
sary perhaps and even effective, but not “true” in any deep sense. This
past has been constructed through a process of bricolage, fusing together
ideas, events, texts, and stories from the distant human past, and by
privileging one narrative, that of the inexorable process of moral improve-
ment over another, the story of human killing, cruelty, and suffering.
These pieces all came together on a global scale in the eighteenth century
when for the first time there was a social phenomenon (European empire)
that served as a vector to globalize what were otherwise culturally and
geographically local social practices.
Accepting the social construction of human rights and humanitarian-
ism means we will find it impossible to settle with decisive authority when
a form of social action is, and is not, an example or contravention of one or
the other. The Catholic Church dealt with issues on which it could not
generate agreement by engineering consensus. When a collective under-
standing of what “the truth” was evolved (or, more likely, was manufac-
tured), that “truth” was given the seal of approval by church authorities
and became “true” allowing punishment to be meted out for denying it.
In his Apostolic Constitution, Ineffabilis Deus (The Immaculate
Conception), issued in 1854, Pope Pius IX wrote:
We declare, pronounce, and define that the doctrine which holds that the most
Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instance of her conception, by a singular grace
and privilege granted by Almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the
Savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin, is

a doctrine revealed by God and therefore to be believed ﬁrmly and constantly by

all the faithful.5
He added:
Hence, if anyone shall dare – which God forbid! – to think otherwise than as has
been deﬁned by us, let him know and understand that he is condemned by his own
judgment; that he has suffered shipwreck in the faith; that he has separated from
the unity of the Church; and that, furthermore, by his own action he incurs the
penalties established by law if he should [d]are to express in words or writing or by
any other outward means the errors he think in his heart.6

This approach (likely to be of limited efﬁcacy for the modern Church) is

far beyond anything that anyone promoting human rights or humanitar-
ian ethics could hope for. Or, indeed, should aspire to? How do we want
our believers? Behaviorally compliant out of habit, custom or instrumen-
tality? Or self-policing and internally committed to the faith? Do we care
why people comply, in other words? Either way, human rights and huma-
nitarianism lack an equivalent authority that can wield the threats of
excommunication and a fiery torment. They remain far more contested
despite codes of conduct, credentialism and training courses, memoirs,
peer pressure and socialization, heart-rending high-profile examples of
suffering, publicity and promotional campaigns, laws and norms, court
cases, and so on. In other words, even the UN, the ICRC, MSF,
Amnesty, and many others have been unable to pronounce with finality
that “X is not human rights” even when what is being proposed, like “the
dignity of the human family” or “traditional rights,” is something very
different from what we would usually call rights. When discrimination is
held up as example of “humanitarianism,” who can say with authority it
is not?
The obvious answer, perhaps the only answer, is: via agreement, espe-
cially one enshrined in the law. We can see this in the many conventions
and covenants on human rights (not to mention the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)) and in the Geneva and Hague
Conventions. These are a more secular and discursive and (hopefully)
democratic version of what the Catholic Church was attempting. We
agree what we mean by “human rights” and by “humanitarianism” and
try to make that a meaningful limit on social action. Like all international
law these are an unusual form of law because in the main they lack
enforcement capacity. The International Criminal Court (ICC) would,
it was hoped, provide it for both human rights crimes (crimes against
humanity and genocide) and international humanitarian law (crimes of
aggression and war crimes).7 In fact, the only major powers to join the
ICC are in Europe, raising doubts about whether or not there is any

consensus over the Rome Statute at all. Indeed, as Mark Goodale shows,
in Letters to the Contrary, submissions to UNESCO on the topic of human
rights in 1947 from luminaries of that age prove there was no consensus at
all even at the start about rights as somehow agreed meta norms for the
coming world order.8
Moreover, states, particularly in the West, talk about human rights while
often rejecting them (US treatment of migrant children, Hungary’s illiberal
democracy, Poland’s dismantling of its constitutional judiciary, the UK
government’s approach to the European Convention on Human Rights).
That is before we look at the attitude to human rights and humanitarian
action in China or Russia or Turkey or Brazil or Egypt. My suggestion is
simple: what little consensus there was in the twentieth century has gone.
There was just a preponderance of sympathetic power. We will no longer
be able to turn to the law to settle the issue of what constitutes “human
rights” on the one hand, and “humanitarianism” on the other.
One might argue: the law clearly defines what human rights and huma-
nitarianism are, it is just that states ignore it. But if these same states
refuse to recognize by consensus the substance and boundaries of the
terms “human rights” and “humanitarianism” and if we can appeal to no
other authority to tell us the answer, we are left with the reality that they
float freely from transcendent origins and are not limited by explicit
agreement.
An analogy is with Buddhism. What might we take as the fixed core of
Buddhism, even beyond the absence of a real self and the disintegration of
the ego, the need to avoid attachment and to embrace the void of empti-
ness, getting beyond the cycle of birth and death and achieving Nirvana?
As the Dalai Lama puts it: be kind. The Nobel Eightfold Path, which even
Theravada Buddhists of Sri Lanka and South East Asia are expected to
follow, has moral virtues that include no killing or injuring and no self-
enrichment in a material sense. Yet one goes to the Schwedagong Pagoda
in Yangon with its roof of gold or reads of the blood-thirsty demands for
violence against the Tamils or the Rohingya and asks: Are these really
Buddhists? And of course, they are – they live the lives of Buddhists,
occupy the temples, walk the path, have been anointed, dress, eat, pray,
and act accordingly. By what authority do we say they are not? Yet they
violate the peaceful and kind core of Buddhist practice and belief. Which
suggests it has no such core. The Bhagavad Gita, the great Hindu epic
from the Mahabharata where Krishna explains to Arjuna what selfless
action and duty requires, was a favorite book of the Nazis, especially the
SS.9 By the same token, Jan Smuts, the highly educated South African
leader and proponent of racial segregation, allegedly carried a copy of
Kant around with him.10

With the necessary “lawfare,” the concepts of “human” and “rights”

can be so defined as to exclude members of certain ethnic, cultural, or
religious groups (see Klose, this volume) without stepping beyond
“humanity’s conscience” (because in reality there is no “humanity” and
thus no “conscience”). It is a short step from “humanitarian” to
“humane” and thus to actions – for example, mercy killing – that might
justify ending the lives of those whose quality of life we, not they, judge to
be undesirable. There is, then, no way to draw a line around these
practices and say what they are, what they are not, and what they should
or should not be. We could even have lived in a world in which humani-
tarianism and human rights were not a thing at all. We can identify pivotal
historical moments where things could have gone differently, and the
subsequent development of our social lives would have been altered in
unpredictable ways. Whether or not you are committed to the arbitrari-
ness of human moral development can be answered by asking yourself:
Do I think a world could have evolved in which treating people unequally
was considered just? That used to be the world, and many if not most
parts of the world still manifest many such beliefs. Why are we unable to
imagine a future where this is explicit again?
In the end, therefore, even law is unable to hold against the tide and
falls victim to a kind of rebus sic stantibus principle. Constitutional courts
struggle with the politics of this constantly and that is within a system of
relatively settled laws and precedents. How much harder is this codifica-
tion in the world of human rights and humanitarianism where so much is
vague and fundamentally contested. When words and concepts are seen
as matters of conventional usage not prefigured meaning, then everything
depends on what is taken to be authoritative resolution of differences of
belief, fact, and opinion. Even the term “human” is now contested in
terms of subjectivity, performativity, artificial intelligence, the post-
human, the xenofeminist.
Indeed, it suggests neither human rights nor humanitarianism is an
ethical practice at all except to the extent that “we” say it is. And if that
“we” fragments and is challenged by voices that have hitherto been
silenced, voices that reassert Gods, alternative faiths and traditions, or
biological essentialism, all things we might think have been relegated to
the detritus of history, then we will be left with a vision that cannot be
universalized any longer, even as an aspiration. How will a Hans Kelsen-
style “grand norm,” the unmoved mover, the point back beyond which
we do not need to go, fare in such a world? The best we can hope for is an
agreement – an “overlapping consensus” – about what we think are
desirable social practices and try to commit to realize those ends with as
much pressure and leverage as we can muster.11 Without even the

possibility of coercion, however distant and diffuse, to give weight to the

charge that this is “the direction of travel” such claims will founder on the
implacable resistance of many who stand to lose authority and power
through yielding up their existing privilege.

Humanist Social Practices

We are left, then, with empirical realities, that is, distinct sets of practices.
Human rights workers tend to advocate for law and justice, to seek
prosecution and accountability, while humanitarians, in contrast, provide
succor for the suffering, focus largely on medical and reparative (not
retributive) intervention, meeting basic needs, before then moving on to
social goods like public health and education. Charles Beitz (this volume)
analyses this as a distinction between “beneficence” and “justice.” When
we focus on crises this division seems clearer. There seems less for human
rights defenders to do when saving lives is the only priority. But things are
not so simple.
What about institutions? We have our set of major humanitarian non-
governmental organizations (NGOs), led by the ICRC, MSF, CARE,
Oxfam, and Save the Children. And on the human rights side, we have
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, along with FIDH,
Human Rights First, and a whole series of other smaller organizations
with global ambitions. The people who work in these organizations often
have different formal qualifications, different sets of standard operating
procedures, and different fundraising and marketing techniques. They
compete with each other for money, publicity, and influence while all the
time professing their strong affinities as parts of the humanist interna-
tional. Within the major global institutional bodies, the UN, the EU, we
have parts working on humanitarian issues and those working on human
rights; for example, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
(UNHCR) and the Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Assistance (OCHA) vs. the Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights (OHCHR); we have the European Civil Protection and
Humanitarian Aid Operation (ECHO) and, in the Council of Europe,
the European Court (and Convention) of Human Rights. We have two
sets of laws – international humanitarian law and international human
rights law. This should enable us to say, “I know you speak on behalf of
human rights because you cite the UDHR and work for Amnesty.” And
yet, once we look more deeply, we discover an inextricable web of
interconnections.
This was not always the case. When Western powers dominated the
international system, especially after the 1970s, there was space for both.

Experts with formal credentials began to assert their own unique con-
tribution to dealing with human suffering and depravity. At first sight, as
noted, humanitarians seemed to act in crises without much explicit
attention to law (excepting the ICRC), while human rights worked on
the basis of finding out who was responsible for abuses and violations and
prosecuting them. This meant that in natural disasters, barring claims for
negligence, humanitarians had things to offer – concrete products like
food, shelter, water, and medicine – that human rights defenders did not.
It also explains why some of the very largest humanitarian organizations –
World Vision, Catholic Relief Services – are both religious and engaged in
compassionate social practices. They focused on needs alone and were
not required to take a position on rights issues.
What brought the two together was the politics. First, the importance of
conflict. I have argued elsewhere that the ICRC – in its attachment to the
suffering human person – can be seen as the first human rights
organization.12 As conflict evolved and attempts to prevent it and ame-
liorate its worst effects became increasingly legalized, the ground that
separated humanitarians and human rights workers narrowed. In the
Rome Statute, as noted earlier, they closed. It is impossible to tell whether
the International Criminal Court (ICC) is a humanitarian or a human
rights court. In truth, where crimes against humanity are concerned, it is
both. Killing is always an act against the human right to life even if some
justifications might be thought to trump that right. Gustave Moynier,
builder of the ICRC, proposed an ICC to try individuals rather than states
as far back as 1872.13 Second, it became clear from the 1970s on,
especially as regards civil wars and non-state actors, that who was inno-
cent (indeed, what innocence was) mattered hugely for both these forms
of normative social action. In the case of civilians in urban and ethnic
conflict, it could be hard to clearly identify combatants. Third, once they
professionalized and bureaucratized in the 1980s, these NGOs started to
fish the same waters for money, members, and supporters. There might
be some distinctions here, prima facie. The lack of an explicitly religious
account of rights might have made humanitarian NGOs more attractive
than human rights for religious people. But the importance within
Amnesty, for example, of its many religious members belies this fact.14
Someone as high profile as Sergio Vieira de Mello could be UN under-
secretary general for humanitarian affairs, and then UN high commis-
sioner for human rights. Jan Egeland could hold the same humanitarian
affairs brief then become deputy director of Human Rights Watch (having
been chair of Amnesty International in Norway beforehand).
Even the crisis exemption – that this is where humanitarians are
uniquely to the fore – does not hold up. The ICRC defines protection

as “to ensure that authorities and other actors respect their obligations
and the rights of individuals in order to preserve the safety, physical
integrity and dignity of those affected by armed conflict and other
situations of violence.”15 The seven fundamental principles of the
International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement – humanity,
impartiality, neutrality, independence, voluntary service, unity, and
universality – are very similar to those of Amnesty International’s
“core values”: “Amnesty International forms a global community of
human rights defenders based on the principles of international solidar-
ity, effective action for the individual victim, global coverage, the uni-
versality and indivisibility of human rights, impartiality and
independence, and democracy and mutual respect.”16 In its fundamen-
tal principle of “humanity,” the Red Cross talks of “assistance without
discrimination,” and of its purpose as being “to protect life and health
and to ensure respect for the human being.”17 Amnesty could make
exactly this statement, minus the “health” element. But this is more
a branding issue. In fact, Amnesty made a set of recommendations to
the G20 in 2017 precisely about the right to health: “Amnesty
International is providing a set of recommendations to G20 countries
on the importance of universal health care for all persons without
discrimination and the full realization of all aspects of the right to
health, including through a human rights-based approach to healthcare
services provision which, if implemented, would demonstrate their
global leadership in this area.”18 The UN’s OCHA – which sits atop
the global humanitarian architecture – has five strategic objectives in its
2018–2021 plan of which number 4 is: “International acceptance of the
centrality of international humanitarian and human rights law, access
and protection that results in meaningful action for affected people,
especially internally displaced people.”19
Let us take a concrete case like Syria. Here, we find Human Rights
Watch and MSF, to take two further examples, both with a great deal
to say. Human Rights Watch points to the targeting of civilians,
indiscriminate attacks, and the use of banned weapons, especially
chemical and nerve agents. It also points to attacks on hospitals
and unlawful restrictions on humanitarian aid.20 MSF gives more
empirical detail to these charges, as well as condemning the Assad
government’s crimes in a language that HRW could have used: “In
reality, they amount to massive, indiscriminate and disproportionate
civilian targeting in urban settings, and, in the worst cases, to acts of
terror.”21
What do these examples show us? That if we are looking for clear-
cut distinctions between the social practices of human rights and

humanitarianism, we will be hard pressed to ﬁnd them. Crucially, the

moral underpinning of each of these social practices is the same, the
evolution of a speciﬁc view of the human person and the obligations
s/he/they are owed. If there appears to be a difference between them,
it is to be found in institutional culture. And most of all, in the fact
that broadly speaking there are a lot more lawyers in the world of
human rights and a lot more nonlawyers – doctors, religious people,
and well-meaning generalists – in the world of professional humani-
tarianism. This seems to give human rights NGOs a particular idiom,
or ethos, one about justice. But under the surface much is the same.
One objection might be that humanitarians deal with need, mainly but
not exclusively in crisis, whereas human rights advocates are looking to
remedy violations of the law that are not among our most fundamental
needs. Even this is controversial, however: protection is as much a core
need in the moments after catastrophe as anything else. Protection is that
part of the UN cluster system that the UNHCR, the most operational of
the UN’s agencies, is directly responsible for, and it is clear that protec-
tion is intrinsically about human rights.22 The ICRC also stresses protec-
tion in terms of the rights of individuals.23 Meeting immediate need is not
a foolproof test.
What about a more ﬁne-grained operational analysis?
Humanitarians provide medical treatment, food, shelter, and clean
water, and human rights workers do not. Human rights groups would
argue and advocate for a person’s “right” to these basic requirements,
but they do not have the expertise and resources to deliver them
directly. They do not need to, of course, because others do. There is
no problem working on the rights to these basic needs, in the same
way that campaigning to stop the bombing of hospitals is an essential
element of ensuring people’s basic needs are met. We can make the
same argument about more development-focused humanitarian
NGOs – Oxfam, for example – and ESC rights, including the right
to development, that many human rights groups work on. Here,
much work is about the law, access to justice, government policy,
aid, all core areas where human rights have as much a role to play as
direct provision of services. MSF is working on conditions in refugee
camps and in prisons, as is the ICRC, as is Amnesty. They could
work together quite easily, each bringing different levels of expertise,
donor and membership groups, contacts and networks, nuanced and
slightly differentiated operational arguments, but all united on the
same basic commitment to humane treatment and respect for all
human individuals. Merger would be an operational, not an ethical
challenge.

Humanist Futures
By focusing on the differences between human rights and humanitarianism
there is a danger of missing the forest for the trees. That is, both rely
heavily on the global liberal settlement for their efficacy and that settle-
ment is coming apart. We are missing the big picture. Humanism itself,
part of the core cultural fabric of Western-led global liberalism, in its
imperial and post-imperial phases, is now under serious pressure. This
period of 200–300 years is marked by vast hypocrisy, bad faith, atrocity,
self-interest, and selective amnesia to name just a few of its ills. But, at the
global level, we have rules, norms, and institutions that are broadly liberal
in their intent.
By liberal, I mean, again with the caveats mentioned previously, nondis-
criminatory in principle, universal in principle, and non-sectarian in principle.
This in-principle commitment to the same opportunities and protections for
all human persons regardless of identity is built into the majority of these
global institutions. How could it be otherwise? In the last few decades
a commitment to the idea of global space and global agreements has been
intensified into something which has been present in the West since the
beginning of modern empire – the urge to modernize other societies along
lines considered appropriate first via Christianity and second via what it
means to live a full, morally autonomous, fulfilled life where you get to
decide how you yourself wish to live. This produces avid consumers, is
heavily driven by the needs of modern capitalism, and your chances of
realizing it are hugely dependent on your position in class and identity
structures, but it has nonetheless embedded the idea that, to paraphrase
Thomas Jefferson, “all human persons are born equal with certain inalien-
able rights” (again, however much that has been ignored in reality).
This version of liberalism is eroding. Identity was, in truth, never
depoliticized for those who had that identity (think race in the United
States and almost anywhere else, or gender, or sexuality). What has
changed is the in-principle objection to rules and policies that discrimi-
nate. This is evident in the rejection of liberal rules and norms in many
parts of the non-West (e.g., China, Russia, Turkey, Uganda, the
Philippines, Cambodia) thereby fulfilling many Western fantasies about
the advanced West and the backward South. But the assault on liberalism
is now in full swing in the core of the West – Hungary, Poland, the United
States, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, and so on. Even Angela Merkel’s
progressive stance on migration in Germany has been tempered by poli-
tical realities and the rise of right-wing parties.
In other words, two dynamics, inextricably linked, have come together.
First the relative decline in the power of the West. At the core of this is the

rise of China whose influence grows ever greater. Given China’s at best
problematic relationship to the whole discourse of human rights, it sees
such demands as an infringement of its sovereignty but also as the kind of
rank hypocrisy that Western nations have indulged in for centuries, a soft
power form of coercion that belies the extent to which states like the
United States ignore human rights when it seems expedient to do so.
Second, the implosion of liberal ideals in a West under pressure econom-
ically and socially through competition, rapid technological change, refu-
gees and migration, growing inequality, and environmental collapse.
In 2018, Freedom House recorded its twelfth consecutive year of
declining freedom worldwide, with seventy-one countries registering
a reduction in political rights and civil liberties.24 Governments of rising
powers, increasingly important in a world whose norms and rules they did
not write, will be suspicious, rightly, that humanitarianism represents the
soft power form of Western modernity, another vector for the transmis-
sion of liberal–capitalist values that threatens their hold on national power
and resources. The degree to which humanitarians often attend crises that
the major Western powers have been complicit in creating substantiates
this concern (think Vietnam, Congo, Cambodia, Iraq, Syria, Libya). The
implications of this are simple but profound: Rules and norms that conflict
in some way with the preferences of the rising powers, and especially the Chinese
government, will no longer necessarily be enforceable at the global level. We
know what this looks like in the case of China because it is how the United
States has behaved for much of the last 80–100 years. This is the pre-
rogative of being a superpower. Now we have two superpowers again. As
China’s influence, its diplomacy, its money, its power filter into all areas
of the international political system, so it will be harder and harder to
persuade either indifferent or reluctant states that they have no choice in
the longer run but to follow the West.
This means that there is a void, an interregnum, a vacuum, where no
one really knows what the most important rules are and whether they will
be enforced anymore (to the extent that they ever were really enforced) –
think international humanitarian law, think torture, think freedom of
speech. States at best have to hedge their bets (trying to retain the good-
will of both China and the United States) and at worst can simply flout
those rules with impunity. The Philippines and Cambodia are the only
Asian states that have signed the Rome Statute of the ICC, the humanist
institution par excellence, to take just one obvious example. Who else will
sign now the United States and China have made it clear they have no
interest in the court? What does this mean for humanism? That the
conditions conducive to the globalization of human rights and humani-
tarianism, which some have argued were rooted in the slow progressive

teleology of a “widening circle of compassion” datable back to the

European Enlightenment, are diminishing.25 Whatever happens next in
our global social and political life, there is plenty of reason to fear it will
not be hospitable to the norms of human rights or humanitarianism,
particularly their legal achievements. Has anything better exemplified
the death (even if it is temporary) of the humanist ideal than the bombing
of hospitals in Syria and Yemen by the governments of Russia, Syria, and
Saudi Arabia? Or the use of torture by the US government? Was this not
a norm “we” assumed would never openly be breached in the West?
These changes, including the possibility of a United States-China trade
war and the United States’s withdrawal from key Western-led transna-
tional institutions (the Human Rights Council), as well as ambivalence
about the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the World Trade
Organization, will take us back to a world of concrete solidarities where
shared interests and identities (and threats) will bind people more tightly
as a mobilizing principle than more abstract commitments to universal
notions (like the moral equivalence of all persons) and the essential
humanity that we all share. Which presents humanists with a fateful
question: What responses are available when faced with rejection of the
whole principle of equal moral worth? Humanitarian social practice
encompasses a kind of silent witnessing, compassion for the suffering
and the dying without words, without judgment. Its repertoire does not
require public condemnation. Human rights advocacy is all about speak-
ing out (making MSF of all humanist organizations perhaps the best
hybrid example).26 There can be humanitarianism in a nonliberal
world, but little human rights (as a social practice; rights-like ideas will
persist, of course). Liberalism is preferable for humanitarians, but they
have things they can do without it. There remains a call for compassion in
the death camp or in the hospital under fire. Whether or not such suffer-
ing is morally wrong, it is always pitiable and capable of inspiring empa-
thy. No one would request help in such extreme situations on the basis
that they had a right to it unless they were faced with someone refusing to
assist them on principle (i.e., someone denying the validity of their
request for help). The demand is: help me. And the expectation would
naturally be that help would be given.
Consider three real MSF examples: should you provide medical assis-
tance to a torture victim in prison when it means he will survive to be
tortured again tomorrow; should you provide condoms to a child soldier
so that when he rapes women in the villages he raids they will not get HIV;
should you re-stitch an infibulated woman after childbirth rather than
letting the local midwife do it with far inferior tools and in less hygienic
conditions?27 What is the human rights answer to any of these questions?

Do not torture, do not rape, do not practice female genital mutilation.

Okay, now given that none of those morally desirable things will happen
in these cases, what is the answer now? In the here and now, humanitar-
ians have one, and must have one, whereas human rights advocates do
not. In the cases above, is not the right thing to do: stay with the torture
victim, hand over the condoms, and reconstruct the infibulation? This is
a recognition of the moral importance of this specific human person, not
of the abstract principle of “humanity.” In each case you are complicit in
an abuse. Humanitarians are used to these morally imperfect choices.
The content of humanitarian books tends to be about crisis, failure, and
defeat. Human rights advocates usually write about achievements, that is,
their success in building a global human rights movement and establish-
ing treaty and national human rights law.
Humanitarianism can survive in a million acts of compassion for
those who suffer. It need not be justified, defended, explained, or
articulated in any form. It can be just a moment of mercy, respite, of
human kindness. We do not all have to manifest it, it does not need to
be enshrined as a law or obligation. It might not even have to come from
a place of love. It is an act of humanity outside the realm of conceptual
justification. There will always be some, maybe only a few, people who
help in this way under any regime of truth, regardless of the identity or
moral character of those they are helping, and in this lies humanitar-
ianism’s inextinguishable mission.

Conclusion
All of this is an important indication of why the humanitarian “business
model” is a more durable form of humanism in inhospitable conditions
than its human rights variant. But humanitarianism has something else
going for it also: it is difﬁcult to see what value human rights have for
states as a whole at the systemic level (beyond narrow areas of reciprocity
like prisoner protection). They can be useful as a foreign policy tool to
apply soft power pressure to other governments, but all states ﬁnd them
more or less irksome when they demand accountability or behavioral
change. Human rights contribute little that is obvious to the functioning
of the international system (assuming that they rarely deter atrocity and
forced displacement, and indeed as this chapter suggests are increasingly
less likely to do so). But humanitarianism does have system-wide func-
tionality – it provides a mechanism to prevent the failures of the system as
a whole (usually because of failures of state policy) that endanger the
broad consensus necessary for the system to exist without the deployment
of massive coercion and the overt suppression of dissent. Humanitarians

mop up a little of the mess when state policies end in failure and collapse.
They give states an alibi and a way out.
Take refugees for example. If humanitarians can keep refugees in their
original country, they stop other states from facing the political costs of
accepting, or refusing, refugee demands for asylum. Or disease. The
frontline role of humanitarians in keeping Ebola “over there” – creating
a quarantine zone that protected other states from danger – prevented
a massive public health and political headache for other governments
including those in the West. The UNHCR can be seen, in this way, not
as the last hope for displaced and traumatized people but as complicit in
a giant camp system designed to stop the negative side-effects of state
actions from undermining the system of states en masse.
It is in this way that human rights, more strident, more principled, more
monotheistic, will be the form of humanism that withers as the climate for
global normative improvement deteriorates. The relationship between
human rights and humanitarianism is a vertical one not a parallel one.
The initial shoots from the core humanist principle of equal moral worth
were simply about compassion, care, concern. From this grew attention
not only to those who suffered but also why they suffered. The over-
whelming influence of the West in the last two centuries, and especially in
the twentieth century, the age of American power, meant that its attach-
ment to ideas of law and justice, however partial and self-interested, could
be globalized.
Nothing could better illustrate this than the victor’s justice on display at
the Tokyo war crimes tribunal after World War II (Japan having just been
subject to the two greatest single examples of crimes against humanity in
history). Human rights – in the guise of international justice – gave the
United States a way out of the Balkan wars (by allowing something to
appear to be done), it even – in the case of Rwanda – provided
a mechanism for post-conflict reconstruction that facilitated the contin-
ued functioning of the system as a whole (to give an example, contra my
argument above, that human rights has no functionality). But these are all
cases that depend on overweening power. Now that has gone, the “stretch
goal” of human rights will need to be reduced to more feasible horizons.
To provide a little solace for those who suffer and to look for those
occasions on which the international system needs to deal, if only cosme-
tically, with threats to its reliable functioning. It will fall to humanitarians,
in other words, to keep the flame alive until the conditions arise once
again within which it can grow into human rights. There is no reason, of
course, apart from a belief in the ineluctability of liberal progress, to
assume that that day will come any time soon.

Practices

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5 Humanitarian Governance and the
Circumvention of Revolutionary Human
Rights in the British Empire

Alan Lester

Humanitarianism and human rights are often seen as having a shared late
eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century provenance within the revolution-
ary fervor of the European Enlightenment, the anti-slavery campaign, and
the rise of sympathy for distant strangers.1 While Moyn points out that
“humanitarianism and rights rarely crossed into (let alone defined) each
other in the hierarchical global order and world visions of the nineteenth
century,” I want to push the distinction further.2 I argue that these projects
were not coeval in the sense that they sprang from a common orientation to
the world. Their genesis was indeed related, but antagonistically rather than
in alignment. Humanitarianism and human rights were oppositional assem-
blages. As Fabian Klose notes in this volume, “humanitarianism and human
rights are presented in opposing terms, sometimes even as rival concepts by
advocates on both sides,” but often, I think, for the wrong reason. Often,
humanitarianism is contrasted with human rights because of the former’s
reliance “upon a discourse of suffering and charity,” and the latter’s basis in
“a discourse of justice and solidarity.” Here, however, I argue that these
discourses are opposed rather by their fundamental political orientation.
Whereas the former had origins broadly in the amelioration of existing
relations of power and privilege, the latter proposed revolutionary transfor-
mation. The former was forged directly to contend with the latter.
My focus will be on humanitarian governance specifically.3
Humanitarianism has specific temporalities and geographies, but it is
also manifest in specific registers. The combinations of words, text, and
images that humanitarian agencies use to express and mobilize concern
for vulnerable and distant others, so as to raise consciousness and funds,
are different from those mobilized by political lobbies on behalf of state
intervention, and these in turn are different from the various articula-
tions by governmental figures of their own “humane” policies. Each
humanitarian register corresponds to a particular project of humane
intervention – a particular kind of change that the humanitarian is trying

107

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108 Alan Lester

to effect in the world on behalf of vulnerable and precarious others. My

understanding of governmentality is derived above all from Foucault,
who sought to describe the practices of government of a population that
emerged in Europe from the Renaissance. For Foucault, governmental
rationalization within these societies “differs from the rationalisation
peculiar to economic processes, or to production and communication
techniques; it differs from that of scientiﬁc discourse.” It “doesn’t
involve instrumental violence,” but rather the inducement by various
means to affect behavior, both of the individual and of the collective:
“right from the start, the state is both individualising and totalitarian.”
The “aim of the modern art of government, or state rationality,” for
Foucault, is “to develop those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives
in such a way that their development also fosters that of the strength of
the state.”4 Humanitarianism has been as much a part of this modern
governmental project as any other.
Humanitarian “reason,” as Fassin puts it, has always existed not solely in
the extra-governmental realm of the nongovernmental organization or the
political lobby. It has also “serve[d] both to deﬁne and to justify discourses
and practices of the government of human beings.”5 Humanitarian gov-
ernance allows for the functioning of the polity as a whole, by providing
welfare to elements of the population in need.6 As Reid-Henry puts it:
technologies of care were . . . an unavoidable consideration both of and for the
modern bureaucratic state . . . if in his analysis of the emergence of the modern era
of government [Foucault] was right to suggest that the new aim of punishing was
not to punish less but to punish better, with more universality and to insert the
power to punish more deeply into the social body, then the same is no less true of
the desire to save.7
Humanitarian regulation as a function of government – a way of being
governmental – was as intrinsic to the project of Britain’s colonization
of other lands as it was to the simultaneous emergence of a modern
state system in Europe. As Fassin points out, humanitarianism is
a “mode of government that concerns the victims of poverty, home-
lessness, unemployment, and exile, as well as of disasters, famines,
epidemics, and wars – in short, every situation characterized by
precariousness.”8 The acquisition of an expanded settler empire pro-
duced such precariousness in multiple, and previously relatively dis-
connected contexts, for all of which British governing men were now
responsible. I contend here that humanitarianism arose, at least within
the British Empire, in part as a counter-revolutionary practice of gov-
ernance, precisely in order to defuse the radical potential of human
rights to destabilize that empire.

Telling the story of two men who sought to govern the British Empire
in different “humanitarian” registers helps us to delineate these ten-
sions, and also to chart the longer history of dynamism within humani-
tarian governance. Both George Arthur and George Grey were
proponents of humanitarian governance. The former developed what
we might call a paternalistic register culminating in policies of
Protection, and the latter an eliminationist one aimed at “amalgama-
tion.” Yet both were engaged in a project to fend off the radical trans-
formation latent in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century
idea of human rights. This was a project that altered quite fundamen-
tally during the course even of these two men’s careers. George Arthur
governed a diverse array of colonies between the 1810s and 1840s, while
George Grey governed the settler colonies of South Australia, New
Zealand, and the Cape Colony from the 1840s to the 1860s. Arthur
was a pioneer of a form of humanitarian colonial governance rooted in
the amelioration of slavery and translated into Protection for Indigenous
peoples. Grey helped to reshape humanitarian governance as assimila-
tion, or the eradication of difference, otherwise known to settler colonial
historians as the attempted cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples.
The two men elaborated quite different styles, or registers to use
Fassin’s term, of humanitarian governance, the former apparently pre-
mised upon a tolerance of difference and a desire to preserve community
autonomy, the latter a form of social engineering designed to erase
distinct communities and difference. Both were counter-revolutionary,
and counter-human rights strategies, articulated by different individuals
for different times and in different contexts.

George Arthur: From Amelioration to Protection

In 1837, Lt. Governor George Arthur, at the time governor of Upper
Canada, wrote that the British government must raise in Canada
a race of Englishmen with the same Government, the same feelings, and the same
love of freedom that fills our bosoms; and here we may by their assistance oppose
the most effectual barrier to the demon of democracy, which is threatening all
civilized Governments.9
For Arthur, freedom and democracy were antithetical concepts. Freedom
consisted in being governed by those most qualified to exercise authority.
Individuals were best protected from want, strife, and oppression by those
most fitted to govern by education and upbringing. Democracy brings
with it rule of the mob. It consists of individuals being trampled upon by
political zealots. Within an increasingly global Anglosphere, the sincere

pursuit of humanitarian objectives by imperial administrators such as

Arthur was, in part, an attempt to head off the revolutionary potential
of a human rights discourse that was seen to lay behind the American,
French, and Haitian Revolutions and their dangerous notion of demo-
cratic governance. Humanitarian governance would help maintain an
established regime centered on aristocracy, Church, and Crown.
By the time Arthur wrote of the contrast between British freedom and
American democracy, he had fought in the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic Wars and been operating in colonial governance for some
thirty years, in Jamaica, Honduras, and Van Diemen’s Land. Recently
posted to Upper Canada (Ontario), he had inherited a potentially revolu-
tionary situation, with American Patriots or Hunters Lodges crossing into
British Canada to stir up rebellion among disloyal colonists and spread
revolt from Lower Canada (Quebec). It was in this context that Arthur
made his most explicit delineation between freedom and democracy. Like
so many other British imperial administrators, Arthur’s formative years
had been shaped by anti-revolutionary warfare. Along with most of his
peers, he saw the amelioration of slavery as a prophylactic response to the
revolutionary potential of the enslaved after the Haitian Revolution; the
protection of Indigenous peoples as a strategy to counter anarchy in the
settler colonies, and the genesis of human rights discourse in France and
the United States as heralding revolutionary terror elsewhere.10
Throughout Arthur’s and other British colonial officials’ careers, huma-
nitarian “amelioration” of certain peoples’ conditions of life was an anti-
dote to the revolutionary potential of human rights. Humanitarian forms
of governance were the way in which both enslaved peoples and settlers
(equally liable to rebellion in Arthur’s experience) would be incorporated
as free and loyal colonial subjects.
Arthur’s career in the military began at a critical time for the shaping of
modern forms of governmentality in Europe and in colonial sites.11 In the
wake of the American Revolution, a modern British state was being
created as a direct rival and conservative counterpart to first the French
Revolutionary and then the Napoleonic state, through “fiscal-militarism,”
as a tax raising and spending civil bureaucracy was brought into alignment
with military discipline and expansion.12 Like so many of his generation of
colonial officials Arthur first came to the attention of the British governing
elite as a result of his distinguished conduct as a young soldier. He fought
bravely in the skirmishes leading up to the Battle of Maida in southern Italy,
the attempted occupation of Alexandria, and the disastrous Walcheren
campaign.13 Lieutenant-General Don, who assumed command of the
survivors from Walcheren, offered Arthur a post as aide-de-camp in the
military governance of Jersey in 1810 as a direct result of his distinguished

service. Here, in close proximity to France itself, Arthur encountered the

difficulties of governing in the face not only of invasion fears but also of
radical critics within the civilian population. In 1779, popular agitation had
forced the autocratic governor of the island to allow the election of magis-
trates on a broad franchise. Don complained about the “very great diffi-
culty in carrying out the Executive business” in the face of “a growing spirit
of insurbordination” from those magistrates who opposed him, and indeed
resolutions opposing control of the island by the British parliament.14
Arthur was struck, apparently for the first, but certainly not the last time,
by the necessity for those who govern to be unimpeded by dangerous
democratic notions.
Arthur’s was a humanism founded on the rights of subjects, rather than
of citizens, let alone those of “man” as a universal entity.15 Arthur’s
understanding, developed through his relationship with Don, was that
those who were best positioned to govern should be able to do so without
interference from subjects who could not possibly comprehend the range
of factors influencing any well-informed and reasoned decision. It was
through his experience of military command that he came to straddle the
transition from autocratic military governance to reforming, humanitar-
ian-inclined intervention in colonial societies. Arthur’s support for Don
allowed him to take up a vacant majority in the 7th West India Regiment
in 1812. This had been founded as a predominantly black corps in 1795
in response to the high mortality among British officers in the Antilles. By
the time Arthur arrived in Jamaica the regiment had served with distinc-
tion against French units similarly recruited among enslaved populations
in the Caribbean. During his eighteenth months as assistant quarter-
master-general and acting paymaster-general in Jamaica, Arthur
expressed himself “a perfect Wilberforce as to slavery,” and objected to
planters’ restrictions on preaching to slaves.16 He also resented planters’
attacks on his soldiers’ freedom to operate outside the plantation econ-
omy. In Jamaica, Arthur became a more devout and convinced evangeli-
cal, “understanding,” as he put it, “what Gospel really was in truth and
power.”17 Rather than his evangelicalism predisposing him to oppose
slavery, in Arthur’s case it was the witnessing of slavery that made him
more evangelical. It was also perfectly consistent for Arthur to become
more autocratic at the same time. His exposure to planters made Arthur
just as wary of “respectable” and powerful settlers who opposed humane
interference in their affairs, as he was of radical agitators.18
The end of the Napoleonic War closed down opportunities for
advancement in the army. Within a month of his wedding Arthur reluc-
tantly accepted the less than glamorous vacant post of superintendent and
commandant (as lieutenant colonel) at Belize, the capital town of a small

British commercial settlement on the Bay of Honduras. There, his evan-

gelicalism took a more serious turn. Honduras was not, technically
a British colony, but rather a settlement of some 150 British settlers,
mostly mahogany cutters and merchants, 900 “free blacks” and 3,000
enslaved people tolerated on Spanish colonial territory. Until 1820
Arthur had believed settlers’ representations concerning the relative
“mildness” of slaves’ conditions in the interior, beyond Belize. A slave
revolt in that year, however, saw him travel inland encountering what he
described as “very unnecessary harshness,” for the first time.19 Having
previously reasoned that there was no need for them, Arthur now became
determined to apply the ameliorative measures that Colonial Office policy
demanded, as a result of the pressure of the anti-slavery lobby, in the rest
of the Caribbean.20
Protectors of slaves were progressively appointed to all the Caribbean
Crown colonies starting with the former Spanish Trinidad. Their
appointments speeded up after the Haitian Revolution, to preempt the
spread of revolt to British colonies. Their role was to enforce the new
ameliorative codes limiting work hours and punishments, and to investi-
gate enslaved people’s complaints against masters who breached them.
Significantly, the protectors were also intended to help prepare enslaved
people for their freedom by encouraging their Christianization and
“civilization.”21 This was a project which Arthur anticipated and pursued
vigorously in Honduras. It represented the convergence of his evangelical
awakening, his distrust of both privileged and radical settlers “who have
ever been unceasingly troublesome and impatient of the most ordinary
interference of the Crown,” and his insistence on the primacy of church
and state in the face of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic
threat.22 The most concrete realization of this project included the appli-
cation in Honduras of Jamaican law so that enslaved people had some
protection from the arbitrary punishment of masters, and the freeing of
descendants of Mosquito Coast “Indians” who had been enslaved illeg-
ally by settler parties.23
Arthur’s attempted prosecution of the British timber cutters and mer-
chants responsible for keeping these “Indians” in captivity was evidence
of his determination to enforce a discourse of humane governance. The
fierce opposition that Arthur encountered when pursuing amelioration in
Honduras affected his health, and he had to return to England on leave in
1822. While the settlers sent an agent to orchestrate legal proceedings
against him in London and bar his return to the settlement, he had to
defend his actions in a voluminous correspondence with the Colonial
Office.24 With the approval of the Colonial Office, Arthur had burnt his
bridges with the settlers of Honduras and so he was offered the newly

vacant post of lieutenant governor of Van Diemen’s Land. There, he

would be confronted by a new challenge for humanitarian governance:
the resistance of a still independent, sovereign people to the colonization
of their land, rather than the plight of an enslaved population.
Arthur began, nonetheless, by taking the notion of “amelioration,”
with its policies of individual and collective reformation of settler and
slave subjectivities, with him to the penal settlement of Van Diemen’s
Land in 1824. There, at first, he attempted to apply the project again, to
both convicts and Aboriginal people. He wrote to the leading anti-slavery
campaigner in London, Thomas Fowell Buxton, that religious instruc-
tion would supply the convicts “with an inward regulator,” which was
“ten times more effectual in every case . . . than all the fear and alarm that
can be exerted from without,” and produced two pamphlets for circula-
tion in the colony and in Britain elaborating upon proper measures for the
rehabilitation of transportees.25 But while he admitted privately that he
felt about a quarter of all transportees were “irreclaimable,” he would not
allow such of the Aboriginal inhabitants of the island.26 Arthur’s response
to the Aboriginal resistance that he was about to encounter, “was more
measured and gradual than his ruthless and decisive crushing of the
bushranging gangs that roamed the colony.”27 One of Arthur’s first acts
in the colony to issue a proclamation affording Aborigines equal rights to
settlers and promising “the same punishment as though committed on
the person or property of any settlers” to those who harmed them.28 Its
effect was soon nullified by the imperative for colonial governance to
facilitate British emigrant settlement.
The year before Arthur arrived, Samuel Guy noted that a new settler “will
now have some difficulty in obtaining good land except he gets into the
infrequent parts of the colony – among the wild natives.”29 Although only
132,500 acres had been awarded to emancipists (former convicts, now free
to settle in the colony) and free settlers between 1804 and 1822, within
seven years of Arthur’s arrival, in accordance with instructions from the
Colonial Office, he had overseen the allocation of a further 1,899,332
acres.30 The central Aboriginal groups responded by initiating a guerilla
war. Arthur continued to dispose of land to the Van Diemen’s Land
Company and settlers regardless of Aboriginal occupation and usage, but
encouraged a small settlement of Aboriginal people on Bruny Island near
Hobart as a humanitarian experiment to see if they could be redeemed and
“reclaimed” for Christianity within a new, colonial environment. When
Arthur advertised among the Hobart settlers for a superintendent of the
Bruny Island settlement, the successful applicant was George Augustus
Robinson, a former builder from the East End of London. Robinson
wrote that he was “fully persuaded that the plan which your Excellency

has devised is the only one whereby the aborigines of this territory can be
ameliorated.”31 Robinson’s and Arthur’s trajectories first became entwined
as a result of this language of amelioration, of which Arthur had encoun-
tered relatively little since his arrival among the Van Diemen’s Land settlers.
By the late 1820s settlers outnumbered Aborigines on the island by
about twenty to one and significant numbers of them backed a campaign
of Aboriginal “extermination” in the face of continued and well-organized
resistance.32 A settler newspaper presented Arthur with an ultimatum: if
the Aborigines were not removed quickly, “they will be hunted down like
wild beasts and destroyed” (Colonial Times 1826). Despite recurrent por-
trayals of him in much of the Australian historiography as a genocidally
inclined imperial autocrat, Arthur was deeply affected, writing to the
Colonial secretary that the violence “wholly engrosses and fills my mind
with painful anxiety.”33 He declared martial law in 1828 in an attempt, as
he portrayed it, to take the conflict out of the hands of settlers and into
those of the state. But the move effectively licensed settlers to continue
exterminatory raids on Aboriginal bands.34 Arthur’s attempt to use settler
militias and the regular army to round up the remaining tribes of the central
island so that they could be held in “benevolent captivity” on reserve land
failed to bring the warfare to a conclusion. His naïve calls for settlers to treat
Aboriginal resisters with humanity were denounced by the settler press as
arising from “false notions of pity.”35
Robinson, in the meantime, had been able to embark on an alter-
native plan that he called his conciliatory, or “friendly” mission. He
would employ the Aboriginal people that he had first come to know
on Bruny Island to travel with him on various expeditions across parts
of Van Diemen’s Land where independent tribes were holding out,
and embark upon negotiations with them. These negotiations would
result in their surrender and removal to a new settlement on Flinders
Island.36 Through Robinson, Arthur found a way to bridge the crucial
differences between an established discourse of amelioration, based on
the protection and reform of captive, enslaved people, and the con-
ciliation and protection of a defiant Indigenous population. Even as all
of the remaining Aboriginal people on the island were finally rounded
up and exiled, the deterritorialization of amelioration in Van
Diemen’s Land and its reterritorialization as protection provided sal-
vation for Arthur’s reputation as a humanitarian governor. Arthur was
sincere when he told the colonial secretary in London that
it cannot hereafter be said that [the Aboriginal people] were torn from their
kindred and friends . . . No! their removal has been for their benefit, and in almost
every instance with their own free will and consent. They have been removed from

danger, and placed in safety in a suitable asylum . . . where they are brought under
moral and religious inculcation.37
Robinson himself wrote, “I trust the time is not far distant when the same
humane policy will be adopted towards the aboriginal inhabitants of every
colony throughout the British empire.”38 Thus would Indigenous peoples
become the nineteenth-century equivalent of refugee camp inhabitants
within the settler colonies.39 On Flinders Island itself, the 200 Aboriginal
people who were the subjects of this “humane policy” resisted the pro-
gram of schooling and agricultural training to which they were intermit-
tently and inconsistently subjected. They continued to protest about their
removal from customary resources and restricted mobility as malnour-
ishment and susceptibility to disease diminished their numbers. In 1847,
the remaining forty-seven were ﬁnally allowed to return to the Oyster Bay
area of the Tasmanian mainland.40
Even while these “beneﬁciaries” of Robinson’s plan ceased to exist as
a viable community, Arthur himself was able to realize Robinson’s vision
for the wider adoption of his policy. He did so primarily through his
connection with Thomas Fowell Buxton, whom the ailing William
Wilberforce asked to take over the campaign to emancipate the enslaved
in Britain’s colonies. Arthur had met Buxton in London before sailing for
Van Diemen’s Land and maintained the connection through letters
thereafter. As member of parliament for Weymouth, Buxton devoted
much of his considerable energy to the pursuit of emancipation in the
Caribbean. But he also maintained his own prior reformist interests.
Giving a characteristic snapshot of the relationship between his domestic
and overseas humanitarian concerns in 1823 he wrote:
How can I promote the welfare of others? In private, by . . . sparing on my own
pleasure and expending on God’s service. In public, by attending to the Slave
Trade, Slavery, Indian widows burning themselves, the completion of those
objects which have made some advance, viz. Criminal Law, Prisons, and Police.41

By 1835, Buxton was planning for a House of Commons Select

Committee to investigate the injustices that settler colonization was occa-
sioning throughout the Empire. He argued that “Great Britain has, in
former times, countenanced evils of great magnitude, – slavery and the
Slave Trade; but for these she has made some atonement . . . An evil
remains very similar in character, and not altogether unﬁt to be compared
with them in the amount of misery it produces. The oppression of the
natives of barbarous countries is a practice which pleads no claim to
indulgence.”42 Arthur returned to Plymouth in March 1837 and between
then and December, when he received his next posting, he was able to talk
directly with both Buxton and the Colonial Secretary Lord Glenelg about

the measures needed to translate anti-slavery discourse into policies for

the protection of Indigenous peoples.
Arthur’s intimate reflections on British atrocities in Van Diemen’s
Land matched precisely the discourse of Buxton’s committee. This too
held that British colonization was just in principle but had been perverted
in practice by particular British settlers.43 That exteriorization and the
projection of blame that it entailed necessitated a moral reformist com-
mitment and it was this which led Arthur to urge for the establishment of
Protectorates of Aborigines in other contemporary spaces of settler vio-
lence and dispossession. It was settlers, not the colonial government, who
had created the destruction of Indigenous society, and it was govern-
ment’s task to protect Indigenous peoples from them throughout the
process of colonization. Arthur insisted on the need for a new, humani-
tarian branch of colonial government. The idea of these Protectorates was
written into the Aborigines Committee’s recommendations and Glenelg
was happy to hand over the process of determining principles and per-
sonnel for a New South Wales Protectorate to Arthur himself. By
July 1837, he was proposing that Robinson be appointed chief protector,
and by December he had chosen his four assistants.44 I will return to the
Port Phillip Protectorate later.
Arthur’s next experience of governance was in North America, where
we encountered him in 1837. It brought to prominence once more those
antipathies to radicalism and democracy that Arthur had fashioned dur-
ing his experiences of fighting the French. As soon as he arrived in Upper
Canada, Arthur inherited the difficulty of deciding the fate of the con-
victed rebels from an abortive 1837 uprising that had been directed
against the colony’s ruling oligarchy and was loosely connected to the
more serious resistance of French Canadians in neighboring Lower
Canada.45 The rebel leaders Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews had
already received capital sentences and Arthur had to decide whether to
proceed with their executions and what to do with the remaining captured
rebels and American “patriots,” who had engaged in cross-border raids in
support of them. Whichever course he took would alienate one settler
faction or another. Loyalist settlers, many of them having resettled from
the United States after the revolution, demanded the severest possible
penalties for all those who had engaged in acts of rebellion, while refor-
mers, among them “respectable” recent British emigrants, called for
clemency. Arthur compromised. He had the sentences on Lount and
Matthews carried out, while “leniently” transporting the ringleaders
among the other convicted rebels back the way he had come, as convicts
to Van Diemen’s Land. Arthur wanted more severe punishment of the
cross-border raiders from the United States than his Legislative Council,

writing “I have caused 17 of the Rufﬁans who invaded the province to be

executed which has damped the courage of the Patriots . . . They are the
most Vain people in the world, and certainly believed that we did not dare
to hang an American citizen.”46 Arthur’s tenure in Upper Canada was
short lived as the colony was soon confederated with Lower Canada
under revised structures of government intended to prevent
a recurrence of settler rebellion. In the meantime, Arthur’s authoritarian
conservatism, expectations of discipline, self-restraint and perseverance,
and dedication to the relief of suffering were a paradoxical mix that
characterized the particular kind of humanitarian governmental doctrine
that Indigenous peoples in certain parts of the British Empire ﬁrst
encountered.

George Grey: From Protection to Amalgamation

While Arthur helped develop a discourse of Protection, entailing the
safeguarding of Aboriginal people on reserves akin to the humanitarian
camps of today, George Grey pioneered a quite different form of huma-
nitarian governance – one that respected the cultural difference of its
“beneficiaries” far less. Grey’s governmental practices, and his represen-
tations of them, proceeded from the notion that Arthur’s Protection had
failed its intended beneficiaries. While it emphasized their ultimate “civi-
lization” and integration with settler communities, Protection entailed
preserving Indigenous communities’ access to land and treating with
them, to a certain extent as if they were still sovereign peoples within
specific locales. Grey, however, established the terms upon which cultural
genocide could be posited as the only humane alternative to racial exter-
mination. Grey’s promotion of “amalgamation” in place of an otherwise
inevitable physical destruction went on to influence the highest levels of
colonial administration. Amalgamation entailed both the elimination of
Indigenous society and the transfer of its territory on the one hand, and
the duty of care to Indigenous individuals newly assimilated into settler
societies on the other hand. On behalf of the British Empire as a whole,
Grey helped to reconcile “humanitarian” governance with settler
colonialism.
Grey, who governed the colonies of South Australia, Aotearoa/New
Zealand, the Cape Colony, and Aotearoa/New Zealand again between
1841 and 1868, remains one of the most enigmatic of British imperial
figures. His biographer noted that “he has been denounced as an autocrat
and a Conservative and hailed as a great Liberal and a radical reformer”;
portrayed as “an ambitious self-seeker who humbugged the authorities by
professions of philanthropy” and “a genuine humanitarian pursuing high

ideals by dubious methods which exposed him to misinterpretation.”47 In

1830, commissioned as an ensign, Grey had been posted to Ireland,
where he served for three or four years. In most biographical narratives,
Grey’s uncomfortable experiences there persuaded him of the necessity
for a liberal, humane empire. Although instructed to counter an orga-
nized boycott of tithes, he could not help himself being inspired by Daniel
O’Connell’s nationalist oratory. Rather than being the cause of the con-
flict between his loyalty and his sympathy, however, the British Empire
offered Grey a resolution to it. “Appalled by the poverty of the Irish
people . . . He reached the conclusion that emigration was the solution
to Ireland’s ills: new nations should be established, in lands of opportu-
nity for the poor.”48 Although Grey left Ireland after three years to return
to Sandhurst for further military training, he made it seem in later
accounts, reproduced by subsequent biographers, as though the experi-
ence of service there had so radicalized him that he chose to leave the army
and pursue a career as a colonial explorer, in order to help realize his
vision of benevolent imperial expansion in new lands.49 After exploring in
Western Australia, Grey acted briefly as magistrate in Albany. He used his
few months in office there to very good effect in the promotion of his
career in Britain. Not only did he publish his exploratory journal and
a vocabulary of Aboriginal languages, but also appended to his journal
a pamphlet entitled “Report on the Best Means of Promoting the
Civilization of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of Australia,” which outlined
a scheme for the humane governance of Aboriginal people undergoing
settler colonization.50
Grey promoted his report assiduously, via James Stephen, permanent
under-secretary at the Colonial Office in London, who enclosed it with
the instructions sent to James Hobson for his first lieutenant governor-
ship of New Zealand, as a potential model for humane governance of the
Mā ori. It was published in Parliamentary Papers and republished in
periodicals in Britain and the Australian colonies. As Damon Salesa
notes, the report’s “strength was that it tied together many diverse
approaches to which the Colonial Office was already sympathetic, with
a few detailed touches that were Grey’s own.” Nevertheless its effect
was, in the words of Colonial Secretary Lord John Russell, to render
Grey “a man destined to reclaim an aboriginal race and amalgamate
them with civilization.”51 The contact that he had made with James
Stephen enabled Grey to embark upon the governorship of South
Australia, aged only 28, after his return to England, and it was there
that he acquired particular favor with the Colonial Office for reversing
the colony’s slide into insolvency and complete dependence on the
British exchequer.

Grey’s subsequent inﬂuence within humanitarian governing circles was

as much due to his reputation for ethnographic expertise acquired during
his Western Australian exploratory adventure, as it was to his exercise of
political economy as a governor. His direct experience of Aboriginal
society and culture enabled him to join in debates about the likely future
under Arthur’s protectionist form of governance. And indeed it was the
colony which Arthur had governed – Van Diemen’s Land – which por-
tended the fate that many believed lay in store not only for Australia’s
Aboriginal people, but for Indigenous peoples more generally. The
almost complete elimination of the Tasmanian Aborigines – at least
those of unmediated Aboriginal descent living on the main island – was
reinforcing a new understanding in Europe that human extinction, like
that of certain species of animals – could be a “natural,” if unfortunate,
process. Aboriginal “eradication” in Tasmania came to be understood as
an inevitable consequence of the spread of a more advanced people and
civilization – the first empirical example of a supposedly dying race.52 It
was this understanding which gave rise to the origins of ethnography as
a project of salvage.53 Before the British Association for the Advancement
of Science (BAAS) in 1839, James Cowles Prichard outlined the tone for
the new discipline:
Wherever Europeans have settled, their arrival has been the harbinger of extermina-
tion to the native tribes . . . Now, as the progress of colonization is so much extended
of late years, and the obstacle of distance and physical difficulties are so much
overcome, it may be calculated that these calamities . . . are to be accelerated in
their progress; and it may happen that, in the course of another century, the
aboriginal nations of most parts of the world will have ceased entirely to exist. In
the meantime, if Christian nations think it not their duty to interpose and save the
numerous tribes of their own species from utter extermination, it is of the greatest
importance . . . to obtain much more extensive information than we now possess of
their physical and moral characters . . . How can this be obtained when so many
tribes shall have become extinct, and their thoughts shall have perished with them?54
If the Indigenous peoples of Britain’s settler colonies (and of the United
States’ proliferating western territories) were dying out, then it was clear
that the project of official Protection had failed. One of the key questions
for colonial governors during the later 1840s and 1850s, then, was how to
perpetuate the legacy of humanitarian colonial governance, inherited
from the emancipationist, evangelical 1830s and early 1840s. George
Grey provided perhaps the most persuasive and explicit rationalization
of the dilemma and answer to this problem. The Colonial Office had
Grey’s report from Western Australia published and circulated the year
before Prichard’s explicit call for a salvage ethnography. Grey himself
would soon become one of the most influential contributors to that

project and at the same time, one of the most powerful figures in the
governance of empire.
Grey began his report by noting that all previous attempts to civilize
Aboriginal people in the Australian colonies had failed. This, he argued,
was because colonial policies were founded on the protective principle
that, until such time as Aboriginal people proved amenable to British
laws, they should be allowed to exercise “their own customs upon them-
selves.” While originating in the “Philanthropic motives” that were man-
ifested in the Protectorates, such a position betrayed an ignorance of the
real nature of these customs and of their effects upon the individuals
subjected to them. Australia’s Aboriginal people, as all good humanitar-
ians knew, were “as apt and intelligent as any other race of men,” but as
long as their code of laws prevailed, it would be impossible for them ever
to “emerge from a Savage state.” Even a highly endowed, civilized race,
Grey asserted, would quickly be reduced once more to savagery if such
laws were ever to be imposed upon them.55 The only solution was to
insist, “from the moment the Aborigines of this Country are declared
British subjects,” that “they are taught that the British laws are to super-
sede their own.” Far from being an aggressive assertion of sovereignty by
right of conquest, this was “the course of true humanity.” Individual
Indigenous people persuaded of the benefits of British civilization might
thus have an escape route from imprisoning and retarding customs. In
order to exemplify, Grey invoked the kind of figure upon which anti-
slavery and evangelical humanitarian narratives had centered in their
attempts to garner compassion at a distance, writing of Aboriginal “girls
who have been betrothed in their infancy, and who, on approaching years
of puberty, have been compelled by their husbands to join them” in the
bush. Such “barbarous laws” would “destroy and overturn” any strides
made by Aboriginal individuals.56
Grey’s ethnographic knowledge acquired a status among men and
women of science because of his prolific correspondence with figures
such as Thomas Hodgkin, Charles Darwin, and Florence Nightingale.
Grey’s early Aboriginal vocabularies were just the beginning of a prolific
publishing career in and on Aboriginal Australians, Native Americans,
and Mā ori.57 As governor in the Cape Colony he was responsible for
amassing the collection that became the South African Library in Cape
Town, and for the appointment of the librarian Willhelm Bleek, who
coined the term “Bantu” for southern Africa’s pastoralist African
peoples.58 Stocking describes Grey as “one of the more perceptive ethno-
graphers of his day and author of some of the most influential ethno-
graphic work of the century.”59 By contributing to governmental and
scientific assemblages from the late 1830s, Grey helped to establish that

any policies which aimed to do more than just smooth the pillow of
inevitably dying Indigenous races could be considered a worthy humani-
tarian intervention. As such he was a participant in humanitarian net-
works as much as he was in governmental and scientific ones. He
persuaded a large trans-imperial constituency that amalgamation was
not simply an expedient governmental exercise, but the only humane
alternative to extermination, and thus the only means of exercising prac-
tical rather than merely sentimental humanitarianism. “As individuals
and as a body, the [humanitarian Aborigines’ Protection Society] . . .
eulogized Grey’s benevolence and ‘sound policy towards the
natives’.”60 Throughout, Grey’s ethnography, his humanitarianism and
his governmentality were inseparable projects, empowered through his
overlapping networks of correspondents.
In the Cape Colony, Grey’s governorship coincided with (and helped
to exacerbate) an existential crisis among those Xhosa polities bordering
the colony. Following sequential losses of grazing land, successive
attempts to regain it militarily (each of which had been punished with
the confiscation of more land), and the spread of lung sickness further
raising mortality among their cattle, from 1856 tens of thousands of
Xhosa placed desperate faith in Nongqawuse, a 15-year-old girl’s pro-
phecies. She predicted that the sacrificial slaughter of remaining cattle
would prompt the ancestors to arise and sweep the British away from the
land once and for all. Grey capitalized on the ensuing catastrophe, known
as the Great Xhosa Cattle Killing, in 1857, in which some 30,000 people
starved the death. He reduced surviving Xhosa to a dependence on work
for welfare programs, employing them in building roads which would
enable more effective crushing of future resistance to colonial
expansion.61 Yet his humanitarianism remained unquestioned. In 1863
after his “successes” in the Cape, the famous missionary-explorer David
Livingstone told him that “a word from you” on the need to act against
the African slave trade, “is ever valuable and exhilarating.”62
Among Grey’s promoters was Herman Merivale, professor of political
economy at Oxford from 1837 to 1842 and then, by virtue of his pub-
lished “Lectures on Colonization and Colonies,” assistant and then per-
manent under-secretary for the colonies at the Colonial Office. Merivale’s
lectures were cited by Marx in Capital as well as being a great influence on
Trollope and, of course, in the exercise of imperial administration on
a daily basis.63 Merivale saw Grey as his informant on Indigenous peoples
and the best ways of administering them within an empire which took
pride in its anti-slavery tradition. For him, Grey was “an observer who has
studied with no common diligence and success the characteristics of the
natives.”64 In particular, it was Grey’s posited alternative futures for

Indigenous peoples that Merivale helped to disseminate and implement.

“What is the ultimate destiny of those races whose interests we are now
discovering?” he asked. The answer was that “There are only three alter-
natives which imagination can itself suggest.” The first was a process by
now becoming widely accepted as probably inevitable: “The extermina-
tion of native races.” The second was the outcome toward which existing
policies of Protection, pioneered by George Arthur, were aimed: “Their
civilization, complete or partial by retaining them, as insulated bodies of
men, carefully removed, during the civilizing process, from the injury of
European contact.” The third was Grey’s particular innovation: “Their
amalgamation with the colonists.” Merivale rationalized Grey’s choice:
Those who hold the opinion that the first is inevitable, are happily relieved from the
trouble of all these considerations. Their only object must be to ensure that the
inevitable end be not precipitated by cruelty or injustice. The second alternative
I cannot but believe to be impossible . . . . Instruction in segregated communities is
only to be carried on under the defence of laws hedging them in from all foreign
intercourse with a strictness impracticable in the present state of the world . . . long
before the seeds of civilization have made any effectual shoot, the little nursery is
surrounded by the advance of the European population; the demand for the land of
the natives become urgent and irresistible, and pupils and instructors are driven out
into the wilderness to commence their work again. There remains only the third
alternative; that of amalgamation. And this I am most anxious to impress upon your
minds, because I firmly believe it to be the very keystone, the leading principle of all
sound theory on the subject – that native races must in every instance either perish,
or be amalgamated with the general [settler] population of their country.65

Merivale added a footnote: amalgamation had

been carried out with more success in South Africa than in any other British
possession . . . on the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony (especially since the
strange collapse of the Caffre [Xhosa] power, under the inﬂuence of scarcity and
superstition in 1857–1858), great numbers of natives appear to have taken volun-
tary service under the settlers, and to have performed it with reasonable
steadiness . . . the experiment was superintended by one of those men who seem
to possess the rare faculty of entering into the savage mind, and becoming
themselves intelligible to it, the governor, Sir George Grey.66
Grey’s own, and others’ ethnography had, by the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, established a very low threshold for what qualiﬁed as humane
governmental intervention in settler colonial societies: the maintenance
of “bare life” at an atomized individual, rather than a social scale.67 In
offering a program for Indigenous peoples’ future welfare as assimilated
subjects, Grey seemed to offer more than this. He offered emigrant and
metropolitan Britons a liberal empire founded on violent dispossession
and cultural genocide without culpability for the physical eradication of

races. The combination of Grey’s geographical mobility and his expres-

sive adroitness, facilitated by the enhanced communications and trans-
port networks of a growing empire, enabled him especially to provide
Britons with a narrative through which they could legitimate
a “humanitarian” empire without biological determinism or the extremes
of scientiﬁc racism, and certainly without the specter of revolutionary
human rights for colonized subjects.68

Conclusion

The Career of Humanitarian Governance

Michael Barnett has written that “[t]he anti-slavery movement is the only
major historical event of the nineteenth century that is claimed by both
human rights and humanitarian scholars as one of their own. On what
grounds? Is this where humanity coalesced? What does this tell us about
human rights and humanitarianism?”69 The anti-slavery movement is
indeed often claimed as a point of origin both for modern humanitarian-
ism and for a discourse of human rights. But in the light of an analysis of
Arthur’s and Grey’s careers across a large expanse of the globe, we need to
be more precise about the routines, techniques, and patterns that it did
pioneer, and those for which it cannot possibly be held responsible.
Evangelical anti-slavery activists in Britain and the United States, in
combination with those who resisted slavery in the British Caribbean
itself, can be said to have forged a certain kind of long-distance mobiliza-
tion. In the context of the moral panic prompted by the loss of the thirteen
colonies, the French and the Haitian Revolutions, they engendered trans-
atlantic networks through which Britons “at home” could be made to feel
responsible for the plight of distant, enslaved strangers with whom they
would never have personal contact or familiarity. They pioneered the use
of campaigning representations of passive, harmless recipients supplicat-
ing the help of more privileged Westerners. It was the period of ameliora-
tion (1806–1830s) in which something that we might recognize as
humanitarian benevolence was inscribed into governmentality.70 With
no more slave “imports” after the 1807 abolition of the slave trade,
Britain’s slave-holding colonies were forced to govern their existing slaves
in ways that complied with the expressions of concern that had resulted in
abolition. Ameliorative codes, enacted by colonial governments along
guidelines supplied by the Colonial Ofﬁce in London, were the answer.
But while amelioration brought what we might identify as humanitarian
concern into the “art of government,” this was still a project delimited by
a primarily transatlantic spatial axis.

Between the early 1830s and the 1860s, what benevolent intent there
was behind ameliorative legislation was translated into the colonization of
new lands across a far more spatially extensive terrain. It was the new
humanitarian governmental register of Protection which marked the first
globalization of humanitarian governmentality. The transition from slavery
to freedom in the Caribbean proceeded simultaneously with the mass
emigration of British settlers to dispossess Indigenous peoples in North
America, Australasia, and Southern Africa. The same individuals and
families that had mobilized against slavery now turned their attention to
the plight of Indigenous peoples facing invasion. Amelioration in the
Caribbean was translated, not least through Arthur’s capacity, into
Protection, as Protectors of Aborigines were sent to certain colonies and
officials elsewhere instructed to protect the lives, and preserve certain
landholdings of, Indigenous peoples. On these landholdings they could
maintain certain of their own customs and practices until such time as they
were ready to be subjected to the same laws as the settlers around them.
Protection was the dominant register of imperial humanitarian govern-
ance for some thirty years, but by the mid-nineteenth century, the contra-
diction between colonization by hundreds of thousands of British
emigrants and the protection of Indigenous difference and landholding
was acute in all of the settler colonies. Grey utilized the expectation that
Indigenous peoples were inexorably dying out when confronted by
a superior civilization – an expectation engendered through the networks
of both scientists and humanitarians – to bolster his own credentials as
one of their most valuable ethnographic chroniclers. But his more striking
innovation was to establish the supposition that any government which
did more than simply making their extinction as painless as possible was
perpetuating humanitarian governance beyond the initial, now failed,
period of Protection. Grey’s particular register of governmentality was
founded not only upon the survival, but also upon the redemptive devel-
opment of Indigenous individuals through their amalgamation with set-
tlers. Thanks to his benign, assimilationist interventions, Grey and others
could claim, individuals of Indigenous descent, released from the failed
“nurseries” of their own land holdings, and thus from territory, would
survive the death of the cultures that had circumscribed previous genera-
tions. As Merivale concluded, “amalgamation, by some means or other, is
the only possible Euthanasia of savage communities.”71
However, when we shift perspective and try to conceive of engagements
with humanitarian governance from its intended beneficiaries’ point of
view, we see less an opportunity to change for the better, and more one to
manipulate certain organs of the state so as at least to preserve a worldview
intact, until such time as it can acquire its own material vitality and

sovereignty once more. Here, perhaps, is where the revolutionary potential

of human rights discourse stands most starkly at odds with humanitarian
governmental practice. Neither Grey nor his contemporaries’ articulation of
humanitarianism ever included the word “rights.” Indeed the word was
anathema throughout this period, both to British imperial officials and to
most humanitarian campaigners. It was associated with the American and
French Revolutions which imperial officials, mainly drawn from the mili-
tary, had fought directly against, and with the Haitian Revolution, which
was itself blamed in part on rights fervor in France. When revolutionary
sympathizers spoke of the “Rights of Man,” British officials saw only the
threats to individual liberty promised by the rule of the “mob.” As Moyn
points out, “In the recent search for a usable past . . . the revolutionary
origins of rights have been domesticated.”72 Moyn’s argument is that the
rights of the early nineteenth century have become narrowly focused on
issues such as torture at the expense of material equalities and more struc-
tural injustices.73 Taking the sting out of rights is not just a contemporary
project though. It was why humanitarian governance was globalized,
through different registers of protection and amalgamation, paternalism
and elimination, by people like Arthur and Grey in the first place.
There is no linear path from an empire engaged in dispossession to the
administrators of humanitarian camps for displaced people today. Nor is
there any direct genealogy linking Indigenous peoples facing colonization
in the nineteenth century to refugees dispossessed by a multitude of
warring parties today. We should be wary of learning lessons from direct
comparisons between discrete historical configurations, especially with
no analysis of the intervening transitions. One such key transition was the
dissolution of the imperial forms of governance within which men like
Arthur and Grey pursued their careers. The post-imperial world, with
new delineations of sovereignty and statehood saw the emergence of
humanitarian intervention, which, as Fabian Klose argues in this volume,
was premised to a great extent upon a convergence of both humanitarian
and human rights ideas. It is tempting to ascribe some of the ambivalence
of the doctrine and its implementation during the twentieth century to
this very conflation of antithetical ameliorative and revolutionary political
orientations. The humanitarian governmental registers that I have dis-
cussed here were peculiar to a globally extensive form of imperial govern-
ance, and the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century revolutionary
human rights discourses that I have alluded to were very different from
those which Moyn locates in the later twentieth century, geared as they
were to the generation of an entirely new social order rather than remedy-
ing specific abuses of individuals.74 There is nonetheless, I think, some-
thing profoundly unsettling in this work of historical recovery to any neat

association between ameliorative forms of humanitarianism and the radi-

cal notion of human rights. Rather than rest content with their putatively
common “genealogy of empathy,” the realization of the historical antip-
athies between humanitarian governance and human rights, and their
very different effects for the maintenance or undermining of an existing
distribution of power and privilege, should force us at least to interrogate
the different potentialities that they and their multiple registers offer to
their intended beneﬁciaries.75

Fabian Klose

From the mid-1960s, especially in the wake of the Biafra conﬂict of

1967–1970, an intense debate on the concept of humanitarian intervention
re-emerged among international legal scholars.* In his article “Intervention
to Protect Human Rights” published in 1969, Richard B. Lillich, an
important US scholar of international law and member of the influential
International Law Association (ILA), vigorously pleaded for this concept
and argued that the right to intervene should be implemented by the
United Nations to defend universal human rights. Especially in regard to
the human catastrophe in Biafra, he argued: “Finally, the situation in Biafra
is one that would have been ideal for collective humanitarian intervention
of the nineteenth century type.”1 From his perspective, the doctrine of
humanitarian intervention seemed to be designed perfectly for the situation
in the South Eastern part of Nigeria and accordingly should be implemen-
ted immediately. Thus, Lillich referred directly to a humanitarian practice,
which emerged in the nineteenth century as a kind of model to protect
human rights in the twentieth century.
The history of humanitarianism as well as of human rights has crystallized
as two very prospering fields of research over the last decade. Both themes
have been the subject of a lively debate among international historians, well
documented by a vast amount of workshops, conferences, special issues of
journals, edited volumes, pioneering books, and research projects.2 Even
though new intriguing research landscapes are opening before our eyes, the
relationship between humanitarianism and human rights is still a “troubled
rapport” as Michael Geyer trenchantly puts it.3 The link between these two
prospering fields remains often blurred and rather ambiguous. Frequently
humanitarianism and human rights are presented in opposing terms, some-
times even as rival concepts by advocates on both sides.4 According to them,
humanitarianism rests upon a discourse of suffering and charity, while
human rights are based on a discourse of justice and solidarity.
Humanitarians focus on providing relief in emergency situations and are

127

very cautious about speaking out against rights violations because of their
fear of endangering access to people in need by politicizing their humanitar-
ian action. By contrast, for human rights activists providing relief is second-
ary to their main goal of collecting evidence about atrocities and prosecuting
perpetrators of human rights violations.5
Undeniably, humanitarianism and human rights indeed constitute two
concepts with different approaches to achieve distinctive goals. However,
instead of mainly elaborating on the opposing characteristics of both
concepts, their obvious distinctions and even rivalries, from a historian’s
point of view it can be far more productive to focus on the relationship and
entanglements of both fields – as Michael Barnett clearly indicates in the
introduction of this volume. Humanitarianism and human rights are not
the same, for sure, but they share some similar historical origins and
developments. In theory as well as in practice there are manifold overlaps
and links between the two fields. Both histories are often so closely
entangled that it is difficult to analyze them completely isolated from
each other. We can identify a fluidity between both concepts, which
enables them to converge without becoming identical.6
The practice of enforcement is one of such issues, where this fluidity
becomes obvious and where both fields are indeed very closely
entangled.7 Generally defined as military intervention across state bor-
ders into the domestic affairs of a sovereign state for the purpose of
protecting humanitarian norms and universal human rights,8 humanitar-
ian intervention is intensively debated within both fields of research.9
Accordingly, the question arises, in which field the history of humanitar-
ian intervention should be located? Or is the concept an integral part of
both historiographies? And if so, does it connect both areas in any way?
Investigating the historical emergence of the practice and legal doctrine
of humanitarian intervention can serve as a significant lens through which
entanglements of the history of humanitarianism and human rights can be
identified, without mixing the two concepts randomly. In my eyes, one
can identify a key transition at the beginning of the nineteenth century:
the departure from the early modern concept of protection on the
grounds of religious affinity to the practice of defending humanitarian
norms for all individuals regardless of their religious affiliation and on the
basis of an evolving notion of a common humanity. The concept of armed
intervention to safeguard humanitarian norms thus arose during the
course of the long nineteenth century in the context of the abolition of
the slave trade; by the early twentieth century, it had become an estab-
lished concept within international law.
However, the history of humanitarian intervention was not necessarily
also a history of the advancement of human rights protection from the

very start as recent studies propose.10 The historical precedents of the

nineteenth century contributed to the emergence of humanitarian norms
within international law, but this was not synonymous with the emer-
gence of the robust implementation of individual rights. Indeed, the
protection of human rights became linked with policies of military inter-
vention only in the course of the twentieth century. This happened first at
the beginning of the twentieth century when prominent activists and
scholars of international law, including figures such as Antoine Rougier,
André Mandelstam, and Hersch Lauterpacht, linked humanitarian inter-
vention directly to the emerging notion of universal human rights.
Thus, my main argument is that the theory and practice of humanitar-
ian intervention emerged out of nineteenth-century humanitarianism.
Various precedents of the nineteenth century then served as a crucial
reference point and as a kind of model for legal scholars to transform this
practice into an instrument to protect human rights in the twentieth
century, thus connecting both fields in a significant way. This chapter
consists of two parts: first, I will elaborate on how the concept of huma-
nitarian intervention emerged in the course of the long nineteenth century
and how it was directly connected to the evolving notion of not human
rights but a common humanity; second, I will concentrate on the transi-
tional period when humanitarian intervention became linked with the
emerging vision of universal human right. Regarding the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, it is therefore more adequate to talk of the concept
of human rights intervention instead of humanitarian intervention.

Enforcing Humanity in the Long Nineteenth Century

The notion of humanity is a malleable and dynamic concept, which exists
in various languages and cultural contexts, having different meanings at
different times.11 It is evoked in a remarkable array of themes and it is the
fundamental essence shared by humanitarianism as well as human rights.
Despite the fact that in various languages the definition of the term varied
over time and historical context, there are some core meanings, which are
significantly and repeatedly associated with the word “humanity.” In
Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language, published origin-
ally in 1755 and considered as one of the most influential dictionaries in
the history of the English language, the word “humanity” (together with
a direct reference to the French translation of humanité and the Latin
translation of humanitas) was defined as the “nature of man” as well as
“Human kind; the collective body of mankind.”12 Beyond this descrip-
tion as the natural characteristics of individual human beings as well as
the collective noun for the body of the whole human species, the

dictionary provided another signiﬁcant deﬁnition, namely the practice of

“Benevolence; tenderness.” In order to explain this third definition more
concretely to the reader, the dictionary explicitly referred to a quote of the
English philosopher and influential Enlightenment thinker John Locke:
“All men ought to maintain peace and the common offices of humanity
and friendship in diversity of opinion.”13
As the burgeoning body of historical research on the history of huma-
nitarianism in the last few years has shown, we have to relate this emerging
notion to a broader “humanitarian revolution”14 taking place in the
Enlightenment during the second half of the eighteenth century. People
started to feel empathy for their fellow human beings, not only within
their own country, but also across borders and even on distant continents.
Individuals were mobilized by a sentimental and moral “humanitarian
narrative” that motivated them to care for strangers.15 Thus, humanity
increasingly gained crucial ethical qualities and transformed evermore to
a kind of “moral compass” for social behavior within human societies.16
In this context, British abolitionism is regarded as the driving force for
the crystallization of humanitarian sentiments.17 In an intensive cam-
paign spanning several decades, abolitionists significantly mobilized pub-
lic opinion and caused an outcry against the transatlantic slave trade.
British Abolitionists started an unprecedented humanitarian campaign,
lasting several decades.18 However, it is of crucial importance to note that
in their campaign the abolitionists articulated their political demands not
in the language of rights but in terms of “humanity.”19 They could
vigorously fight against the transatlantic slave trade and ask for state
intervention, but at the same time endorse the paternalistic concept of
a mission to civilize the Africans without granting them equal rights. For
example, William Wilberforce, one of the leading voices of the abolitionist
movement in parliament, was recorded as expressing this view in a debate
on the abolition of the slave trade in the House of Commons in April 1791
with these words:
The Negroes . . . were creatures like ourselves: they had the same feelings, and
even stronger affections than our own; but their minds were uninformed, and
their moral characters were altogether debased. Men, in this state, were almost
incapacitated for the reception of civil rights. In order to become fit for the
enjoyment of these, they must, in some measures, be restored to that level from
which they had been so unjustly and cruelly degraded. To give them power of
appealing to the laws, would be to awaken in them a sense of the dignity of their
nature. The first return of life after a swoon, was commonly a convulsion, danger-
ous, at once, to the party himself, and to all around him. Such, in the case of the
Slaves, Mr. Wilberforce feared, might be the consequence of a sudden commu-
nication of civil rights.20

Instead of rights it was the moral category of a common “humanity”

that was crucial to the abolitionist argument and thus became the move-
ment’s undisputed leitmotif. Their primary goal was to raise awareness in
public and parliamentary debates that African slaves were not ordinary
commodities but human beings with feelings who formed an undeniable,
integral part of humankind.21 The abolitionist task was to revoke the
process of dehumanization of the captives to mere goods in the Atlantic
trade system by emphasizing their true human nature. The iconic image
created by Josiah Wedgwood of the enslaved African kneeling with
manacled hands outstretched, posing the rhetorical question “Am I not
a man and a brother?,” which swiftly became the official emblem of the
movement, represented this notion most vividly.22 The abolitionists tried
to appeal to the humanitarian sensibility of their fellow citizens to evoke
sympathy for the fate of African slaves and to demand action on behalf of
suffering fellow human beings.
The abolitionist cause finally prevailed and gained official recognition
in parliament. On March 25, 1807 the Act of the British Parliament for
the Abolition of the Slave Trade was passed,23 which stigmatized the slave
trade as “contrary to humanity.” The singular importance of this decision
lay, above all, in the fact that the struggle against the transatlantic slave
trade, which the abolitionists had up to that point conducted exclusively
at the levels of civil society and politics, now became, by law, a matter of
the United Kingdom. The British government had committed itself to
deploy means of state against the traffic in human beings. Accordingly,
the Act had practical implications, stipulating the seizure of slave ships.24
In this way the Abolition Act laid the legal foundation for the military
deployment of the Royal Navy off the coast of West Africa to enforce the
ban on the transatlantic slave trade. From 1808 to the mid-1860s the
United Kingdom continued to demonstrate its permanent military pre-
sence along the infamous Slave Coast, the first and longest humanitarian
intervention in history.25
Thus, humanity and its violations became a guiding, legally recognized
principle for the new paradigm of abolition, which eventually initiated
and justified the new practice of humanitarian intervention. Beside the
national level in the United Kingdom, this also came true on the interna-
tional level. Following the international condemnation of the slave trade
at the Congress of Vienna in February 1815,26 which may be regarded as
one of the first important documents in the history of international
humanitarian law, the British government initiated diplomatic negotia-
tions to install an international machinery of enforcement.27 In the course
of diplomatic negotiations lasting several decades, the United Kingdom
successfully managed to establish a comprehensive international treaty

network to enforce abolition. This included almost all states in Europe

and the Americas as well as several African kingdoms.28 Thus, by the
mid-nineteenth century an international moral and legal consensus had
emerged that human trafficking was indeed a gross violation of common
humanity and international humanitarian norms, which justified the
employment of violent means.
This significant consensus also found its way into such a fundamental
text of international law as Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International
Law, first published in 1836. The renowned US legal scholar, explicitly
stated in his study: “The African slave trade, once considered not only
a lawful, but desirable branch of commerce, a participation in which was
made the object of wars, negotiations, and treaties between different
European states, is now denounced as an odious crime by the almost
universal consent of nations.”29 By referring directly to the Vienna
declaration and the related international treaty regime he clearly under-
lined this position. Moreover, in his later publications, he denounced the
slave trade as a “crime against humanity,”30 using a legal term long before
it became a crucial element of international criminal law of the twentieth
century.31
Some recent scholarship links this development and these historical
precedents of humanitarian intervention directly to the rise of the modern
human rights concept. For instance, legal scholar Jenny Martinez argues
that international human rights law derives its origins from the fight
against the slave trade and the related “Courts of Mixed Commission
for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” In her opinion, this Mixed
Commissions represent the first “international human rights courts”
and were a significant forerunner of international criminal justice of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries.32 Additionally, Brendan Simms and
David Trim put forward the argument that due to the frequency of these
early humanitarian interventions against the slave trade and for the pro-
tection of minorities, “‘human rights’ emerged as a term and legal con-
cept in the mid-nineteenth century.”33
However, this perspective provokes a clear objection, especially concern-
ing the recent controversial debate about the origins of the human rights
concept and its relation to humanitarianism. The historical precedents of
humanitarian intervention indeed contributed significantly to the emer-
gence of humanitarian norms in international law, but this was not tanta-
mount to the rise of the human rights concept in a modern sense.
Admittedly, prominent advocates of a legal doctrine of humanitarian inter-
vention during the second half of the nineteenth century like the Swiss legal
scholar Johann Caspar Bluntschli and his German colleague Aegidius
Arntz referred in their works to the protection of “Menschenrechte”34 and

“droits de l’humanité”35 as a justiﬁable reason to interfere. However, without

defining the content and nature of these aforementioned rights, they left the
term completely vague and did not codify these rights, as was later realized
in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. As already shown,
abolitionists could passionately fight against the transatlantic slave trade
and demand military intervention against this violation of common-sense
humanity, but at the same time endorse the paternalistic concept of
a mission to civilize the Africans without granting them equal rights.
Even though the idea of protecting humanitarian norms by force was
established in the long nineteenth century, this was not synonymous with
the idea of protecting human rights according to the principles of equality
and universality.36
Quite the contrary, the process of establishing humanity as an interna-
tional norm and protecting it by violent means remained a rather arbitrary
and ambiguous concept. Attacking the slave trade did not immediately
and automatically lead to the end of the institution of colonial slavery
itself and the final liberation of slaves by granting equal rights. The United
Kingdom would passionately fight for its foreign policy paradigm of
abolishing human trafficking, but at the same time leave colonial slavery
untouched for nearly another two decades until the final Slavery Abolition
Act of 1833. Other countries, also part of the international treaty regime,
waited even longer to abolish human bondage eventually, such as the
United States in 1865, Spain in Cuba in 1886, and Brazil in 1888.37
Moreover, there is a strong argument that the practice of intervening
against the slave trade “in the cause of humanity” triggered a development
in the exact opposite direction, thus revealing the ambivalence of humanity
as a nineteenth-century norm. The concept could be successfully used to
support abolition and even its military enforcement. However, at the same
time abolishing the slave trade in the name of humanity could be an
effective instrument for legitimizing colonial and imperial conquest in
Africa as most infamously shown in the case of the Congo Free-State.
Thus, the issue of intervening against the African slave trade in the name
of a common humanity reveals most vividly the close entanglement of
European humanitarianism with nineteenth-century colonialism and
imperialism, but not with the history of universal human rights.38

Humanitarian Intervention as Human Rights History

in the Twentieth Century
Over the course of the long nineteenth century, the concept and practice
of humanitarian intervention had developed to the point that, by the start
of the twentieth century, it had become an established doctrine of

international law.39 In July 1900 the historian William E. Lingelbach,

professor of European history at the University of Pennsylvania, indicated
that “intervention on humanitarian grounds” had peculiarly developed
due to various historical precedents in the course of the nineteenth
century.40 Even though Lingelbach was fully aware of the importance of
political and economic self-interests of the intervening states he argued
that this practice was now recognized as a legal mean in international
relations: “Intervention, therefore, instead of being outside the pale of the
law of nations and antagonistic to it, is an integral and essential part of it;
an act of police for enforcing recognized rights, and the only means, apart
from war, for enforcing the rules of International Law.”41 During the
nineteenth century, interventionist doctrine focused mainly on the aboli-
tion of the slave trade and the protection of minorities in the context of
enforcing humanitarian norms. At the beginning of the twentieth century,
it became increasingly associated with an international rights discourse
and directly linked with the emerging language of universal human rights.
Antoine Rougier, a French law professor at the University of Caen, was
one of the first to deal with this issue.42 In 1910 he presented his “Théorie
de l’intervention d’humanité,” in which he also referred to the historical
precedents of the nineteenth century and the first legal approaches by
Bluntschli and Arntz.43 In contrast to them, he not only described the
violation of the rather abstract “lois de l’humanité” and “droits humains”
as a legitimation for intervention, but also started to define concretely the
content of these laws and rights of humanity. In this context, he identified
three fundamental human rights, namely the “droit à la vie” (the right to
life), the “droit à la liberté” (the right to liberty), and the “droit à la
légalité” (the right to legality) as the only legitimate reason to
intervene.44 Thus, Rougier connected in his legal theory the concept of
humanitarian intervention for the first time directly with the idea of the
protection of defined fundamental human rights.
After the end of World War I, this development gained further momen-
tum, especially in connection with the newly founded League of
Nations.45 Legal scholars such as Malbone W. Graham hoped that the
Geneva-based international organization would become the central
authority in charge of international security and provide an effective
safeguard for the emerging concept of human rights. For Graham the
creation of the League of Nations fundamentally altered the question of
humanitarian intervention, because a legally recognized international
organization could act on an objective basis as the enforcer of the law of
nations.46 Instead of a “subjective Law of Nature” and a “sentimental
Law of Humanity” a new substantive law of nations was now clearly
defining the right of humanitarian intervention.47 Graham argued that

interventions of a humanitarian character would occur henceforth “as the

express result of the action of the League in selecting the appropriate
country to act as its mandatory, its agent, in enforcing the terms of the
mandate given for the purpose of removing unfortunate conditions vio-
lative of the most elementary human rights.”48
Another strong advocate of the idea of collective mechanisms to safe-
guard human rights implemented under the aegis of the League of
Nations was the Russian diplomat André N. Mandelstam. Being in
exile in Paris after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, Mandelstam became
one of the central figures in the international struggle to establish human
rights during the interwar years. He took part in various initiatives as
a member of the renowned Institut de Droit International and played
a leading role in securing the adoption of the “Déclaration des droits
internationaux de l’Homme” adopted by the institute during its session in
New York in October 1929.49
In one of his essays on the importance of the New York declaration,
Mandelstam focused on the active international protection of human
rights, making reference to the various European interventions in the
Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century.50 However, the
Russian exile rejected the idea that humanitarian interventions on behalf
of international human rights could be grounded in the nineteenth-
century division between “civilized” and “uncivilized” nations. In his
perspective, the founding of the League of Nations and the associated
move toward universality meant that all states were now obligated to
protect these rights around the world without exception.51 The “principle
of universal protection of human rights,” Mandelstam argued, should be
enshrined in a “world contract.”52 He hoped that the New York state-
ment by the Institut de Droit International would serve as the impetus for
the adoption of such a world contract.
Thus, Graham and Mandelstam referred explicitly to the nineteenth-
century model of humanitarian intervention, but now separated it from
the “sentimental law of humanity” as well as the division of “uncivilized”
and “civilized” nations. Instead, they linked the practice for the first time
directly to an international organization such as the League of Nations
and the emerging notion of universal human rights. However, neither
Graham’s nor Mandelstam’s idealistic hopes that the League of Nations
might serve as the new international authority for humanitarian interven-
tion were fulfilled. The Geneva-based organization did not possess the
kind of robust mechanisms needed to implement a “world contract” on
human rights. Although a number of non-European states joined the
League of Nations, including Abyssinia, Japan, and Siam, the League
was strongly influenced by the old colonial hierarchies and the dominance

of the European member states.53 During the interwar years, the imperial
nations that dominated the League – Britain and France – were both at
the height of their colonial power and had little interest in developing an
international system to carry out interventions on behalf of universal
human rights.
After World War II, the United Nations even incorporated a strict and
legally binding prohibition on the use of force and a clause on noninter-
vention in domestic affairs in its charter. Article 2, Paragraph 4 of the
Charter bans any threat or use of force in international relations apart
from the right to self-defense, while Article 2, Paragraph 7 forbids inter-
ference in the internal affairs of a sovereign state.54 These two provisions
are fundamental norms in the UN Charter, which can only be limited
under exceptional circumstances such as a threat to peace or a breach of
peace. Despite this strict limitation placed on the concept of forcible
intervention, some experts on international law sought to establish
a direct link between the concept of humanitarian intervention, interna-
tional human rights protection, and the newly developing system of the
United Nations.55 One prominent proponent was no other than Hersch
Lauterpacht, who as a renowned professor of law at Cambridge
University, member of the UN Commission on Human Rights, and
judge at the International Court of Justice at The Hague, must be
regarded as one of the most influential legal scholars of the twentieth
century.
Lauterpacht, born to a Jewish family in Habsburg Galicia, was
a vociferous advocate of the incorporation of human rights in interna-
tional law. His engagement was certainly also influenced by his own
personal history and the death of nearly his entire family in the
Holocaust.56 In December 1942, during World War II, Lauterpacht
presented a paper before the British Grotius Society advocating the crea-
tion of an “international bill of rights” and demanding effective enforce-
ment mechanisms.57 The presentation also made explicit reference to the
theory and practice of humanitarian intervention in the nineteenth cen-
tury as well as the international humanitarian treaty regime on slavery and
the protection of minorities.58 Lauterpacht suggested, that these histor-
ical cases could serve as valuable inspiration for the development of an
effective mechanism to safeguard human rights.59
After World War II, he continuously argued in a large number of
publications, including his influential treatise “An International Bill of
the Rights of Man,” that this protection could best be accomplished
within the framework of the United Nations.60 As a supranational
authority, he believed, the United Nations would possess the means
to promote, monitor, and peacefully enforce international human

rights standards.61 However, in the case that political means were

exhausted, the United Nations must also be permitted to engage in
more direct means:
in the last resort . . . there must remain with the highest political authority of the
Organization of States the legal power to give effect to the Bill of Rights by means
of coercive action. Such action will be exceptional, but it is that ultimate power
which will give to the Bill of Rights the impress of an organic part of the interna-
tional legal order.62
In Lauterpacht’s opinion, the enforcement of human rights by the United
Nations – by coercive measures if necessary – was an important step in the
development of an effective international human rights regime.63
However, during the postwar period Lauterpacht’s hopes would
remain unfulfilled. Instead, the violent conflicts that arose in the course
of decolonization and the emerging East–West conflict hindered the
development of a robust human rights regime.64 Rather than implement-
ing the enforcement mechanisms envisioned under the UN Charter,
individual states instead retreated behind the charter’s nonintervention
clause and rejected humanitarian interventions in the cause of universal
rights. It was not until the mid-1960s that the topic of humanitarian
intervention gained fresh impetus when the issue became the subject of
an intense debate among experts in international law. The passage of two
UN human rights pacts in 1966 and the International Year of Human
Rights in 1968, culminating in the first International Conference on
Human Rights in Tehran, lent further momentum to the debate, which
soon focused on fundamental questions regarding concrete and robust
mechanisms to safeguard human rights. At its August 1966 meeting in
Helsinki, the influential ILA passed a resolution announcing that it would
henceforth shift its focus away from purely definitional debates in favor of
discussions on the concrete implementation of human rights.65
One of the important contributions to this debate came from Richard
B. Lillich, member of the ILA and director of the Procedural Aspects of
International Law Institute in Washington, DC. In his already mentioned
essay “Intervention to Protect Human Rights,” Lillich defended the con-
cept of humanitarian intervention, which he described as a form of state
self-help, and argued that the right to intervene should only be implemen-
ted within the framework of the United Nations. As examples for his
argument, Lillich cited several contemporary political hot spots, including
the Congo crisis of 1964, the US intervention in the Dominican Republic
in 1965, and the emerging humanitarian catastrophe in Biafra.66
Finally, it was the Biafra conflict of 1967–1970 that would lend even
greater intensity to this emerging debate. As the humanitarian crisis

threatening the Igbo people in the Nigerian secessionist region of Biafra

continued to aggravate, Lillich’s colleague Michael Reisman, an
American professor of international law at Yale, submitted a petition to
the UN in September 1968, demanding that the world organization
should intervene immediately.67 The petition concluded with a vigorous
argument in favor of institutionalizing the concept of humanitarian
intervention:
Whether or not a U.N. humanitarian intervention in Nigeria will lay the ground-
work for an institutionalized pattern of humanitarian intervention in the future,
the United Nations must consider the creation of such an institution as soon as
possible. . . . We have waited too long and have already lost our innocence; if we
cannot perfect, as a minimum, a system of humanitarian intervention, we have
lost our humanity. If we sit passively by while the Ibos [sic] suffer genocide, we
have forfeited our right to regain it.68

After submitting his petition to the United Nations (which also explicitly
mentioned the cases of the humanitarian interventions of the nineteenth
century69), Reisman circulated the memorandum among international
legal scholars both within and outside the United Nations in order to
encourage further debate.
This discussion continued and the topic of humanitarian intervention
thus did not recede from the international agenda. Indeed, since the mid-
1960s, prominent scholars of international law have continued to address
the central questions of whether forcible intervention in the domestic
affairs of a sovereign state on behalf of the protection of universal
human rights is permitted under international law, and whether such
interventions may be carried out within the framework of the United
Nations.70 Thus, the concept and practice of humanitarian intervention
was inextricably linked to the history and growing prominence of human
rights in the twentieth and twentieth-ﬁrst centuries.71 In this regard, in
the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries, it is probably more adequate to
talk of the concept of human rights intervention instead of humanitarian
intervention.72

Conclusion
The concept of armed intervention to safeguard humanitarian norms
arose during the course of the long nineteenth century and it was directly
connected to the evolving notion of not human rights but a common
humanity. By the early twentieth century, it had become an established
concept within international law. It was the ﬁrst half of the twentieth
century, especially the interwar period, when prominent scholars of

international law, including Mandelstam and Lauterpacht, started to link

the idea of humanitarian intervention with the emerging notion of uni-
versal human rights and international organizations. Even though the UN
Charter of 1945 had anchored the principle of nonintervention within
international law, scholars such as Lauterpacht continued to place great
hopes in the emerging system of the United Nations, in which the ideas of
humanitarian intervention were linked to notions of the international
protection of human rights. By the mid-1960s, these discussions received
fresh impetus as the concept of human rights increasingly began to move
away from a purely definitional debate in favor of concrete measures to
protect and implement universal rights, a development that was spurred
by the passage of two UN human rights pacts in 1966 and the events and
publicity surrounding the International Year of Human Rights of 1968.
Legal scholars such as Richard B. Lillich and Michael Reisman assumed
a leading role in these efforts. Over the course of the 1970s, the topic of
human rights continued to gain prominence in international politics,
which lent at the same time further weight to debates on humanitarian
intervention to safeguard human rights.
Returning to the questions raised at the beginning, in my opinion the
issue of humanitarian intervention is indeed an integral part of both
historiographies – of humanitarianism as well as of human rights. As
shown, I argue that this practice originated in nineteenth-century huma-
nitarianism and then became more and more connected to twentieth-
century human rights history. Thus, to fully understand the historical
emergence of the concept and practice of humanitarian intervention it is
inevitable to look at and to analyze both fields of research without mixing
the two concepts. It is exactly these transition processes, which show the
fluidity between both fields and enables them to converge from time to
time. Again, to be clear, humanitarianism and human rights are not the
same concepts, but they share some significant historical developments
and practices. One of these is the history of humanitarian intervention
and it is exactly this shared history, which makes it so interesting to look at
both concurrently, not as completely separated, competing, and opposing
concepts, but as related and complementary ones.

Bronwyn Leebaw

One way to think about the relationship between humanitarianism and

human rights is to go back to the debate between Socrates and
Thrasymachus at the outset of The Republic. Thrasymachus becomes
angry with Socrates for talking about justice in a way that dances around
what he takes to be most important about it – that justice is “the advantage
of the stronger.”1 The powerful write laws that reflect their interests, he
explains, they make other people obey them, and they call that “justice.”
Thrasymachus becomes increasingly frustrated and eventually walks away
from the conversation. Their disagreement is not necessarily about the
meaning of justice, as Hanna Pitkin observes, but centers on what kind of
conversation people should be having about justice.2 Socrates wants to
discuss what the idea of justice might mean apart from the way it is
conventionally understood, while Thrasymachus makes a sociological
point about the conventional meaning of justice and how it is institutiona-
lized in ways that legitimate domination and hierarchy. His departure
seems like a victory for Socrates and for the reasoned pursuit of ideals
over an emotional display of cynicism. However, his contribution also
reminds readers that outrage, in response to hypocrisy and injustice, is an
important starting point for those who invoke ideals to challenge estab-
lished institutions. Thrasymachus would probably respond to contempor-
ary debates on human rights and humanitarianism by raising concerns
about how these ostensibly idealistic frameworks reflect and legitimate
the interests of the strong. This chapter investigates differences in the
way in which human rights and humanitarian frameworks are formulated
with respect to their significance for this kind of concern. In evaluating
what is at stake in these differences, the chapter suggests, it is useful to
examine how humanitarian and human rights organizations have devel-
oped distinctive strategies for mobilizing emotions in order to hold power-
ful actors accountable for their responses to suffering and injustice.
Humanitarianism, whether conceptualized as beneficence, charity, or
an effort to minimize “unnecessary suffering,” is predicated on strategies

140

for altering the way in which those in power deﬁne their own advantages.
Humanitarianism has been associated with appeals for compassion and
empathy aimed at soliciting support for life-saving assistance to those who
are experiencing crisis.3 In contrast, human rights have been conceptua-
lized as a basis for empowering excluded and persecuted peoples to
confront various forms of domination and hierarchy, as Jeffrey Flynn
and Aisling Swaine stress in contributions to this volume. Professional
human rights organizations have developed confrontational shaming
strategies designed to exploit the hypocrisies of abusive authorities as
weapons that can be turned against those who wield them.4 Shame is “a
felt ethic of obligation or regulation,” writes Jill Locke, “that judges our
thoughts and actions in terms of their relationship to norms and standards
that one shares.”5 The feeling of shame is an important response to
injustice, writes Chris Lebron, because in alerting people to their com-
mon failures, it also reminds them of their commitment to shared values.6
Strategies for mobilizing shame are appealing as a basis for exerting
pressure “from below” without conventional forms of material power,
or “from above” without the conventional enforcement mechanisms
associated with state power and military hierarchy.7 Shaming strategies
are also championed as a basis for establishing accountability through
socialization aimed at cultivating the internalization of norms.8
Professional human rights advocates have positioned shaming as a kind
of bridge between the diplomatic posture of humanitarianism and the
broader, more transformative, aspirations elaborated in major human
rights conventions. However, human rights shaming strategies are also
associated with certain frictions and boundaries that set professional
human rights advocacy apart from the kind of work that is associated
with humanitarianism, as well as the kind of work that is associated with
social justice. The effectiveness of shaming, as formulated by inﬂuential
human rights organizations, depends on confrontational strategies that
frequently clash with humanitarian commitments and a legalistic
approach to justice centered on individual accountability for “physical
integrity rights.”9 Although shaming strategies cultivated by prominent
human rights advocates are at odds with familiar approaches to humani-
tarian diplomacy, then, they reinforce the minimalism associated with the
“humanitarianization of human rights,” as discussed by in chapters by
Jeffrey Flynn and Samuel Moyn. Some see these limitations as necessary
to the effectiveness of the human rights framework as a basis for holding
powerful authorities accountable for their actions, while others contend
that these shaming strategies place arbitrary limits on the transformative
potential of the human rights framework. In evaluating these competing
claims, however, most commentators share a tendency to focus on a very

distinctive approach to confrontational shaming that is practiced by

professional human rights organizations.
This chapter looks at how shame has been mobilized in other ways, by
other actors, in relation to other emotions. It argues that prominent
humanitarian organizations have also developed strategies for mobilizing
shame, but in ways that are different from human rights strategies for
mobilizing shame. Human rights organizations mobilize the power of
shame in the form of threatened ostracism, by framing appeals that
inspire outrage in audiences and encourage them to stigmatize abusers.
Humanitarian appeals suggest that passive bystanders ought to feel per-
sonally ashamed if they do not respond with compassion and action to
alleviate suffering. Shaming strategies are also routinely developed by
authorities who seek to justify abuses by stigmatizing those who complain
about them. Others have pursued accountability for human rights abuses
by developing strategies for confronting shameful systems and institu-
tions. In evaluating the relationship between human rights and humani-
tarianism, this chapter suggests it is important to consider how familiar
“naming and shaming” strategies intersect with these other ways of
mobilizing shame. To do so, the chapter builds on two general insights
that have been widely recognized among scholars who have studied the
politics of shame and shaming disciplinary perspectives. First, the order-
reinforcing role of shame is thought to be especially powerful when it is
most subtle, and operates by inhibiting people from challenging estab-
lished institutions and authorities, by stigmatizing deviant behavior, by
shaping daily habits, or by influencing the kinds of values that people take
for granted in how they define themselves.10 Second, although fear of
stigmatization can be a powerful form of pressure, confrontational sham-
ing tends to be double-edged and associated with fairly predictable forms
of backlash, defensiveness, or emotional deadening.11
The first two sections of the chapter build on these insights to investi-
gate how prominent humanitarians and human rights advocates have
invoked shame in framing appeals for moral action and accountability
in response to suffering and injustice. I suggest that these different stra-
tegies for mobilizing shame are associated with distinctive forms of back-
lash, but that both can backfire by intensifying the stigmatization of those
who are singled out as uniquely deserving of protection. Prominent
human rights advocates and humanitarians have responded to this pro-
blem in a similar manner, with appeals for action that frame account-
ability with reference to discrete choices made in response to the plight of
uniquely helpless victims in need of urgent protection. This strategy
positions human rights advocacy as a kind of humanitarian practice –
one that centers on actions taken by privileged or powerful actors on

behalf of those who are thought to be helpless. The problem with this is
not that it limits scope of human rights advocacy per se. The problem is
that when human rights are identiﬁed with advocacy on behalf of the
helpless, this reinforces the stigmatization of those who pursue transfor-
mative responses to hierarchy and undermines efforts to mobilize human
rights as a basis for political empowerment. The third section of the
chapter locates an alternative approach to shaming in the writings of
W. E. B. Du Bois and other thinkers who have conceptualized human
rights as a response to institutionalized racism and structural injustices. In
contrast with those who mobilize shame in response to helpless victims,
Du Bois framed his human rights appeal as a call for political agency and
solidarity needed to confront international norms implicated in colonial
domination and white supremacy. In contrast with those who mobilize
shame as a basis for individual accountability, such thinkers suggest that
the role of human rights depends on strategies for exposing shameful
systems, institutions, and hierarchies.

The Shame of Bystanders

“I was a mere tourist with no part in this great conflict,” reports Henry
Dunant in the opening pages of Memory of Solferino, “but it was my great
privilege to witness the moving scenes that I have resolved to describe.”12
Dunant’s account of the 1859 Battle of Solferino charts his own personal
transformation and invites his readers to be transformed by sharing his
experience. Having witnessed and admired the bravery of the soldiers as
they prepared for battle, Dunant conveys his horror at the sight of the
fallen, “faces black with flies,” as they “gazed around themselves, wild-
eyed and helpless.” He recalls how he came to feel a sense of obligation to
stay and tend the wounded soldiers despite the fact that he could do so
little for them. The proximity to their suffering and to their pleas for help,
Dunant discovered, inspired a “positive energy” and a desire to “relieve as
many as one can.”13 The experience also led Dunant to become painfully
aware that much of the suffering and death associated with war has little
to do with military goals and might have been prevented if organized relief
organizations had been in place. His account of Solferino features graphic
details about the bodies of the wounded soldiers interspersed with reflec-
tions on his own instinctive impulse to assist them. “I moistened his dry
lips and hardened tongue,” writes Dunant, “took a handful of lint and
dipped it in the bucket and squeezed water into the deformed opening
that had been his mouth.”14 He was no longer a “mere tourist.” Dunant
suggests that those who read his account should not do so as vicarious
tourists and that they should be moved by similar instincts and energies to

lend support to his efforts. He proposed to channel the instinctive impulse

to act in the presence of suffering into support for such relief efforts by
facilitating cooperative agreements among powerful states that could be
maintained in accordance with the principle of reciprocity. Such organi-
zations could do a great deal to help, he suggested, if established in
a manner that could be perceived as an advantage for powerful states
and consistent with the way in which military leaders defined their own
strategic interests.
Dunant’s account exemplifies what Arendt refers to as the “politics of
pity,” characterized by appeals that draw power from their capacity to
awaken sentimental responses to the spectacle of suffering.15 Such
appeals aim to inspire a commitment to general norms by awakening
instinctive compassion in response to graphic particulars of suffering.
Dunant was aware, however, that the sentiment of compassion would
not be enough to sustain such commitments, and indicates that his sense
of compassion was not the only thing that motivated him to remain with
the wounded soldiers. He suggests that his instinct to act was not only
a response to his experience as a witness to suffering, but also a response to
his experience of being witnessed by the suffering. He recalls the outrage
and sense of abandonment expressed by soldiers as they begged for help:
“They desert us, leave us to die miserably, and yet we fought so hard!” In
the presence of acute suffering, Dunant suggests, the moral obligation to
assist becomes a uniquely powerful imperative – one that transcends
borders and overrides hesitation.
Peter Singer’s 1972 essay, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” uses
a kind of thought experiment to extend this logic to appeals for famine
relief.16 In the presence of a drowning child, Singer contends, inaction is
obviously shameful and the obligation to assist is felt as an instinctive
imperative. If a child is drowning in a pond and calling for help, it would
be shameful to hesitate or to worry about one’s expensive clothing, Singer
argues. It is just as shameful, he proposes, when privileged people spend
money on indulgences instead of sending support for famine relief. If we
think about what we would feel obliged to do in the presence of those who
are struggling to survive, Singer suggests, then life-saving assistance is
better understood as a moral imperative, rather than a benevolent act.
Like Dunant, Singer invokes an image of helpless suffering in order to
compel privileged audiences to see themselves as bystanders confronted
with a clear moment of decision that presents a choice between immedi-
ate assistance and shameful inaction. Both thinkers observe that in the
presence of acute suffering, indifference and passivity feel shameful in
very obvious ways. Both configure physical and emotional distance as
unnecessary obstructions that stand in the way of efforts to develop the

moral implications of this impulse and both assert that one should have to
be physically present with those who suffer to feel a sense of obligation to
assist them.
Jean Pictet invokes a similar logic in his commentary on the
Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross. Humanitarian action is rooted
in the instinct for pity, according to Pictet, and a duty to combat distress,
“no matter how disproportionate to it are the means available.”17 Framed
in this manner, humanitarian action is in tension with efforts to investi-
gate and remedy injustices that cause suffering. However, Pictet suggests
that this instinct to alleviate suffering can influence the elaboration of
shared norms that might inform efforts to pursue justice. Because all
humans are aware of our shared vulnerability to suffering, he contends,
we also share a common intuition that it is wrong to abandon those who
are struggling to survive. As a response to the sense of obligation felt in the
presence of suffering, Pictet asserts, humanitarian action reflects and
reinforces a distinctive approach to justice that aims at “correcting the
inequalities of fate,” as well as a Christian ethic of charity, extended “even
to our enemies.”18
The idea that it is shameful to abandon those who suffer puts huma-
nitarians in a difficult position. The “forces of compassion” have an
expansionary logic, Barnett suggests, propelled by greater awareness of
suffering with the spread of ideas and technologies that dissolve
boundaries.19 There is always more that one could do to help, and
“[o]nce a set of needs is attended to,” observes Barnett, “then it
becomes virtually impossible to refuse an adjacent set of needs.”20
This expansionary logic is intensified by the way in which humanitarian
appeals shame the figure of the passive bystander, suggesting that it is
inhumane or immoral to witness suffering without feeling compassion
and an instinctive desire to help. The proximity to limitless suffering,
whether physical or virtual, provides humanitarians with a constant
reminder that there are limits to what they can feel and limits to what
they can do to help those in crisis. This causes humanitarian shaming
strategies to have an expansionary logic as well. “The feeling one has of
one’s own utter inadequacy,” Dunant writes of such experiences, “is
unspeakable.”21 This feeling of shame at the limits of what he could do
made it difficult for Dunant to sustain his compassion for the soldiers,
causing him to adopt a posture “akin to cold calculation” in order to
avoid becoming overwhelmed with despair. “Your heart is suddenly
breaking,” he writes of such moments, “as if you were stricken all at
once with a bitter and irresistible sadness.”22 Hugo Slim suggests that
this complicated mix of emotions may be an enduring feature of huma-
nitarian work.23

Scholarship on affect and shame would suggest that humanitarian

appeals are likely to backfire in predictable ways that are consistent
with Dunant’s account of his own conflicting emotions. Appeals for
compassion in response to helpless victims can backfire by causing
privileged audiences to engage in emotional distancing, as Berlant
observes.24 Based on a study of responses to humanitarian appeals,
Stanley Cohen suggests that this kind of distancing might have some-
thing to do with the way in which such images not only awaken feelings
of compassion, but also cause people to feel a sense of helplessness,
despair, or resentment in response to any overt suggestion that it would
be shameful to look at such images without feeling compassion and
taking immediate action.25 Those who feel resentful in response to the
inference that they are expected to feel ashamed may respond defen-
sively by avoiding exposure to information about the suffering of others
or by cultivating indifference. Humanitarians may try to mitigate this
defensive response by appealing for beneficence from audiences with nar-
rative strategies that dramatize the helplessness of victims. This under-
scores the message that even a small effort can help those who have very
little. This strategy can also backfire, as a number of commentators have
observed, when it turns graphic accounts of helpless suffering into
a spectacle for privileged audiences. Citing the example of Bob Geldoff’s
“Save the Children” campaign, Jen Rubenstein notes that humanitarians
are generally aware that images of helpless suffering reinforce distancing
stereotypes and that their continued reliance on such images is an enduring
ethical dilemma.26 By portraying suffering as limitless, and by focusing
attention on common experiences of extreme helplessness, humanitarian
appeals depict victims as interchangeable, superfluous, and disposable,
observes Christina Beltrán.27 Such appeals can reinforce the stigmatization
of those depicted as victims, as well as those who assert agency in ways that
are at odds with representations that characterize deserving victims as
helpless.28 At the same time, however, such appeals release privileged
audiences from any shame they might feel about their own insularity or
apathy by suggesting that people will be grateful to them for doing some-
thing to help–even if it is something very small.
Humanitarian strategies for soliciting the beneficence from those posi-
tions of power and privilege can also backfire when they cause humani-
tarians to feel that they are becoming implicated in the legitimation of
abusive authorities in ways that turn them into passive bystanders despite,
or even as a result of, their own relentless efforts to help. Humanitarian
norms have legitimated colonial conquest and dispossession, as well as
mass killings characterized as “collateral damage” defined in relation to
“military necessity.”29 In their efforts to save lives, Arendt suggests,

humanitarians assumed a public posture of deference to the Nazi regime

and played a role in normalizing the systemic logics of mass killing.30
A similar set of concerns was raised in the 1990s, regarding the role of
humanitarianism in relation to the Rwandan genocide and mass killings
in Bosnia-Herzegovina. “I have to confess that what I feel most tonight is
shame,” stated Rony Brauman in 1993, regarding the humanitarian
responses of the United Nations during this period.31 As Médecins
Sans Frontières’s (MSF) general coordinator in Bosnia, Eric Stobbaerts
agonized, in correspondence, over whether the emphasis on providing
life-saving relief had put MSF in a position of legitimating abusive autho-
rities. “Should MSF play the role of jailer/prison doctor in the service
of . . . the parties in conflict?”32 Stobbaerts asked, adding that the pre-
sence of MSF might have given the impression that everything was “going
well.”
In her influential 2001 article, “Bystanders to Genocide,” Samantha
Power proposed that powerful liberal states should be shamed as bystan-
ders if they fail to pursue timely military intervention to stop genocide.33
In Power’s formulation, the shameful bystander is one that hesitates to
use the force required to stop mass killings in order to rescue people
threatened with genocide. Power called for an approach to humanitarian-
ism that would set aside the principles of impartiality and neutrality,
which had been crucial to Pictet, yet framed her case for humanitarian
intervention as the logical evolution of the humanitarian idea that it is
shameful to be a passive bystander. She compared the role played by the
Clinton Administration in response to the Rwandan genocide with the
role played by Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, who served as head of
the UN Peacekeeping Mission. It was Dallaire who stayed behind and,
with only a few hundred remaining peacekeepers, resolved to remain
present and to save as many as he could. “He feels that the eyes of those
killed are constantly watching him,” writes Power, after detailing
Dallaire’s inability to move on after the genocide with business as usual.
Power’s account invokes Dallaire’s personal experience of bystander
shame in order to invite readers to imagine that their own responses to
suffering are also being witnessed by those who beg for assistance in
moments of acute crisis.
Power’s case for humanitarian intervention exemplifies the double-edged
power associated of humanitarian shaming strategies. It identifies moral
action as an urgent imperative to alleviate the suffering of helpless victims –
one that depends on choices made by powerful actors in discrete moments
of decision, without regard to the implications of history or long-term
calculations. As outlined in “Responsibility to Protect Doctrine,” such
interventions are to be regulated in accordance with political and legal

accountability mechanisms. Power’s formulation of humanitarian interven-

tion, suggests that these accountability mechanisms are to blame for shame-
ful inaction and urges powerful leaders to cast them aside.34 By condemning
United States leaders as shameful bystanders to genocide, Power’s formula-
tion displaces concerns regarding the state’s role in sponsoring perpetrators
of war crimes. US leaders are too inhibited, she suggests, by diplomatic
strategies and by their concern for the unintended consequences of
interventions.35 This denigration of diplomacy is consistent with the kind
of thinking that reportedly contributed to the breakdown of diplomatic
initiatives in response to violence and abuses in Syria, suggests Asli Bâli,
who notes that Koﬁ Annan resigned from his role in such initiatives in 2012,
followed by Lakhdar Brahimi in 2014 – both citing US preconditions that
had rendered diplomacy untenable.36 The disregard for the unintended
consequences of humanitarian intervention is consistent with a general
indifference or denial of responsibility, in political debates within the
United States, for the violent aftermath of the US intervention in Libya.
For Arendt, the humanitarian “politics of pity” is also double-edged in
the sense that it can undermine efforts to cultivate solidarity and political
responsibility in response to those in need of assistance, as Flynn observes in
his chapter for this volume. In “We Refugees,” Arendt suggests that when
persecuted populations feel compelled to suppress their identities and voices
to appear as deserving recipients of aid, this can lead to a destructive form of
self-abnegation, causing people to internalize their own stigmatization and
to carry shame quietly as a private burden instead of working together to
contest oppressive logics.37 To some extent, Pictet shared such concerns
regarding this “dark side of charity,” as he put it, observing that recipients of
aid feel obliged to cultivate a posture of deference and unending gratitude
for a debt that can never be repaid. This problem could be mitigated, he
suggests, through efforts to institutionalize the provision of aid in ways that
would enable it to be claimed as an entitlement and received “as a right.”38
Many thinkers have proposed that the limits of humanitarianism, as pre-
dicated on appeals for beneﬁcence, could be addressed through efforts to
mobilize human rights in ways that would empower people to assert agency
to confront abusive authorities and institutionalized forms of injustice. Like
humanitarians, however, human rights advocates have pursued shaming
strategies that are double-edged as responses to systemic forms of abuse,
and at odds with efforts to confront structural injustice.

Naming and Shaming

“The newspaper reader feels a sickening sense of impotence,” wrote Peter
Benenson, in “The Forgotten Prisoner,” the 1961 op-ed that is credited

with launching Amnesty International. “Yet if feelings of disgust all over

the world could be united into common action, something effective could
be done,” he argued in his appeal for a collective response to the unjust
imprisonment of “prisoners of conscience.”39 The goal of Amnesty
International, as outlined by Benenson, would be to mobilize global
support for the rights outlined in Articles 18 and 19 of the UDHR,
which call upon all states to protect freedom of thought, religion, expres-
sion, and opinion, as well as the right to import information through the
media, “regardless of frontiers.” Whereas Dunant told audiences that
they should be outraged by the indignities suffered by brave young
soldiers, Benenson rallied his readers to outrage at the plight of the “non-
conformist,” imprisoned without due process for opinions deemed threa-
tening to the state. Benenson’s appeal did not incorporate graphic
accounts of physical suffering endured by political prisoners, but empha-
sized the pain of being silenced and forgotten. He appealed to readers for
support by introducing specific “prisoners of conscience,” sharing their
names and providing a brief overview of their stories. Benenson’s call for
action centered on a case for mobilizing “the force of public opinion.”
The force of opinion could be uniquely powerful, he suggested, when
people with very different views and opposing political identities come
together in a manner that is “broadly based, international, non-sectarian,
and all party.” Benenson hoped to cultivate a sense of community for
idealists that had become disillusioned with leftist politics, according to
Hopgood.40
The trial of Adolf Eichmann also took place in 1961. As prosecutor in
the Eichmann Trial, which was held in Jerusalem, Gideon Hausner
invited survivors to share extensive testimonies regarding their experi-
ences of abuse, loss, daily life, and resistance in a range of forms.41 His
decision to air lengthy victim testimonies would have a major influence on
global perceptions of genocide and victimhood.42 In the decade prior to
the trial, the divisive “Kastner Affair” had centered public attention and
shame on the actions of Jewish leaders, such as Rudolph Kastner, accused
of bargaining with the Nazis to save select friends.43 More generally,
Holocaust survivors had encountered pervasive forms of shaming and
silencing in portrayals that stressed their passivity or expressed skepticism
regarding what they might have done to survive.44 Hausner was explicit in
framing his decision to invite survivors to share lengthy testimonies as
a strategy for countering this stigmatization. Despite their very different
political agendas, Hausner and Benenson shared a common concern with
the way in which victim-shaming is bound up in claims about resistance.
Those identified as victims are either stigmatized for their failure to resist
or for having resisted in shameful or treasonous ways – as “terrorists” or as

“subversives” that threaten the integrity of established order. Both

Hausner and Benenson proposed to confront victim-shaming by mobiliz-
ing public outrage in response to the guilt of perpetrators. Stigmatizing
perpetrators can be a way to destigmatize the persecuted, both suggest,
and cultivating empathy for victims is a way to galvanize support for the
institutional order that empowers advocacy on their behalf.
As Amnesty International and other organizations expanded the scope
of human rights activism, they pursued strategies for strengthening the
force of stigmatizing shame. In theory, such efforts would complement
humanitarian relief work by addressing what Pictet referred to as the
“dark side of charity.” Human rights shaming strategies would expose
powerful authorities to public criticism, which could enable human rights
organizations to address the limitations of humanitarianism as a challenge
to the advantage of the strong. Human rights shaming strategies differ
from those developed by prominent humanitarians and aim to mobilize
different emotions. Instead of mobilizing bystander shame, human rights
appeals aim to awaken outrage by stigmatizing specific abusive authori-
ties. Like humanitarians, however, human rights advocates direct their
appeals to privileged audiences and aim to galvanize support by cultivat-
ing empathy in response to accounts of victimhood. To be effective, Keck
and Sikkink observe, efforts to mobilize stigmatizing shame must be
framed in ways that resonate with values that are already deeply held
and widely shared. And they are unlikely to work on those who commit
abuses openly and shamelessly.45
Human rights shaming strategies are associated with different, and
more public, forms of backlash than the shaming strategies cultivated by
humanitarian organizations, yet share a common reliance on accounts of
helpless victimhood that are framed to solicit empathy. Mobilizing
around the binary of criminal guilt and innocence has been a prominent
strategy for defending the integrity of victims against such attacks, as
Ticktin observes in her chapter for this volume, yet this strategy can
backfire when the binary is flipped by those who wish to legitimate
exclusion by stigmatizing the persecuted.46 When presumptive innocence
is established with reference to indicators of helplessness, this can rein-
force the logic by which political exclusion is justified or rationalized
through the stigmatization of those who assert agency to challenge abu-
sive authorities and institutions.47
In the 1970s, the Madres de la Plaza Mayo began to make weekly
processions to demand information regarding children “disappeared”
by the military dictatorship in Argentina, incorporating imagery that
identified motherhood with innocence. The military dictatorship was
shaming women for their political engagement and that of their children,

writes Diana Taylor. The Madres worked to counter this stigmatization

and to establish their own moral authority by incorporating symbolism
identified with maternal self sacrifice and the Virgin Mary.48 However,
this did not prevent them from being shamed for the way they challenged
authority, observes Taylor. “I can’t imagine the Virgin Mary yelling,
protesting, and planting seeds of hate,” one commentator asserted,
“when our Lord, was taken from her hands.”49 The concerns of the
Madres were taken more seriously by representatives from Amnesty
International, members of the Carter Administration, and the Inter-
American Human Rights Committee, who visited Argentina in the late
1970s. However, the human rights strategy of cultivating empathy by
stigmatizing perpetrators is associated with predictable forms of backlash.
When appeals for empathy make people feel judged or shamed, it is
common for them to react defensively by cultivating indifference, rather
than compassion. This strategy is likely to reinforce the kind of failures of
empathy that Feldman identifies in response to Palestinian suffering, in
her chapter for this volume.
Political backlash raises the stakes for human rights organizations that
are invested in mobilizing stigmatizing shame. Stigmatizing shame func-
tions as a public accusation, and the accused are likely to respond with
counter shaming strategies, aimed at discrediting or intimidating their
accusers. Backlash can embarrass human rights advocates when abusive
authorities respond to stigmatization with public displays of shameless-
ness. This kind of backlash exposes the limitations of confrontational
shaming strategies and weakens the subtle force of shame as a basis for
cultivating the internalization of international norms by exposing their
politically contested character. In order to mitigate such challenges,
human rights organizations have borrowed shaming strategies associated
with humanitarianism, which appeal for beneficence from privileged and
powerful actors in response to acute bodily suffering. They have focused
on stigmatizing those who violate human rights that are also prohibited in
international humanitarian law, and worked to develop enforcement
mechanisms that criminalize violations of the laws of war. These efforts
have altered international humanitarian law and led to the incorporation
of human rights principles into the laws of war.50 However, they are in
tension with the aspiration to mobilize the human rights framework as
a basis for empowering political agency in response to unjust hierarchy
and systemic forms of abuse.
In an essay written as executive director of Human Rights Watch,
Kenneth Roth argued that in order to mobilize shame effectively,
human rights organizations must be in a position to establish the identity
of a “violator,” the identities of “the violated,” and an effective remedy for

the violation. If any one of these three elements is missing or ambiguous,

he added, “the capacity for shame is greatly diminished.”51 Roth outlined
this analysis of human rights methodology as part of a larger discussion of
its limitations as a basis for pursuing economic, social, and cultural rights.
It makes sense for human rights organizations to focus primarily on
abuses of “physical integrity rights” that are associated with specific
abusers and legal remedies, Roth argued – not because they are more
important than economic, social, and cultural rights, but because those
who commit such abuses can be effectively shamed. Shame cannot be
effectively mobilized in response to structural injustices, Roth contends,
because stigmatization loses its power when people cannot perceive clear
lines of accountability.
Roth does not explain why those committed to confronting human
rights abuses would want to bind themselves to such a limited strategy.
He implies that the answer to this question is somewhat obvious, and that
human rights organizations and institutions depend on such strategies if
they are to be effective in challenging powerful authorities. These com-
ments exemplify some of the striking internal contradictions associated
with prominent human rights strategies for mobilizing shame. Although
human rights are championed as a basis for confronting systemic, insti-
tutionalized, and legalized forms of abuse, Roth and other influential
advocates suggest that human rights advocacy should be limited to dis-
crete violations abuses of established law. Although human rights are
championed as a basis for empowering people to assert agency in response
to hierarchy and domination, human rights shaming strategies are only
effective as a basis for aiding those who are helpless and thought to be
incapable of acting on their own behalf. In his response to concerns about
this minimalist approach to advocacy, Roth insists that the power of
shame can be mobilized in ways that are inherently benign, as a basis
for strengthening legal norms that does not displace or undermine efforts
to address structural injustices. However, such shaming strategies are
double-edged, as many critics have observed. By identifying some forms
of abuse as uniquely shameful and outrageous, human rights organiza-
tions suggest that other forms of abuse are not as shameful or worthy of
concern and that those who experience such abuses may be less deserving
of empathy.
Human rights organizations have championed international criminal
justice institutions, such as war crimes prosecutions and truth commis-
sions, as a basis for accountability for crimes against humanity and other
systematic forms of abuse. As discussed by Ilana Feldman, the influence
of such institutions is associated with the way in which they intervene in
the politics of memory. Such institutions have been championed for their

pedagogical role in confronting systemic, institutionalized, and legalized

forms of abuse. This basic aspiration is reflected in the way in which
South Africa’s influential Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)
introduces the findings presented in its final report by observing that
legalization of apartheid-era abuses had been a powerful strategy for
legitimating the apartheid state – a strategy that influenced global public
opinion for many years by shielding the state from concerns regarding the
institutionalized brutalities of the apartheid state: “Laws tore millions of
workers from their families . . . Laws forced people to work for grossly
insufficient remuneration . . . Laws forced people from their homes and
communities.”52
In order to effectively stigmatize individual perpetrators, and cultivate
empathy for victims, the TRC adopted a narrow interpretation of its legal
mandate to investigate “gross-violations of human rights,” by focusing on
jus in bello violations of international humanitarian law. This meant that
the TRC would not investigate the denial of voting rights, dispossession,
forced labor, forced removals, and other institutionalized forms of abuse.
South Africa’s TRC also urged victims to let go of anger and embrace
forgiveness. As a number of commentators observed, this would discou-
rage participation from those who wanted to express anger, discuss grie-
vances beyond the scope of the mandate, and share accounts centered on
experiences of agency and resistance.53 In theory, human rights advocacy
addresses the limits of humanitarianism by mobilizing shame to confront
abusive authorities. In practice, human rights shaming strategies obfus-
cate the systemic logics of abuse and reinforce various forms of stigmati-
zation that maintain such logics.

Shameful Lands and Systems

We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and
dreamed, is as yet a shameful land.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers”54

In his 1919 essay, “Returning Solders,” Du Bois invokes the collective

voice of black soldiers to lament the hypocritical idealism of wartime
rhetoric meant to justify their sacrifices and the reality that they had
been forced to fight for an America “that gloats in lynching, disenfranch-
isement, caste, brutality, and devilish insult.” Written in the first person
plural, “Returning Soldiers” catalogues a list of institutionalized injus-
tices and appeals for action. This appeal is not directed at America, which
Du Bois refers to as “It,” but imagined as a song that is sung about
America by the soldiers to themselves: “It keeps us consistently and

universally poor . . . then feeds us on charity and derides our poverty,”

they sing. “It insults us” through a “world-wide propaganda of racism”
and “it looks upon any attempt to question or even discuss this as
arrogance, unwarranted assumption and treason.” American shameless-
ness has been institutionalized, Du Bois suggests, to such an extent that
“It” cannot hear the voices that of those that would expose its worst
hypocrisies. The song they sing is imagined as a fight song, meant to
fortify those heading from one battle into another: “We return from
fighting / We return fighting . . . Make way for Democracy!”
A system cannot be made to feel ashamed. It is difficult for people to
perceive the systemic logics of abuse, as Du Bois observes, because those
same logics generally function to normalize and rationalize abuse. The
work of challenging social and political hierarchies requires “unashamed
citizens,” writes Jill Locke, including those who may or may not have
formal citizenship, to “interrogate and denaturalize the terms of shame
and shaming . . . and fight for a reconstituted social order.”55 It is difficult
for privileged audiences to hear narratives that challenge established
institutions and the systemic logics that have come to define what they
take to be natural or normal. When people are asked to reflect on their
responsibilities as beneficiaries of a shameful system, it is common for
them to respond in a defensive manner. For people who are accustomed
to appeals for beneficence, such challenges may appear to be misguided
and destructive. For people who identify accountability with social ostra-
cism, the prospect of being implicated in systemic forms of abuse may feel
deeply threatening. When people are accustomed to feeling empathy in
response to helpless victims, they may be less inclined to respond with
empathy to those who attempt to engage them as political agents or those
who ask them to consider their responsibilities as beneficiaries of, and
participants in, institutionalized forms of abuse.
People who mobilize human rights to challenge structural and systemic
logics of injustice confront a problem: they will find it difficult to be heard
by those who wield power within those institutional settings. They can
frame narratives that appeal to the beneficence of privileged audiences,
yet it is difficult to do so without participating in the silencing or erasure of
their own most pressing concerns. Ida B. Wells addressed this dilemma in
a 1900 speech entitled, “Lynch Law in America,” with journalistic stra-
tegies aimed at exposing the shame of courts that accepted the “unwritten
law” that African Americans would not receive a trial for allegations made
by others, and could not go to the courts to seek justice for wrongs
committed against them. She worked to expose the normalization of
white supremacist violence with accounts that would document the role
of lynching as a systematic pattern of abuse. Her accounts draw attention

to details aimed at exposing the role of bystanders, including “leading

citizens,” who may not have carried out such acts themselves, but con-
tinuously condoned them with their presence.56 Wells drew attention to
the shamelessness of American bystanders to lynching in order to expose
it as an institutionalized atrocity, rather than an aberration, while obser-
ving that in the eyes of the world, America was a shameful country. “No
American travels abroad without blushing with shame for his country on
the subject,” wrote Wells.57
If the inﬂuence of shame is bound up in its subtle order-reinforcing
role, then it might seem sensible to set aside concern with shame and
shaming. However, the order-reinforcing role of shame can cause stigma-
tized populations to internalize the burden of shame in ways that compli-
cate efforts to organize as “unashamed citizens.” Du Bois characterized
“double consciousness” as a “peculiar sense of always looking at the
world through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape
of . . . contempt and pity.”58 “Learning to see and hear only what the
priests and brothers wanted you to see and hear,” recalls George Manuel
of his experiences with the Indian Residential School System in Canada,
“even the people we loved came to look ugly . . . can there be a more
elegant violence than this?”59 Internalized shame can be profoundly
destructive and violent, yet facilitate the appearance of consent in ways
that make it especially difﬁcult to contest institutionalized injustices. In
“Returning Soldiers,” Du Bois imagines a way of working with the power
of shame that would respond to this problem. The soldiers announce
their refusal to continue tolerating the normalization and silencing that
perpetuate structural injustices. They do not frame their appeal as an
effort to compel those in positions of power to feel outrage or compassion
on their behalf. Instead, they issue a call to those who share the similar
burdens to shed the internalized shame associated with such stigmatiza-
tion through the collective work of exposing what is shameful in estab-
lished systems and institutions.
In 1947, Du Bois addressed those involved in drafting the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights with “An Appeal to the World:
A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case
of Citizens of Negro Descent.”60 Du Bois invokes human rights princi-
ples to frame racial injustice in the United States as an international
problem. The United States was lending support to white supremacist
regimes, Du Bois observed, and participants traveling to meetings of the
United States would be highly vulnerable to American racism. “Peoples
of the world, we American Negroes appeal to you,” wrote Du Bois, “our
treatment in America is not merely an internal question of the United
States. It is a basic problem of humanity . . . and as such it demands your

attention and action.” Only through pressure from “peoples of the

world,” Du Bois, suggested, would it be possible for the United States
to begin to confront profound injustices embedded within its very justice
system – legalized and normalized to the extent that white Americans
could not even seem to see their own abuses well enough to grasp the
nature of the appeal.
The appeal was not taken seriously by those who institutionalized
human rights. This is not because Du Bois failed to grasp the power of
shame, but because he pursued an approach to working with that
power that stands in stark contrast with the “naming and shaming”
practices of prominent human rights organizations. The appeal that
Du Bois submitted to Eleanor Roosevelt was not framed in a manner
that was designed to appeal to the sensibilities of privileged audiences.
He did not articulate a plea for empathy and outrage aimed at stigma-
tizing individuals for uniquely egregious and deliberate cruelty. His
appeal was meant to embarrass American elites and unsettle their
assumptions about victimhood, guilt, and rights. Like “naming and
shaming” however, the strategies favored by Du Bois were confronta-
tional and inspired backlash. Backlash can be useful to those who
aspire to expose and weaken the order-reinforcing role of shame, yet
it is also costly and dangerous, and it can provoke repressive violence
that makes it difﬁcult to continue the work of challenging established
norms.
Human rights organizations and institutions can play an important role
in supporting efforts to expose shameful systems, then, when they provide
strong collective support, as well as support for the civil and political
rights claims of those engaged in asserting political agency. The assassi-
nations of high-proﬁle environmental justice activists, such as Tomás
García and Berta Cáceres, leaders of the Civic Council of Popular and
Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) underscores the sal-
ience of their appeals for civil and political rights protections as an integral
dimension of their efforts to challenge economic exploitation, disposses-
sion, racial injustices, and corruption.61 Following García’s assassination
in 2013, Cáceres was routinely threatened for her leadership in
COPINH’s efforts to stop logging projects and secure communal land
titles for Indigenous communities in Honduras. COPINH responded by
demanding that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights investigate
the 2016 assassination of Berta Cáceres, and that the banks invested in
extractive projects and dams in the region investigate Indigenous rights
violations associated with such projects. They also called for congres-
sional representatives in the United States to support the Human Rights
in Honduras Act.62

Mily Treviño-Saucedo also cultivated strategies for empowering

agency by responding to stigmatization when she began organizing
Lideres Campesinas in response to the abuse and sexual harassment of
undocumented migrant workers in California’s Coachella Valley.
Treviño-Saucedo found that the men did not want to discuss it and that
the women had been intimidated by a culture of blaming and stigmatizing
women who spoke out. As part of a master’s thesis project at Cal State San
Bernardino, Treviño-Saucedo surveyed women working in the ﬁelds to
document the scale of the problem and to solicit their ideas about how to
address it. Lideres Campesinas builds on insights from this work by
providing a network of support for women that aims to “strengthen
leadership of farmworker women and girls so that they can be agents of
economic, social, and political change and ensure their human rights.”63
The organization now has chapters throughout the state of California and
works to educate farmworkers and their families regarding rights issues
associated with pesticide poisoning, wage theft, asylum, and workplace
safety, in addition to sexual violence. As Ramona Felix puts it, “[W]hen
we realize that there are many who feel like this, we unite in order to stand
up for human rights.”64 Human Rights Watch and other rights groups
provide support for legal strategies associated with the work done by
organizations such as Lideres Campesinas and COPINH. However,
these organizations do not identify justice with law enforcement and
they do not position themselves as helpless victims in order to appeal for
empathy and outrage among privileged advocates. Rather, they work to
empower agency by countering internalized shame and stigmatization,
and they offset risks associated with the inevitable threat of violent back-
lash by providing networks that can offer legal expertise, as well as
collective political support.

Conclusion
In his chapter for this volume, Stephen Hopgood contends that human
rights will likely decline in signiﬁcance because there is little consensus on
what is essential about them and they are an annoyance for powerful
states that underwrite international laws and institutions. As this becomes
increasingly clear, he adds, it will also become clear that human rights
advocates can no longer rely on the legal frameworks and institutions they
have established. Thrasymachus might respond approvingly, while not-
ing that if human rights laws and institutions are generally framed in ways
that advantage the strong, then their unreliability is not really a new
development. Socrates night observe that there is little consensus regard-
ing what is essential to justice more generally, but many people think it is

still an important point to debate and to pursue. Ideals are generally

institutionalized in ways that benefit those in power, but it is difficult for
people to critically evaluate such institutions and to assess the logics of
legitimation when they get in the habit of conflating the meaning of
concepts and ideals with their institutional expression in a given order.
Attention to the order-reinforcing role of shaming strategies is useful in
pursuing Thrasymachus’s concern with unmasking the logic by which
ideals are invoked to legitimate the interests of the powerful, as well as
Socrates’s concern with the process by which people critically evaluate
institutions by debating the meaning of their ideals.
Prominent shaming strategies enable privileged audiences to remain
shameless in denying responsibility for their role in policies and strategies
that perpetuate systemic forms of abuse. To the extent that they inhibit
political agency and obfuscate systemic logics, these strategies can rein-
force resignation, even as they demand moral action. By defining moral
action in relation to stark binaries, shaming strategies are associated with
predictable logics of backlash and defensive maneuvering in response to
grievances and critiques that expose the limits of established institutions.
These dynamics can reinforce the silencing and stigmatization of those
who pursue the kinds of political engagements that are needed to trans-
form systemic and structural logics of abuse. Such strategies establish
subtle, yet powerful incentives for those who seek support to share stories
that are likely to appeal to the sensibilities of those in positions of power
and privilege. They can also discourage those who might wish to share
stories that privileged audiences might find unsettling or off-putting. This
makes it difficult for humanitarians and human rights advocates to hear
the voices of those best positioned to explain what kind of assistance they
need, and the voices of those who might explain how the appearance of
peace can be maintained by the normalization of violence. Such strategies
can make it difficult for those most affected by persecution, exploitation,
and abuse to share stories that might convey full weight of the invisible
burdens they bear and what it would really mean to take responsibility for
addressing them.
A well-known Aesop’s fable “The Dog and the Shadow” tells the story
of a dog crossing a river with a bone in its mouth when it looks down and
sees another dog with a bigger bone sitting in the water. Eager to acquire
a better meal, the dog opens its mouth to reach for it. This causes the
original bone to fall into the water, revealing that the desired bone was
nothing but a shadow of the one the dog already had and has now lost.65
The fable teaches a lesson about the importance of valuing modest, yet
life-saving, achievements. It invites audiences to reflect on whether their
impulse to ask for more might be driven by foolish illusions and imagined

visions of what could be. Humanitarian organizations convey a similar

message when they mobilize shame in ways that position deserving reci-
pients of aid as helpless victims, grateful for assistance no matter how
limited or inadvertently destructive it may be. Human rights shaming
strategies reinforce this message to the extent that they cultivate habitual
obedience in response to conventional norms and institutionalized author-
ity. These strategies also inhibit and stigmatize those who assert agency to
call for more expansive approaches to justice, implying that they, like
Aesop’s foolish dog, risk losing what they have been given if they open
their mouths to chase shadowy illusions. We could question the logic of
the fable by imagining a different and more just kind of order that would
grant the dog access to a supply of bones. To pursue such goals would also
require different approaches to formulating moral action and just order –
approaches that are not designed for audiences that are expected to
behave like foolish dogs, but for those that are expected to participate in
the process of elaborating, maintaining, and revising legal orders through
the continuous exercise of critical judgment and political agency.
Efforts to confront suffering and injustice will be limited, Arendt suggests,
without support for those who assert agency to confront institutionalized
forms of abuse. In her view, this would also require new ways of thinking
about authority that do not identify the achievement of just order with
evidence of success in enforcement and compliance, and do not limit the
scope of moral action and accountability to intentional choices made in
discrete moments of decision. Wells, Du Bois, and Treviño-Sauceda may
be viewed as exemplars of an approach to working with the power of shame
that advances such goals, and one that is not uncommon among those who
mobilize the human rights to confront structural and systemic forms of
abuse. The signiﬁcance of such strategies cannot be evaluated with refer-
ence to their success in gaining support from powerful actors because this is
not their primary goal. Such strategies are premised on a common assump-
tion that those who confront systemic forms of abuse must work to expose,
unsettle, and transform the kinds of subtle order-reinforcing logics that
preclude meaningful access to institutional remedies for abuse and injustice.
It is an approach that challenges silencing and political exclusion by repu-
diating internalized shame and by exposing what is shameful in established
institutions and familiar conventions.

Aisling Swaine

In 1999, working with an international aid agency on the Albanian border

with Kosovo during the NATO bombing of that territory, I encountered
an issue that was to become central to the ways in which international
human rights and humanitarian organizations would establish their
approach to women’s experiences of conflict. As thousands of Kosovars
streamed over the border to the growing camps and services on the other
side, the stories of atrocity by the Milošević regime on those people were
pouring out too. My work, and research that I was conducting, led me to
speak with adolescent girls. Through conversations with them, I learned
that almost every one I spoke with had experienced some form of sexual
assault and/or rape; that this violence was part of the range of threats that
their families were fleeing from; and for some girls, their families had
spontaneously married them to men from their communities during flight
as a form of protection from rape that was targeted at “virgin” Kosovar
girls.1 When I raised this issue with the humanitarian agency that I was
working with, and with others on the ground, and explained that almost
every girl I met with was describing sexual violence as part of their
experience of the conflict and refuge from it, I received consistent
responses: “We don’t do that,” “It’s too sensitive,” “That’s not within
our remit, we deliver aid.”
Fast forward to 2018: since the turn of the century, the foremost
multilateral system that oversees response to the impacts of armed con-
flict on affected populations, the United Nations and its entities and
partners, have dramatically changed their tune. In the human rights
arena, human rights monitors on the ground, working with entities such
as the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) and
UN political and peacekeeping missions, specifically document conflict-
related sexual violence (CRSV2);3 the UN Human Rights Council’s
Commissions of Inquiry now include sexual violence within their man-
dates and experts on sexual violence in their teams conducting investiga-
tions in conflict-affected settings globally,4 with a roster of people with

160

these speciﬁc investigatory skills established for deployment;5 the UN

Human Rights Council has adopted several resolutions on this issue;6 the
Committee of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) has adopted a specific
General Recommendation advising states parties of their obligations to
address women’s rights in conflict, including sexual violence;7 while in
2015, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution nominating
June 19 as international day against CRSV.8 In the humanitarian arena,
prevention and response to CRSV as part of humanitarian relief emerged
through the UN Security Council’s specific resolutions condemning the
use of sexual violence in war;9 in 2005 (and updated in 2015) the UN
Inter-Agency Standing Committee on Humanitarian Action (IASC) first
published its specific guidelines for the sector on addressing what they
term “gender-based violence” (GBV) through humanitarian response;10
a specific sub-cluster on GBV was established under the process of reform
of the global humanitarian response architecture in that same era;11
a state-led high-level global conference on the prevention and response
to CRSV was held in 2014;12 the G8 issued a declaration condemning the
issue;13 international aid agencies are now measured on their level of
response to GBV programming;14 while international donor governments
are now assessed and critiqued for their levels of funding to policy and
programming addressing this issue.15
Attitudes and approaches to conflict-related violence against women
(CRVAW16), and particularly CRSV, have clearly changed dramatically
since 1999. Normative and operational changes toward these issues are
conspicuous in the rapidity at which they have developed and the degree
to which the UN system and its associated entities have embraced CRVAW
as relevant to their remit. Also conspicuous is that these developments
traverse both the human rights and the humanitarian fields of global policy
and practice in response to conflict-affected settings. As evidenced here,
issues of women’s rights, particularly CRSV, have become very much
entwined in the global policy systems of human rights and humanitarianism.
In fact, comparative to my experience in humanitarian operations in 1999,
the neglect of CRSV in a complex humanitarian setting on the part of either
human rights or humanitarian organizations on the ground is now unthink-
able and would be subject to serious critique, and identified as a failing.
What do these developments represent? Are they simply evidence of
a growing cognizance of women’s experiences of conflict and their rele-
vance to the mandates of the human rights and humanitarian actors? Or
more than that? Do they represent evidence of fragmentation within the
UN system in terms of its structural and normative approach to issues
that are common to, but are evidently developing separately within, its

differentiated human rights and humanitarian regimes?17 Or of the mer-

ging of these regimes and norms within practice, a complementarity
galvanized around a singular issue, where human rights workers docu-
ment violations, including sexual violence, that have led to the displace-
ment of people across conflict settings, while humanitarians get nearer to
those frontlines, witness those violations, and make addressing them part
of their operations? Critical questions arise in respect to what has moti-
vated these developments and what they say about each sectors’ approach
to the impacts of conflict on affected populations. Of most interest to this
volume is a consideration of what they say about the relationship between
and areas of intersection across the fields of human rights and humanitar-
ianism when it comes to the issue of CRVAW.
This chapter examines the relationship between the human rights and
the humanitarian fields through the lens of their normative and related
practice response to the issue of CRVAW. In its exploration of these
issues, the chapter focuses on the approaches to practice that have come
to characterize the human rights and humanitarian fields. By this, I mean,
the body of normative laws, policy, and operational approaches that have
emerged through the United Nations system and associated actors. For
the purposes of this chapter, each field of practice is understood in respect
of its evolution within the international system of governance, represent-
ing “regimes” within the UN system. The human rights regime is under-
stood as the genealogy of the post-World War II international legal system
which established an “adjudicatory model” with the “ultimate normative
power” to make human rights “protectable.”18 The adoption of the UN
charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the evolving
body of international human rights treaty law that followed espoused
a new mode of legal accountability for human rights ideals.19 The concept
of human rights thus became “premised on the idea that outsiders must
judge the way in which states treat their own citizens.”20 Accordingly, the
UN human rights regime as it is referred to, is made up of a body of
human rights conventions, with an associated architecture designed to
oversee monitoring of their implementation by states, with the aim of
accountability for transgressions of legal obligations. This practice field is
made up of, among many actors, the UN Human Rights Council, the
treaty bodies that are attached to international human rights conventions,
and operational agencies such as the OHCHR which establishes many
“missions” around the world to monitor implementation of human rights
law.21
The humanitarian field of practice, on the other hand, is understood to
be founded in international humanitarian law which “does not set out to
end war or eradicate civilian casualties but rather to tame war by

minimizing death and suffering.”22 Traced back to Henry Dunant’s

creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, the humani-
tarian practice field has evolved to become “the impartial, neutral, and
independent provision of relief to victims of conflict and natural disas-
ters,” with its own architecture, or governance system.23 The humanitar-
ian “regime” within the UN (very loosely conceived) would broadly
include the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee on Humanitarian
Action which draws together many of the more prominent UN and
other international actors in the field such as the Red Cross movement,
to establish and oversee UN-led normative rules and policies for the
operation of humanitarian assistance,24 and UN Secretariat entities
such as the Organization for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(UNOCHA), which coordinates the activities of UN and other actors in
sites of operation. Associated actors in the humanitarian space are depart-
ments on humanitarian action within governmental donor agencies,
nongovernmental and UN agencies with specific mandates to operate
humanitarian relief. The practice of this field involves provision of basic
services, water, food, shelter, as part of the relief response to those
displaced and otherwise impacted by humanitarian crises, and is “under-
taken in the name of compassion, care, and responsibility.”25 The field of
humanitarian practice is largely preoccupied with addressing the conse-
quences of a crisis, rather than its causes per much of the human rights
regime, even though this is changing for many actors.26 It is important to
note that what is referred to here largely represents what has emerged as
a “formal or institutional humanitarian system . . . mostly Western actors
whose raison d’être is humanitarian and who are linked together by
established codes, shared principles and jargon . . . [which] has become
increasingly institutionalized and centralized under UN leadership for the
sake of improved coherence and coordination.”27
Through examining the issue of CRVAW within and across each of
these sets of regimes and associated practices, this chapter considers
whether there are commonalities and/or distinctions in the ways in
which each deals with the impacts of conflict on women’s and girls’
lives, and specifically, their experiences of conflict-related violence. The
chapter explores the perceived boundaries in terms of the foundational
basis of both fields, identifying that they are not so clear cut when
examined in respect of specific thematic areas of human rights and
humanitarian operations; namely, in the case of CRVAW. It is, how-
ever, in the strategies that both sets of actors use to fulfill these con-
ceptual aims that divergence emerges, as well as opportunities for
synergies. The chapter first sets out an overview of the development
of approaches to CRVAW within the field of human rights and then

humanitarianism. It then identiﬁes areas of divergence between the

fields in respect of conceptual and practical approaches to CRVAW.
On the basis of these key areas of tension, the chapter then uses
a gender interests framework to explore the potential for future com-
plementarity across the fields for the fulfillment of women’s rights
within and across each field of practice.

Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Conﬂict-Related

Violence against Women: Developments in Each Field
The fields of human rights and humanitarianism have offered much to the
formal and substantive advancement of women’s rights. Historic and
informal civil society activism on women’s liberation and rights, which
largely took place outside of governance structures, gained a foothold in
the evolving and increasingly formalized and rule-based paradigm offered
through the emerging multilateral systems of the United Nations. Initially
an imperative for women’s rights activists that post-World War II multi-
lateralism was informed by and engaged with women’s equality, it is now
the case that critical issues that arise for women, such as specific forms of
crime, violation, and inequalities, are normatively shaped and molded by
this very system.
The “global governance” role that spheres of human rights and of
humanitarianism have come to occupy have been documented by scho-
lars of both fields.28 It is perhaps the issue of CRVAW that has most
predominated, gained traction and is the most commonly addressed
women’s rights issue across both of these fields in recent times.
Curiously, it is an issue that is quite tangible in respect to rights and
delivery of services and around which, not without controversy, states
have galvanized.29 This is most evident in respect to sexual violence by
conflict actors, where both human rights and humanitarian organizations
have increasingly carved out a specific role for themselves in respect of
their mandates and modes of working. In a short time-span, primarily
from the late 1990s to the current time, the issue of CRVAW, and
particularly specific forms of CRSV, namely rape, has become quite
central to whether and how each field engages with women’s equality.
There appears to be critical synergies between what becomes normative
through public international law (e.g., forms of CRVAW as human rights
violations), and what then also becomes normative to and a legitimate
concern for the field of humanitarian response (programmatic responses
to CRVAW). To explore these synergies further, I first map out the
genealogy and key characteristics of the approach taken to CRVAW by
the human rights system, and then by the humanitarian system.

Human Rights and Violence Against Women

The human rights field is the earliest site of feminist engagement with
international law, with women’s rights becoming quite central to that
body of law relatively quickly.30 The need to overcome the gendered bias
in the founding human rights instruments31 and to promote the inclusion
of specific rights pertaining to discrimination impacting women was
a primary site of initial “liberal inclusion” and “structural bias” scholar-
ship of the 1980s and early 1990s.32 The rights entitlements formally
articulated under early human rights frameworks, such as the UN
Convention on Civil and Political Rights (1969) and Economic and
Social Rights (1969), although in theory available to “all,” were found
to have “blind spots” with respect to women’s rights.33
The introduction of the idea of a “bill of rights” for women at the time
of the proliferation of human rights treaties in the 1960s resulted in
a “declaration on the elimination of discrimination against women,”
eventually culminating in the adoption of a specific treaty on this same
topic.34 The Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against
Women (CEDAW) was adopted in 1979.35 It advanced the overall
human rights doctrine in general terms, formally articulating a legal
definition of discrimination for the first time, while firmly situating spe-
cific areas of discrimination relating to women’s lives as central to the
evolving human rights field: the family, reproduction, employment and
legal identity, among others.
The human rights field thus offers a very specific frame through which
the lives of women are articulated: discrimination, which derives from
and causes inequality, and which is tackled in terms of a legal definition
and means. This differs quite significantly from the humanitarian sphere,
which as will be discussed later, is very much about operational program-
ming and still questions, on the part of some operational actors, whether
or not longer-term gender equality issues are even relevant. The lens of
discrimination implies that there is an explicit bias to be tackled, and its
human rights and legalized framing means that the direction of account-
ability and redress is the state.
It was not until the 1990s, with the wave of human rights attention
following the end of the Cold War, that the issue of violence against
women (VAW) came formally under the frame of human rights. The
proximity of the Yugoslav wars and the reports of sexual violence emer-
ging from the region to the 1993 Vienna Conference on Human Rights
inevitably held significant influence on the resulting attention to VAW.
On the heels of CEDAW’s General Recommendations 12 (1989) and 19
(1992)36 which articulated the applicability of the Convention to VAW,

the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women

(DEVAW) was adopted.37
These developments in the human rights ﬁeld did a number of things for
the issue of VAW. First, VAW was above all deﬁned as a violation of human
rights, which was an important development in respect of gaining the poli-
tical and legal legitimacy and symbolic currency needed to be addressed
within the vertical regime of accountability under the UN’s state-based
system of human rights.38 Second, the instruments denoted VAW as
a “gender-based violence,” framing it in respect to the social construction
of harm in a gendered social world, and relating it directly to gender inequal-
ities experienced by women. Third, it framed VAW within the founding
basis of formal legalistic ideas of women’s rights, namely under CEDAW’s
articulation of “gender-based violence [as] a form of discrimination that
seriously inhibits women’s ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis
of equality with men.”39 The violence in women’s lives thereby became
framed as a form of discrimination requiring legal redress for violating
women’s human rights and potential in respect of equality.

Humanitarianism and Violence Against Women

The development of approaches to VAW within the humanitarian sphere
has not been quite so formalized. A distinctive body of multilateral state-
driven consensus-based frameworks on VAW speciﬁcally for and within
humanitarian governance has not evolved over time. Rather, engagement
with CRVAW by humanitarian actors is arguably grounded in the UN’s
existing legal and normative frameworks outlined before and developed
elsewhere i.e. in the human rights and development regimes of the UN.
There has however been the adoption of ad hoc and derivative policy
statements under the IASC that have progressively come to shape
a distinctive humanitarian body of policy approaches to such issues.
The ﬁrst related major policy development in the humanitarian “regime”
of the UN system came in 1999, with the adoption of a “Policy Statement
for the Integration of a Gender Perspective in Humanitarian Assistance”
by the IASC, which oversees articulation of standards and norms for
humanitarian policy and programming.40 Following the adoption of
“gender mainstreaming” as a UN system-wide strategy for the advance-
ment of gender equality by the UN’s Economic and Social Commission
in 1997,41 the IASC, recognized that in complex emergencies “the
human rights of women and children are often directly threatened, i.e.
the right to physical integrity and to lead a life free of violence, and women
become more exposed to violence, especially sexual violence.”42 The
policy is underpinned by principles of “gender equality and the equal

protection of human rights of women and men.”43 A later 2008 policy

aims to ensure that “gender equality is addressed adequately in all aspects
of the IASC’s work.”44 These policy developments were followed by the
aforementioned IASC policy guidelines on GBV and on gender main-
streaming in humanitarian action.45
Humanitarian agencies have been slowly developing programming
responses to VAW in humanitarian operations since the 1990s. The
UNHCR was the first agency to develop a specific policy and set of
guidance on addressing “sexual violence against refugees” in 1995
(alongside the events in the former Yugoslavia), and a later edition in
2003.46 Numerous aid agencies followed suit and have focused on the
broader frame of GBV, which is understood as “an umbrella term for any
harmful act that is perpetrated against a person’s will and that is based on
socially ascribed (i.e. gender) differences between males and females. It
includes acts that inflict physical, sexual or mental harm or suffering,
threats of such acts, coercion, and other deprivations of liberty. These
acts can occur in public or in private.”47 The United Nations Population
Fund (UNFPA) has led this field with a focus on GBV within and outside
of humanitarian settings, while NGOs such as the International Rescue
Committee became the first of the international aid organizations to
establish a specific institutional unit and expertise on responding to
GBV. The Sphere Minimum Standards, evolving in the late 1990s, failed
to adequately address gender or GBV issues, but later updated in its
handbook of 2011 and 2018, setting out critical standards for attention
to gender and GBV within humanitarian operations.48
It was not until the UN Security Council adopted its women, peace,
and security (WPS) agenda that specific links between humanitarian
action and response to CRVAW, and particularly CRSV, were formally
adopted by decision-making political organs of the UN system. Its reso-
lutions articulate the need to “ensure the protection of all civilians inha-
biting such camps, in particular women and girls, from all forms of
violence, including rape and other sexual violence, and to ensure full,
unimpeded and secure humanitarian access to them”49 and “urges
United Nations entities and donors to provide non-discriminatory and
comprehensive health services, including sexual and reproductive health,
psychosocial, legal, and livelihood support and other multi-sectoral ser-
vices for survivors of sexual violence.”50
The outline given here has offered some clues as to the areas of con-
vergence and divergence between the fields of human rights and huma-
nitarianism with regards to normative responses to CRVAW. I use this as
a basis for next exploring the critical issues that arise in terms of their
interrelationship and interconnections in how they approach these issues.

Divergence and Symbiosis in Approaches to CRVAW

in Human Rights and Humanitarian Fields
The purpose of this volume is to explore the interrelationship between the
fields of human rights and humanitarianism, their symmetries, as well as
the boundaries and distinctions that may set them apart. Considering the
relationship between human rights and humanitarianism in respect to the
issue of CRVAW is far from a simplistic or straightforward exercise
however. Whether the human rights field’s approach to CRVAW is
similar to or distinctive from that taken in the humanitarian field, and
whether distinctive boundaries exist, and how they relate, might be some-
what more difficult to discern than other debates and themes set out in
this volume. Arguably, preventing and responding to violence against
women, whether through the legal redress process (human rights) or
provision of medical care following an assault (humanitarian response),
are endeavors aimed at fulfilling women’s rights. Parsing out one from the
other as distinctive is not only tricky, but also negates the framing through
which multiple women’s movements globally have brought visibility to
and attempted to tackle violence against women – to fulfill women’s rights
and achieve gender equality. It is the very fact of boundaries such as those
discussed through this volume that feminist scholars and women’s rights
activists have for decades decried as being the central problem to the ways
in which the international governance system, and particularly interna-
tional law as the basis for its actions, has responded to women’s lives.51 As
I discuss some of the divergences between both fields in respect to
CRVAW, I do so solely on the basis of distinctions in normative and
programming approaches, and in places point back to the synergies
between both fields as it is critical that their shared approach to
CRVAW because it is a violation of women’s rights is recognized as
inherent to my argument and to the work of both fields. In discussing
the divergences, I do so on the understanding that human rights actors are
those in conflict settings wishing to document and seek legal redress for
violations of international law by parties to a conflict, while humanitarian
actors are those providing a range of services which are otherwise absent
in a conflict crisis setting. I attempt here to set out three observations on
the ways in which the human rights and humanitarian fields, and their
differentiated histories and substantive approaches, first demonstrate
divergence, and then commonality, in how they address CRVAW. In so
doing I also underline the problems that boundaries present in compart-
mentalizing women’s needs and rights in complex humanitarian settings.
First, divergence between human rights and humanitarianism primar-
ily emerges through the ways in which the mandates of each field are

interpreted and implemented in operations and programming. The

human rights field and its approach to CRVAW has evolved on the
basis of its founding in legal and judicial approaches to human rights
violations, while the humanitarian field has been led and is characterized
by its response to life-saving and addressing the bodily needs of people,
which has prompted a medicalized and health-centric approach. These
are divergences that characterize each field’s understanding of the issue
and have implications for how it is substantively addressed. These differ-
ences have critical implications for the fulfillment of women’s rights and
needs in conflict settings, and adherence to mandate-specific formulas
thereby have implications for women’s lives. This is particularly the case
where human rights violations are understood by human rights actors as
state-centric phenomenon. The solution thereby rests with tackling state
responsibility in respect to omissions or the commission of violations.
Humanitarian actors focus on the needs of the population that is suffering
as a result of an event outside of their control, likely resulting from state
lack of/actions.
In global policy, and increasingly in humanitarian programming, there
has been a significant and substantial turn to legal redress as the solution
to the “problem” of CRVAW, and particularly of CRSV. Evident is an
increasing securitization and legalization of CRSV normatively.52 As
feminist activists have turned to global governance institutions to respond
to the prevalence of CRVAW, there has been a growing “carceral femin-
ism” that has espoused a response grounded in legal redress and punitive
criminal responses.53 The solution to both prevention and deterrence of
CRVAW and responding to its occurrence is increasingly a legal punitive
criminal redress issue. This is evident through a number of normative
means: the framing within the UN Security Council resolutions on WPS,
the only multilateral normative frameworks setting out the UN systems’
approach to this issue, as a focus solely on CRSV and specifically “tac-
tical” and “systematic” rape by parties to conflict, with a primary focus on
legal redress by the system;54 and the focus on “tackling impunity” for
CRSV as the primary solution driven by global state-driven responses
(including, for example, the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative
(PSVI)).55
In practical terms, within humanitarian settings, this has meant that
there has been a growth in the number of human rights and “rule of law”-
focused organizations operating legal programs providing support for
victims/survivors to secure legal accountability for sexual harms that are
attributable to the state.56 The inclusion of “Women Protection
Advisers” in UN peacekeeping operations57 to collect data on forms of
CRSV that come under the UN Security Council’s WPS agenda are also

a new development in the UN-mission response to the issue,58 as is the

reporting and “naming and shaming” of those state and non-state actors
known to enact sexualized violence.59 The framing of the WPS agenda on
sexual violence is, however, a very narrow and reductive focus on “sexual
violence when used as a tactic” in conflict, that is, a very specific and
political form of violence that is attributed to armed actors for the pur-
poses of their political aims. This has advanced a degree of divergence
within the field of humanitarianism itself, where the peace and security
realm intersect with that of the humanitarian. Some cleavages are evi-
dently emerging between the legal, peacekeeping and security-focused
actors that will focus on a specific form of CRSV under a “peace and
security” umbrella, while humanitarian actors take an approach based on
the wider “GBV” frame and its capture of wide-ranging forms of harms
impacting women in humanitarian settings such as intimate partner
violence (even though for many agencies, funding and resourcing
a program may depend on framing it as a response to the same narrow
forms of sexual violence specific to the conflict).
For humanitarian agencies, the original development of on-the-ground
programming responses to GBV evolved as a public health response. This
mirrors the initial engagement on VAW in national jurisdictions in the
global north outside of conflict, where state and non-state policy
responses have primarily developed as a public health response. The
medicalization of GBV in humanitarian action was initially sustained by
international humanitarian organizations, led by NGOs mirroring and
establishing what they saw as the most pressing concern with respect to
this issue – providing a practical response to the physical life-threatening
injuries and sexual health issues that VAW results in for women and girls.
This has been and remains the primary focus of humanitarian agencies. It
fulfills the life-saving imperative of humanitarian agencies and means that
they can provide life-saving services, even if and where the harms they are
responding to are highly politicized as being part of conflict tactics. In the
case of humanitarian action, the service response is inclusive of broad-
ranging forms of GBV as a response to urgent need. This service is
provided to victims/survivors of GBV regardless of who enacted the
violence (combatant/civilian), where it took place (the home/battlefield),
and its outcome (injury, political gain, sexual opportunism).
Humanitarianism, in its mission to serve all on the basis of impartiality,
provides services regardless of distinctions in what is occurring, while
human rights law and its practice, as evidenced, tends to reinforce them.
There are implications to these divergent approaches that I set out here
as being characteristic of the boundaries that exist in practice for both
fields. First, there is little cohesion between these actors on an overall

agreed and consistent approach to CRVAW within a humanitarian set-

ting, with divergent approaches even among and across UN entities. In
a humanitarian setting there will be a range of organizations that may
determine their mandate as human rights focused or humanitarian
focused, or both. All of that work, human rights and humanitarian in
focus, is about fulfilling an individual’s right to life, livelihood, and
services and is a thread that runs through the work of both sets of actors.
Nonetheless, on the one hand, in any one setting there are a range of
human rights organizations that promote a legal response, encouraging
victims/survivors to “report” their rape and seek legal redress, primarily of
violations by state and non-state armed actors. Advocates for justice and
redress argue that without accountability, the potential for legal deter-
rence is lost and the roots of the problem will never be addressed,
particularly where prosecution is understood as a deterrence to violations
of human rights and humanitarian legal norms in political violence. On
the other hand, there are a range of humanitarian organizations that
provide humanitarian services for CRVAW in the form primarily of
a health and personal-safety response. While they may also provide pro-
gramming, information or referral to legal and justice services, the orga-
nizations that predominate the responses to GBV, primarily encourage
victims/survivors to seek, in the very least, a medical response to the
physical and psychological harms they have endured to receive basic
treatment. Many advocates argue that the most urgent need is
a medical response to the very real physical, emotional and psychological
injuries that are experienced as a result of violence. While for the human
rights organizations the process of seeking legal redress for violations by
culpable actors is of primary concern, for the humanitarian organizations
it is not only secondary, but also may in fact counter their means of
providing confidential and safe services, which is central to their service
provision. Each set of actors claims to “know what’s best” in the interests
of those affected. The focus in human rights on “the state over civil
society, and of civil and political rights over economic and
social rights”60 is seen by many as an obstruction to what humanitarian-
ism terms “women-focused” or “survivor-focused” approaches to GBV.
These approaches increasingly come into tension with one another, par-
ticularly in complex political humanitarian emergencies where legal
accountability is paramount for actors who require reporting and data
to achieve legal redress, and for health service providers, maintaining
confidentiality rather than reporting is paramount to ensure the safety
of women who do come forward.
For both, in an increasingly donor and funding-led environment, the
need for reporting of how many victims/survivors accessed their medical

or legal support services is very real. In fact, as I have witnessed myself in

humanitarian programming, there is a guarded protectionism over cli-
ents. While confidentiality and the security of the woman herself is para-
mount and central to much of the good practice that is happening, there is
also a protectionism whereby some service providers may act as gate-
keepers for those who report, unless and until that woman expressly
requests access to legal services. On the other hand, such protectionism
may be necessary in an environment where UN agencies and NGOs are
under pressure to be seen to be acting or to “deliver” on justice in their
programming, and are breaching much needed confidentiality principles
that are necessary for the safety and security of women who report in
highly politicized contexts.61 There is a competitiveness emerging. As has
been noted in the DRC, where CRSV has received hyper-visibility and
politicization, and where multiple international organizations are wanting
to be seen to respond and are motivated to do so on the basis of the broad
availability of funding, this has resulted in the “creation of a ‘market’ for
services for prevention and protection.”62 There results significant diver-
gence over policy terminology (legal human rights vs. health-focused
language), or agreement on the causes (political neglect or deliberate
political intent vs. gender and a gender-based harm resulting from
inequalities) and solutions to the problem of violence in women’s lives
(legal vs. health). The divergent language also determines how the issue
becomes represented to those that human rights and humanitarian actors
are trying to influence, that is, the UN system, donors and funders, and
influencers.63
Second, the two fields have offered distinctive responses in respect of
the feminist endeavor to address violence in women’s lives. Feminist
engagement with human rights and other bodies of international law
has been a political project, politicizing the interests and concerns in
women’s lives. From the outset of engagement, feminists identified the
boundaries that international law establishes with respect to women’s
lives.64 The dichotomy between the public and the private sphere,
where women and the issues impacting them were relegated to the private
sphere and noninterference by the state and its regulatory apparatus
(except in regards to reproduction), is the most fundamental boundary
that feminists identified.65 A reconceptualization of human rights law was
envisaged by activists to reform and overcome this distinction, a move
largely taken forward in the 1990s and through the developments in law
that were earlier outlined. The ultimate achievement was the re-framing
of VAW from being a private concern, to a human rights and thereby
state-based and political concern, making the issue a concern of the
public and political sphere.66 While there has been much critique of the

“depoliticization” of women’s rights that occurs within global policy

spheres, securing a framing of this issue as a concern of rights, equality,
and discrimination has been a wholly political endeavor and a necessity to
make it an issue of high politics.
In contrast, the approach in the humanitarian field is estimated to
have had the opposite effect. The centrality of medical practical
responses to CRVAW has a reductive effect in delineating forms of
violence as an “apolitical ‘injury’, a ‘harm done’,”67 rather than
a violation or form of discrimination as is framed by the human rights
field. “Medicalisation has had the strange effect of erasing gender – that
is, the power relations that produce and inform gender – leaving in
its place suffering bodies, without perpetrators or causes, each of
which can be treated by the universal ‘humanitarian kit.’”68 While the
“gender-based” framing of VAW is essential to humanitarian engage-
ment with CRVAW, that is, addressing GBV because it is a violation
aimed at women because they are women, arguments abound that
tackling the underlying inequalities, gendered and political in respect
of conflict-driven violence, is not an imperative for humanitarian set-
tings. While GBV advocates will argue that GBV programming is about
advancing gender equality, evident is a distinctive suspicion and skepti-
cism among wider humanitarian actors as to the relevance of social
change issues like inequalities to the humanitarian field. Gender may,
on the one hand, be essential to understanding the basis for why women
experience violence, but on the other, addressing inequalities are not
essential to delivery of services and is thereby questioned by some (even
though the very recent securing of inclusion of GBV response in huma-
nitarian “packages” has arguably been a progression toward achieving
equality for women in humanitarian response in itself). Further, the
focus on a medical response has been noted to address the outcomes or
impacts of the violence, rather than the gendered and structural causes,
a dynamic that is again the focus of the human rights field.69
“Medicalisation directs attention away from the structural inequalities
that are so intimately linked to this human rights violation, for both
western women and women from the global south.”70 This approach
“depoliticizes the (female) victim/survivor of sexual violence in order to
render her, as a recipient of international aid, ‘palatable, legitimate,
even sympathetic.’”71 That status of “social suffering” rendered to the
conflict-affected female population72 and the foregoing process of attri-
buting legal status to the issue of VAW within the human rights field has
arguably been integral to ensuring that responses to CRVAW are
among the panoply of concerns, namely human rights concerns, that
humanitarian organizations consider as within their remit.

These developments within the humanitarian sphere are clearly framed

around the imperative of humanitarian action in response to
a humanitarian need. In the articulation of this imperative comes the
concept of need and with it the concept of vulnerability and victimhood.
The “refugee” or “displaced” or “conflict-impacted individual” is at the
center of its approaches. It is about “addressing need,” the basics of
survival, and also of protection. The very recent UN system and huma-
nitarian institutional engagement with CRVAW signals another way to
understand and to approach it – the events of a conflict and of
a humanitarian crisis causes something that is done to an individual that
requires response, differing from the human rights regimes’ positioning of
the issue as an outcome of structural discrimination. Humanitarian action
starts from this frame – that vulnerability and dependency arise in acute
ways in humanitarian contexts, where “victims” are blameless and war-
rant immediate support, which now includes women who have experi-
enced GBV. Human rights arguments, and particularly those from
women’s rights constituencies, affirm and re-affirm that addressing
GBV requires addressing structural inequalities that impact women and
girls. The politicization of the issue through human rights stymies the
ability to deliver services, while the depoliticization of the issue through
humanitarianism misses addressing its structural causes.
Third, international legal frames conversely establish boundaries
between forms and locales of violence. The human rights, and later
criminal law developments on CRVAW in the 1990s, brought
a necessary gaze to and regulation of the conflict-time violence of armed
combatants targeting women. This has, however, resulted in
a dichotomized stance in relation to that violence – the violence of warfare
now receives inordinate attention under international law, while the
“private” violence outside of conflict, and that continues during conflict,
does not get captured, nor achieve redress under these legal regimes.73
Human rights, derived from its basis in public international law, sets out
clear parameters for what it considers state-based violations to be and its
role in respect to state accountability for the same, including for CRVAW.
This is a specific approach derived from the tenets of international law.
While the inclusion of VAW within human rights regimes represents
a gain for many rights activists, it is critiqued for the boundaries it sustains
in respect to public/private distinctions in the legal, social, and political
constructions of difference in that violence.74
It is at this point of legal construct that perhaps humanitarians and
human rights operators most clearly part ways. Conceptually and theore-
tically, feminist scholars have pointed to the continuums in the violence
that appear in women’s lives across time and space. They have argued

that there are connections in forms of violence across women’s lives,

underpinned by the social, cultural, and gendered norms that inform
this violence.75 Thereby there is need to theoretically understand that,
regardless of its location or form, VAW appears because of its basis in and
continued presence of gender inequalities across time and space.
Empirically, some violence is experienced or understood as distinctive
relative to the normative levels of violence in women’s lives, such as mass
or tactical rape occurring during warfare.76 However, this violence may
also be understood as still connected to their normative basis outside of
conflict, their appearance in conflict deriving meaning and function due
to their connectedness back to pre-conflict gendered norms.77
The human rights project is generally surmised as an endeavor to bring
a singular focus toward individual rights violations and is characterized by
a “One victim = One violation = One perpetrator” paradigm.78 Arguably
a reductive approach, this not only singles out specific violations for
attention, but can also inculcate hierarchies in harms, which are an
anathema to the humanitarian actors (in my personal experience). This
fundamental basis to the human rights field is what creates a boundary
with the humanitarian field. In an example I have recounted elsewhere,79
on the ground practice may also reinforce these legal distinctions. When
working in Darfur, Sudan, I was working with an international agency
providing first-response and clinical services to women and girls who were
experiencing GBV. Through our services we regularly provided support
to women and girls who had experienced rape by armed parties to the
conflict. The majority of reported violence we saw through our services
were, however, violence occurring within the camps – by family and
community members, ranging from physical and sexual domestic vio-
lence, to sexual assaults within the community. One extremely challen-
ging case was a teenage girl who had been raped by someone within her
community and discovering that she was pregnant, her family had tied her
up and were attempting to kill her for the sake of hiding and preserving the
family’s “honor.” In seeking assistance from the UN human rights office
serving the camp community in dealing with this, I was informed by the
human rights officer that this was not technically a human rights violation,
at least not in respect to their mandate in that location, that is, to monitor
and report on the violations perpetrated by the state and parties to the
conflict. This violence fell into the “private” category. It was thereby
something that as a humanitarian organization we were compelled to
deal with, but the human rights officers did not find relevant to their
mandate, modus operandi, and legal basis of their work in that specific
context. This kind of distinctive approach is emerging more commonly
within humanitarian settings, where international organizations focus on

the violence of armed actors for the purposes of political and legal
accountability, to the neglect of the broader harms that women may be
experiencing. For example, in Northern Uganda, a study found that
services were distinctly directed at those who had experienced sexual
violence by armed combatants, even though broader forms of harm
were more prevalent among the population.80 Dichotomies in the forms
of VAW that in reality map across women’s lives, from intimate familial
spheres, to public and political spaces, and from non-conflict to conflict
spheres, have been established and reinforced by the boundaries that have
characterized the legal and policy framing of that violence available
through the UN human rights system.
A fourth observation identifies a synergy between both fields that
derives from how each conceptualizes and engages with the issue of
CRVAW. A point I made earlier must be reiterated to underscore the
complexity, and to some degree the futility of arguments that point to any
hard and exclusive boundaries between human rights and humanitarian-
ism. Both fields essentially engage with CRVAW because it is a violation
of women’s human rights. Approaches to “GBV” that have evolved
within humanitarianism have done so on the basis of broader human
rights principles. In the primary policy guidance document for addressing
GBV in humanitarian action, the IASC is clear that GBV is both a public
health and a human rights issue.81 Humanitarian agencies address GBV
because it is a violation of women’s rights. The nature of the impact of
that violation on women, bodily, materially, practically, and socially,
requires a practical and programmatic response, primarily understood
as medical. It is only, however, because of the progress made on framing
VAW as a human rights issue that feminist activists within the humani-
tarian field have had the normative basis from which to advocate for and
secure a distinctive response to it, so that addressing GBV has become
a standard part of the humanitarian aid package. Further, as noted earlier,
addressing the harm done by GBV through a health response is none-
theless fulfilling women’s right to health care in the event of a violation,
demonstrating the complexity of attempting to parse out the difference
between human rights vs. humanitarian response when it comes to
addressing GBV. However, in respect to my overall argument, there is
a difference in focus of each set of actors in conflict settings, where human
rights actors are understood to be solely focusing on securing vertical
accountability for violations by parties to a conflict. Ultimately, humani-
tarian response is focused on repairing the harm done, rather than seeking
that same legal rights accountability and redress as per human rights
actors (even though humanitarian actors will facilitate access to legal
services as part of GBV responses). That is the difference between the

modus operandi of human rights vs. humanitarian agencies. As discussed

by Jeffrey Flynn in this volume, “[h]umanitarian action often provides
what someone needs (and can use the language of rights in doing so), but
human rights work, at its best, attempts to put one in a better position to
stand up and effectively demand what one needs.”82 That essentially
sums up the complementarity between the two ﬁelds when it comes to
addressing women’s rights concerns and certainly CRVAW. How that
complementarity could be further advanced to the advantage of both the
institutions and women in those settings is discussed next.

Turning Tensions into Opportunity: Exploiting

the Gender Equality Imperative across Human Rights
and Humanitarian Mandates
As noted before, a simplistic assessment of the boundaries between these
two fields is naïve. The complexities of the issue of CRVAW and the
evolving nature of both fields reveals intricacies in both relations and
boundaries between the fields beyond a clear dichotomous assessment.
As discussed, feminist scholars have critiqued the dichotomies that have
been established through international frameworks in respect to women’s
lives. The divergence outlined in the previous section reflects not just this
conceptual and normative divergence between the fields of human rights
and humanitarianism, but also those within the practice of humanitarian-
ism and human rights in response to conflict settings.
As humanitarian interventions in armed conflicts become increasingly
complex, protracted, and embroiled in the political contestations that
cause them, the work of humanitarian agencies takes them to the fron-
tlines of witnessing and responding to human rights violations as they
occur. The question arises as to whether it is enough anymore for huma-
nitarian action to deliver just basic services. This question also appears to
be bothering the actors in the architecture of global humanitarian
response: evident is a bending and re-shaping of its role in recent times
in response to the complex emergencies that it is now involved in.
Humanitarian response has come to include “protection” as a central
concern. The establishment of the IASC’s “protection cluster” in the
humanitarian reform process in 2005 is indicative of this. The protection
cluster’s articulation of its mandate states that: “Human rights protection
is at the core of humanitarian action.”83 It is thereby the case that if the
protection cluster goals are to be achieved, and ostensibly the goals of the
entire humanitarian operation, then humanitarian workers must under-
stand their role as contributing to the protection of human rights. It is not
just that rights-based approaches to programming are espoused, but also

that human rights are increasingly seen as part of what humanitarianism is

about. Humanitarians may, by virtue of being present and delivering
services, also see their work thereby as delivering on human rights, albeit,
as noted before, in a service-oriented manner. Evident in the articulation
of approaches above is a founding origin in the idea and field of human
rights – humanitarian needs and the humanitarian imperative to address
these needs and the protection of those in need is founded in the norma-
tive frames of human rights offered by the UN system.
What doing protection or “doing human rights” means for one sector
appears to be very different to what it means for another however.
Engaging in protection, placing human rights, and even women’s rights,
as central to what you do, may differ for different actors and thereby
create some areas of distinction. For example, many humanitarian agen-
cies in complex emergencies, such as Médecins Sans Frontières, draw
clear lines between what they do, that is, humanitarian response and
delivering services to affected populations84 vs. what “human rights
work” is, that is, dealing with the rights violations that are occurring
and addressing the big “P” politics of seeking state-level accountability
for those violations. As is argued by Charles Beitz elsewhere in this
volume, it may be that the two are intricately tied conceptually, however,
it is in practice that their approaches diverge. As he notes, humanitarian-
ism is more of a short-term focus, with little concern to “systematic
change in the longer term,” while human rights “often aims explicitly at
inducing legal and political change.”85 Even where normatively they may
in principle and practice converge, the “procedural norms” may differ.86
Feminist scholars have advanced conceptual and practical ideas for
“how” issues of women’s equality may be advanced in practice. I draw
from one of those frameworks here to try to identify how some of the
tensions between the two fields identified in this chapter may be under-
stood a little differently. In doing so, I see this as an endeavor to put
forward a way to imagine the possibility that the overlapping synergies
and divergences between the fields of human rights and humanitarianism
could be seen as complementary rather than in tension with each other, in
both concept and practice. The idea that VAW is “gender-based” was
coined to signify the relevance of inequalities between men and women as
significant in the manifestation of the violence in women’s lives, promot-
ing an understanding that this is ultimately violence as a result of the
context of prevailing patriarchies. The argument goes that there is
a difference between pointing to gender in respect to the demographics
of a population and to the inequalities of structural oppressions that exist
between men and women.87 It is through the latter understanding of
“gender” that the similarities and distinctions between these fields

might be made visible and more fully exploited. When issues such as
VAW become institutionalized, through human rights, humanitarian, or
international development frames (where much of this early thinking
derives), feminists have espoused that attention to both the gendered
practical and the strategic aspects of women’s rights require attention.88
In advancing women’s gendered interests in context (either through
human rights or humanitarianism), the complexity of women’s social
positioning requires attention, that is, attention to their systemic gen-
dered positioning within a given social context. The oppressions that lead
to the inequalities and discrimination that are understood to underpin
VAW must be understood as “multicausal in origin and mediated
through a variety of different structures, mechanisms and levels which
may vary considerably across space and time.”89 The best or most appro-
priate approaches to addressing VAW in practice are thereby divergent
and debated, varying between engaging with men as the problem, with
social power relations or with institutions, or with all of these.90 This
debate and divergence of approach is evident in the previous account of
the differentiated operational approaches taken by human rights and
humanitarian actors.
The proposal made here is to address the issue of CRVAW relative to
how it arises within a given social context, that is, outside of constructed
ideas of “women” and “violence” to an understanding of the gendered
social context in which it occurs, and how that influences the construct
and meaning of that harm for women in that specific context. Maxine
Molyneux has proposed that this requires a multilevel response that
simultaneously engages with the structural, institutional factors as well
as with the basic everyday interactions and issues that give rise to gender
inequalities. These are framed as, first, “strategic gender interests” found
at the level of the structural and which “are derived in the first instance
deductively, that is, from the analysis of women’s subordination and from
the formulation of an alternative, more satisfactory set of arrangements to
those which exist.”91 Second, these are formulated at a “practical gender
interests” level, which
are given inductively and arise from the concrete conditions of women’s position-
ing within the gender division of labour. In contrast to strategic gender interests,
these are formulated by the women who are themselves within these positions
rather than through external interventions. Practical interests are usually
a response to an immediate perceived need, and they do not generally entail
a strategic goal such as women’s emancipation or gender equality.92

The differences are evident. Strategic gender interests are those that
relate to the macro structural and legal level frames that relate to the

concerns of the human rights field, where the strategy taken to address
CRVAW is very much about addressing discriminations and inequalities
and state accountability at formal structural levels. The field of human
rights is largely about responding (in this case) to the human rights
violations that increasingly characterize armed conflicts and fuel complex
humanitarian crises globally, that is, CRVAW. The human rights system,
its constituent components, and its actors are focused on the macro and
strategic level where accountability for entitlements to rights can be
secured through the fulfillment of the duties of states. The motivation
on the part of human rights workers is to advance the strategic interests of
women in respect of gender inequalities and discriminations that cause
the harms incurred and ensure states fulfill related responsibilities.
On the other hand, humanitarian response has largely evolved to
ensure the provision of a “salve” to the affected populations, ensuring
access to what are perceived to be essential life-saving services, such as
shelter, water and sanitation, food, and in the case of CRVAW, health
care and safe spaces. The humanitarian operation exists and accom-
plishes aid provision at a very practical and micro-individual level, and
increasingly, ensuring that any gender disparities in access to those service
are tackled as part of humanitarian operations.93 The practical gender
interests level characterizes those taken by the humanitarians, providing
practical life-saving needs provision to the harm that has occurred. They
allow women to decide for themselves what they need – a health response
to injury or a decision to seek legal redress through relevant actors. The
motivation here is in providing a practical solution to the practical experi-
ence of the harm and resulting need. There is acknowledgment that
“these practical interests do not in themselves challenge the prevailing
forms of gender subordination, even though they arise directly out of
them.”94 That, in some way, fits with the perception within humanitar-
ianism that provision of services is apolitical and impartial and is a short-
term, immediate fix rather than a longer-term, strategic-level intervention
aimed at structural change.
There is a further level of complexity to be acknowledged than this
straightforward division of strategy between the fields, and this is where
some of the synergies between the fields might be identified. As noted,
humanitarian programming in response to CRVAW has evolved in a way
that has centered around provision of life-saving services, in this case
service delivery to victims/survivors of GBV. The specific mandates of
humanitarian organizations delivering those services are framed around
this idea. However, and this is where the boundaries blur, it must be
acknowledged that the very tenets that underpin the delivery of those
services to those impacted by violations derive from and are considered as

essential to the fulfillment of basic human rights: the right to health care in
response to rape; the right to bodily integrity and protection from viola-
tion; the right to safety and security and freedom from violence. These are
all related to acts of harm that the state may be responsible for, whether
through commission or omission. As argued throughout this chapter and
is evident here, there is some degree of cross-over between these fields
when it comes to the perceived centrality of human rights to their work.
There is overlap in respect of the fulfillment of practical gender interests
(services) with strategic gender interests (the right to access and decision-
making over services), and both of these as an entry point for fulfilling
broader strategic-level-related legal rights. Is this a place where the blur-
ring of boundaries between these fields could in practice be exploited so
that the operational approaches of each set of actors are maximized not
just in reducing tensions between them, but also in enhancing potential
for the fulfillment of women’s gendered interests and rights in a given
context?
Problematic with the strategic end of this approach is that “[h]uman
rights positions itself as a neutral field of equality for all. Such a claim of
neutrality, however, denies the myriad ways in which ideas about what it
means to be a woman, about the proper relations between men and
women, about the existence of a private and a public sphere, for example,
structure the demands and expectations of rights.”95 What that means in
respect to my argument here is that, whereas human rights aim solely for
the strategic interests of women, it ignores that fact that women’s ability
to even seek the strategic, for example justice and fulfillment of those
rights, is in itself disabled by the very context in which women must seek
those rights, that is, a starting point of inequality and discrimination. The
context to rights-seeking for women in an unequal playing field in which
practical concerns, such as ability to secure basic needs, or in the case of
VAW, to practically deal with a serious physical injury as a result of rape,
an unwanted pregnancy, or being ostracized from home and family as
a result of stigma, all determine whether the strategic end of their interests
could ever be attained. Human rights implies that all are equal before the
law, occluding how unequal gender power relations determine whether
access to those rights and the enjoyment of them ever occurs.
Humanitarians practically try to overcome inequality of access to fulfill-
ment of practical interests, on the one hand negating attention to the
strategic, while on the other, importantly, enabling access to the strategic
at some point should women so choose – by the very virtue that their
practical interests are fulfilled.
It is thereby the case that the practical interests fulfillment is very much
required, or an entry point at least, to advancing the strategic rights of

women at macro structural and “justice” and remedial levels. It is perhaps

in this critical overlap between these two, in the strategic and practical
strategies that are espoused by human rights and humanitarian fields, that
there is significant overlap, interconnection, and potential for synergy and
complementarity. It is in a co-dependence of the relationship between the
practical and the strategic that we can understand the potential to move
beyond the boundaries imposed by the normative and operational frames
of human rights and humanitarianism toward a complementarity, as well
as an ability of the humanitarian field to advance its claim to sustain a co-
existing interest in both a practical response and a strategic and human
rights focus to its work.
For actors in the fields of human rights and humanitarian practices, and
in response to an issue such as CRVAW, there exists a range of potential
actions. A critical question is what do you choose to do when, and why?
Many scholars have argued the need for context-specific approaches to
addressing VAW, that is, while this issue is universal, it manifests in
different ways in different contexts, and the response should be tailored
to different realities.96 While many international organizations follow this
kind of approach, the increasing institutionalization of issues such as
CRVAW and their subjection to the framing offered by international
legal norms also means that agencies with specific mandates often work
back to those mandates more readily than they do to the context in which
they find themselves and in which violations arise. This is perhaps the
greatest challenge in respect to whether and how each of these fields might
work in more congruent or complementary ways. Where the human
rights field offers means and methods for advancing strategic gendered
rights and interests and the humanitarian field addresses the practical
gendered interests that must be met for longer-term rights fulfillment,
a critical step is the need for each set of actors to respond to specific
settings and the reality of those harms in context for women. This means
working with and across different organizations, and while they will need
to work to respective mandates, that should be done in ways that enable
complementarity rather than competition, and overall enable women to
make their own choices in context. This might require each of the fields
reneging some control, ownership, or traction in respect of their stake in
the very attractive issue of “GBV.” This is a risk, after all, it is only
recently that GBV “became the poster child for humanitarian aid”97
and actors with a stake in the game will not easily let go of the credibility
it might offer to be seen to act on this issue. This is particularly true in the
increasingly data- and measurement-led aid industry, where donors will
want to know how many victims/survivors have received legal aid, even
where it may actually be precarious for any woman to seek legal redress in

a context where rape has become highly politicized. While the human
rights field requires the idea of the benevolent state as the central actor in
human rights violations, and the humanitarian field requires the innocent
and blameless victims98 who require their stewardship through the
experience of violence they have just undergone, women are the ideal
subject. Addressing the practical and strategic gender interests of women
relative to a given context in complementary ways would mean that the
micro- and macro-level concerns of human rights and humanitarian
actors are advanced, but in ways not restrictive to mandates, but com-
plementary to them. The challenge is that boundaries between the fields
are at times stark, however it is in the areas where they are more fluid that
opportunity arises. The multisectoral model of response to CRVAW now
established in humanitarian settings99 allows complementarity to occur,
that is, true ease for a victim/survivor of GBV to navigate the health and
justice models if they so wish and in ways that are safe and led by that
woman. The potential for more complementarity is perhaps in respond-
ing to the context of women’s rights and interests over and above but in
line with complementary in fulfilling institutional mandates.

Conclusion
In summarizing the complexity of the relationship between the practice of
human rights and humanitarian organizations, the following should be
borne in mind: “existing inequalities certainly are not natural.
Inequalities are produced and reproduced by society and its institutions.
Because neither inequalities nor the systems that produce them are inevi-
table, they can also be objects of reform.”100 Not only are the inequalities
and violences that women experience in conflict settings thereby critical
subject matter of human rights and humanitarian operations, but also the
potential for those organizations to reproduce and generate further
inequalities through their institutional ways of working make reform on
the basis of complementarity an imperative. The case study that begun
this chapter, where addressing CRVAW in the conflict setting of Kosovo
was seen as entirely outside the remit of international organizations, has
changed utterly. It is now essential that these organizations address
CRVAW as part of a comprehensive response to women’s rights and
interests in any conflict setting. However, the wrangling about mandates,
the need to respond to institutional requirements and reporting to
donors, has largely meant that the tensions between those organizations
have been to the detriment of the efficacy of their work and of women
subject to that violence. If the change in understanding and perception of
both the issue of CRVAW and of its relevance to the remit of international

responses to humanitarian crises can occur so rapidly, then a change in

attitude toward the tensions between these sets of actors in any one setting
may also be possible. Further, there can also be changes in the perception
that gender equality is not relevant to the work done in a humanitarian
crises and that change can be furthered by an approach of complemen-
tarity through work practices. In the practices of each field lies the
potential to congruently promote transformational change in the lives of
women and girls, that is, by ensuring that their practical gender interests
are adequately fulfilled in the event of an experience of harm, while at the
same time ensuring that macro-level reforms and strategies are in place to
deter, prevent and prohibit such harms from occurring in the first place,
and of course, providing redress where it does. Both fields have
a contribution to make in this regard. There is need for a more conscious
willingness to work in complementary ways, or to let go of strict adher-
ence to mandates or reporting requirements where necessary. Otherwise,
they become part of the problem, sustaining and contributing to inequal-
ities, reinforcing ideas of women’s victimhood, potentially furthering
more harm and ultimately placing their own fields’ imperatives before
those of women themselves.

Miriam Ticktin

The ethical category of innocence is central to modern secular notions of

humanity; indeed, humanity, in its purest form, is imagined as innocent,
fresh, and full of potential. We need only think of the images associated
with organizations that protect humanity: innocence is figured centrally
on webpages and in publicity materials, particularly in the form of the
child. As former director of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) USA
Nicolas de Torrenté writes, “deeply rooted images put a premium on
the innocence of victims, making children, who are by definition blame-
less, the ideal recipients of care.”1
The connection between humanity and innocence is not new, of course;
we can trace it back to early theological interpretations. These locate
innocence in the story of Adam and Eve, wherein innocence means not
knowing the difference between good and evil; it means lacking worldly
knowledge. Innocence is represented as a state of calm and repose, parti-
cularly in the Garden of Eden, before the fall of humanity, when Eve eats
from the tree of knowledge. According to theological interpretations, the
Fall helps to define humanity afterward; the loss of innocence is how we
become human. But this changes with Enlightenment thinkers such as
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, who overturned the Judeo-
Christian notion of humanity as soiled by original sin. Recalling the
Garden of Eden, they saw humanity at its truest in the state of nature, as
unsullied simplicity – as life that preceded the social contract and the
political life of citizens. But they saw this purity as the essence of humanity,
rather than its precursor – as the uncorrupt base from which all potential to
act in the world arises. Innocence – as blank slate – is what enables us to
imagine we can be the authors of our own future.
While the relationship between innocence and humanity is inherently
unstable in that innocence derives from a mythical or imaginary past, and
is thus always shifting, innocence nevertheless plays a central role in
modern, secular discourses and practices of humanity. Where humanity
is grounded on the principles of equality and dignity, innocence helps

185

deﬁne these principles, sometimes as their constituent outside, some-

times as their precursor, and often as their hope for the future. To be
sure, innocence itself never embodies equality or dignity – it simply marks
their limits. While I will be discussing the world of humanitarianism and
human rights – a largely secular, liberal world, concerned with individual
autonomy, freedom, justice, and rationality – innocence has persisting
Judeo-Christian contours that give it power in these secular worlds, and
even in the worlds that may border on illiberal or authoritarian. For
instance, as with the Garden of Eden, our departure from the innocence
of the “state of nature” (according to philosophers like Rousseau) is the
beginning of our social existence, our state as political animals – this is the
beginning of humanity as both a religious and a secular category. Perhaps
unsurprisingly, then, those associated with innocence tend to be at
humanity’s edges; they mark its border, in the sense that they are not
corrupt (as is a normative humanity), yet nor are they fully human in the
Enlightenment sense of having reason, will, or autonomy – they are not
fully socialized creatures, and often get ﬁgured as incapable of being
thinking, active, or informed subjects. As such, innocence acts as the
boundary for liberal ideas of personhood, where this constituent outside
is simultaneously idealized and denigrated. In this sense, playing with the
borders of innocence also means playing with the borders of humanity:
this is its power, and its danger.
In this chapter, I trace the way innocence and humanity come together
in contemporary practices of human rights and humanitarianism. What
does innocence show us about the ways humanity is practiced, and
indeed, how it is practiced differently by these movements? Humanity is
often understood as an equalizing principle; for instance, we say that all
human lives have equal value and dignity, and all human beings have
equal rights. Yet innocence plays a complicated role here; even as it
promises to further such notions of equality by way of giving everyone
the beneﬁt of the doubt (in secular thought, innocence is the grounding of
our potential as human beings) in practice, it inexorably constitutes
hierarchies, distinguishing between deserving and undeserving. That is,
while both human rights and humanitarian movements rely on and
deploy the concept of innocence in their work, I am interested in explor-
ing how far innocence goes to further the recognition of universality
(whether as shared suffering, or as rights), and when it works instead to
institute moral hierarchies. Sometimes, this depends on whether inno-
cence functions as a noun rather than an adjective (i.e., an innocent
action); that is, whether innocence is seen as an essential identity char-
acteristic, or whether it simply concerns an act. I will argue that humani-
tarianism and human rights both work to buffer the tendency to use

innocence to create moral distinctions, albeit differently so, one through

the concept of life, the other through the practice of law; despite this,
I suggest that innocence primarily works to divide humanity, rather than
to unify it as an affective, ethical, or political collectivity. Ultimately,
innocence cannot escape its conceptual history as the limit of humanity;
as we will see, in practice, this plays out by way of the unending redeﬁni-
tion of that limit, through moral distinction. For instance, innocence
often works by protecting the rights of the exceptional, with a promise
that this will eventually lead to rights for all – but this is an ever-elusive
goal. In this sense, how might we begin to imagine humanity without
innocence – can we decouple these concepts?

Innocence in Theory and in Practice

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, innocence means “freedom
from sin, guilt or moral wrong in general,” “freedom from specific guilt,”
“freedom from cunning or artifice.”2 This space of “freedom from” – this
negative freedom – is so free indeed that it is seemingly free of content; it
purports to be a state of moral and epistemic purity. Innocence is defined as
a state of guilelessness, artlessness, want of knowledge or sense – in the
terms of the OED, it is a state of ignorance, even a state of “silliness.” But
innocence is a concept that – either because of or despite its very empti-
ness – has been deployed politically in more or less vigorous ways over
time; and indeed, it is critical in the work of both human rights and
humanitarian organizations. Insofar as these movements are instrumental
today in shaping our political grammars, it behooves us to take innocence
seriously.
Innocence promises a space of experiential or epistemic purity. Of
course, innocence has many meanings: it comes into being in relation to
various binary others, such as guilt, knowledge, and sexuality. While the
concept does different work in relation to these binaries, in each case
innocence works to regulate a space of purity: sometimes this means to be
without knowledge, sometimes to be without intention, sometimes to be
free from desire, and sometimes free from guilt. It works as a boundary
concept, and in the process it helps produce and regulate human kinds
and their constituent outsides – it helps to imagine “humanity.” It
becomes relevant to human rights and humanitarian organizations insofar
as it helps to define the contours of the secular humanity that grounds
these organizations; but insofar as purity structures moral categories, it
also fills out binary notions of deserving and undeserving, the innocent
and the guilty. How does this tension play out in practice? Under what
circumstances does innocence work to construct moral distinctions, and

when does it enable a belief in and practice of universal equality? I ask this
in the interest of fostering a politics of equality.
To further understand, let us begin with the archetypal figure of inno-
cence: the child. Capturing innocence in the figure of the child reflects
this search for purity in the secular world, this deep yearning for a time
before corruption, a space beyond social norms. The child represents
a mode of experience that is protected, controlled – it performs the part of
tabula rasa, and as such it offers proof that as humans we can be anything,
that we are not condemned by our sinful past. Of course, childhood was
not always considered the epitome of innocence; this is a modern inven-
tion, dating to the eighteen century.3 Following theories of original sin,
which held that all humans carry the guilt of Adam’s disobedience,
children were understood as inherently sinful; they were small, faulty
adults in need of discipline, correction, or worse, since they had no idea
how to control their various impulses.4 Notions of childhood as soiled by
original sin shifted to the now more well-known ideas of romantic child-
hood, thanks in part to John Locke, who situated the child as simply
a subject without experience and memory.5 For Locke, the child was an
instance of natural humanity, revealing humanity’s capacity for knowl-
edge and reason, without being tainted by the prejudices of actual knowl-
edge in society. The child was pure and uncorrupt potential.
That said, locating innocence in the figure of the child leaves little space
for actual childhood experiences. What happens when these experiences
do not fit the parameters of innocence? Innocence carves out a conceptual
space and time of unsullied hope, one that is linked to a freedom from
knowledge. Yet the borders of this space are profoundly contested; rather
than a given, this space is a political battleground. Understanding the
work of innocence in relation to humanity requires tracing which types of
knowledge are named or counted as pure (which experiences slip into
a space of epistemic purity, unnoticed) and, by contrast, which ones
somehow tip the balance and result in an expulsion from innocence.
Child soldiers, for instance, trouble the image of the child as innocent.
And as Liisa Malkki has argued, child soldiers are seen as an abomination,
a category mistake that leads to their being labeled “youth” or “teens” as
opposed to “children” whenever possible, to set aside and protect a time
of innocence, when they are still unworldly and untainted.6 Similarly, the
undocumented minors crossing into the United States from Central
America in great numbers in the summer of 2014 were not categorized
or treated as children; they were called “minors,” no matter their age, and
imprisoned in detention centers. While child soldiers are sullied by their
involvement in war, the undocumented children were tainted by their
association with gangs, drugs, and violence; they were rendered complicit

in these crimes by virtue of coming from the same place – racially,

geographically, and socioeconomically.
As these examples demonstrate, the concept of innocence does not
describe a clear-cut state of epistemic or other purity. Rather, it helps
distinguish morally acceptable forms of knowledge, action, and experi-
ence, and these are inevitably tied to one’s being in the world. That is,
innocence is defined not simply by a period of life called “childhood” or
by outside standards such as age but by, as we just saw, class, gender, and
racial background, among other positionalities, histories, and experi-
ences. Certain conditions enable the space for an unsullied childhood;
clearly class formation is important here, in configuring a space and time
understood as pure, as empty or free of knowledge. But so is race: as
feminist theorist bell hooks has noted, black children in the United States,
particularly black boys, are never allowed to be children.7 This is also true
for black girls, who, starting as early as five years old, are treated as more
adult than their white counterparts, with presumed knowledge of topics
like sex.8 Racial regimes mean that they are never allowed this period of
untroubled and ignorant life; they are immediately interpellated into the
structures and hierarchies of society, which render their knowledge sus-
pect. Historian Robin Bernstein argues, in fact, that childhood innocence
was from the very beginning racialized as white in the United States; it
came into being in the second half of the nineteenth century in relation to
its Other, the black child, who was constructed as a nonfeeling, noninno-
cent, juvenile worker.9 In this sense, childhood was forged in the context
of capitalism and slave labor – and innocence worked to mark the bound-
ary of allowable, exploitative, racialized labor. Innocence thus not only
evokes moral distinctions, but also produces and regulates ontologies of
human kinds. When one is a noninnocent child, one is no longer a child –
one is simply expelled from the category.
Nearly every humanitarian and human rights website figures children
prominently. This is perhaps not surprising; the most iconic images of
suffering figure innocent children, from Kevin Carter’s 1993 photograph
of a starving Sudanese child, crouched on the ground while being preyed
upon by a vulture, to the 2015 photograph of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-
old Syrian refugee whose body washed up on a Turkish beach in 2015. In
the summer of 2018, figures of the migrant children separated from their
parents by Trump’s draconian detention policies were featured all over
the news, successfully pressuring the government to change their policy;
unfortunately, the new proposed regulation does keep children with their
families, but in a challenge to what is known as the “Flores settlement,”
this would allow all of them to be kept for indeterminate periods in
detention centers. It is images of suffering, solitary children that most

galvanize public response. The ideal victim – the innocent – is appealing,

particularly for fundraising efforts. And yet, having just seen that inno-
cence not only draws attention to children, but also works to determine
who counts as a child, and therefore, who gets recognition, attention,
rights or aid, we must ask: How do the organizations manage innocence’s
tendency to categorize and qualify some as more deserving than others? In
the name of humanity, how do they work to draw attention to those who
are not deemed innocent – how do they protect these others?
One more aspect of innocence is worth noting here. Innocence helps to
create a pure space for humanity, and both human rights and humanitar-
ian regimes regularly draw on the concept to both ground and enact their
missions. Yet both end up producing and enacting what Didier Fassin has
termed “hierarchies of humanity.”10 Not only do they produce hierar-
chies among the people they seek to help or defend, but innocence also
enables a distinction between those who help – human rights and huma-
nitarian workers – and those whom they help. That is, while the concept
of innocence shifts according to the constellation of experiences and
histories in which it is located, it nevertheless always carries with it the
desire to protect and the impetus to take responsibility for those whom –
in their want of knowledge – cannot take care of themselves. Guilelessness
evokes the need for care; innocents cannot take responsibility for them-
selves. But this means that it props up a feeling of control in those who
care for the innocent; it assures them not only of their power but also of
their knowledge, insofar as the innocent person is oblivious. It creates
a class of saviors. As a space of purity, innocence itself appears outside
history, and as such, it allows those who work as saviors to ignore the
political and historical circumstances that created these victims.
This not only allows saviors to feel powerful or knowledgeable but also
enables them to simultaneously capture innocence – to purify or absolve
themselves. In other words, innocence also creates a savior class or sub-
ject, and they too make claims to innocence. If the people one is saving are
understood as innocent, outside time and place, and one is intervening
only to stop the suffering, how can this not be considered innocent too?
For instance, while those inspired by humanitarian sentiments may try to
bypass politics, claiming to act only as witnesses to injustice or in response
to the immediacy of suffering, the political innocence they proclaim often
ignores the privilege that allows them to act – it can masquerade as
a refusal to acknowledge the structural inequalities that allow them to be
humanitarians, witnesses, or saviors. And with human rights, innocence
manifests in a belief that human rights are timeless, and that by protecting
them, we protect a universal humanity; this ignores the historical and
political contexts that produced the idea of human rights, and that

enshrine certain political ideals while precluding others. Is there a way to

act in the name of humanity, without capturing or claiming innocence in
the process – without using it to reify differences in power?

Scales of Innocence in Humanitarian Action

I move now to think about the place of innocence in human rights and
humanitarianism, to see how innocence figures both theoretically and
practically, and where moral distinctions come to play. While I focus
primarily on the Euro-American context, I trace what I see as
a transnational deployment of innocence; that is, I suggest that political
and affective dimensions of innocence travel across borders and work to
shape transnational spaces – we cannot keep these spaces or politics
distinct as domestic or international. Even something like the
Innocence Project – which I will discuss in the last section – has chapters
in various countries now, shaped by similar affective and legal goals.
Contemporary humanitarianism is largely understood to address
humanity as a collection of suffering victims. Innocence is only relevant
insofar as it is understood to be the condition of all of humanity in the face
of suffering: no one deserves to suffer. MSF’s four key principles clearly
lay out the absence of moral or political distinction in their version of
humanitarian action. According to de Torrenté, these include humanity
(all people have equal dignity by virtue of their membership in humanity),
neutrality (organizations must refrain from taking part in hostilities or
conflicts that advantage one side over another), independence (humani-
tarian action only serves the interests of war victims, and not political,
religious, or other agendas), and impartiality (assistance is provided based
solely on need, without discrimination among recipients).11 Of these
four, the last – impartiality – is the most relevant here. The innocence
or guilt of those who suffer is irrelevant; suffering is not ascribed to moral
failure.
Humanitarians work hard to stick to their principle of impartiality, and
to avoid moral distinctions about who deserves aid, and one way they
accomplish this is by a focus on the sacredness of life. That is, rather than
a virtuous, dignified, or deserving life, the ultimate moral value in huma-
nitarian action is human life itself – it is the survival of each individual. As
Redfield states in his insightful ethnography of MSF, “they [MSF]
assume that the lives of people around the world are precious and some-
thing to be saved through human intervention.”12 Human suffering in
whatever form requires a response: all human life is worth saving.
An overriding ethical focus on life – any life, all lives – means that
humanitarians agree to treat anyone who needs urgent medical attention,

whether victim or perpetrator. They do not make distinctions. In this

sense, they recognize what Erica Bouris has called the “complex political
victim,” and the way in which victimhood is never pure or simple.13
Indeed, they work very pragmatically, making compromises and interact-
ing with whomever they need to get access to conﬂict zones – this includes
armed militias. For instance, MSF’s Marc le Pape relates that in Caritas’s
work in Congo Brazzaville in the late 1990s they decided to accept
military escorts on aid convoys in order to avoid being attacked, which
was still common at that time, when groups of armed men would set up
roadblocks to commit rape and other forms of abuse.14 Yet this occasion-
ally involved taking on military escorts who carried the spoils of their
plunder, which could provoke other groups, and threaten understandings
of neutrality. He tells this story to say that humanitarians are constantly
making decisions about which compromises to make: the point is that life
itself is what drives their mission, not the moral status of those with whom
they interact or treat.
A brief history of MSF reveals how life – particularly life in crisis – came
to be held as the highest moral value; and yet this history demonstrates
how innocence nevertheless still plays a role in deﬁning what counts as
“life.” The founders of MSF – doctors and journalists, largely Marxist
and Maoist inspired – were initially guided by the belief in a universal
humanity grounded in equality and solidarity. But after the failure
of 1968 to transform the social and political order and after the disap-
pointment of anti-colonial revolutionary Marxist movements, Bernard
Kouchner – one of MSF’s founders – and many of his comrades from
1968 radically changed their views. They turned away from engagement
with what they thought of as politics – engaging with power relations in
the struggle for a collective future – and instead embraced the belief that
one can ultimately address only individual suffering; in this sense, they
attended to what they conceived of as a universal humanity composed of
suffering victims.15 Kouchner and MSF brought a form of action that
appealed in its purported ability to avoid Machiavellian politics.16 It was
an ideology grounded in individualism, one that no longer allowed for the
possibility of larger political change.17
This “new humanitarianism” was shaped by a frustration with and
refusal of politics; consequently, it was driven by the search for an uncor-
rupted space of action. Innocence offers such a space of imagination, even
as it calls forth and protects different versions of epistemic and moral
purity. In this sense, the suffering victim driving humanitarian action
quickly inhabited the conceptual space opened by the notion of inno-
cence, even if it was not always identical to it – of course, humanitarianism
is not simply a politics of innocence, and innocence clearly travels beyond

its humanitarian deployments. While MSF maintains impartiality as a key

principle, meaning that it offers assistance to people irrespective of their
race, gender, religion, or political affiliation, in many humanitarian con-
texts – on the ground – innocence becomes the necessary accompaniment
to suffering, required to designate the sufferer as worthy. That is, the
suffering victim is best and most easily recognized by humanitarians when
considered innocent – pure, outside politics, outside history, indeed,
outside time and place altogether.18
So while humanitarians are guided by the principle of impartiality, in
practice, finite resources limit their action.19 The goal is to treat everyone
equally, adjudicating based on need whether or not they are perpetrators
or victims, but they themselves admit that they must triage, prioritizing
those considered in the most serious and immediate danger. The concept
of innocence helps in this process, as a way to grasp and measure vulner-
ability. Indeed, former MSF president Rony Brauman has criticized how
moralist positions have marked humanitarianism, noting that the sym-
bolic status of victim can in effect “only be granted in cases of unjustified
or innocent suffering . . . . The point is that he [sic] must be 100% victim,
a non-participant.”20
This process of triage is evident in the case of sexual violence. Before
the early 2000s, survivors of sexual violence were not included in standard
models of humanitarian aid delivery (see Swaine this volume). In the
collection of essays by MSF about humanitarian practices in the Congo
Republic in the late 1990s, Civilians under Fire,21 former MSF-USA
executive director Nicolas de Torrenté and former MSF president Jean-
Hervé Bradol admit that this is because relief organizations search for the
“ideal victims.” On the one hand, they acknowledge that this is strategic,
insofar as it is a way to get donors interested. On the other hand, they
suggest that this focus, instrumental or not, pushes other categories of
victims into the background. Survivors of sexual violence were not seen as
innocent – as Bradol writes, “The raped woman rarely represents the ideal
victim.”22 This is because such survivors raised a number of unsettling
issues for practitioners around violence and gender roles, which they felt
were too political to engage. As a result, de Torrenté states that MSF
reproduced forms of prejudice against women in general and survivors of
sexual violence in particular. These discussions are haunted by the his-
tories and treatment of women victims of rape, who were (and still are)
seen as responsible for and consenting to their own rapes because of how
they dressed or behaved, or where they had chosen to be. They are seen as
too knowing and too agentive to be innocent.
In many ways, MSF’s collection of essays marks the shift in the huma-
nitarian mandate; sexual violence now merits an immediate response

from aid workers. This was not because humanitarianism stopped looking
for innocent subjects; rather, there was a shift to seeing these women as
innocent enough to be compelling humanitarian subjects. This hap-
pened, in large part, through the medicalization of gender-based violence,
which is a longer story related to its changing treatment by regimes of
human rights and global health.23 Attention was transferred to health
consequences such as infection with HIV, physical injury and trauma,
unwanted pregnancies, reproductive health, and STDs. This medicaliza-
tion of rape and sexual violence ended up shifting the blame and render-
ing the victims innocent of the harm they endured. More speciﬁcally,
a focus on the vulnerable body in biomedical terms brackets off social and
political identities and realities. The medicalization was helpful insofar as
it allowed women to be abstracted from their political contexts, rendered
blameless, and treated; it has been less helpful, however, insofar as it has
worked to depoliticize the larger gendered inequalities that lead to such
harm. Even if humanitarian aid now seems to be more inclusive, it risks
perpetuating inequality by writing out politics, and the causes of such
inequalities. This further enables the capture of innocence by those who
provide aid; they frame their work as addressing the pure horror of gender
violence. Yet, as Lila Abu-Lughod and Leti Volpp have argued, this
yearning for innocence in certain feminists whose politics are grounded
in the desire to save others, such as Muslim women, is based on their will
to not know about their complicities in the disenfranchisement of those
they are saving.24
As Fassin notes in his book on humanitarian reason, humanitarian
government tends to set up a “scale of innocence and vulnerability” that
works to privilege some, like HIV-positive children who are the ultimate
innocents, but in the process, it also works to penalize others, like their
mothers.25 While humanitarianism purports to serve and protect
a universal suffering humanity, with the conceptual help of innocence, it
nevertheless enacts hierarchies on the ground.

Human Rights: Just for Innocents?

If in humanitarianism, humanity is understood primarily by way of life in
crisis, for human rights movements, humanity is about protecting the
basic rights of individuals, joining humanity less with a biological or
medicalized conception of life than with a philosophically and legally
deﬁned one, whether real or ideal. All human beings, so the familiar
phrase goes, are bearers of rights by virtue of their humanity (of course,
who protects those rights is another matter). And if, in humanitarianism,
innocence’s tendency to create moral distinctions and hierarchies is

mediated by a focus on life itself, in human rights practices, the focus on

the law attempts to serve as safeguard.
Human rights are for everyone, not just for the innocent. Human rights
organizations claim to protect every person whose basic rights are being
violated, including, for instance, those on death row, whose right to life is
being threatened. That is, in theory, one can be both a perpetrator and
a victim of human rights violations, as the idea of “complex political
victim” suggests. As with humanitarianism, if one’s rights are being
violated, innocence should not matter – it should not depend on who
one is, or one’s past history.
But, as with humanitarianism, innocence nevertheless comes to play in
human rights claims and responses. I will discuss two different ways that
innocence is written into human rights struggles and protections, despite
the affordances offered by the law to protect against moralisms. The ﬁrst
involves women’s rights; and the second pertains to the death penalty.

Women’s Rights
Women’s rights bring the question of innocence to the fore in a way like
almost no other group. While women have been figured as innocent,
particularly in the form of mother and child, for women by themselves,
chastity or sexual integrity has historically been the most important thing
about them, and in this sense, innocence is still inextricably tied to sexual
innocence.26 As we know, sex is a particularly dense site of struggle
between knowledge and ignorance; the term carnal knowledge illustrates
the battle over how to categorize different forms of action and
experience.27 Kincaid describes innocence as simply “virginity coupled
with ignorance.”28 For women, then, sex is considered the primary cor-
rupting form of knowledge. To be innocent is to be chaste.
Sexual innocence comes to play in various ways in struggles for
women’s rights. The most written about, perhaps, is the case of traffick-
ing. While current anti-trafficking laws are concerned with trafficking for
forced labor as well as for forced sex, trafficking for the purposes of sex
still receives the most publicity and emphasis transnationally, and one
reason for this is the focus on and appeal of innocence. As anthropologist
Carole Vance has long argued, the central characters in stories of sex
trafficking are teenage girls and young women, putatively devoid of
sexuality or knowledge, and sold into brothels.29 This requires a focus
on the blameless – not on the sexually active young women. Here, victims
lack not only (sexual) knowledge but also intention.
These accounts successfully frame sex trafficking as a human rights
issue, and yet there are limits to who can benefit from these rights; Vance

states, “sexuality is made a special case in which only those who are
sexually inexperienced, or those who frame their stories that way, are
recognized as victims of human rights abuses.”30 More speciﬁcally, only
those who are considered sexually innocent are given protection; they
have to present very particular, scripted stories about how they were
smuggled over borders or kidnapped into prostitution or modern slavery.
Indeed, Vance continues, “nowhere in human rights doctrine and acti-
vism are protections and remedies reserved only for the innocent.”31 The
necessity to perform innocence was true in my own research, in France,
when I worked with undocumented immigrants;32 nearly all the undocu-
mented immigrants who were categorized as “modern slaves” and who
were therefore granted documents and rights were young girls who had
supposedly come to France naively, sexually innocent, and often without
a choice. There was no room for their complicity in wanting a better life or
to provide for their kin. The girls were described as vulnerable, defense-
less, lost, and excluded. They were portrayed as unable to comprehend
their situations. Those with sexual knowledge or experience, who chose
sex work as part of a better life, or took opportunities to leave their homes,
often with the help of their families, did not qualify for these human rights
protections. In the process, sex work as work was either rendered invisi-
ble, or criminalized.
We see similar kinds of questions about sexual innocence coming to
play in claims to reproductive rights. Advocacy groups argue that
women’s right to comprehensive reproductive health services, including
abortion, is rooted in international human rights standards guaranteeing
the rights to life, health, privacy, and nondiscrimination. Many of the
international human rights bodies protect reproductive rights as part of
already existing human rights obligations. The Committee on the
Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee)
and the Committee on the Rights of the Child are two of the UN bodies
that have worked to protect these rights, but cases have also been heard in
the Inter-American human rights system, and the European human rights
system, which have recognized state obstructions of lawful abortions as
rights violations. In jurisdictions that generally prohibit abortion, claims
aim to ensure access in exceptional cases such as to preserve the life of
a woman or where pregnancy results from rape.
In an essay about abortion rights litigation in Latin America, Lisa
M. Kelly makes a compelling argument about the centrality of narra-
tives of innocence, and how these immediately circumscribe who gets
rights.33 This is relevant in that these have become landmark cases in
international human rights law, and the strategies and tropes of course
circulate, just as do the laws and the activists. Starting from the 1990s,

she covers ﬁve successful claims in the Inter-American Human Rights

system, each of which involved denial of a lawful abortion at a public
hospital. Interestingly, these all involved young girls, who were raped or
sexually abused, and became pregnant as a result. Of course, the
lawyers chose cases that they felt would be high-profile internationally
and could win both at law and in the court of public opinion. As we
know, naming and shaming is one of human rights organizations’ tried
and true strategies, and for this, engaging with public opinion is critical
(see Leebaw this volume). As Kenneth Roth, executive director of
Human Rights Watch (also involved in advocating for abortion rights
in Latin America), stated, “We are at our most effective when we can
hold governmental (in some cases nongovernmental) conduct up to
a disapproving public.”34 With this in mind, the lawyers chose those
who could best foreground the exceptional elements of cruelty and
inhumanity in current abortion laws, creating the possibility for sham-
ing: innocent sufferers.
Anti-abortion advocates and similarly inclined civil society groups are
active in these Latin American countries. And in fact, anti-abortionists
frame their struggle in terms of innocence: they pit a universal fetal
innocence against the guilt or lack of moral fiber of the person requesting
an abortion. In the Latin American cases, the lawyers arguing for abortion
rights did not challenge this frame. Instead, they chose to take on the cases
of those whom they could also configure as innocent, and who could
therefore compete with the status of the fetus: they chose the figure of the
child-like rape victim to personify innocence. In this sense, they limited
their cases to girls, with no sexual experience, and who did not consent to
sex. For instance, there was the case of Paulina de Carmen Ramírez
Jacinto vs. Mexico. Paulina was a thirteen year old who became pregnant
as a result of rape, and was unable to get an abortion because medical staff
dissuaded her mother, citing the dangers of abortion. In the Inter-
American Commission, Paulina’s team argued for compensation, and
that by failing to provide adequate procedures through which she could
access lawful abortion, the Mexican state had violated its obligations
under human rights treaties and declarations.35
Kelly demonstrates how the language of childishness (“la niña”) is used
in each of these cases, to distinguish girls from teenagers, who are more
likely to be seen as sexually active. Once again, we see innocence being
used to draw the line between human kinds: girls deserve abortions,
teenagers do not. Their arguments for abortion rights involved demon-
strating the mental and physical health consequences of having their
girlhood innocence violated – their grievous suffering – and as girls,
their particular vulnerability.

Insofar as human rights movements agitate for political change, one

can say all these cases were successful. However, they all draw on rape
exceptions, which only provide safe access to abortion for a very few.
They rely on women’s nonconsent to sex – their sexual innocence; this
means that women who do consent to – or desire – nonprocreative sex
do not have reproductive rights, and must resort to informal means of
termination or take on unwanted pregnancies. It also disqualifies
women who are economically vulnerable and financially unable to
raise a child. In general, arguments based on innocence cast the
majority of those who want abortions outside the realm of rights,
framing only the exceptional as deserving. As with the case of traffick-
ing, innocence in the form of sexual innocence steals into these strug-
gles, making moral distinctions about who deserves certain kinds of
rights.
The lawyers and human rights activists argue that they use these
exceptional cases for incremental change, that is, they hope that these
cases will clear the way for further exceptions and for the eventual liberal-
ization of abortion law and access. But can these exceptional conditions
translate into more generalized arguments for universal rights? Or do such
limitations fundamentally alter who we consider worthy of rights – do
they work to sediment hierarchies of humanity? So far, looking at abortion
debates in Latin America and in places like the United States and parts of
Europe, such moves have simply narrowed the space of struggle, writing
out others not only as different in age or experience, but as different in
kind.

The Innocence Project

I turn now to another project that makes the case that protecting the rights
of the exceptional will eventually lead to rights for all: the Innocence
Project. Of course, this movement, unlike the others we have discussed,
explicitly takes on innocence – but of a different kind. It refers to the
presumption of innocence, or the idea that everyone should be considered
innocent until proven guilty. This principle is enshrined in Article 11 of
the UN Declaration of Human Rights – it is an understanding of inno-
cence as universal, as something everyone should be granted if accused.
Under the presumption of innocence, the legal burden of proof is thus on
the prosecution, which must collect and present compelling evidence to
the trier of fact. According to the deputy executive director of the
Innocence Project, Meryl Schwartz, the Project was put into place to
counter what they understood to be a creeping reversal of this presump-
tion of innocence – it was to counter a turn to the racialized presumption

that certain people are a priori guilty. They wanted to show that inno-
cence still matters.36
Before I say more, I want to clarify the difference in the meanings of
innocence here. If I have so far foregrounded the ethico-moral concept of
innocence – as experiential or epistemic purity – and largely approached it
in the secular, liberal context, the concept of innocence at play in the
Innocence Project is based on its juridical version, to be free from specific
wrong or guilt.37 In contemporary legal terms, innocence is about acquit-
tal – a decision to acquit means that the judge or jury had a reasonable
doubt as to the defendant’s guilt. It may be based on exculpatory evidence
or a lack of evidence to prove guilt. It does not mean that there is absolute
certainty, only reasonable doubt. To find someone innocent is not neces-
sarily to make a judgment on who they are but on whether they committed
a particular act. There is a distinction between innocent or guilty actions,
and innocence as a kind or category of person. In other words, the legal
concept has developed to judge acts, not identities (although, as Janet
Halley has demonstrated, acts and identities may not be as easily distin-
guished as we might think).38 The legal concept leaves room for uncer-
tainty; it does not presume absolute truth. This is not the case of
innocence as an ethico-moral concept, which is much less flexible,
much less compromising, and which helps to constitute identities or
kinds in relation to purity.
With the Innocence Project, there are several versions of innocence at
play. These include actual or factual innocence, and legal innocence.
Actual or factual innocence means that the defendant did not commit
the crime they are accused of, even if found guilty at trial – one might say
that they are “truly” innocent. Legal innocence, again, is where one starts:
with the presumption of innocence. For legal innocence, as stated above,
one only needs to be acquitted based on reasonable doubt. The goal is not
to prove that they did not commit the crime.
While the Innocence Project started with the goal of preserving and
defending legal innocence in the United States, where the number of
people incarcerated is extraordinary, they have expanded their network to
other common law countries like Canada, the UK, and Australia; but in
the United States, they now work only with actual innocence, to show that
innocent people do get wrongly accused. They do this by way of DNA
evidence, to exonerate those wrongly accused. They started in the early
1990s with the advent of DNA technology, which offered them a tool with
which to push back against racist analyses; they saw forensic evidence as
a way to make a case more “objective.” The Innocence Project’s legal
team makes a point of staying up to date on the latest scientific technol-
ogies, holding firmly to these as the way to “truth.” For instance, as they

recount in their materials, they helped to exonerate Steven Mark Chaney,

who was convicted in Texas for a grisly double murder on the basis of bite
marks on the victim’s body. Drawing on forensic analysis, they challenged
this evidence, and demonstrated his innocence. This resulted in
a moratorium on the use of bite mark evidence in future criminal prose-
cutions in Texas, since it is a technique that cannot be scientifically
validated.
In this sense, they do work to produce system reform by fighting for
more sound procedures for everyone, from access to DNA testing, to
police procedure reform in relation to eyewitness testimony; and they
have also pushed mandatory video-recording of interrogations. But
despite this, a desire for moral purity compels their work. DNA evidence
is only available for a tiny fraction of cases, so right away, the cases they
take on are exceptional. In looking for actual innocence, there is a claim to
purity – to real innocence – that is grounded not just on legal, but moral
distinctions. In an article “In Praise of the Guilty Project” – critiquing
“innocentrism” – Abbe Smith writes about a flyer put up by one of the
chapters of the Innocence Project, seeking clients, but stating in big font,
“We do not help guilty inmates lessen their sentences or get off on
technicalities.” This language purports to distinguish the deserving
from the undeserving, the real from the malingerers or the fraudulent;
and such moral distinctions get repeated in remarks like that of one of the
founders, Barry Scheck, who stated that “he had not represented a guilty
person in twenty years.”39 The Innocence Project comes armed, as Smith
states, “with both justice and certainty, a lethal combination.”40 Here, we
see moral distinctions not only between the innocent and the guilty, but
also between the lawyers who claim their own version of innocence by way
of helping only those they deem factually innocent.
There is no room for political complexity in those they defend; no place
for the not-quite-innocent, who, with the presumption of innocence, still
deserve to be fairly treated. They focus on people who are untainted, and
separate them out from the rest – those who have not committed the
crime, full stop – not those who might have been unfairly sentenced, or
sentenced for something different from what they did, or who have
extenuating circumstances that might explain why they committed
a crime. It does not focus on local-level crimes, and those held for violat-
ing parole or minor drug crimes, which bloats the prison population. This
emphasis on the pure reinforces the idea of good and bad criminals, and
like the distinctions made between good and bad immigrants when inno-
cence is used to give papers to some and deport the rest, this allows for the
further mistreatment of those designated bad. In looking for truth, rather
than proof, this type of innocence slips from legal to ethico-moral, and

once again, moves to create distinctions between people rather than

protecting rights for all.
While the work of the Innocence Project is undoubtedly pathbreaking
and important – some have called it a “new civil rights movement” – it
nevertheless seems to cast doubt on the ability of the language of inno-
cence to be ﬂexible enough or to stretch enough to be able to address the
injustice of those sentenced to life in prison for the most minor of crimes,
such as stealing $50, as was the case with Alabama resident Alvin
Kennard – or more broadly, for the injustices of the ever-expanding
carceral system. So, we might ask, does the slippage in the concept of
innocence (from legal to moral) preclude struggles for a different kind of
justice? For more systemic equality?

A Humanity without Innocence?

Human rights and humanitarianism both depend on the concept of
innocence to enact their work, and in so doing, both create distinctions
and hierarchies in their practice of humanity. However, they have slightly
different consequences. Humanitarians draw on the concept of inno-
cence to determine who is most in need – tying need to vulnerability,
which in turn is measured by way of innocence. But this is a practice of
triage that could, presumably, have different measures. That is, precisely
because of its minimalism – which is grounded in saving life itself, unqua-
lified life – humanitarianism does not generally work to distinguish
between human kinds; it makes distinctions based on the urgency of
need. While this can and does result in the privileging of some over others,
such distinctions are less about who one is or what one has done than how
vulnerable one appears at a particular moment. In other words, the fram-
ing of need is flexible, and changes over time and context.
With human rights practices, however, it seems that innocence may
(inadvertently) work to construct distinctions in human kinds; perhaps
counter-intuitively, it is the identities that come to matter most, not the
acts. I see this as related to the maximalism that is often a part of human
rights practices, which, unlike humanitarianism, includes installing and
protecting fuller versions of what it means to be human (i.e., dignity). As
Michael Barnett describes in the introduction to this volume, this is linked
to the progress narrative built into human rights projects. The goal of
human rights discourses and practices is to create the conditions in which
individuals can better flourish; as such, they try to support and amplify
different qualities in the humanity they protect. Insofar as innocence is
evoked as a special quality to be protected, betterment for a few is
accompanied by the exclusion of many. That is, innocence works to

value some forms of life at the expense of others. People may fight for the
rights of innocent young girls who have been raped – and in this sense,
a different, better world is imagined, one that does not countenance these
forms of gender-based violence. And yet, when the language of innocence
is used to further these girls’ rights, their innocence necessarily produces
the guilt of others (in this case, all women, or anyone with sexual experi-
ence). Innocence is a boundary concept, always working to create a space
of epistemic or experiential purity, but in the process, it produces
a constituent outside for the impure, contaminated or guilty. All those
in this outside space are cast as unworthy or undeserving of rights or
protections.
As such, when innocence comes into play in both humanitarianism and
human rights work, it actually functions to further inequality: in the case
of humanitarianism, while it may not be producing different and unequal
human kinds, the use of innocence nevertheless can produce inequality in
terms of life chances. In the case of human rights, it turns out, only some
people deserve rights. We saw this in the case of anti-trafficking dis-
courses; these not only exclude – but actually further penalize – those
who cannot show they entered into sex work unknowingly and unwil-
lingly. In the case of the Innocence Project, those who are not actually or
factually innocent are similarly criminalized and condemned in a stronger
sense, and deemed deserving of whatever sentences they may receive.
Innocence slips between its meaning as a lack of agency (helpessness,
vulnerability, defenselessness), a lack of knowledge (naiveté), a lack of
desire, and a lack of responsibility (blamelessness). It is a flexible concept
that intimately shapes why and how we should care, for whom we should
care, and whose lives matter: it constantly engages with the category of
humanity, but it does so by defining distinctions in the category, and by
circumscribing its limits. It seems unlikely, then, that humanity and
innocence will be disentangled anytime soon. Even if humanity is differ-
ently practiced and understood by humanitarianism and human rights,
with humanitarianism at least less dependent conceptually on the inno-
cence of those it saves or helps, nevertheless, humanity is almost impos-
sible to think without innocence; and insofar as innocence furthers
distinctions rather than equality or inclusiveness, we must accept that
humanity as a concept provides an inadequate basis for struggles for
political equality.

Ilana Feldman

In 1981 a mukhtar (village leader) in the Balata refugee camp near

Nablus in the West Bank sent a petition to the high commissioner of
the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees
(UNRWA) complaining about a significant curtailment in UN rations
provided to Palestinian refugees. The demand for rations restoration
was explicitly couched in the language of rights: “The Palestinian refu-
gees, who are suffering under occupation, appeal to you to extend to
them immediate assistance, as an act to safeguard their rights and their
dignity which is diminishing day by day and one month after one
month.”1 And the petition also marshaled the specific language of
human rights: “Where is humanity and what they call Human Rights?
The rights that were granted to them by the United Nations in-lieu-of
their usurped lands? Where is justice? Where is democracy? Where is the
Human Rights that protect all the refugees . . . women, children, and
widows who are left without rations and on the verge of extinction.”
Even as he asked for rations, the mukhtar distinguished his request from
charity: “we are not seeking charity or almsgiving. We are after our many
usurped rights – the rights which were recognized unanimously by the
United Nations.”
The petition mobilized the language of human rights in pressing a self-
defined humanitarian organization for a widely recognized humanitarian
good. It demanded action in the present to both redress a past wrong and
secure future rights. This sort of multiplicity is common in Palestinian
discourse. In the seventy years since the displacement and dispossession
of the majority of the Palestinian population, they have made rights claims
of at least three sorts: humanitarian rights, human rights, and national
rights. They have made these kinds of demands in multiple fora and to
many parties. And they have generally presented them as, at most, differ-
ent registers of a single rights universe. The concept of humanitarian
rights, especially, showcases the porousness of the boundaries between
human rights and humanitarianism. The way these rights are pressed for

203

by Palestinians highlights the multiple parties involved in constituting

these ﬁelds.
Some of the addressees of Palestinian claims, at least some of the time,
view the conjoining of human rights and humanitarianism, and related
demands for action across multiple temporalities, as a form of category
confusion. Humanitarian organizations often view their jurisdiction as
the provision of care, rather than the protection of rights. And human
rights efforts are often more targeted at violations of individual rights than
the national rights that Palestinians insist upon. Humanitarian activity is
most comfortably situated in the present – providing aid to people in need
now. Human rights, in partial contrast, takes up reckoning with the past
and working for a different future as fundamental tasks. But even as many
humanitarian and human rights organizations see boundary maintenance
as fundamental to their ability to do some good in the world – the
argument being that it is better to do a few things well than to do many
things badly – the circumstances these organizations confront render such
distinctions tenuous at best. And the demands of recipient communities
are only one aspect of these circumstances.
The aim of this chapter is not to render a judgment about whether these
distinctions are right or real, but to explore the terms in which they are
both articulated and muddied. It is organized in three sections, each
focused on a particular temporal dimension. The ﬁrst part of each section
considers how past, present, or future have been taken up in human rights
and humanitarian communities, both scholarly and practitioner.
The second part turns to the Palestinian instance to see how people on
the receiving end of these interventions not only engage these terms, but
also participate in their making and remaking.
The content, limits, and viability of human rights and national rights
are all contested. But their existence is widely acknowledged.
Humanitarian rights, on the other hand, seem to many to be an oxy-
moron. For some critics the problem with humanitarianism is precisely
that it relies on compassion, rather than the more stable ground of rights.2
The language of rights is not, though, alien to humanitarianism. Nor is it
new. Bruno Cabanes traces the emergence of the concept of humanitar-
ian rights to the aftermath of World War I, as part of the European turn
away from war.3 Both the international obligation to respond to circum-
stances of suffering and the expectation on the part of victims that such
a response should be forthcoming were part of this conceptual frame-
work. Cabanes describes the humanitarian rights of the 1920s as
a transitional concept on the path toward the articulation of human rights.
But humanitarian rights have persisted into the post-World War II human
rights era even as they remain, as in the 1920s, “far from self-evident.”4

The Ofﬁce of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees notes

that the cornerstone document for refugee protection, the 1951 Refugee
Convention, is “both a status and rights-based instrument.”5 The prin-
ciple of nonrefoulement, the right not to be returned to danger, is at the
heart of the refugee protection regime. The convention also specifies
other rights, including nondiscrimination, access to courts, and that
“the unity of the family . . . is an essential right of the refugee.”6 The
protection of civilians in armed conflict is a matter of concern for both
international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law
(IHRL). The legal scholar Dan Kuwali has argued that the notion of
humanitarian rights – articulated at the intersection of IHL and IHRL – is
necessary to maximize these protections: “humanitarian rights can be the
symbiotic concept regarding the protection of fundamental human rights
and humanitarian norms in order to enhance the protection of civilians.”7
If human rights are “not enough,” as Samuel Moyn puts it, humanitar-
ian rights are arguably even less adequate.8 I would not go as far as
Jacques Rancière, who describes humanitarian rights as “the rights of
those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of right.”
He views these rights as charity, “sent abroad, along with medicine and
clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights.”9 But in
addition to their articulation in legal domains, protection regimes, and
discourses of distant concern, humanitarian rights are also claimed by
people such as Palestinians, who insist both that humanitarianism is
a right and that humanitarianism entails specific obligations. Their
demands may not have the force of law, but, at least sometimes, they
have been effective in changing practice.

Human Rights and Memory

The challenge of confronting the past has been one of the central ques-
tions in human rights practice. Bringing perpetrators to justice for crimes
they have committed is one of the clearest ways that human rights advo-
cates can take concrete action in support of their principles. The interna-
tional tribunals that have been established to deal with particular
atrocities – such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslovia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
(ICTR) – and the broader International Criminal Court (ICC) are key
means for a global reckoning with the past. And societies that have
directly experienced these crimes have sometimes pursued local forms
of human rights justice, such as the gacaca courts in Rwanda. Whether
international or local, memory plays an important role in retributive
justice, as people serve as witnesses in the trials.

Retributive justice is not the only human rights idiom for reckoning
with the past. Generally considered as part of transitional justice practice,
the truth and reconciliation model takes the past as its terrain and mem-
ory as a key means of acquiring the data for its accounting.
Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in South Africa, Canada, and
Peru, for example, sought to deal with the violations of, respectively, apart-
heid, Indian Residential Schools, and insurgency and counterinsurgency, by
providing thorough and unsparing accounts of these crimes. Lea David notes
the growth since the 1980s (Argentina’s truth commission was established in
1983) of “the human rights vision of memorialization as a process of remem-
bering the wrongs of the past and honoring the victims.”10 Kimberly Rae
Lanegran identifies a number of challenges in the T&R approach: “By
demanding to know ‘the truth’ about past atrocities, do societies risk over-
simplifying their pasts? Should remembering the past always be privileged
over forgetting? To what degree does collective memory of atrocities con-
tribute to society’s healing? To what degree does it maintain wounds?”11 Her
conclusion is that such commissions are often “fundamentally limited and
indeed flawed because those efforts are products of political processes.”12 In
other words, perhaps too much memory and not enough justice.
Still, as important as it is to human rights practice, memory does not
always sit easily in that frame. Andreas Huyssen laments this distance and
asks: “Where would today’s international human rights movement be with-
out memory of the killing fields of the twentieth century? The dignity of the
victims, their struggles, and their fate must be preserved in memory, all the
more so since it was the express aim of the masters of genocide to obliterate
all memory of their victims.”13 Why might memory pose a challenge for
human rights? It may lay, in part, in the multiplicity of tenses in which
human rights needs to operate. Huyssen argues that too often the past has
been neglected for the sake of the future, indicating that “the human rights
movement, however, remains firmly oriented to the future goal of establish-
ing an international, perhaps even global, rights regime.”14 But Lea David
suggests that human rights memorialization can engage multiple
temporalities.15 She quotes a UN report that describes such memorialization
as not only past-oriented, but also oriented “equally to the present (healing
processes and rebuilding of trust between communities) and the future
(preventing further violence through education and awareness-raising).”16
In tribunals and truth commissions, memory is a mechanism for
human rights redress. In other contexts – one can think of the demonstra-
tions of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Argentina17 or pilgrimage
marches to former prisons in Morocco18 – memory makes a claim for the
necessity of human rights action. Memoralizations that are intended to
honor victims of past atrocities are presented as a form of action

themselves; these other performances of memory use remembrance as

a lever to push for other kinds of action. Participants in groups such as the
Mothers of the Plaza place themselves in public space in order to make
embodied memory (and grief and anger) a potent force. The tension that
Susan Slyomovics notes between the “mufﬂed, secretive nature of prison
and disappearance” and the “qualities that make for verbal performance
in the public domain” can make this embodied appearance difﬁcult.19
And yet people do it. Past and present blend together here as these
performers insist that memory is neither private nor closed: memory is
offered up as a force that makes a demand on the present.

Palestinian Memory
Palestinian memory has often been denied a place in the global world of
human rights memory, though Palestinians are pushing back on that
exclusion. Memory has certainly been central to Palestinian political
practice and life experience, and to local human rights discourse. The
central focus of this memory practice has been the nakba (catastrophe):
the displacement and dispossession of the majority of the Palestinian
population in 1948. Rosemary Sayigh and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
have tracked the glaring absence of the Palestinian nakba from the
“trauma genre.”20 The collection and circulation of trauma memory
(the Holocaust is the paradigmatic case for the genre, but it has expanded
considerably) is a key way in which memories of suffering are given a place
on the global stage and rendered part of the universal ﬁeld of human
rights.21 Nakba memory has been excludable, Sayigh argues, because of
a broad politics that makes Palestinian lives less “grievable”22 and
because “in many Western academic circles today, anti-Palestinianism
is a permissible form of racism.”23 The Palestinian circulation of nakba
memories has been important for both the continuity of their community
and the global recognition of their experiences and claims.
Nakba memory is also not about a single displacement event. Much of
this memory is about life “before their diaspora.”24 It includes the circu-
lation of stories of ayyam al-balad (village days) and the printing of
“village books” describing these lost spaces.25 It entails materialized
memorialization in the regular naming of Palestinian institutions after
lost Palestinian places (such as the Haifa hospital in the Burj al Barajneh
refugee camp). It involves social expressions of such memory in marriage
patterns that long retained preference for unions among descendants of
the same village. Nakba memory is also about life in the aftermath of
dispossession. Stories about the early years in refugee camps, about aid
distribution, and ongoing precarity are all part of this landscape. For

many years the dominant international (and Israeli) approach to

Palestinian memory has been that such recollection is an impediment to
“peace.” The Palestinian (and some dissident Israeli) response is that it is
the refusal to confront the past that is the real impediment.26
Palestinians have never considered the nakba a bounded event, and in
recent years the idea of the “ongoing nakba” (al-nakba al-mustamirrah)
has become an increasingly central lens for framing their continued
experience of colonization, dispossession, and occupation. The term itself
has been around for a number of years. At the 2001 Durban conference
on racism, Hanan Ashrawi spoke of “a nation in captivity held hostage to
an ongoing Nakba [catastrophe], as the most intricate and pervasive
expression of persistent colonialism, apartheid, racism, and
victimization.”27 Its prevalence has increased signiﬁcantly over the past
decade. Not only does it underscore the relationship between current
conditions and past events, but it also highlights the shared experiences of
a dispersed population.
In 2009, Badil (a Palestinian research center in Bethlehem focused on
“Palestinian residency and refugee rights”) published a special issue of its
journal with the title: Palestine’s Ongoing Nakba.28 Published right after
a punishing Israeli assault on Gaza, the editorial described that attack as
“the latest chapter in a sixty-year nakba.”29 The articles in this issue
described “ongoing forced displacement” in Jaffa, Jerusalem, the
Negev, and the West Bank (among other places). Palestinian citizens of
Israel protesting the Lyd municipality’s demolition of their homes
included the term “ongoing nakba” on their signs.30 Even Mahmoud
Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority and no cutting-edge poli-
tical thinker, used the term in advocating for Palestinian statehood at the
UN.31 If memory becomes “human rights memory” when it both stakes
out a universal relevance and makes a claim for redress, restitution, or
another form of justice in the present, the language of the ongoing nakba
must be understood as part of the work of giving Palestinian memory
a place in this ﬁeld. And it has certainly been important in Palestinian
demands for humanitarian rights.

Humanitarianism and the Challenge of the Durable

Present
Human rights work is often slow and exacting, involving the careful
accumulation of evidence of past violations that can be prosecuted for
future deterrence. Humanitarian work, on the other hand, is meant to be
quick and nimble, able to move speedily to respond to a crisis and ready to
move on to the next disaster as the situation improves.32 The idea of crisis

response is at the heart of the humanitarian imaginary. The goal is to save

lives and move on.33 A consequence of this orientation is that the present
is humanitarianism’s “natural” time.34 Humanitarian practice is often
focused on addressing needs that are both urgent now and can be
addressed now, rather than on planning for change. And humanitarian
interventions frequently have short mandates and funding streams, limit-
ing their planning horizon. The present crisis, though, often extends into
uncertain futures. The UNHCR, for instance, estimates that two-thirds
of the global refugee population experience protracted displacement.35
The humanitarian sector is also often in conversation with fields such as
development that are explicitly future-oriented. The humanitarian take-
up of concepts such as “resilience,” which addresses a society’s ability to
withstand and manage a future shock, is a product of such engagement.
So even as present-focused, crisis intervention has seemed to be the heart
of the humanitarian field, this natural time is not humanitarianism’s only
temporality.
The future is part of humanitarianism’s existential challenge.36
A significant portion of humanitarian work is long term, extending across
the lives (and lifecycles) of individuals and communities, even as that
future is not highly conceptualized.37 The longevity of humanitarian
operations in many cases calls the “temporariness” that is central to its
self-definition into question. In these circumstances temporariness is not
replaced by permanence, but rather by an uncertain in between. Not only
is it difficult for humanitarian practice to actively engage with change over
time, but also the very fact of a humanitarian future is evidence of
(humanitarian) failure. The parenthetical marks indicate that the failure
is perhaps more properly assigned to the political actors who have primary
responsibility for producing and resolving conditions of humanitarian
need, and humanitarian actors would certainly so wish to assign it. One
of the ongoing debates in the field is about the extent to which humani-
tarian presence can abet a lack of resolution. Regardless of responsibility,
the continuation into the future of humanitarian work feels like a failure
and certainly presents a problem.
Even though situations of long-term displacement are common, they
strain the limits of the humanitarian imaginary, and also of humanitarian
resources. Long-term humanitarian work poses both operational and exis-
tential difficulties for what Peter Redfield terms its “minimalist biopoli-
tics,” the use of biopolitical techniques in an effort primarily to keep people
alive rather than to help them thrive.38 These conditions require organiza-
tions that are oriented toward emergency to respond to circumstances that
are “protracted.” Common in the dynamics of long-term humanitarianism
is movement between the “humanitarian situation” – the emergency that

presents itself as an urgent need and which mobilizes a humanitarian

machinery – and the “humanitarian condition” – the less acute, but no
less fundamental experience of living and working in circumstances of
long-term displacement and need. One of the challenges that humanitarian
actors face is being buffeted between the catastrophic and the cruddy and
trying to respond alternatively to both situations.
If the future lurks as a definitional challenge, the past is sometimes
absent from humanitarian consideration. For humanitarianism how peo-
ple came to be in need in less important than the fact that they are in need.
But again, since humanitarianism is in fact often a long-term proposition,
there are humanitarian pasts as much as humanitarian futures. These
pasts form part of the lexicon through which recipients, and practitioners,
understand their current condition. The past becomes a ground for
judging the present: that aid used to be better is an oft-heard complaint
by recipients.39 That “best practices” have evolved and improved is
a belief shared by many practitioners. The past helped define the relation-
ships that structure the present.
The humanitarian experience, furthermore, often involves living with
time out of joint, and experiencing multiple temporalities at once.40
Certainly circumstances of displacement – whether products of war or
natural disaster – often upend people’s sense of where they are in time.
Not only does it take time to come to understand what has happened –
that home is gone, that communities are sundered – but also the daily
rhythms of humanitarian assistance are so dramatically different from
those of what had been ordinary life that it can be extremely difficult for
people to temporally orient themselves.41 Waiting in line for rations as
opposed to getting ingredients from one’s own supplies (whether from
a household garden or purchased as a store) indicates a different source of
sustenance, and also takes a different kind of time in one’s day.42 So too
does baking bread over a fire outside a tent instead of in a village or
backyard oven. The rending of daily time that accompanies displacement
makes temporality unstable. Even as the first crisis passes, temporal
confusion can continue. Does the experience of a day (or days) define
the present for the displaced? Or does the present still abide in their
former experiences? Can a refugee’s future have any continuity with the
past or will it only be rupture? These questions are both existential and
political. And they persist.

Humanitarian Rights and the Palestinian Present

Not only have Palestinians claimed multiple sorts of rights – humanitarian,
human, and national – they have made these claims around multiple

temporalities. The insistence that nakba memory be recognized as part of

the landscape of human rights memory is a claim to acknowledgment of
past wrongs. The language of the ongoing nakba is a reminder that these
wrongs are not only in the past. Humanitarian rights demands have been
another venue for making claims on the present – for insisting on interna-
tional engagement in halting these ongoing wrongs. Refugee responses to
Israeli occupation policy in the Gaza Strip offer a case in point. The
occupation of Gaza was met, from the outset, with resistance. Organized
armed struggle peaked in the years between 1969 and 1971, and then it was
largely crushed by the Israeli military under the command of Ariel
Sharon.43 As part of its security measures, and its territorial expansionist
policy, Israel both encouraged emigration from the strip and forcibly
moved refugees out of camps.
In 1971, usually in the name of fighting terrorism, the Israeli military
began demolishing shelters in Jabalia, Shati, Rafah, and Deir al Belah
camps. Some demolition was done to widen roads in the camps, in order
to enable easier patrolling. A 1972 demolition project in the Rafah camp
was described as a matter of town planning, rather than security.
UNRWA vociferously objected to the forced movement of refugees and
repeatedly sought Israeli agreement to provide adequate alternative hous-
ing for refugees who were evicted. Many refugees, and Israel itself,
reported that the only alternative housing that was made available was
either in El Arish in the Sinai or in the West Bank. That is, the project of
“thinning out” the refugee camps was also a project of depopulating
Gaza. Even when people could not be moved from the strip, Israel sought
to move them out of camps, claiming to transform them, as an editorial in
the Jerusalem Post put it, from “refugees into people.”44 Commenting on
this editorial, an UNRWA official dismissed it as “strictly propaganda.”45
As refugees protested against forced removals, they used the language
of humanitarian rights to press their claims. Demonstrations targeted
UNRWA in an effort to enlist the agency’s help. On July 24, 1971,
a group of demonstrators, mainly women and children, gathered at the
gates of the UNRWA headquarters early in the morning. According to
a report by the responsible official on site, they came “from the direction
of Jabalia camp, crying, shouting, and demonstrating.”46 The gendered
character of this protest was surely not accidental. In part, it may have
reflected a division of political labor, with men more likely to be engaged
in militant action. In part, it also reflected different vulnerabilities in
public assembly. Women and children are not wholly insulated from the
threat of violent response, but they are slightly more sheltered from it.
The protesters pushed their way into the compound and could not be
persuaded to quiet down. A small group of protesters was brought in to

meet with the director and, in the meantime, those outside obstructed
staff members from entering their offices. When the meeting concluded,
the representatives told the rest of the protesters that “they were sure and
confident that the director of UNRWA operations, Gaza is taking the
matter seriously and he has promised to make all his efforts to help them.”
At this point the demonstrators agreed to return to the camp.
Other petitions accompanied this assembly in defense of the right not to
be further displaced. The president of the UNRWA staff association
wrote to the commissioner-general in the latter’s “capacity as the repre-
sentative of the Secretary General and the United Nations, the guardian
of human rights, to put an end to their pains and suffering.”47 He cited
legal and political bases for the objection to the Israeli demolition plan:
“Compulsory movement individually and collectively of the inhabitants
of the occupied territories is prohibited in accordance with Article 49 of
the Geneva Convention IV . . . . It is prohibited for the occupying State to
destroy movable or immovable belongings of individuals or groups of
persons as stated in Article 53 of the above mentioned convention.”48
The letter also argued that these compulsory movements were political in
nature, and that the UNRWA should work to stop them so that it “will not
be involved in these political currents which are in conflict with its
humanitarian mission.” The language of humanitarian rights was paired
with the presence of Palestinian bodies as an assertion of their demand to
stay in place.
As demolitions and evictions continued, the UNRWA registered its
dissent, but largely in vain: “The Agency requests an assurance that the
Israeli authorities will proceed urgently with the provision of housing
within the Gaza Strip for the refugees moved to El Arish and that they
will be free to return to the Strip as soon as the accommodation is
ready.”49 The agency viewed the entire operation as a violation of both
the Geneva Conventions and General Assembly resolutions. And it
expressed concern about its employees. A special report to the General
Assembly in September 1971 noted that “despite assurances given by the
Israeli military authorities . . . about 70 Agency staff members had had
their shelters demolished.”50 Challenging an Israeli claim that refugees
moved to El Arish “of their own free will,” the commissioner-general
wrote to Israeli General Shlomo Gazit that it seemed “inconceivable” that
UNRWA employees would willing move so far from their place of
employment “and if UNRWA employees were treated in this way, there
must be considerable doubt about the consent of many others to their
movement to El Arish.”51
UNRWA files include numerous letters from local UNRWA employ-
ees describing the process by which they were forcibly removed, often to

El Arish. One teacher described how soldiers took all of his family’s
identification cards and told him that they were being moved: “I then
addressed the following question to them: Where to will we be emigrated?
They said: ‘We do not know.’ I then said to them: ‘I work with UNRWA
as a teacher.’ They said: ‘You will find schools there in which you will
work.’”52 Other employees reported similar treatment. Israeli officials
continued to insist that the home demolitions were necessary for security,
that it sought to “avoid undue hardship,” and that no one was sent to the
West Bank or El Arish “against his will.”53 And UNRWA and refugees
continued to protest, to little effect.54 This failure is a reminder of the
limit of politics in the humanitarian space, a limit that is not simply
attributable to the relative weakness of refugees. Rights to humanitarian-
ism and humanitarian rights came together in UNRWA’s later acknowl-
edgment of its obligation to provide shelter assistance for persons whose
homes were destroyed, making “no distinction between destruction by
military action, by punitive demolition and for such reasons as the secur-
ity ‘road widening’ operation in the Gaza Strip in 1971.”55
Just as Arendt noted that the “right to have rights” is more fundamental
than any of the specific rights of citizens, so, too, do Palestinians claim
a general right to humanitarian rights that underlies any of the specific
rights they demand as refugees. This right to humanitarian rights entails
recognition, however limited, of Palestinian inclusion in an international
community. To have humanitarian rights does not mean that Palestinians
are not refugees; it does not entail a change in status in that sense. But the
claim to these rights does constitute an argument that as refugees they
should not live in the condition of arbitrariness that Arendt views as the
lot of the stateless.56 “What they do, did, or may do” should matter,
Palestinians argue. And in so claiming they try to redefine the condition of
being a refugee.

Can Human Rights Govern the Future?

If human rights engagement with the past is often about adjudication,
human rights take up of the future is frequently about deterrence. One of
the key purposes of human rights activity – including criminal prosecu-
tion of past wrongs – is to set precedents for the limits of acceptable
behavior and to constrain future state action. Human rights practitioners
also often view themselves as responding to an obligation to future gen-
erations to help make a better world. The memory work described earlier
plays a central role in these future concerns as well. As Elizabeth Jelin
argues for the Argentine case, the human rights response to the political
violence of dictatorship moved through several phases, from an urgency

around discovery and publicity, to “the vindication of the historical and

collective memory struggling against oblivion,” and then to demands for
punishment and “the future projection of human rights in education and
in new legal provisions.”57 She further indicates about the operations of
memory in this instance: “The moving idea is that only through remem-
bering can avoidance of such violations be ensured – as if ‘never again’
could only be guaranteed by the constant remembrance of the terror
experienced during the dictatorship. Is memory the key to deterrence?”58
To the extent that human rights seeks to govern the future, it does so
in several ways – through the social and political transformation of
possibility and through specific legal mechanisms of deterrence.59
Considering the US government’s use of torture in the “War on
Terror,” Francesca Laguardia contends that there is significant evi-
dence to suggest that state actors have been deterred by the prosecution
of human rights violations. She further suggests that these efforts are
part of a broad strategy of future-oriented human rights practice which
recognizes that “rather than interrupting or punishing abuse, it would be
far preferable to prevent its occurrence entirely. Perhaps surprisingly,
criminal sanctions offer great promise in this regard.”60 Not only might
prosecution deter human rights violation, Laguardia indicates that
“deterrence theory also suggests failure to prosecute is likely to breed
more lawless behavior if it is allowed to stand.”61 According to this
argument, failure to act has its own future effect: the production of
more human rights violations.
Prosecution is a key venue for human rights’ future work. Education is
another. Elif Babul has explored the importance of human rights training
for Turkish government officials to the process of accession to the
European Union. This process has several (future-oriented) aims. It
seeks to transform the character of Turkey and Turkish governance to
make it suitable for a place in Europe. In so doing it works to reconfigure
the relationship between Turkish bureaucrats and the Turkish popula-
tion. And it also tries to reorient human rights violations themselves from
“manifestations of state violence” to “symptoms of deficiency in govern-
mental capacity and expertise.”62 The training process has a present
effect on the participants – shifting their understandings of their own
positions, but this present effect is embedded within a future-oriented
project. Like prosecutions, these trainings are intended to have
a deterrence effect – in this instance as much through changing subject
positionings as through shifting their calculations about the possible out-
comes of their actions. Whether sanctions or human rights education can
actually shape the future as proposed is an open question. So too is
whether the international human rights regime has a future at all.63

Deterrence does not, though, exhaust the landscape of future-

thinking around human rights. There is also a great deal of human
rights talk that centers around the obligations that the present has to
the future: “What kind of world will we leave our children?” It makes
sense that the language of intergenerational obligation looms large in
arguments about the environment and in efforts to stake a place for
environmental activism in the human rights arena. Edith Weiss argues
that “intergenerational equity finds deep roots in international law” and
that environmental protection – specifically preservation of resources,
planet quality, and access – is a central part of fulfilling this
obligation.64 Richard Hiskes acknowledges the difficulty, for a range
of philosophical reasons, in sustaining an argument about intergenera-
tional justice and avers that “emergent environmental rights supply
a strong argument for justice across generations, because environmental
rights logically presume concern for the future.”65
When a group of young Americans (ranging in age from 9 to 20) sued
the federal government to demand greater action on climate change, they
explicitly used the language of obligation to the future in claiming that
inaction was a threat to their “fundamental constitutional right to life and
liberty.”66 When the court granted them a right to a trial on the matter, it
acknowledged that there was merit to the claim. As the presiding judge
wrote: “I have no doubt that the right to a climate system capable of
sustaining human life is fundamental to a free and ordered society.”67
Whether environmental justice will be recognized as a fundamental
human rights remains an unsettled question – though as the effects of
climate change increase it will only become more pressing – but it seems
clear that if it is so recognized, it will be in significant part through efforts
to make claims for and on behalf of the future.

Palestinian Futures through Human Rights

From the condition of the present, the Palestinian future looks bleak.
There have been many moments of hope and possibility along the trajec-
tory of Palestinian suffering: the years of the “revolution” (thawra) in
Lebanon (1969–1982) when the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO) not only promised to ﬁght for Palestine, but also offered protection
and opportunity to refugees in Lebanon; the time of the ﬁrst intifada
(uprising) (1987–1993) when grassroots resistance to the Israeli occupa-
tion of the West Bank and Gaza Strip not only mobilized Palestinians in
the territories, but also energized the community in exile; even the early
period after the Oslo Accords, the 1993 agreements that created the
Palestinian Authority (PA) in the territories and which many hoped

would lead to an independent Palestinian state. But each of these

moments has ended in defeat, leading many people to feel that there is
little hope for the future.
As bleak as things seem for Palestinians today, today is not all there is.
Looking at the Palestinian experience over time makes the recurring
movement between possibility and impossibility evident. And there is
no reason to think that the present constitutes the end of (Palestinian)
history. It is true that certain futures are irretrievably foreclosed in the
passage of time. As we have passed the seventieth anniversary of the
nakba, the passing of the Palestine generation without return or resolu-
tion appears inevitable. The deepening infrastructure of occupation and
settlement in the West Bank makes some political outcomes (namely
a two-state solution) increasingly difficult, many argue impossible. But
even as Palestinian political organizing and leadership is at a low ebb, and
therefore ill-equipped to resist these conditions, the fact of continued
Palestinian existence – perhaps the signal Palestinian political achieve-
ment over these decades – means that other possibilities can still emerge.
Human rights has had a vexed place in the landscape of future feeling
among Palestinians. In her study of the world of human rights work in
Palestine, Lori Allen describes the tension between faith in a better future
and cynicism about achieving it through the system of NGO operations.
She notes that Al-Haq, the oldest and most venerable Palestinian human
rights organization, was explicitly founded with the aim of laying the
groundwork for the future in that it “endeavored to prepare the popula-
tion’s collective consciousness for its future task of organizing Palestinian
society in a just and equitable manner.”68 Indeed, in a context of occupa-
tion and the absence of national sovereignty, rule of law work such as
human rights can only be future-oriented. For many in the field the work
“gives a sense of doing something, even if results come only in the
future.”69 And as the founder of Birzeit University’s human rights pro-
gram told Allen, “the flocking of students to a program in democracy and
human rights is itself an indicator that even the pessimists, in their hearts,
are persuaded of a promising future.”70 It may equally be that they are
persuaded of the utility of the degree in an employment market that is
NGO-heavy and RFP (request for proposals)-driven.
The international aid world shapes Palestinian engagements with
human rights in other ways as well. Things like human rights education
are increasingly built into donor demands. Promoting respect for human
rights among Palestinians was a key impetus behind the development of
a human rights curriculum for UNRWA schools. After beginning with
a pilot program in Gaza in 1999, and then extending to other fields, in
2012 UNRWA formally adopted a policy for incorporating human rights

education into its curricula in all five fields where it operates. The policy
asserts that as a subsidiary organ of the United Nations UNRWA has
a responsibility to uphold and promote the human rights instruments
adopted by the General Assembly. And human rights education is
described as part of the Agency’s overall requirement to achieve “align-
ment with the international human rights system.”71 It calls its program
“education for human rights, conflict resolution, and tolerance
[HRCRT].”
UNRWA’s advancement of this curriculum is part of a broader land-
scape in which human rights education (HRE) is developing as a field
(and as an industry).72 And the lessons and principles that UNRWA
suggests to its teachers are well aligned with this broader field. It is
more usual, however, for HRE to be pursued by self-defined human
rights organizations, rather than a humanitarian organization like
UNRWA. But UNRWA is an unusual humanitarian organization in
having such a sustained responsibility for the education of so many
children.73 UNRWA schools follow the host-country curriculum in
each of its area of operations. Incorporating human rights into this curri-
culum requires developing specific educational materials that can either
be folded into other lessons or deployed as a stand-alone module (as was
done in Gaza). The human rights curriculum is meant both to introduce
students to the international human rights system and its instruments
(UDHR, the convention on the rights of the child, etc.) and to bring
a human rights approach into the life of schools – teaching children
tolerance of difference, promoting educational inclusion, and developing
techniques for nonviolent conflict resolution. And the goal is to have these
lessons extend far beyond the classroom. As a toolkit developed for
educators describes, a key aim of this education is to promote the spread
of a “culture of human rights”74 throughout the community.75
What does this culture consist of? As outlined in the materials: “A
culture of human rights is one in which the full potential of Palestine
refugee students is realised. It is a culture where the students develop
attitudes and behaviours that are respectful of human rights.” The goal is
to “promote lifelong respect for human rights and tolerance as they
mature and become active citizens in their communities.”76 Human
rights are described as resting on five basic principles: human dignity,
universality, equality and nondiscrimination, participation and inclusion,
and tolerance.77 There have been objections to aspects of the curriculum.
Some see the focus on conflict resolution and tolerance as an attack on
what they view as legitimate resistance to Israeli occupation.78 Others
have argued that the rights emphasized are too generic (such as the right
to play) without giving sufficient attention to the precise ways in which the

Israeli occupation persistently violates Palestinian rights.79 Certainly

human rights education has emerged from donor interest and UN
requirements rather than community demands. To this extent the future
that is envisioned and enacted through human rights work is only partially
a Palestinian future.

Impossible Distinctions
What do these different engagements and temporalities tell us about
questions of boundary maintenance and encroachment in human rights
and humanitarianism? They offer some indications about why boundary
maintenance might be viewed as important by actors in the field. And they
also highlight some of the reasons why such separation might also be
viewed as undesirable and even impossible. Actors in both fields of
humanitarianism and human rights, along with the communities where
they intervene, regularly confront the limits of their capacities to have the
effect they hope to in the world. Insisting upon a clearly defined task and
jurisdiction is one response to these limits. But even as some actors claim
the ground of distinction as a means of improving their chances of doing
good, others argue that expanding activities and forming alliances with
closely related actors is a better way of unsettling limits of possibility.
As scholars and practitioners debate boundaries and intersections,
politics is a central concern. Some people worry that human rights will
lose its capacity to deliver justice by blending too much with humanitarian
compassion. Others fear that humanitarian access will be imperiled by an
entanglement with political claims and fault-finding. The temporal dis-
tinctions in these modes of engagement with human vulnerability and
suffering are part of this terrain. In the face of the human rights demand
for redress of past injustice and a claim to offer future deterrence, the
needs of the present can seem “tradeable.” From a humanitarian per-
spective, inadequate attention to the urgent needs of now is an ethical
failing of the highest order. And the reverse is true as well. Human rights
actors (and others) argue that meeting the needs of the people in front of
you – the doctor’s oath and the humanitarian imperative – cannot be
considered an unmitigated good if the past that brought people to that
need and the future that is likely to extend it are not made a matter of
concern. Whatever ground people try to stake, in human rights and
humanitarian work temporalities get muddied, interventions overlap,
and recipients work across all these lines of distinction to try to achieve
better outcomes for themselves.

Bertrand Taithe*

In 2017, a veteran of border refugee camps and medical development

work in Cambodia mused on his professional journey and on the evolu-
tion of humanitarian work in the country. In a short anecdote he recalled
how, when Ta Mok, “the Butcher,” was still in hiding, optimistic huma-
nitarians had convened for their human right workshop in his house, deep
in Khmer Rouge territory.1 This short story embodied many of the
paradoxes of Cambodia in the 1990s but also illustrated how human
rights issues had become salient among the many needs of a country
being rebuilt with humanitarian assistance. Like my informant, many
humanitarians of the 1990s had first experienced Cambodian politics
from the margins of the border camps which represented one of the
largest “emergency” relief operations between 1979 and 1992. With
many others, he had joined in Cambodia a range of other humanitarian
workers whose organizations had chosen to act within Vietnamese-
controlled Cambodia during the same period.
Over nearly a generation, humanitarians engaged with the conse-
quences of the Cambodian genocide, responded to the many demands
of large refugee populations, and after 1990, to local and international
expectations of state building. Humanitarians thus worked for over two
decades with or alongside the perpetrators of genocide even as they
engaged with human rights practices. In 1979, many humanitarians
perceived the immediate response to emergencies to be the provision of
basic protection and services. They reinterpreted these services as the
guaranteeing of the rights of the refugees – sometimes in paternalistic
terms.2 This period was a very significant episode in the development of
protection practices and in their assimilation to a rights-based approach
to humanitarian relief. In the later phase, by the mid-1980s, this chapter
argues, some imagined their role at the Thai border to be that of witnesses
and promoters of human rights beyond refugee rights.
In significant contrast, development international nongovernmental
organizations (INGOs) operating in Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia

219

campaigned against the relief work at the border, arguing that it was
a form of support for Khmer Rouge war-mongering. Throughout their
work they favored more holistic programs of social and political renewal.
In the debates around the future of Cambodia after the genocide, those
working in Cambodia began to dream of a postwar order based on the rule
of law and the promotion of human rights. In 1991, two understandings of
humanitarian and human rights practices thus merged when the repatria-
tion of border refugees entailed the mass arrival of emergency INGOs in
Cambodia and the proliferation of small organizations within the country.
Following this merger, coalitions of INGOs sought to establish a rights-
based polity. In what they convinced themselves was their project, interna-
tional humanitarian organizations sought holistic and rights-based
solutions. By the early 1990s, the UN-sanctioned peace agreement had
brought into an unstable alliance the enemies of yesteryear. The ghost of
the genocide hung over this new Cambodia and continues to inspire poli-
tical debate.3 Facing the full consequences of mass genocide for the first
time since World War II, humanitarians attempted to establish their legiti-
macy and practices by using the terms of human rights discourses. For the
purpose of exploring the complex relationship between human rights and
humanitarian practices there are few case studies as relevant as that of the
twin humanitarian interventions which took place in the border camps and
inside Kampuchea/Cambodia4 between 1979 and the era of liberal peace
building.5 Few sites have proven as complex and enduring as Cambodia
since. There are a few other examples of continued presence and political
activism by INGOs (excepted perhaps Sudan, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan)
that shaped so significantly both humanitarians and their “beneficiaries.”
Cambodia became a locus classicus of the transformation of humanitarian
protection practices into so-called rights-based humanitarian ones.
This chapter explores the context of this development of humanitarian
work, the concepts of protection and rights it gave rise to, how humani-
tarians sought to bear witness of human rights violations and of the
impending threat of a return of the Khmer rouge and how they took
sides, in order to promote human rights as they saw them, in the recon-
struction of Cambodia. This complex story of a humanitarian landscape
responding to and being reshaped by the specificity of Cambodian politics
may be coming to an end as the political usefulness of INGO works
recedes in a developing economy under autocratic rule.

Context
The Cambodian humanitarian project was complex and multisited. It
began in earnest in 1979 though there were some precursor interventions

as early as 1975 on the border between Thailand and Khmer Rouge-

controlled Kampuchea. From 1975 until the forced repatriation of most
Cambodians in 1992–1993,6 seventy-two temporary camps were
established.7 The United Nation’s Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the
International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) managed most border
camps until the UN enabled the creation of a specific organization, the
United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO), which oversaw
responsibility in 1982 of all camps with the exception of the resettlement
camp of Khao I Dang, managed by the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).8
Originally a part of the World Food Programme and under the author-
ity of the special representative of the secretary general for humanitarian
assistance to the Kampuchean people, UNBRO managed relief work for the
dozens of displaced persons and refugee camps set up in the no-man’s-land
between Cambodia and Thailand. These camps contained the flow of
refuge-seeking Cambodians and kept their population in situ. Meanwhile
the UNHCR managed the emblematic Khao I Dang camp. Unlike other
camps, Khao I Dang was a site of transit. Though mostly built of mud,
straw, and bamboo to satisfy the Royal Thai Government’s (RTG)
demands that nothing permanent might be established, the camps formed
large urban centers. The largest housed up to 180,000 people in one
composite urban complex in Site 2. Site 2 was really a conglomerate of
camps sitting at the border of Thailand and vulnerable to occasional
Vietnamese assaults; Khao I Dang was by far the most visited and public
camp within the Thai territory. It became the subject of constant studies,
visits, and academic engagement. In contrast, other camps remained under
the control of political factions and for some, such as the Khmer Rouge
camps, almost entirely outside any kind of humanitarian oversight.
Humanitarians working at the border soon discovered the complexity
of late Cold War politics in the Indochinese peninsula. Far from being
a simple “hot spot” between East and West, the Cambodian situation
combined regional rivalries, Sino-Russian competition, postcolonial
influence, and the fallout from the Indochinese wars since the 1940s.
The Thai military had overall control of all refugee camps, but they
surrendered management to competing Cambodian armed factions
opposed to the Vietnamese. The Royalist FUNCINPEC party, the
Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, and the Khmer Rouge
ruled parts or entire various camps (site B, Site 2, Site 8 respectively),
while the Thai Task Force 80 governed access to these sites.9 The
Cambodian parties present at the border eventually formed the
Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea in 1982 under
the leadership of Prince Norodom Sihanouk. The Khmer Rouge under

Khieu Samphan, the foreign secretary of the coalition, remained in con-

trol of the UN representation for Kampuchea and led militarily in the
anti-Vietnamese guerrilla resistance. For their American, Chinese, and
Thai backers, these camps created leverage against the Soviet-backed
Vietnamese. A covert war ensued throughout the 1980s during which
the Vietnamese controlled the ground over the dry season while their foes
were most active in the rainy season. Following the Vietnamese offensive
of 1984, most of the camps were regrouped on the edge of the border zone
of Thailand. The end of the Cold War removed some of the international
actors but did not end the ideological divides within Cambodia or the
regional tensions around it.
After many false starts, the international political process ending war in
Cambodia was formally agreed in Paris on October 23, 1991. It ended
both a civil war of twenty years and a thirteen-years-long war with
Vietnam. Deliberately ambiguous, the peace process gave precedence to
national reconstruction over the resolution of all conflicts or retribution
for the unspeakable crimes of the 1970s.10 In practice, this “peace”
remained fragile until the Khmer Rouge weakened. On losing Chinese
support in 1992, the Khmer Rouge retired to their forest hideouts once
again and withdrew from formal politics to resume guerrilla warfare.
Claiming to be a government in waiting in 1994, the Khmer Rouge
were by then harassed by governmental forces and proved unable to
resume full-scale warfare. In 1996 the so-called “win–win” offer from
Prime Minister Hun Sen led to the defection of most of the remaining
combatants, the split of the movement, the death of Pol Pot, the surren-
der of Khieu Samphan in 1998, and the arrest of Ta Mok in 1999.11
The 1991 accord also formally ended all humanitarian work at the
border of Thailand. Relief INGOs that had grown dramatically over the
period, for instance, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF),12 relocated to
mainland Cambodia. This shift profited NGOs focusing on wider devel-
opment issues rather than emergency relief work. UNBRO folded gradu-
ally into the UN-controlled authority. Sergio Vieira de Mello
masterminded its final mission and transformed its mandate in
March 1992.13

Accessing Human Rights: The Politics of Protection

Over the border camps period, from 1979 until 1991, humanitarians
working with displaced people and refugees reframed their practice in
relation to protection needs and human rights issues. Humanitarians on
the border were addressing the needs of people at a juncture when most
world refugees were ﬂeeing communist oppression. Human rights issues

were clearly underpinning the political understanding of this oppression.

The concern with the delivery of practical relief and the need to offer
protection to displaced people and refugees merged with a general sense
that these guaranteed also the protection of human rights.14 In practice
humanitarians were increasingly managing a growing range of needs.
Binding both ideology and practice, humanitarian protection became an
overarching concept. The concept of protection in humanitarian aid had
evolved dramatically since its first uses. Originally it denoted access to the
bare wherewithal of survival – what Agamben calls bare life.15 Manuals on
protection from the 1940s referred to the basic human needs of water,
food, and shelter.16 At the Cambodian border the concept of protection
remained in the first instance attached to providing very basic needs.
For humanitarians the notion of protection then developed empirically
in relation to two specific aspects of the border: physical protection from
structural camp violence inflicted by Khmer and Thai armed groups and
protection from brutal “refoulement” or undesired repatriation.17 All
three dimensions of protection responded to abuses of “basic human
rights” which humanitarians observed and reported on from 1975
onwards.
The arrival of refugees from 1975 onwards was limited to a handful of
usually educated individuals who could communicate with the media
some of the atrocities ongoing in Kampuchea.18 Despite their repeated
testimonials, European and American media kept on asking what had
been going on in Cambodia since the evacuation of Phnom Penh by the
Khmer Rouge. Until 1977 much debates between the left and right rested
on the validity of refugees’ testimonials.19 The debate ended with the
sudden collapse of Khmer Rouge control and the advance of Vietnamese
forces when new arrivals in 1979 bore witness to extraordinary sufferings.
In 1979 the bulk of the refugees were fleeing the invasion and war rather
than the Khmer Rouge dictatorship. The catastrophic situation at the
border was thus not a direct result of genocide but the product of
a different type of “red” terror. Throughout the 1980s the flow of refugees
fleeing the Vietnamese occupation never ceased. This perspective from
Thailand was strongly framed by anti-communist rhetoric. Yet some of
the earliest Cambodian refugees, mostly ethnic Chinese, were encamped
in communist Vietnam or Laos and awaited there for their visas for
resettlement to the United States or France for much of the 1980s.
Throughout the 1980s the Royal Thai Government reluctantly toler-
ated such a large a potentially hostile crowd on its land – itself largely
populated with ethnic Khmers. In the early days, it occasionally
attempted to push them back whence they came. Humanitarians were
thus weary of the host and their understanding of protection as against

brutal repatriation was grounded in facts.20 The most signiﬁcant act of

brutality on the part of the RTG in June 1979 was the forced repatriation
of freshly arrived Khmers originally hosted in the Nong Chan camp. The
Thai authorities pushed back through the Dangrek Mountain some forty-
five thousand refugees. The crowds were sent straight in the direction of
minefields surrounding the passage of Preah Vihear. Much like during the
Khmer Rouge genocide itself, Cham and ethnic Chinese were apparently
singled out, pushed first, and left to die when they detonated anti-
personnel mines.21 The events were reported by UNHCR and known
at the border but remained largely silenced in the press. Only since 2010
has the Cambodian diaspora started commemorating the events and
attempting a class action against Thailand at the International Criminal
Court.22
Beyond the permanent risk that Thai authorities might change their
attitude toward Cambodians, humanitarian workers in camps were also
cognizant of the violence that armed bands, the notoriously brutal Task
Force 80 and Cambodian political groups, inflicted on civilians in the
camps. Though humanitarians had to leave at 4 pm for curfew, they heard
on the grapevine tales of night-time terror. Despite these known and
suspected atrocities, the official line was one of collaboration and coop-
eration with the Thai armed forces and the Cambodian authorities in
exile.
Within this uneasy setting, UNBRO and the UN defined the purpose
and meaning of humanitarian action. They structured humanitarian work
by coordinating their INGO partners according to their core mission. At
the border, the most active partners were the American Refugee
Committee, the Christian and Missionary Alliance church (CAMA),
the Catholic Relief Services (CRS), the Japan International Volunteer
Centre (JVC), Operation Handicap International (later Handicap
International, HI), Concern, Youth With a Mission (YWAM), IRC,
Japan Sotoshu Relief Committee (JSRC), and ZOA refugee care from
the Netherlands. MSF grew from being a partner in medical provisions to
dominating the medical landscape and being in charge of referent hospital
provisions. A number of other providers including the order of Malta
resumed their traditional role in looking after lepers and, occasionally,
lunatic asylums.23
Beyond “bare life” necessities, humanitarians sought to develop their
roles and expand their protection in order to meet human rights needs. In
particular, humanitarians developed educational provisions which met
the rights of children that were themselves being refined in the 1980s.
From the early 1980s, they developed educational premises suitable for
a largely illiterate population. UNBRO’s mandate was officially extended

in 1984 to encompass new deﬁnitions of protection that took into account

these needs (resolution 34/22).24 By 1988, UNBRO delivered primary
education for 61,748 primary school children.25 Primary education was
defined as a human right since 195926 but the 1980s were a key period in
the development of the legal status of children, embodied in the 1989 UN
declaration. As the border camps had a very high birth rate, many refu-
gees in camps were born refugees. To address their needs, many NGOs
volunteered their services such as Écoles sans Frontières. Yet in this
crucial role UNBRO decided to manage alone. UNBRO devised a new
Western style curriculum inspired by the French colonial precedent
(though UNBRO replaced French with English as the main foreign
language of instruction). Despite these efforts, the provisions of educa-
tion in the camps failed to match those of the Vietnamese PRK regime
according to UNICEF’s own assessment. By 1987, the UN thus indir-
ectly admitted its inability to meet the basic rights of children.
To its critiques, humanitarian protection and its provision of basic
services to refugees failed to meet a more emancipatory understanding
of human rights. In educational terms many commentators criticized
UNBRO for its heavy-handed neocolonial attitudes to Cambodian
culture:
With an appropriate Khmer-oriented educational vision, some of these western
methods may help foster community and other indigenous, self-help forms of
empowerment, but they also run the risk of promoting western patterns of
behaviour (individualism, mindless consumerism, secularism, materialism) that
would again act as solvents on Khmer culture and society.27
Critics of the modernizing agenda of INGOs in camps highlighted the
significance of the arts for not only the survival of Khmer culture in the
new diasporic communities but also for the survival of a sense of self: “He
emphasized the importance of Khmer children learning artistic skills
(creative writing, drawing, singing, dancing, acting) through which they
can express, and thereby cathartically release, their inner, and cultural
struggle to regain identity or, as he put it, ‘to know themselves’.”28
Expanding the remit of humanitarian aid to fulfill rights, restore cul-
tural identity, and fulfill entitlements demanded the endless broadening
of focus and an increasingly vast project going well beyond the provision
of basic refugee rights. JSRC, ZOA, and IRC under UNBRO developed
protection in the general direction of social care issues. During the 1980s,
Japanese and EEC funding increasingly went to projects intending to
relieve more than the physical needs of the refugees. Humanitarians
were defining a rights-based response which transcended the emergency
relief work they had originally been contracted for. They promoted

notably higher-level education responses in an effort to make camps and

their population self-reliant. This went beyond the established rights of
refugees but was line with the wider remit if the 1980s definitions of
children’s rights. Ironically, as the protagonists of one of Rithy Panh’s
documentary “The Tan family” complained, they neglected agricultural
training so necessary after repatriation: “I am a child of the camps. I have
never done this [agricultural work] and I am afraid . . . I do not have a job,
I have only ever studied medicine.”29 Humanitarian protection addres-
sing the needs of the soul, mind, and body found its justification in terms
of health benefits. But the evidence provided from the camps soon framed
a much more disturbing discourse on the sociocultural needs and
required correctives to the malfunction of a traumatized and post-
totalitarian society.
Cambodians were presented as broken and post-traumatized.
Following the genocide of 1975–1979, Cambodians were often com-
pared with the victims of concentration camps of the Nazi period.
Much science developed to address the needs of Holocaust survivors
was deployed in relation to Cambodians.30 Ironically of course, most, if
not all, refugees had fled not the killing fields of the 1970s but the food
shortages and political violence of the Vietnamese occupation. Unable to
distinguish between different causalities, much of this science addressed
thus not the trauma of genocide but the ensuing trauma of humanitarian
relief camps. Some of the science that humanitarians enabled, sometimes
very reluctantly, sat on the boundaries between exploitation and problem
solving.31 A key focus was on the development of children, many of whom
were born in a prison-like environment.32 Site 2 and Khao I Dang
enabled longitudinal studies of group psychology and the study of ado-
lescent responses to stress.33 American specialists such as Richard
Mollica were at the forefront of this experimental engagement with refu-
gees in camps. On the one hand, Richard Retchman and Didier Fassin
argued,34 this episode was part of a wider shift in the development of
victim-based approaches to trauma and the rise of post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD) as an umbrella term.35 Retchman, himself one of the
main critics of PTSD in France, worked clinically with Cambodian
refugees resettled in France.36 This emphasis on PTSD later impacted
on the proceedings of the justice process devised to “heal” the genocide.
As the anthropologist Anne Yvonne Guillou puts it:
many narratives of the Tribunal have focused on the “healing” of the victims as its
most important role, as if post-genocide justice were foremost a matter of health.
By doing so, the accounts given in many areas of the Tribunal have tended to
impose an overall pattern of what social suffering should be and how it should be

expressed and relieved, by using the idioms of “trauma” and “post-traumatic

stress disorder” as their only models.37
The paradox of all these well-intentioned studies remains the lack of
agency of the refugees themselves or the deﬁnition of their rights in
a very abstract manner. The “humanitarian research” agendas were
designed to address wider socioeconomic questions and sought to address
actual needs and rights of refugees in camps or following repatriation, but
they often seemed to have been an imposition on camp dwellers.
Nevertheless, through this research, humanitarians maintained the
needs of refugees in focus at a time when UNBRO and humanitarians
needed the oxygen of publicity. By the late 1980s, private funding had
gradually dried out precisely as humanitarian work had become more
complex.

Witnessing Human Rights in and out of Cambodia

Humanitarian access was always conditional on either the specifics of the
border refugee regimes or the close control of the Vietnamese regime and
this conditional access framed how “political” or vocal humanitarian
organizations could be. On the rumor of famines which alone might
have explained the constant flow of refugees from Cambodia, French
humanitarians mobilized in 1979 to denounce a new genocide separate
from the Khmer Rouge genocide. In a momentous public debate on
French national television, the missionary priest François Ponchaud
denounced a new “subtle” genocide while MSF president Dr. Claude
Malhuret described the continuation of the genocide by other means.38
Despite the flow of migrants, the fear of a major famine in Cambodia
proved unfounded.39 In a publicity stunt and in the hope of gaining access
to mainland Cambodia, humanitarians at the border gathered in
a symbolic march for Cambodia. As Eleanor Davey has shown, the
“march for Cambodia” in 1980, which featured Joan Baez and French
anti-communist nouveaux philosophes, represented a watershed in the shift
toward hard anti-communist humanitarianism.40 What the marchers
demanded – and did not obtain – was the opening of the border to their
relief convoy and the right to intervene in occupied Cambodia.
If those at the border claimed their political integrity against Soviet
oppression, they opposed those who had made the choice of collaborating
with the occupiers of Cambodia. In the French humanitarian context, this
split had brought medical practitioners who were closer to the French
communists, the comité français d’aide médicale et sanitaire à la population
Cambodgienne led by Dr. Jean-Yves Follézou41 to join forces with Soviet,

Polish, and East German humanitarian aid. This socialist humanitarian

effort had begun to arrive immediately after the Vietnamese invasion.42
The French communists claimed the backing of Secours Catholique as
well as the communist French NGO Secours Populaire Français.43
Socialist humanitarians, including Warsaw pact state-sponsored efforts,
unlike their conservative opponents were landing medical supplies
directly in Phnom Penh in the name of solidarity. Among the British
NGOs, Oxfam also took the view that to stand with the regime of Heng
Samrin (led from 1985 by Hun Sen) was to stand with the real opponents
to the genocide and was thus grounded in rights-based politics. This
stance became the moral justification of the regime and of its identity.
This of course brushes aside the fact that the entire pro-Vietnamese
leadership originated from a split within the Khmer Rouge and that its
leaders had only defected when the regime had launched major purges.
While the main events of the refugee crisis were the years 1979–1983,
the actual end of the camps became a debated issue from 1989. With the
fall of the Berlin wall and the end of military support from the Soviet
Union, the Vietnamese army withdrew from Cambodia leaving Hun Sen
to manage his own affairs. By that stage Hun Sen had self-educated in
international relations largely through his frequent encounters with UN
and NGO deputations.44 The camps themselves remained an object of
contention until the final Paris agreement and mass repatriation in
1992.45 Ironically, the peace talk years were also the period during
which competing Cambodian political groups remilitarized in order to
guarantee their presence in “democratic” Cambodia. As the end of the
border camps became more likely, humanitarians begun to express more
vocally their repulsion at being manipulated.46 Since 1982, UNBRO
relied on the financial expediency of Cold War great games as well as on
the continued support of the United States, Japan, France, and Thailand.
The end of the Cold War freed critiques of international humanitarian
work within and on the border of Cambodia.
In 1989, the thirteen INGOs operating in Site 2 denounced American-
backed military rearmament of Sihanouk’s nationalists partisans.47
Paradoxically, the Vietnamese withdrawal and the prospect of peace
also reopened the prospect of the Khmer Rouge’s return and the possi-
bility of a new genocide.48 As Hun Sen’s army ceded territory to the west
of the country, the Khmer Rouge regained military control over many
mountainous areas – including much of the border zone. In effect, the
Paris Accord signified the return of the Khmer Rouge in Phnom Penh
through a broad coalition of all political forces.49 To mitigate this risk, the
UN set up a transitional authority in 1992, led by the Japanese Yasushi
Akashi, and staffed its largest military and policing deployment to date

with a peacekeeping force of some 18,000 under Australian command.50

Nevertheless NGO workers and international observers vociferously
denounced the risk taken by allowing the unrepentant Khmer Rouge
back.51
By 1993, Cambodia’s recent history had been entirely rewritten in
the light of the genocide and through a historical comparison with the
Holocaust/Shoah. From the writings of François Ponchaud52 to the
march for Cambodia, the concept of genocide and systematic abuse of
human rights had been applied to both the Khmer Rouge and their
opponents. The initial shock of the revelation of the Khmer Rouge
atrocities was constantly reinvented through documentaries and cinema –
most significant in the 1980s was the 1984 film The Killing Fields and its
main character, the photojournalist Dith Pran, himself a genocide
survivor.53 Even naïve humanitarians working at the border could not
ignore the serpent in their nest. By August 1990 more than 120 humani-
tarian workers from the border camps signed a petition against any peace
treaty with the Khmer Rouge.54 Even as their role was about to end,
humanitarians at the border used their cultural capital as witnesses to
lobby on the nature and outcome of the Cambodian peace process. Major
actors in the international response such as ICRC and UNHCR were
unwilling to deal with the Khmer Rouge but remained silent.55 Others,
such as MSF denounced the political situation they were part of while
they also denounced the Vietnamese puppet state which refugees con-
tinued to flee throughout the 1980s.
But the INGO which had most explicitly taken a side was Oxfam. Since
1979 Oxfam had chosen to engage with the food-based protection of
Cambodians under Vietnamese control, distributing, despite some con-
siderable political and logistical difficulties, food, bright fabrics which
could challenge the ubiquitous black pajamas of the Khmer Rouge and
nets which might restore the Khmer fishing industry.56 In many ways true
to their development ideals, Oxfam, which had raised much of its funding
on the ultimately inaccurate portrayal of a famine in Cambodia in
1979–1980, sought to provide the essential means of reconstructing
Cambodian society.57
This insider position entailed a systematic rejection of humanitarian
protection through camps. Tony Jackson, who acted as an “independent
member” of a World Food Programme evaluation mission in 1987, did
not mince his words in his report, “Just Waiting to Die?”:
It should be emphasized that the very efficient delivery by UNBRO of relief items,
and the good technical work by the NGOs is not in question. Rather the overall
result of the effort, particularly the support it gives to a resistance movement

dominated by the Khmer Rouge and the hopeless future it creates for the people in
the camps are the major concern in this report. 58
Jackson went on to describe the absence of rights and protection affecting
even the largest UNBRO camps59 pointing out that the Thai authorities
having not signed the international treaties on refugees made no differ-
ence between immigrants, migrants, aliens, and refugees. If their rights
were unclear, their entitlement was much more clearly deﬁned and, by the
time Jackson visited in 1986, the quality of food supply and even health
provisions at the border exceeded that in Cambodia itself – with the
border camps being the best resourced refugee settlements in the world
at that time:
where the voluntary agencies have fallen down is not on the technical side of
their work, but on another aspect where we pride ourselves of being strong – in
serving as a voice for the people for whom we are working. If ever a group needed
a voice, someone to speak up for them, it is the Khmers in the border camps.
However the agencies have been effectively muzzled by their close association
with UNBRO.60

Oxfam policy leaders concluded that the rights of Cambodians could not
be served by the political recognition of the coalition government. From
1979 it convened a Consortium for Cambodia which included thirty-
three NGOs working within the country including Oxfam, Catholic
Relief Services, and the Lutheran World Federation, which also repre-
sented the World Council of Churches.61
From 1988 it set out to broaden this group into an international forum
which met in Brussels and London and which purposed to gather all
NGOs working in the camps and Cambodia. Though it never quite
managed this feat, it nevertheless represented sixty-seven international
NGOs in 1990 and eighty-seven by 1991, when it became more for-
malized. Its range extended from Socialist Solidarity to Caritas,
Christian Aid, Lutheran World Service, and a range of faith-based
organizations across Asia, Europe, and North America. Oxfam
Belgium and United Kingdom convened in the late 1980s and were
joined by Christian Aid in 1991.62 MSF was part of the forum but also
conducted other human rights initiatives through its anti-communist
offshoot Liberté sans Frontières.63
By the late 1980s, humanitarians on both sides of the border joined
forces to claim for themselves the legitimacy of human rights guardians.
In 1989, MSF and Médecins du Monde issued a joint call which stressed
the importance of their volunteers as “our teams are on the ground. They
have the support of public opinion and international organizations, our
volunteers will act as the sentinels of human rights.”64

Rebuilding Cambodia on Human Rights

This focus on human rights led to stark political choices. The NGO sector
as a whole chose to align itself with one faction of the Paris negotiations.
The forum and its members thus ended up backing unequivocally the
Hun Sen government in Phnom Penh which many of them had
denounced a decade earlier as genocidal in its own right. Party to the
politics of the peace process, the NGO forum sought legal advice on its
potential role in the peace negotiation and decided, on the advice of Tony
Jackson of Oxfam, to focus its activities on the Khmer Rouge presence as
seat holders at the United Nations and to ask specifically for the “non-
involvement of the Khmer Rouge at the UN.”65 On November 6, 1989
Oxfam and the International Council of Voluntary agencies, who repre-
sented eighty-five NGOs, called for the Khmer Rouge to desist from the
United Nations. Meanwhile, in 1989, the forum hired the British diplo-
mat John Pedler as its diplomatic advisor, later replaced by the Belgian
consultant Raoul Jennar in 1990.66 Jennar’s brief was to lobby on human
rights ground all twelve states of the European Economic Community
(EEC) and the Scandinavian states to convince them to withdraw support
from the Sihanouk coalition and to divert their funding toward the
reconstruction of Cambodia.67 Jennar served as an expert witness on
Cambodia to parliaments in Europe and to the US Senate on the
Khmer Rouge threat.68 Area studies academics added their own spin on
the “new Khmer Rouge” threat.69 INGOs which had grown dramatically
in setting up national branches used their franchises to lobby locally. The
Quaker United Nations Office lobbied for the forum at the UN.70
On the face of it, INGOs failed to win the initial battle. The Khmer
Rouge remained part of the Accords and were only sidelined later by the
combined efforts of Sihanouk and Hun Sen. Though briefly part of the
transitional Conseil National Suprême, they were now without further
political use for their allies. Consequently, the genocidal political party
was targeted by sanctions through Resolution 792 in the United Nations
on November 30, 1992. On April 13, 1993, the Khmer Rouge fled to
Phnom Malai, to resume life in the bush regrouping around their military
headquarters of 1985.
If the human rights diplomatic lobbying had failed to win outright, it
nevertheless set INGOs in what they thought was their natural position:
as the rebuilders of Cambodia and guardians of human rights. The NGO
forum set itself out as a partner and match to UN presence in Cambodia
and sought to coordinate and shape humanitarian provisions in the new
Cambodia.71 In February 1993, the INGOs issued a common declaration
calling for sustained UN effort and for the exclusion of all active Khmer

Rouges (but not repentant Khmer Rouges).72 A rush to rebuild, reshape,

mend, and heal flooded Cambodia with NGOs. A whole district of
Phnom Penh became known as “NGOland.” This unprecedented rush
brought together the NGOs of the border and the ones who had long
collaborated with the Hun Sen administration.73 On the one hand, the
forum set up in Cambodia represented the coming of age of
a humanitarian system, while on the other it made unsustainable claims
for humanitarians to contribute to development while guaranteeing the
most extensive understanding of protection and the guarantee of formal
human rights for the “voiceless people” of Cambodia. Courted by the
Hun Sen government, NGOs became associates in a “democratic pro-
ject” arising from an uneasy compromise and much silence on
genocide.74
Between 1992 and 2015, NGOs developed and invested every aspect of
Cambodian life and developed in Cambodia new rights-based
approaches to their practice which referred explicitly to the need to
expand local understandings of human rights. Oxfam thus trialed gender
mainstreaming in Cambodia in the 1990s. MSF, MdM, and other med-
ical NGOs developed programs which sometimes combined high-level
training and basic primary health care. Primary health care provisions
were, in the spirit of the Alma Ata declaration, fulfilling a fundamental
human right.75 Yet even as INGOs experimented new fields of interven-
tion or as new NGOs were set up by backpackers to address specific
inequalities or human rights issues, the political narratives of Cambodia
had become more focused on sovereignty issues.
Ever since 1992, the internal politics of Cambodia have been charac-
terized by their constant return to the events of the late 1970s.
Throughout that era Hun Sen, the champion of the leading NGOs, out-
maneuvered all his political opponents and, arguably, his international
supporters too. Hun Sen had to demonstrate, over and over, his indepen-
dence from foreign interventions. Arrived as the man of the Vietnamese,
he had to strike a diffident position toward meddling foreigners. Calling
for US reparations for the secret war of the 1970s, chastising unprofes-
sional volunteering organizations or anyone paying too much notice of
land grabs or corruption, Hun Sen proved to be a difficult partner for his
advocates of yesteryear, particularly if they claimed to defend human
rights.76
On July 13, 2015, Hun Sen’s government passed a new law on associa-
tions and NGOs77 which effectively ended thirty years of free for all inter-
ventionism. The law “had a severe chilling effect on Cambodian civil
society,” according to Chak Sopheap of the Cambodian Centre for
human rights cited by the Cambodia Daily Newspaper, shut down since by

the government in September 2017.78 The result has been that humanitar-
ians have returned to the grind of their immediate objectives, favoring
protection duties over more abstract needs and leaving human rights
activists vulnerable to the increasingly illiberal policies of a regime backed
by Chinese investments. A ﬁne example of this can be found in 2009 when
Hun Sen’s regime reﬂected on its own priorities in relation to human rights
and thus decided to forcibly repatriate Uighur refugees to China.79 There
was no Year 0 for a humanitarian and human rights Cambodia.
Cambodian politicians had other priorities.

Conclusion
The boundaries between short-term immediacy around needs-based
protection, and long-term principles of human rights were constantly
blurred.80 The shift that humanitarians embraced logically was to set
themselves as the protectors of the rights of camp refugees, uphold their
human rights, and campaign for a new Cambodia free of the Khmer
Rouge. Since the latter were holding the UN seat and formed the main
plank of the anti-Vietnamese coalition funded by China, the United
States and its allies, this emphasis on human rights led key humanitarian
organizations to take sides in internal Cambodian politics and support the
Hun Sen government in the Paris Accords and political settlement of the
early 1990s. From humanitarian practices – often at the bedside and
through complex cultural encounters – a situation of permanent emer-
gency had allowed the maturing of humanitarian concerns into broader
and longer-term objectives. The humanitarians of the emergency days of
1979 could develop their goals toward developmentalist objectives ﬁrst
under the guise of humanitarian protection and later as rights-based
practice. In mobilizing they reached new degrees of political militancy
and arguably enlisted themselves in political projects over which they had
little control.81
Arguably, this also corresponds to a period of profound hubris for
humanitarian organizations, which were courted by a cunning political
regime to provide them with legitimacy, expertise, and resources.82 The
human right agenda underpinned the humanitarian agenda for
Cambodia while encouraging NGOs to claim Cambodia as their model
project for post-genocide and post-trauma reconstruction. Cambodians
themselves had different notions of what a world put right might entail – it
included the past, ghosts, and spirits whose deranging presence haunts
the landscape. As the psychoanalyst Rechtman points out, the rights of
the survivors of genocide were not fulﬁlled by the granting of formal
human rights – they had to include the dead for whom no healing process

based on rights could exist.83 The genocide was not so easily corrected84
and in the granting of humanitarian relief, UN warranted security might
not bring real peace.85
The absence of boundaries between human rights political campaign-
ing and humanitarian practices appear with hindsight a strategic mistake.
One could argue that the Hun Sen regime managed very well its relation-
ship with the NGO sector by playing up the risk presented by the Khmer
Rouge while allowing delivery NGOs to become guarantors of its human
right legitimacy. Ironically, as Caroline Hughes argues, the formalistic
demands of human rights NGOs may have stunted the growth of “civil
society” in favor of an increasingly autocratic regime better equipped to
meet the KPI of international norms.86
Twenty years hence, the Cambodian government (once considered
a developmental model for the World Bank) is repressing and containing
the activities of NGOs, even the least politically motivated. Hun Sen’s
regime seems indifferent to being regularly accused of violating human
rights.87 The coalition between politicians and international NGOs has
outlived its initial political usefulness. Cambodia has embraced economic
reforms which set it on a course for Chinese-funded economic develop-
ment. This is a model of development in which neither humanitarian nor
human right agendas feature highly. In July 2018, Hun Sen could thus
declare without any sense of irony his belief in democracy and human
rights as his party won every seat available in parliament: “People showed
great will in exercising their rights to vote for any political party they liked
freely without pressure or coercion.”88

Michael N. Barnett

How to distinguish human rights from humanitarianism? The standard

method is to consult an authoritative source, such as a dictionary, high-
profile rights and relief agencies, and classic texts in the field, and inven-
tory the differences. For instance, the Oxford English Dictionary defines
human rights as “rights possessed by humans; spec. the set of entitle-
ments held to belong to every person as a condition of being human; (in
sing.) an entitlement of this kind.”1 In contrast, humanitarianism is
defined as “concern for human welfare as a primary or preeminent
moral good; action, or the disposition to act, on the basis of this concern
rather than for pragmatic or strategic reasons”.2 Amnesty International
defines human rights as basic rights and freedoms that all people are
entitled to regardless of nationality, sex, national or ethnic origin, race,
religion, language, or other status. The ICRC and other medical aid
organizations often refer to humanitarianism as the independent, neutral,
and impartial provision of relief to victims of humanly made and natural
disasters. According to one classic text on human rights, rights are enti-
tlements that are natural (every human has them), equal (all humans have
the same rights), and universal (applicable anywhere and everywhere).3
Various articles and book on humanitarianism refer to the attempt to save
lives of distant strangers that are in extremis.4
Yet dictionary entries, mission statements, and scholastic nominalism
are acts of stipulation – human rights and humanitarianism are what we
say they are – and fail in two important ways, as evidenced by the
contributions to this volume. First, they border if not cross over the line
into essentialism. Essentialism “consists in the identification of kinds by
singling out some relevant property (or set of properties) that are pos-
sessed by all and only those [units] that belong to that kind.”5 For
instance: humanitarianism is about saving lives, and human rights flour-
ishing lives; humanitarianism is about charity, and human rights justice;
humanitarianism is about addressing harms, and human rights reducing
status inequalities. Such discussions often include a consideration of the
characteristics the kind cannot possess. Many in the human rights

235

community will challenge the credentials of those human rights organiza-

tions that favor group over individual rights. Samuel Moyn discusses the
humanitarianization of human rights, questioning whether it is hollowing
out human rights. Many in the humanitarian community insist that to be
a humanitarian requires having the right motives – it is not enough to save
lives, it also requires selflessness.
A second problem is that human rights and humanitarianism, like all
social kinds, are not homogenous but rather heterogenous. A cursory
reading of the writings on humanitarianism and human rights immedi-
ately reveals considerable variation in each community, which accounts
for the contestation of the characteristics and boundaries of the field.
Moreover, what is being contested can itself change historically; core
debates over the constitution of human rights and humanitarianism
have altered over the decades. This ongoing, evolving contestation rein-
forces the claim that both human rights and humanitarianism can have
different and disputed meanings. The human rights and the humanitar-
ianism of today look quite different from their predecessors of the pre-
vious century.
The tendency toward essentialism and failure to recognize diversity and
contestation within each kind underscores the necessity of treating
human rights and humanitarianism as the social constructions that they
are. Social construction is a thicket of a process – produced by structure
and agency, interests and ethics, practices, power and principle, history,
and contingency and experimentation. Socially construction means
denaturalizing something that appears quite natural, recognizing that
things exist not because of genetics but rather because of human agree-
ment. The agreement might be so powerful that it becomes taken-for-
granted, at which point it becomes a social fact. But there is a difference
between essential and enduring characteristics. To claim something is
essential to a kind is to insist that the kind will cease to be a kind if it no
longer has that characteristic. In doing so, it tends to treat a social kind as
if it is a natural kind. But to claim that something is enduring to a kind is to
recognize that what groups might believe is core can, in fact, change
historically. For instance, elsewhere I have argued that some of the core
members of the humanitarian community, including the ICRC, get their
history wrong: they have insisted that humanitarianism has always been
the impartial, independent, and neutral provision of life-saving relief to
distant strangers, when, in fact, this is a bit of myth-making as it overlooks
a near century of humanitarianism, defined quite differently by the parti-
cipants and that existed prior to the establishment of the ICRC.6
Enduring suggests a resilience because it fended off alternative views,
interpretations, and meanings. But such endurance should not obscure

a history of contestation. Even during periods in which meanings appear

to be settled there are nonconformists. And then there are periods that are
considerably unsettled, such as the current one.
What follows is not a search for their core and contrasting differences or
an inventory of the forces that have shaped human rights, humanitarian-
ism, and their relationship. Instead, it uses a practice perspective to
consider the critical points of contrast between the two since the 1990s
when scholars and practitioners began exploring their relationship.7
Human rights and humanitarianism are practical activities. They are
intended to achieve concrete results that improve the lives of vulnerable
populations. It is not only practitioners that use the language of practices,
but also scholars. There is an expansive literature on the concept of
practices, it is well represented in the literature of human rights and
humanitarianism, with important contributions from several of those in
this volume.8 Not surprisingly, there is neither a common definition nor
agreement on the conceptual elements of practice or how human rights
and humanitarian practices relate. My effort to do so consists of decom-
posing practices into four elements: the problem to be solved; the material
and mental technologies that are viewed as most appropriate to address
the problem; the background knowledge that subtly guides action and
forecloses options; and meanings. These elements provide critical points
of comparison for scholars and practitioners between human rights and
humanitarianism. And to the extent that practitioners believed such
differences must be maintained, they become posts for creating a border
between the two.
Before launching into how a practice perspective can capture differ-
ences and distinctions between the two, I want to qualify my remarks in
several ways.9 First, I offer stylized comparisons of human rights and
humanitarianism along these four dimensions, and in doing so potentially
reify the very elements that are contested and in flux. Second, although
I treat these four elements as analytically distinct, the chapters underscore
their connections and co-constitution. For instance, Swaine and Taithe
argue that the kind of suffering to be addressed can shape what counts as
competent technologies and background knowledge; and the technolo-
gies and background knowledge can affect the definition of the problem
to be solved and what kinds of suffering gets attention. Third, the chap-
ters suggest how human rights and humanitarianism affected each other,
including how each adopted characteristics of the other. Fourth, while
human rights and humanitarianism are increasingly connected, my obser-
vation is humanitarianism was more vulnerable to human rights than the
reverse, for reasons I suggested in the Introduction. The simplest piece of
evidence of this unequal vulnerability is that the humanitarian field

appeared to be much more concerned than the human rights field with
drawing boundaries between the two.
Fifth, while the chapters examine differences, comparisons, and
boundaries at the macro, meso, and micro levels, the following discussion
focuses on the former two. The macro level concerns the conceptual
underpinnings, principles, and broad self-understandings that define
the community. Many of the chapters operate at this level, both histori-
cally and philosophically. The meso level regards the formal and informal
institutions that are places where discussions about the field occur; rules
are created, diffused, and enforced; and boundaries are created between
one field and another. Within each field many of these institutions are
intersecting and overlapping, and thus are both creatures and effects of
networks. The practice literature tends to operate with the concept of
community of practice to capture this institutional dimension.10 The
micro level concerns local, historically situated, and culturally embedded
actors who understand the boundaries between the two. As Feldman’s
chapter demonstrates, working at the micro level can help recover how
these meanings and practices associated with each category can interpel-
late and produce categories such as “humanitarian rights.”
Feldman’s chapter also does something that is critical but largely
neglected in most volumes (including this one) on human rights and
humanitarianism – the view from recipients. Including their views is
important for reasons of politics and theory. Human rights and humani-
tarian scholarship can silence and exclude those who are supposed to
benefit from these interventions. In doing so, it turns the suffering objects
of concern into passive actors that are denied agency, or at least makes
invisible their agency. They can do nothing more than suffer in silence
(and if they choose to make noise, then possibly become unworthy of
compassion). Ignoring the recipients also means failing to include how
they also imagine the relationship between humanitarianism and human
rights, their vernacularization, whether they view them as differences
without a distinction, and how they can strategically choose which dis-
course makes most sense to them.11

The Problem of Suffering

When does suffering become a problem? Sometimes it doesn’t. In fact,
a reasonable observation is that most of the people most of the time do not
register the suffering of others. Martha Nussbaum cites three, almost
necessary, conditions that are required to spur action: the suffering is
serious and not trivial, the person did not deserve to suffer, and there
exists an emotional identiﬁcation between the observer and the sufferer.12

But which suffering? Humanitarianism and human rights are offering

alternative claims regarding what kind of suffering is a “problem”: the
former is organized around the needs that threaten physical survival, and
the latter around the violation of rights that affect individual wellbeing,
autonomy, and the ability and capabilities to choose how to live a full and
flourishing life.13
“Needs” refers not to anything and everything individuals claim to
require, but rather, inputs that are deemed (objectively) essential to the
propagation of life itself.14 Food, shelter, clothing, medicine, clean water,
and sanitation are essential for “bare life” and are fundamental for
a “regime of life.”15 Yet not all unfulfilled needs fall into the box of
humanitarianism. Instead, humanitarianism focuses on “emergencies”
that threaten mass suffering and death.16 Emergencies can be caused by
either natural or humanly made forces (even though there is widespread
recognition that there are humanly made reasons for why some popula-
tions are more vulnerable than others to natural causes). “Natural” dis-
asters are often likened to “acts of God.” Violence and conflict are the
most common cause of humanly made disasters. In either case, though,
these are emergencies because time lost means lives lost.
Rights, on the other hand, refer to the entitlements that individuals
purportedly possess that foster their freedom and flourishing.17 In con-
trast to the handful of needs identified by humanitarianism, discussions of
rights and entitlements can be wide-ranging.18 There are rights that
derive from natural and positive law. There are negative and positive
rights. Some rights are seen as “basic” because, without them, other
rights cannot exist. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes
dozens of rights, and the subsequent decades have added new generations
of rights that often become attached to specific populations. There are
political, civil, cultural, religious, economic, and social rights that can be
claimed by minorities, refugees, women, children, prisoners disabled,
aged, and other categories of people. This rich tapestry of rights, though,
serves a basic function: to help individuals preserve their freedom and
protect them from tyranny, oppression, and unwanted interference; to
allow them to express their opinions, beliefs, and views without fear; and
to create the space to allow them to live their lives as they see fit and to
pursue their flourishing as they define it.
Suffering is not objectively “out there” but rather must incite, be
recognizable, and be meaningful. The concept of framing is often invoked
at such moments to capture the social organization of reality. Frames “are
specific metaphors, symbolic representations, and cognitive cues used to
render or cast behavior and events in an evaluative mode and to suggest
alternative modes of action.”19 Frames shape how actors situate and fix

meaning to events, understand that there is a problem and how that

problem connects to shared interests and identities; fashion a shared
understanding of the world; galvanize sentiments as a way to mobilize
and guide social action; and suggest possible and appropriate resolutions
to current plights. Different frames, therefore, will have different kinds of
effects.
The chapters suggest how humanitarianism and human rights have
alternative frames of suffering.20 These frames share the goal of mobi-
lizing action and often implicitly suggest that a little compassion can be
the difference between life and death. But they nevertheless rest on
different evaluative, prescriptive, and normative foundations. The
frame of humanitarianism casts the suffering as part of an emergency
that demands immediate action; tends to mobilize action on the basis of
sentiments and pity; demands that action be defined by principles of
neutrality, impartiality, and independence; and limits action to the
immediate symptoms of suffering.21 In contrast, human rights frames
elevate the obligations of the state to protect and respect basic rights;
advance principles of nondiscrimination justified on the basis of uni-
versalism; demand that the state and other political authorities be
accountable to victims; look to law to define rights and determine
whether rights have been violated; attach suffering to the categories of
victims and perpetrators; demand punishment of perpetrators; and seek
justice.22
Discussions of frames and their potential impact often stress their
cultural proximity to existing ways of understanding a problem, but the
most effective frames rely not on reason but rather on emotion.23 We are
not expected to think about suffering but instead to feel it. Images of
injured, sick, and dead children are expected to be a gut punch and rip out
our hearts. Images of prisoners in stress positions and in long-term
solitary confinement are intended to trigger outrage, anger, and call for
justice. These victims might not be “innocent,” but they nevertheless
deserve decent treatment. Leebaw discusses the importance of different
kinds of shame for understanding why and how individuals are prepared
to contribute to human rights and humanitarian action. The West’s
occasional outpouring of assistance to victims of famine are intended
not only to help them but also to make it feel good about itself.24
Indeed, the desire to care about distant strangers might be driven not by
any change in their circumstances but rather because of their need to
recover a sense of moral goodness after national shame or disenchant-
ment, as Brown observes in his study of British abolitionism and Keys in
her account of the rise of human rights in the United States in the
1970s.25

Visual images can be critical to framing processes and framing pro-

cesses are important to the potential impact of visual images.26 Mark
Twain gave credit to the “incorruptible” Kodak camera for the inter-
national campaign to end the horrors in King Leopold’s Congo.27
Disinterested and indifferent bystanders can be shaken by the image
of the body of a little boy washed up on a beach or a vulture lingering in
the background as a malnourished girl has collapsed as prey in the
foreground. But whether such images resonant emotionally depends
in part on how they are framed. As Ticktin observes in her chapter,
pictures of suffering people might not produce an emotional reaction
unless they are defined as innocent and undeserving of their fate.28
Humanitarian and human rights agencies have learned that such images
can be quite effective, but also costly. Some might be excited or even
aroused by them.29 Agencies also have become increasingly uncomfor-
table with commodifying, exploiting, and using images of people’s
suffering. At their worst, these images are tantamount to “humanitarian
porn” and snuff films. In response, human rights and humanitarian
agencies have developed norms regarding what kind of images can be
used, how, and when.30
Aware of the power of frames, humanitarian and human rights agencies
will compete to frame events so that they mobilize action in their desired
directions. When Doctors without Borders declared soon after the Asian
Tsunami of 2005 that it no longer needed funds because there no longer
was an “emergency” because those who had died were dead and the living
were in little danger of joining them. This message directly undermined
other aid agencies’ siren for urgent action, and they countermessaged that
MSF’s position was irresponsible and harmful to the survivors. This
competition can represent a sincere difference of opinion or be strategic.
Lester’s contribution highlights how the British imperial state self-
consciously adopted the language of humanitarianism – and not human
rights – because it was more consistent with civilizing discourses and
imperial interests. If the suffering of aboriginal populations is
a humanitarian issue, then the solution is to protect them from settlers.
If the suffering, on the other hand, is a matter of human rights, then the
solution is to confer rights, including self-determination. For empires that
aim to maintain their rule, humanitarianism has its obvious advantages.31
States also have learned that framing their actions as humanitarian has the
advantage of suggesting that they care while avoiding the necessary poli-
tical action that might be necessary to end the roots of the conflict that is
causing mass suffering. Humanitarianism serves as a “fig leaf” and real
solutions require switching away from the humanitarian frame to another
that is more political.32

How to Solve Suffering: Material and Mental Technologies

The chapters in this volume suggest that human rights and humanitar-
ianism have developed distinct technologies that are related to their goals.
Technologies are means to ends. But technologies are not just born from
function. They also are deeply sociological. They are produced by
a community, and the community will often advance technologies
based not only on evidence of effectiveness but also on beliefs about
appropriateness. The community also will determine the standards used
to determine not only what counts as competent action but also who is
competent, which increasingly depends on proper training, accreditation,
education, and knowledge. Competent action is more than garden-
variety pragmatism – it also requires the proper mindset, attitude, and
cultural understanding, combining the cognitive, physical, normative,
and even a “state of mind.”33
The chapters suggest that the human rights community of practice is
deeply imprinted by law and the humanitarian community of practice by
the medical profession and public health. Law has come to dominate the
human rights field.34 A fair bit of human rights is nonlegal because it
concerns outreach and teaching individuals what are their rights. In this
activist role, human rights lawyering resembles social justice action and
investigative journalism.35 But law increasingly defines what counts as
a human right, what is a human right violation, what evidence is needed to
demonstrate the violations of human rights, and how human rights vio-
lators should be sanctioned. Law also imprints human rights as it shapes
what are the competent methods, skills, and tactics.36 Human rights
activists try to pass and revise laws, litigate, provide legal counseling,
and use law to change behavior. Human rights work also “has developed
a very specific practice that deploys investigation, exposure, and confron-
tation to identify and rectify violations of people’s human rights. This is
the practice of the courtroom taken directly to the war zone.”37 There has
developed a field of forensic human rights that combines medical, arche-
ological, and detective skills to recover and exhume bodies, identify
victims, and collect evidence to build cases against suspected criminals.38
The humanitarian field is shaped by those skills and professions that are
best suited to the goal of saving lives, which has meant primarily medicine
and public health and secondarily sanitation, water engineering, logistics,
and other highly technical fields. Humanitarian medicine has made tre-
mendous strides in treating malnutrition and managing cholera through
the invention of new technologies and strategies of intervention.39 There
are more manuals that create minimum standards of care and provide
guidance for how to respond to and work in an emergency. The 2016

World Humanitarian Summit showcased technological advances, such as

drones and 3D technology, to improve the ability to locate, protect, and
assist populations in need.
The different goals of human rights and humanitarianism can lead to
different kinds of strategies, tactics, and best practices. Human rights is
well known for the tactic of naming and shaming. As Leebaw discusses in
her chapter, the hope is that publicizing those who have violated basic
rights will cause them a high degree of shame. Central to this tactic,
consequently, is making noise.40 In contrast, the humanitarian commu-
nity emphasizes “humanitarian diplomacy.” Aid actors want immediate
access to populations at risk; to that end they must negotiate, including
with those who are responsible for the harms being committed against the
victims. They must practice quiet diplomacy and adopt a “much less
adversarial focus on assessment, appeal, and negotiation.”41
Mental technologies also include reasoning. There are many kinds of
reasoning, though students of international practice have elevated four to
understand human rights and humanitarianism. Practical reasoning: get-
ting things done and accomplishing some goal. Technical reasoning: the
development of specialized methods for restricted domains of problems.
Moral reasoning: doing the right things for the right reasons, frequently
with reference to a broader ethical codes that determine right from wrong
or the broader values of the community, public, or humanity.42 And, legal
reasoning: uses law and legal norms, including the centrality of precedent,
rules for handing evidence, and the guidelines for which arguments are
admissible and available, to justify decisions and guide action.43 These
forms of reasoning are not mutually exclusive, and often they are com-
bined in processes of analysis and argumentation. In any event, different
reasoning processes help constitute the competent.
Human rights draws heavily from legal reasoning.44 There are certainly
strong elements of moral reasoning: all humans are born with inalienable
rights because of their humanity, and when those rights are violated, they
must be defended.45 Human rights law refers to “the system of law that
establishes fundamental individual and group rights, and the obligations
of states relative to those rights.”46 Importantly, human rights and law,
according to many observers, have been mutually reinforcing, to the point
that it is nearly impossible to think of human rights in terms other than
law. Precisely why and how law became nearly constitutive of human
rights is a matter of debate, but it has undeniably undergone a process of
legalism.47 The concept of legalism, as introduced by Judith Shklar,
highlights how law shapes what counts as a right and whether a right
has been violated, and what kinds of harms are a matter of political and
moral concern.48

Humanitarianism is constituted by moral, technical, and legal reason-

ing, arguably in that order of salience. The very idea of humanitarianism
is driven by a powerful emotional and moral reasoning that directs “our
attention to the suffering of others and make us want to remedy them.”49
This “humanitarian imperative” – that “action should be taken to pre-
vent or alleviate human suffering arising out of disaster or conflict, and
that nothing should override this principle” – suggests acting first and
asking questions later.50 There also is technical reasoning. A central
technology is triage. The presumption is that there is a diagnostic assess-
ment that can be used to determine the order of treatment and how to
allocate scarce resources. Legal reasoning, especially when compared to
human rights, is relatively modest and limited to international humani-
tarian law.51 When Doctors without Borders justifies its interventions in
faraway places, it typically points not to legal justifications (the right to
be present according to this or that law) but rather to the moral claim
that all humans deserve medical attention. When aid organizations
began incorporating the language of human rights, it was softened,
became “rights-based,” used strategically and rhetorically, and rarely
referred to human rights law.52 And when aid organizations do adopt
the discourse of law, they mainly do so to emphasize that individuals
have certain rights in areas of armed conflict, but humanitarians prefer
the nonlegal language of protection and security. Indeed, much of
human rights law presumes that individuals can make claims on others
who have duties, but humanitarians refuse to accept that they are duty-
bearers; at most they are second best actors and the first best is the
state.53
There is mounting evidence that the growing technical nature of
human rights and humanitarianism is shifting their forms of reasoning.
One study of human rights suggested that the increasing reliance on
technology might be changing the nature of decision-making from
moral and legal to more technocratic and managerial.54 There has been
a perceptible rise in technical reasoning in the humanitarian sector over
the last several decades, owing in part to professionalization.55 Although
humanitarianism lists volunteerism as an important principle, volunteer-
ism does not mean amateurism. Instead, it now means those who work in
the sector without ulterior motives such as profit. Aid workers should be
professionals and experts, with training and skills that allow them to
provide effective and efficient life-saving interventions. Relief agencies
must move tons of aid over long distances in short order, which places
a premium on logisticians and those who expertly coordinate many mov-
ing parts. Because aid workers operate in increasingly dangerous envir-
onments, there is a growing demand for security experts, often recruited

from the private sector, and with law enforcement and military experi-
ence. Inside and outside aid agencies there is greater pressure to provide
evidence of results and efficiency, leading to a heightened presence of
those trained in epidemiology, cost-benefit analysis, and evaluation meth-
ods. A consequence of this rationalization and emphasis on results and
efficiency is an expansion of opportunities for private and for-profit firms.
After all, who knows more about moving mountains in a cost-effective
way than Walmart or Federal Express?56
The material and mental technologies of human rights and humanitar-
ianism are developed, taught, learned, and revised in different places.
Increasingly, to gain knowledge and become an expert in human rights
requires being trained in law, which, in turn, elevates the importance of
law schools and clinics, and law-shaped human rights centers. Although
those who want specialized knowledge in international humanitarian and
refugee law might also head to law-related institutions, most seeking
a career in the field go to medicine, public health, and other areas that
are central to human survival and health, such as sanitation. Not only do
those who want to be credentialed in human rights and humanitarianism
head in different directions, but the creation of these institutions of
training and accreditation help to maintain the boundaries between
the two.

Background Knowledge
Background knowledge exists in the shadows, is implicit rather than
explicit, is on the tip of the tongue and often built into muscle memory,
and is “just understood.” It serves several functions that pertain to getting
things done, including helping actors make sense of the meaning of events
and developments, guiding their response, coordinating with others, and
working toward collective action.57 In this way, background knowledge is
situated between mental and material technologies and meanings. The
volume and other writings suggest that humanitarianism and human
rights operate with different background knowledge, including the
following.
First are principles that help organize action. Many discussions of
humanitarianism’s principles begin with the famous desiderata by the
International Committee of the Red Cross’s Jean Pictet.58 He identiﬁed
seven core principles: humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence,
voluntary service, unity, and universality. The ﬁrst four principles,
though, arguably constitute the core. Humanity commands attention to
all people. Impartiality requires that assistance be based on need and not
discriminate on the basis of nationality, race, religion, gender, or political

opinion. Neutrality demands refraining from taking part in hostilities or

from any action that either benefits or disadvantages the parties to the
conflict. Independence requires that assistance should not be connected
to any of the parties directly involved in armed conflicts or who have
a stake in the outcome; accordingly, there is a general rule that agencies
should either refuse or limit their reliance on government funding, and
especially those that are involved in the conflict. Also, aid agencies are
constantly fiddling with the principles in the everyday, on the ground
practices of relief.59
The human rights community also refers to the principles of impartiality,
neutrality, and independence, though with different interpretations.60 In
human rights, impartiality is determined in relationship to human rights
principles and documents that are treated as having a universal status.61
Amnesty International’s claim to impartiality, for instance, “reflects the
premise that the expansion of international human rights law is transform-
ing human rights norms from a set of political aspirations into a body of
impartial legal norms.”62 Like humanitarianism, human rights also treats
impartiality as part of instrumental reasoning: it can be a strategy to portray
a stance of “distance or disinterest needed to discriminate between victims
and perpetrator.”63 In the world of human rights, neutrality, at least as
understood by humanitarianism, makes little sense. The point of human
rights is to pick sides and to promote social change. Independence can be
a hinder to getting things done. Human rights advocacy is precisely
designed to appeal to states and other constituents, which often requires
making strong alliances.
The divergent interpretations of these principles also are bound up with
alternative stances toward politics. As discussed in the Introduction,
human rights unapologetically engages in politics while humanitarianism
presents politics as a moral pollutant.64 In brief, humanitarianism wants
to save lives in immediate risk and worries that if it engages in politics it
will potentially jeopardize its access to those in need, while human rights
must engage politics if it is to punish perpetrators, challenge human rights
violations, and create a more just society. These differing objectives are
most keenly observed on the question of assigning responsibility for
harms. Humanitarians are reluctant to assign blame, at least publicly. In
natural disasters, or acts of God, no one is to blame. And while it is
possible to blame God, and question why God would permit such suffer-
ing, the important point is that individuals are not held directly
responsible.65 Although in humanly made emergencies it is quite possible
to identify the perpetrators, humanitarian agencies avoid assigning blame
because the moment they do they potentially jeopardize their access.
Rights approaches almost always see a human hand behind suffering

and deprivation. This conclusion is practically baked into the very dis-
course of human rights – victims are those who have had their rights
violated, and human rights violations cannot exist without a violator.

The Meaning Behind the Act

Meaning is central to the concept of practices.66 Action absent meaning is
mere behavior. Meaning has an instrumental and existential dimension.67
Instrumental or functional definitions of meaning tend to focus on spe-
cific short-term tasks. The meaning of humanitarianism is to save lives
and human rights to stop oppression. In this way, meanings reinforce the
problems to be solved and practical action. Meaning also can have a much
more encompassing dimension, including the transcendent that necessi-
tates a consideration of the whole of reality and “something beyond or
transcendent to their lives.” Action can be part of a “search for meaning”:
the attempt to position oneself in relationship to others and the cosmos;
the need to fend off questions of emptiness and alienation that might
otherwise intrude on our sense of self; and the almost existential need to
make sense of suffering.
Humanity can help provide answers to these questions and address
these demands. It can be part of the sacred that binds the members of the
community and points them toward something that is “larger than them-
selves.” Although such beliefs used to be primarily associated with a deity,
since the nineteenth century secularization processes contributed to the
sacralization of the human, resulting in humanity becoming “the object of
a sort of religion . . . a common faith.”68 This intertwining of the theolo-
gical and secular recalls John Dewey’s approving reference to William
James’s understanding of religious experience (as distinct from religion),
in which the “self is always directed toward something beyond itself and
so its own unification depends upon the idea of shifting scenes of the
world into that imaginative totality we call the Universe.”69 The capacity
of individuals to link their everyday actions to the transcendental, to find
meaning and enchantment in practical and worldly activities, is reminis-
cent of the distinction between the immanent and the transcendental.70
Human rights and humanitarianism are part of the transcendent as they
connect to humanity and a world that is bigger than us.71 But do they have
the same meaning? The chapters and other studies of these fields provide
strong hints that they offer contrasting meanings that are potentially
based less on metaphysics and more on practice. One influential version
of the practice perspective argues that the act precedes the meaning. If so,
the different actions associated with human rights and humanitarianism
will produce different meanings of humanity. A humanitarianism that

focus on needs and keeping people alive will tend toward a humanity
defined by bare life. In contrast, a human rights that aspires to produce
a full and flourishing life might be more likely to operate with a fuller idea
of humanity. Not only might they operate with different meanings of
humanity, but also their limited versus expansive actions and meanings
of humanity might be more or less likely to create space for alternative
views of humanity. Humanitarianism minimalism possibly provides
greater possibilities than does a human rights maximalism that is con-
stituted by Western culture.
The meaning of humanitarianism and human rights might also func-
tion to help us make sense of the world. Humans search not only for
material advancement and security but also meaning. The search for
meaning is likely to be most intensively felt during moments of chaos,
despair, and bouts of inhumanity.72 Different communities will have
different ways of making sense of disorder, which invariably draw on the
cultural material that binds the members. The post-Enlightenment West
leans heavily on the idea of the sacredness of the human and the idea of
progress. As discussed in the Introduction, progress has material and
moral dimensions, but it is the fragmentation of the moral that is most
likely to trigger the search for meaning. When do those in the post-
Enlightenment West tend to engage in an urgent search for meaning?
When war and other apoplectic-like events challenge the belief in ration-
ality, learning, and the march of progress. Where does the West turn at
such moments of loss, despair, and senseless suffering? The religion of
humanity and its progeny of human rights and humanitarianism. There
are many ways to explain why the West and the international community
have institutionalized human rights and humanitarianism after great
cataclysms, and one possibility is the spiritual need to restore the belief
in humanity. The turn to humanity, human rights, and humanitarianism
as a response to inhumanity can be understood as a form of coping and
theodicy.73 But only time will tell if the international community con-
tinues to find solace and hope in them.

THE WORLD AHEAD

It is indisputable that the modern world order has made a greater space
for human rights and humanitarianism over the last century. There have
been setbacks, plenty of them, but the record suggests an overall march
forward. Yet contemporary discussions of the future of humanitarianism
and human rights suggest they must prepare not for the occasional pot-
shot but rather a pummeling. The current fear is that the long durée in
which the milder forms of cosmopolitanism enjoyed considerable

popularity is yielding to populism, narrow-minded nationalism, chauvin-

ism, and xenophobia. Why this is happening is split between various
hypotheses, including shifting geopolitics from the West to the East,
widening domestic and global economic inequality, migration flows,
and the rumored decline of the West and liberalism.
Another, somewhat ironic or perhaps tragic, factor might be the very
discourse of humanity.74 What sort of humanity has been constructed?
Humanity demands the recognition of the humanity of all others, but we
tend to offer such recognition only when they are in pain, when their
rights are violated, or when they are on the verge of death. Those who are
in positions to give often do so because of pity and know little about these
people that are reduced to stick figures and their suffering. Is this cosmo-
politanism of suffering up to the challenge of producing a meaningful
community. As Hannah Arendt observed, “The world finds nothing
sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.”75 And those who
rely on such a humanity to create connections are selling themselves
short – or stunting their emotional life.76 In the spirit of Orwell’s infamous
eulogy of Gandhi, the person who loves humanity perhaps is not capable
of love, because love depends on knowing the person.77 The connections
associated with humanity are abstract and bloodless, especially when
contrasted with a local that provides intimacy, chromatic emotion, and
genuine we-feeling.
If humanity becomes questioned or recedes, then what happens to
a human rights and a humanitarianism that are constituted by it? In
closing I want to suggest that their fates are dependent on how they
have practiced humanity and how closely associated they are to the
West and liberalism. Those looking ahead seem to identity three possible
paths. There is the occasional statement that human rights and humani-
tarianism will do just fine, or even that one or the other provides hope for
the future. For instance, Kathryn Sikkink concludes that growing “wealth
disparities, intolerance, and regressive nationalism signals a difficult
struggle ahead to create a just and sustainable planet. The universal,
supranational, emancipatory, and expansive character of human rights
is poised to serve as a connective tissue binding disparate movements and
awakening a global citizenry in a supra-movement capable of accelerating
a Great Transition.”78 I cannot find a comparable statement in discus-
sions of the future of humanitarianism; I suspect that this is partly because
humanitarianism has never fully embraced the idea of progress or the
possibility that humanitarianism might serve this end. In any event, the
idea that human rights or humanitarianism might provide the light in
these dark times could be based on a careful reading of history or theodicy
and other coping mechanisms.

Another possibility is that both will suffer, and not only because these
are less compassionate times but also because of their association with
liberalism and the West. Even those in the human rights community who
see the possibility of hope nevertheless acknowledge that the combination
of long-term trends and missteps by human rights movements have con-
tributed to these troubled times.79 Human rights, rightly or wrongly, is
associated with the West and liberalism. A prevailing view is that inter-
national human rights rose on the shoulders of Western states that wanted
to create a world in their image for reasons of vanity, wealth, and security.
And the version of rights that became hegemonic – political and civil, not
economic and cultural – were closely associated with the version preferred
by Western states and human rights organizations. Human rights also
engaged in politics, proudly spoke truth to power, which made powerful
enemies. In the past human rights organizations could look to Western
governments for support, but they are increasingly absent as they are
developing their own strands of illiberalism, becoming much less inclined
to defend human rights abroad and friendlier with serial violators of
human rights. These are dark days for human rights.
Many of the same factors that sponsored the rise of human rights also
propelled humanitarianism, but arguably humanitarianism was never as
reliant on discourses associated with liberalism as it proclaimed that
saving lives has no ideology.80 It insisted on working outside of politics.
Most were heavily reliant on Western states for their funding, but that did
not stop them from trying to project the appearance of independence.
The supposed universalism of humanitarianism never experienced the
barrage of critique that human rights did. But humanitarianism confronts
considerable difﬁculties. It is constantly instrumentalized by states and
others who found it useful, and there is now a growing fear that that this
instrumentalization will become even more intense and force aid agencies
to choose between compromise and complicity.81 Also, while humanitar-
ianism might not be as susceptible to cultural fragmentation as human
rights, there are a growing number of non-Western attempts to construct
locally generated forms of humanitarianism that might or might not
include principles of neutrality, independence, and impartiality.
The third possibility is that human rights and humanitarianism will
continue to exist, but not as we know it and without the same meaning.
Humanitarianism and human rights, as we know them today, are pro-
ducts of age and their interactions with each other. But, if these currently
unsettled times are but a passage toward a different world order, then the
likelihood is that there will be a change in the kind of suffering matters,
whose suffering matters, what counts as unnecessary suffering, and what
are the acceptable remedies to suffering. Will humanitarianism and

human rights extend their concern to the suffering of different kinds, such
as animals and even androids? As the effects of climate change become
more keenly felt, what will be come of the meaning and practices of
human rights and humanitarianism? Will the Earth have rights? Will
humanitarianism shift toward the prevention of the climate change, as is
happening at the ICRC?82 Or will climate change cause a shrinking of
humanity and the international community as people retreat to their
territories and look to defend the homeland?83 Will the desire to prevent
suffering lead humanitarianism to associate with modern eugenics?84 Will
human ﬂourishing become tied to genetic engineering? COVID-19
makes a compelling case for the need for more humanitarianism, not
less, but the evidence so far suggests that states are focused on their
own. And in the name of public health, the state is introducing new
surveillance techniques that all governments seeking power ﬁnd to their
advantage. But the hopeful premise of many of these questions is that
individuals will continue to embrace a concept of humanity that includes
the desire to prevent and relieve the unnecessary strangers. But, as in
centuries past, will suffering strangers become pitiable but not grievable?
For quite some time, human rights and humanitarianism have been
expressions and guardians of global ethics, representing a world that
many hope to exist and a set of principles to guide them there. What lies
ahead?

Introduction: Worlds of Difference

1. Gordon 2007.
2. Teitel 2011. Also see Fortin 2012; Meron 2000; Droege 2007 and 2008;
Hampson 2008; Lubell 2005; Leebaw 2007 and 2017; Reidy 1998; Heintze
2004; Crowe 2014; ICRC 2010; and Benison 1999.
3. We Robotics 2018; Emery 2016; Tapak 2019.
4. Nascimento 2004; Dutton 2001; Fox 2002.
5. Cuttitta 2018; Sciubra and Furri 2018; Perkowski 2016.
6. Feldman 2009; Ticktin 2016.
7. Slim 2001; Chandler 2001; Leebaw 2017; Dixon 2019.
8. Pﬂanz 2009. Also see Beison 1999; Kendall 2015 and 2018.
9. Geneva Macrolas. COVID-19: Privacy Versus Health. April 29, 2000. http://er
bguth.ch/COVID-19_tracing_privacy.mp4; Mark Latonero, “Stop Surveillance
Humanitarianism,” New York Times, July 11, 2019; www.nytimes.com/2019/07/
11/opinion/data-humanitarian-aid.html; Petra Moinar, COVID-19: Can
Technology Become a Tool of Oppression and Surveillance?”
OpenDemocracy, May 1, 2020, www.opendemocracy.net/en/pandemic-bor
der/covid-19-can-technology-become-tool-oppression-and-surveillance/;
Amnesty International, “COVID-19, Surveillance, and the Threat to Your
Rights,” April 3, 2020, www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/04/covid-19-
surveillance-threat-to-your-rights/
10. Slim 2004; Viero de Mello 2004; Ogata 1997.
11. Stevens 2016; Dubois 2009.
12. Liu and Salignon 2003; Ticktin 2011; Kelsall and Stepakoff 2007; Schopper
2014, 593; and Kendall and Nouwen 2018, 7.
13. Hilhorst and Jansen 2012; Hilhorst and Jansen 2010, 1135–1136; Feldman
2007.
14. Dubois 2009.
15. Lubell, 2005, 738. Also see Gillard 2005.
16. Slim 2015, 16.
17. See note 2.
18. Sikkink 2011 and 2018; Simmons and Strezhnev 2017.
19. Moyn 2012; Keys 2014; and Iriye, Goedde, and Hitchcock 2012; Jensen
2016.
20. Goodale and Merry 2007.

252

21. Nash 2015.

22. Moyn 2017; Rutazibwa 2019.
23. Laqua 2014; Hilton et al. 2018.
24. Cooley and Ron 2002; Weiss 2013.
25. Ticktin 2014; Fassin 2011.
26. Agier 2011; Duffield 2019; Clark 2016; Weitzman 2012.
27. Festa 2010; Spelman 2001.
28. Kinsella 2011.
29. Manfredi 2013, 15–19; Geyer 2016.
30. Also see Slim 2015, 47.
31. Barnett 2011.
32. Wichmann 2019.
33. Foucault 1994, 708. Cited from Finkielkraut 2001, 88.
34. Shapcott 2010, 3–4.
35. Habermas 2010; Flynn 2003; Rorty 1999; Joas 2013; Bayefsky 2013.
36. Singer 2010.
37. Brudholm and Lang 2018; Burke 2017.
38. Faulkner 2014.
39. Arendt 1963; Boltanski 1999; Chouliaraki 2010; Wilkinson 2014.
40. Fiering 1976; Haskell 1985.
41. Fassin 2007, 15.
42. Arendt 1963, 79–80.
43. Weinert 2015.
44. Wilson and Brown 2009, 43.
45. Wilkinson and Kleinman 2016.
46. For a discussion, see Barnett 2011. Also see Oxfam 2019; Nelson and Dorsey
2018.
47. Zaman et al. 2018; Hunt et al. 2018.
48. Dunant 1862.
49. For a different understanding of the politics of life, see Fassin 2007.
50. And, as the old joke goes, the fish is then sold to the ex-pat development
worker. For other jokes based on this saying, see www.iluenglish.com/give-
a-man-a-fish-funny-adaptations-of-the-proverb/.
51. Brown 2004.
52. Moon 2016.
53. Brysk 2013.
54. Festa 2010, 8.
55. However, for discussions on the relationship between needs and justice, see
Barry 1982; Buchanan 1987; Valenti 2015.
56. Cited in Leebaw 2007, 261.
57. Cited in Rubenstein 2015, 207. Also see Redfield 2013, 229–244; Leebaw
2017.
58. Cited in Leebaw 2007.
59. Valenti 2015, 736; Spivak 2004, 523–524; Festa 2010, 16; Kurasawa
2007, 204.
60. O’Flaherty and Ulrich 2010, 8.
61. Barnett 2016.

62. Appiah 2010; Hollinger 1985; Shapcott 2008.

63. Hollinger 1985, 59.
64. Festa 2010, 6, 7. Also see McManus 2017 and Nguyen 2010.
65. Branch 2011, 8.
66. Hutchison 2014; Balaji 2011.
67. Sluga 2013.
68. Keohane 1982; Alexander 1990.
69. Sikkink 2017 and 2018. Also see Teitel 1997; Moyn 2012;
Hopgood 2013; Cmeil 2004; Dawes, Gupta, and Jayasinghe 2014;
Slaughter 2014.
70. This progressive spirit in human rights is also sustained by similar sentiments
in international law, which connect progress, humanity, and universalism.
Altwicker and Diggelmann 2014.
71. Sikkink 2011.
72. For counternarratives, see Lacroix and Prachére 2018; Moyn 2012;
Hopgood 2015; Afshari 2007; Dawes, Gupta, and Jayasinghe 2014;
Slaughter 2018.
73. Fortrun 2012, 447.
74. Lacquer 2009; Rorty 1993; Linklater 2007.
75. Terry 2002.
76. Bradol 2004.
77. Redﬁeld 2013, 229–244.
78. Dawes 2007, 18–19. Also see Bradol 2004.
79. Dawes 2007, 5.
80. De Waal 2010, S131.
81. Marx and Engels 1848, Ch. 3.
82. Donini 2010.
83. Swamy 2017.
84. Whyte 2019.
85. Also see Perugini and Gordon 2015.
86. Robbins 2017, 19; Giridharadas 2018.
87. Young 2006.
88. Donini 2012.

1 Human Rights and Humanitarianization

1. For the distinction, see Jeffrey Flynn’s Chapter 2 in this volume.
2. Robbins 2017.
3. Moyn 2006 and 2017.
4. Davis 1966, 523–556.
5. Fulton 2002.
6. See Crane 1934, and the successor literature by Geoffroy Atkinson,
G. J. Barker-Benﬁeld, Michael Bell, Markman Ellis, Peter Uwe Hohendahl,
David Marshall, John Mullan, Janet Todd, Ann Jessie van Sant, Anne
Vincent-Buffault, and a host of others.
7. Laqueur 1989.
8. Arendt 1965, 65.

9. Pinker 2011, 129.

10. The first diagnosed “sadist” in world history was the man who got off on
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s graphic humanitarian imaginings of whipped slave
bodies. See Halttunen 1995, 303–334.
11. See Davis 1975 and Bender 1992.
12. Brown 1999; Festa 2006; Barnett 2011; Benton 2011; Lester and Dussart
2014; Benton and Ford 2018. For popular studies of humanitarianism that
acknowledge then run away from the connections, see Hochschild 2006. For
a very different account, see Moniz 2016.
13. See, most revealingly, Lauren 1998, 37–70, which dealt with humanitarianism
not as an old or new generalized phenomenon in the modern age but mainly
when it came to “protecting the wounded” in the codified law of war in the
nineteenth century. With the 1990s canonization of the Universal Declaration,
much attention to the 1940s followed, perhaps most famously in Glendon
2002. For more details, see Moyn 2012, 123–140.
14. Hunt 2007; for my critique, see The Nation, April 16, 2007, repeated in Moyn
2014, 1–19.
15. See Edelstein 2018 for the latest try.
16. Barnett and Stein 2012; for the prevalence of Christian forms of
humanitarianism today, see Power 2009.
17. Arendt loathed humanitarianism, charging it with fomenting terror; and, for
that matter, she was skeptical about human rights whether locally or
internationally – though she never conflated the two categories in her own
usage. It is still justifiable, in spite of both facts, to cast modern rights for most
of their history as part of the citizenship politics that Arendt generally
championed in other terms. What I still wonder about is what to say
regarding the fact that – long antedating the current theoretical scene –
Arendt theorized compassionate humanitarianism in terms of local rather
than distant suffering as well as squarely within the revolutionary
phenomenon rather than sounding the death knell of revolutionary solidarity.
18. See the chapters by Fabian Klose and especially Alan Lester in this
volume. Recent works by Frederick Cooper emphasize that citizenship
cuts across both nation-state and imperial forms; both settings feature
boundaried stratification, but also “the right to claim rights.” But,
notwithstanding the potential of imperial citizenship some have
perceived, there is no denying the modern ideological affinity between
claims to rights on the basis of humanity and revolutionary nationalism
from the Atlantic revolutions through decolonization. See, for example,
Cooper 2018.
19. See Moyn 2010, 33 on general principles and Moyn 2010, 243–444n.17 on
Hunt’s argument.
20. Green 2014; Green and Viaene 2012; see also my “Human Rights and the
Crisis of Liberalism,” in Moyn 2017b.
21. The best single account is Rodogno 2012; see also Klose 2016. More broadly,
see Klose and Thulin 2016. But compare with Tusan 2014.
22. For a vivid example of post-1865 appeals to “human rights” in the United
States, see Stanley 2015, or, in a popular mode, 2017.

23. The sole major counterexample of the propagation of rights beyond borders
also concerned Christians under the Ottoman Empire, when instead of
humanitarian intervention the non-Christian sovereign was deemed
a target for the sort of treaty-based protection of collective rights of
religious worship which Christians had once demanded from one another
across borders, but dropped in the nineteenth century on the premise that
civilized states neither brooked nor required interference. (Jews intelligently
piggybacked on such practices, by convincing powerful Western states to
lobby for collective Jewish rights in the Ottoman Empire and later semi-
civilized new Christian states on the European periphery such as
Czechoslovakia and Poland.)
24. See Moyn 2010, 249n.62, 308n.17, and 324.
25. For an especially early and unconvincing dating, see Cabanes 2014.
26. For example, Paulmann 2016a or O’Sullivan, Hilton and Fiori 2016.
27. Moyn 2010, 72, 125.
28. Compare Cohen 2011.
29. Compare Klose 2013. In the law of war, the first sign of attempted merger in
our time is the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2444 (XXIII),
“Respect for Human Rights in Armed Conflicts,” December 19, 1968 – and
in spite of a lot of talk connecting human rights and humanitarian law, this
merger has barely progressed to date. See Ohlin 2016.
30. Moyn 2010, 220.
31. I thank Jeffrey Flynn for destabilizing my originally excessive segregation
of human rights and humanitarianism in the 1970s; see Barbara Keys,
2014, for details on the gendering of anti-torture politics of the period.
As I have argued elsewhere, Elaine Scarry’s classic if strange The Body in
Pain, was born out of Amnesty’s anti-torture campaign; see also Moyn,
2013, repeated in Moyn 2017b.
32. Shue 1980; Moyn 2018.
33. Heerten 2017.
34. Moyn 2017b, 103–113.
35. See especially Davey 2015, 212–214, as well as Mohandesi 2017.
36. Moyn 2010, 221.
37. Redfield 2013, 37–68, 98–123, 229–244. See also Givoni 2016 and Malkki
2015.
38. Barnett 2011, 16.
39. See, for example, Marks 2011. Conversely, subsequent research on the
history of humanitarianism itself by Keith Watenpaugh has contended that
a turn to causal insight into otherwise symptomatic suffering was the central
event in its history, taking place in the early twentieth century. See
Watenpaugh 2015, 57–90, 124–156.
40. Fassin 2011; Feldman and Ticktin 2010; Bornstein and Redfield 2011;
Ticktin 2011a – the main canon and touchstone collections of the
contemporary anthropology of humanitarianism. See also Guilhot 2012.
41. Ticktin 2016.
42. Moyn 2018.
43. Feldman 2012; Allen 2013.

44. Compare Toscano 2014.

45. Simmons 2011.
46. For example, see Agier 2010, as well as some aspects of his writings elsewhere
in anthropology.
47. Chouliaraki 2013.

2 Suffering and Status

* I am grateful to Nicholas Sooy for assisting with and discussing the research
for this chapter, and to all my fellow participants in the workshops organized
by Michael Barnett, at George Washington University, for such rich and
illuminating discussion of the chapters in this volume.
1. See Halpern 2002 for an excellent genealogy of the modern politics of
suffering, and Stuurman 2017 on the history of status equality.
2. Barnett 2011, 49, 133. See also Fassin 2012, 4–5, on two “temporalities.”
3. For the former see Hunt 2007; for the latter see Moyn 2010 and Eckel and
Moyn 2014. I engage Hunt and Moyn on human rights and humanitarianism
in Flynn 2012.
4. I focus on describing challenges to status hierarchies rather than the normative
question of what makes a status hierarchy unjustifiable. For an account of
normative criteria that must be met for any social and political order to be
justifiable, see Forst 2011 on the “right to justification.”
5. Fiering 1976, 195.
6. Taylor 2007, 23.
7. Fiering 1976.
8. See Hunt 2007, and Wilkinson and Kleinman 2016, ch. 1.
9. Barnett 2011.
10. Feinberg 1973, 88–89.
11. Ibid., 89.
12. Festa 2010, 7. See also Klose this volume.
13. Festa 2010, 5.
14. Ibid., 4. See Klose this volume, on “the cause of humanity” as an ambivalent
norm throughout the nineteenth century.
15. Hunt 2007, 39.
16. Hunt 2007, 58.
17. Ibid., 27.
18. Ibid., 29. See also Sliwinski 2011 on the role of eighteenth-century visual
culture in the rise of the Rights of Man.
19. Hunt 2007, 213.
20. The later section “Stories of Suffering” aims in part to show that she was
overly skeptical in this regard.
21. Arendt 1963b, 85.
22. Ibid., 89.
23. Ibid., 119.
24. Spelman 1997, 65.
25. Spelman 1997, chapter 2 provides a vivid account of how the risks can be
mitigated. For a critique of Arendt’s distinction between compassion and pity

in relation to humanitarianism, see Fassin 2011, 37. In Nussbaum 1996,

Martha Nussbaum argues that “compassion” and “pity” can be used to refer
the same basic emotion, and that it was only in the Victorian era that “pity”
acquired “nuances of condescension and superiority to the sufferer” (29).
I use “politics of pity” to refer to a politics with undertones of those attitudes.
26. Arendt 1963b, 88.
27. Gündogdu 2015, 16. This is one form of “humanitarianization” of “human
rights” that predates the periodization in Moyn, this volume. See also Lester
this volume for an account of how a “moral economy of suffering” was
instrumental within the British Empire in defusing the radical potential of
human rights.
28. For a similar argument about contemporary France, see Ticktin 2011a.
29. Habermas 2010.
30. See also Waldron 2012.
31. Marshall 1963, 87.
32. Habermas 2010, 92.
33. See Sangiovanni 2017.
34. Barnett 2011, 82–83. See also Klose this volume, on the early nineteenth-
century shift in justifying humanitarian intervention by reference not only to
religious afﬁnity but also to a common humanity.
35. Quoted in Slim 2015, 45.
36. Beitz 2009, 1.
37. Buchanan 2013, 69.
38. Ibid., 30.
39. Ibid., 28–30. Buchanan articulates this status egalitarian function in defending
his own philosophical position. See Sangiovanni 2017, chs. 5–6 for a similar
defense, and Miller 2016 for a critique of Buchanan. My aim here is not to
compare philosophical theories; I draw on Buchanan simply to highlight the
status-egalitarian elements that are evident in the contemporary human rights
system.
40. For the argument that it has not done enough, see Moyn 2018. For a counter-
argument, see Sikkink 2018, 235–240.
41. See Flynn 2019, 303–307.
42. Feinberg 1970, 252.
43. Honneth 1996, 107–120.
44. Beitz 2009, 288.
45. Ibid., 289.
46. Merry 2006, 47.
47. Allen 2013, 4.
48. See the contrast between “human rights” and “Human Rights” in Hopgood
2013, viii–ix.
49. See Moyn 2010, and Flynn 2018.
50. Of course, humanitarian practice has not remained untouched by
a politics of equal status across that time period either. This is
particularly evident in the development of international humanitarian
law, with the legal statuses and rights that come with them. See Beitz,
this volume and Teitel 2011.

51. On the nineteenth-century discourse of stopping perpetrators, see Klose

this volume on the extension of British abolitionism into humanitarian
intervention, and Rodogno 2012 on the broader discourse against
“massacre” and “atrocity.”
52. Boltanski 1999, 48. The long history of a politics of indignation is in part
what allows Hunt to look to the eighteenth century for the pre-history of
today’s human rights activism, but Boltanski views this politics as one of the
many strands in the long history of humanitarianism.
53. Ibid., 149.
54. Haskell 1985b, 565.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 566.
57. Hochschild 2006, 6.
58. Barnett 2011, 85.
59. Robbins 2017, 3. See also Flynn 2017.
60. Laqueur 1989.
61. Ibid., 201.
62. Ibid., 178.
63. Ibid. 179. For echoes of this connection in the contemporary work of MSF,
see Redfield 2006.
64. Laqueur 1989, 190.
65. Ibid., 191, 192.
66. Ibid., 195, italics added.
67. Laqueur (194) even cites passages in Marx’s Capital as drawing on this genre
when discussing the daily lives of laborers and effects on their health and
longevity.
68. Sontag 2003, 102. For insight into the trope of innocence in
humanitarian and human rights discourse and practice, see Ticktin this
volume.
69. For a philosophical account of emotions as containing judgments, see
Nussbaum 2001.
70. See the relative lack of attention to human rights in Fassin 2012 and to
humanitarian themes in Moyn 2010. See, however, Moyn 2012b and
Moyn this volume, for attempts to theorize them together.
71. Sargent 2014, 142. See also Heerten 2017, esp. 9–10, 339–340.
72. In her memoir, Jeri Laber, one of the founders of Human Rights Watch,
vividly depicts being moved to enter human rights work in the first place by
reading about Greek torture victims in 1973. See Laber 2002, 8, 229.
I discuss this in Flynn 2012.
73. See Moyn 2014 and Moyn this volume, 7.
74. Keys 2012, 201.
75. Ibid., 202.
76. Ibid., 203. See also Keys 2014.
77. Heerten 2015, 263.
78. In Flynn 2017, I situate Peter Singer’s classic 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence,
and Morality” in this context.
79. Ticktin 2011a, 70.

80. See Davey 2015. On the full scope of how “witnessing” is now conceived by
MSF, see Redfield 2013, 104. For a broader treatment of witnessing, see
Givoni 2016.
81. Keys 2014, 93.
82. Hopgood 2006, vii.
83. Malkki 1996.
84. Redfield 2005, 346.
85. On mitigating this inequality, see Anderson 1998; on its ineradicable nature
see Fassin 2010.
86. Moyn this volume. See also Moyn 2018 on why status equality is not enough.
87. See Gündogdu 2015 and Kennedy 2005.
88. For an approach that does not shy away from the task of clearly articulating
these pathologies, while still defending human rights practice, see Beitz 2009,
201–209.
89. Rubenstein 2015. See my review in Flynn 2019.
90. Sontag 2003, 102–103.
91. On the nature of this shared responsibility, see Young 2011. See also
Rothberg 2019 on the “implicated subject.” On the way the shaming
strategies of both human rights and humanitarian organizations can
undermine a focus on structural issues, and on possible ways of overcoming
this deficit, see Leebaw this volume. On bringing beneficiaries into the
picture, see Robbins 2017 on humanitarianism and Marks 2011 on human
rights.

3 Humanitarianism and Human Rights in Morality

and Practice
* For comments and criticisms I am grateful to Michael Barnett and the other
contributors to this volume and to audiences at the Florida International
University School of Law, the CUNY Center for Global Ethics, and Pompeu
Fabra University.
1. These points are related. See Abruzzo 2011, ch. 1.
2. Dunant 1939 [1862].
3. Another body of IHL originated at two conferences held at The Hague in
1899 and 1907 (“Hague law” as distinct from “Geneva law”). For present
purposes I leave it aside.
4. Meron 2000, 251–252. See also Hitchcock 2012, 96–97.
5. Barnett 2011, 19.
6. Ibid., 39.
7. Ticktin 2014, 274–277; Fassin 2012, 243–257.
8. Here and in the following two paragraphs I summarize parts of Beitz 2009,
ch. 2.
9. For a discussion, see Droege 2008, 520–524, and Oberleitner 2015,
ch. 5.
10. Discussed in Beitz 2009, ch. 2.
11. I adopt this formulation from ibid., 42. Michael Barnett surveys the idea of
a practice in more detail in the Conclusion to this volume. My notion of the

“distinctive culture” of a practice is meant to embrace what he calls background

knowledge as well as the forms of (“moral, technical, and legal”) reasoning
publicly accepted within the practice. For a review of the literature about
international practices taking human rights as a case study, see Karp 2013.
12. Barnett 2011, 8, 13, 16, 19. As Hugo Slim puts it in a guide to humanitarian
ethics aimed at practitioners, the “ground of ethics in humanitarian action is
a profound feeling of compassion and responsibility towards others who are
living and suffering in extremis” (Slim 2015, 26). Slim presents an elaboration
of this basic “ground” that acknowledges the limited but important
appropriation of ideas about human rights in recent humanitarian practice
(ibid., 118–121).
13. Elsewhere in the same document he observes: “[T]here are certain principles,
such as those of humanity and non-discrimination, which in a sense are
common to both [charity and justice]” (Pictet 1979). Compare Miriam
Ticktin’s observation – meaning to describe a belief found among
humanitarian workers – that “humanitarianism is about feelings rather than
rights; it is about compassion, not entitlement” (2016, 264).
14. See Barnett this volume.
15. See Dworkin 1986, ch. 2, developing a view he advanced in earlier works. For
criticisms with which I largely agree, see Postema 1987.
16. Berman, Felter, and Shapiro 2018, fig. 0.1 and accompanying text.
17. On the interface between IHL and IHRL in these circumstances, see Watkin
2016, ch. 5; also Teitel 2011, 120–133.
18. Then there is the phenomenon of “aerial occupation,” for example, by
drones, that can impose serious harm on noncombatant populations even
in the absence of the use of force. Emery and Brunstetter 2015.
19. Watkin 2016, 312–313.
20. See, for example, Walzer 2006.
21. For a review of the implications of changes in the nature of armed conflict for
the legal regulatory frameworks, see Watkin 2016, esp. chs. 1–2.
22. For a detailed account, see Droege 2008, 504–509.
23. For example, Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949, Protocol Relating to
the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts [1977], art. 72.
24. Leebaw’s analysis of this contrast is illuminating (2007, 224–227). She notes
the association of these organizations’ strategic stances with their contrasting
conceptions of the relationship of ethics and politics (225). On the shift in
AI’s orientation in the early 2000s, see Hopgood 2006.
25. Slim describes this as a “role responsibility” of humanitarian workers
(2015, 67).
26. There of course need be no inconsistency here: the effort to portray human
rights as impartial norms is compatible with regarding them as means of
addressing injustice. Leebaw 2007, 227.
27. Ibid., 230–232.
28. Slim 2015, 119.
29. Sphere Project 2018. See also Ferris 2011, 194–196.
30. Cicero 1991 [44 bce], 1.20. For a discussion of Cicero’s distinction, see
Nussbaum 2000.

31. On the sources and soundness of the distinction, see Campbell 1975 and
Schumaker 1992. J. B. Schneewind traces the career of the distinction
(among many other topics) in his masterful 1998.
32. Here I roughly follow Henry Sidgwick’s account of what he called the
“morality of common sense” in his 1907, bk. 3, chs. 4–5.
33. For example, my colleague, Peter Singer, most famously in Singer 1972.
34. Sidgwick 1907, bk. 3, ch. 4, §3.
35. I say “substantially” because there are some complications. For a discussion, see
Pope 1991.
36. I leave aside cases of consensual harm, like the bodily harm done by a surgeon
to a patient who has consented to the surgery.
37. Feinberg 1970, 252. See also Flynn 2019.
38. For critical examinations of the traditional view, see Campbell 1975 and
Buchanan 1987.
39. For discussion see, for example, Fleischacker 2005.
40. As John Rawls argues, for example (Rawls 1999, sec. 19).
41. International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS)
2001.
42. Essentially this point was recognized by the authors of the ICISS report, who note
that the Commission avoided the phrase “humanitarian intervention” in
deference to “the very strong opposition expressed by humanitarian agencies,
humanitarian organizations and humanitarian workers towards any militarization
of the word ‘humanitarian’: whatever the motives of those engaging in the
intervention, it is anathema for the humanitarian relief and assistance sector to
have this word appropriated to describe any kind of military action” (2001, 9).
43. As I argued in Beitz 2009, sec. 21 and ch. 7.
44. This is not an eccentric idea. For a discussion in the context of the welfare
state, see Campbell 1974.
45. For such a view, see Forsythe 2013, 59–62.
46. Beitz 2009, sec. 21.

4 For a Fleeting Moment: The Short, Happy

Life of Modern Humanism
1. For an alternative, and in some way contrasting, argument, see Moyn this volume.
2. For example, Hannum 2019.
3. Magone, Neuman, and Weissman 2011.
4. There is another alternative – that human rights and humanitarianism evolved
because of their contribution to group survival. This structural–functional
explanation allows no room for conscious human decision at all, and thus
removes agency from the picture entirely.
5. Papal Encyclicals Online 2018.
6. Ibid.
7. Critics (see Hannum 2019) will say: but the ICC is not a human rights court.
This is precisely my point. For lots of human rights advocates it is treated as
one and, as a result, it becomes one. De jure follows rather than precedes de
facto – the law follows the facts.

8. Goodale 2018.
9. Poewe 2005.
10. Mazower 2009.
11. On an “overlapping consensus,” see of course Rawls 1993.
12. Hopgood 2013, ch. 2.
13. Ibid.
14. Hopgood 2006.
15. ICRC 2008.
16. ICRC 2016; Amnesty International 2018.
17. ICRC 2016.
18. Amnesty International 2017.
19. UNOCHA 2018.
20. Human Rights Watch 2018.
21. Liu 2016.
22. UNHCR (UK) 2018.
23. ICRC 2008.
24. Freedom House 2018.
25. Pinker 2011.
26. On the humanitarianization of rights, see Moyn this volume.
27. Reuters 2012; Lepora and Goodin 2015. The inﬁbulation story was
a personal conversation with an MSF doctor.

5 Humanitarian Governance and the Circumvention

of Revolutionary Human Rights in the British Empire
1. See Barnett 2013, Hunt 2007, Skinner and Lester 2012. The extent to which
these projects had origins in this period has been questioned more recently.
Barnett (2013, 379) notes how global humanitarian governance, deﬁned as
“the self-conscious effort by the global community to relieve the suffering of
distant strangers,” was the result of more contemporary “revolutions in
international ethics,” while Samuel Moyn (2017) argues that the
contemporary discourse of human rights is also of a much more recent vintage.
2. Moyn 2017b, xv.
3. My focus thus differs from humanitarian intervention which, as Klose
indicates, consists of a more recent entanglement between humanitarianism
and human rights. I am concerned with humanitarian practice in the
governance of (appropriated) sovereign territory within an imperil world
order rather than with intervention in nonsovereign territory within
a postimperial state system.
4. Foucault 1979.
5. Fassin 2012, 2.
6. Elden 2007.
7. Reid-Henry 2014, 419.
8. Fassin 2012, x.
9. Quoted Shaw 1980, 197.
10. On the link between terror and a revolution in the sensibility of rights, see
Arendt 1963b. As Stefan-Ludwig Hoffman notes, Lynn Hunt’s seminal

Inventing Human Rights (2007) “acknowledges the paradoxes of human

rights as politics, that rights claims emerged in tandem with revolutionary
violence, but insists that their self-evidence ultimately transcends these
historical mutations” (Hoffman 2016, 280).
11. Weber 1964, 3; Foucault 1979.
12. Brewer 1989.
13. Shaw 1980 and 2008.
14. Shaw 1980, 15–16.
15. See Maslan 2004.
16. Arthur to Bathurst, November 7, 1816, The National Archives UK
(hereafter TNA), CO 123/25.
17. Quoted Shaw 1980, 22.
18. Ibid., 17.
19. Bolland 1977, 70.
20. Ibid., 61–63; Thomson 2004, 58–60.
21. Newson 1976; Brereton 1981.
22. Arthur to Bathurst, June 15, 1820, TNA, CO 123/31.
23. Bolland 1977, 61–63.
24. TNA, CO 123/31.
25. Arthur 1833 and 1835.
26. TNA, CO 280/49, Arthur to Hay September 24, 1834.
27. Reynolds 2004, 143.
28. Ibid., 130.
29. Boyce 2009, 146.
30. Ibid.
31. My emphasis: Plomley 1966, 51. The high death rate among those
Aborigines relocated to Bruny Island foreshadowed that which decimated
the surviving Aboriginal population as a whole on Flinders Island.
32. Ibid., 576fn.2; Reynolds 2004, 141–143.
33. Quoted Reynolds 2004, 146.
34. Boyce 2009, 268–270.
35. Shaw 1980, 125.
36. Plomley 1966; Edmonds 2014.
37. Shaw 1980, 132. Reynolds 1995 and Boyce 2009 concur that those
Aboriginal people who surrendered to Robinson did so only after false
promises that their removal to Flinders Island would be a temporary
measure until the ﬁghting was over.
38. Plomley 1966, 2.
39. See Ryan 2012.
40. Ryan 1996; Johnston 2004.
41. Buxton 1848, 125.
42. British Parliamentary Papers 1968/1836–7, 75.
43. Laidlaw 2004.
44. Cannon 1983, 365–391; Millis 1992, 375–380.
45. Read 1988; Greer 1993.
46. Quoted Shaw 1980, 197.
47. Rutherford 1961, v.

48. Sinclair 2012, np.

49. Dale 2006.
50. Grey 1840.
51. Salesa 2011, 108.
52. Lawson 2014.
53. Sera-Shriar 2013.
54. Prichard 1839, 1.
55. Grey 1840, np.
56. Ibid.
57. Grey, 1841, 1855; Grant 2005; Stocking 1987; Thornton 1983.
58. Bank 2000; Bleek, 1858–1859; Dubow 1995, 78–79.
59. Stocking 1987, 81. Grey’s identification of north-western Aboriginal
Australians’ ability not only to survive in harsh environments, but also to
secure an abundance of resources, was a key inspiration for Marshall
Sahlin’s famous characterization of poverty as not “just a relation
between means and ends,” but rather “a relation between people”:
Sahlins 1974, 37–38.
60. Grant 2005, 36.
61. Peires 1989; Lester 2001.
62. Grant 2005, 36, 46.
63. Marx 1887, 439, 539; Hall 2002, 212–213.
64. Merivale 1861, 499.
65. Ibid., 510–511.
66. Ibid.
67. Agamben 1998.
68. What is missing from the accounts of both Arthur’s and Grey’s various forms
of humanitarian governance here is the agency of those subjected to them: the
intended “beneficiaries” among Indigenous peoples. Arguably, this is also
what is missing from most scholarly accounts of the forms of humanitarian
governance that have succeeded these British colonial ones. Elsewhere I have
argued that colonial humanitarian governance, intended to be counter-
revolutionary as it was, opened opportunities for colonized peoples to
acquire what Tracey Banivanua Mar (2013) called “imperial literacy.” This
entailed the intended beneficiaries of humanitarian forms of governance
gaining some, albeit excessively limited, capacity in their dealings with the
colonial state: Lester and Dussart 2014; Laidlaw and Lester 2015. Michael
Barnett, too, has critiqued a view of “recipients” only as “victims,” for
obscuring “the capacity of the affected populations to save themselves and
even to act strategically and manipulate outside interventions for their own
purposes” (2013, 380).
For the need to examine contemporary humanitarian camps from the per-
spective of their residents, see Zaman 2017.
69. In original project outline provided to contributors to this volume.
70. It is no coincidence that a newfound attentiveness to the welfare of enslaved
people, rather than simply the fact of their enslavement, took place in the
context of the Haitian Revolution. Despite the pioneering work of
C. L. R. James, who first pointed out its significance for the creation of the

modern world in 1938, the impact of this successful slave uprising and
creation of a republic, in unsettling European notions of entitlement to
govern enslaved populations, is only now being reassessed: James 1989
(orig. 1938); May 2008; Trouillot 1995; Geggus 2002; Fischer 2004;
Dubois 2005; Bhambra 2016.
71. Merivale 1861, 512.
72. Moyn 2017b, xv.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. Johnston 2017, 74. Johnston points out that both projects – humanitarian
governance and human rights – can and have been used by Aboriginal people
within Australia’s legal systems, even if not on the terms in which they were
formulated by colonists.

6 Humanitarian Intervention as an Entangled History

of Humanitarianism and Human Rights
* This chapter is based on the research for my new book, In the Cause of
Humanity. Eine Geschichte der humanitären Intervention im langen 19.
Jahrhundert. This chapter profited from the suggestions of many, for which I am
grateful. I specifically want to thank Michael Barnett, Marc Lazar, Paul–André
Rosental, and the participants of the international doctoral seminar at the Centre
d’Histoire at Sciences Po Paris as well as Tobias Grill and Konstantin Rometsch.
1. Lillich 1969, 216.
2. For instance, new projects such as the Global Humanitarianism Research
Academy (GHRA), organized by the Leibniz Institute of European History
in Mainz, the University of Exeter, and the University of Cologne in
cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva,
connects both fields by bringing together young scholars working on the
history of human rights and of humanitarianism. See http://ghra.ieg-
mainz.de/ and http://hhr-atlas.ieg-mainz.de/.
3. Geyer 2016.
4. On this, see also Michael Barnett’s introduction to this volume.
5. For a clear distinction between humanitarianism and human rights and the
risk of conflating both fields, see Moyn 2016.
6. For two important recently published articles emphasizing this fluidity and the
close entanglement of both fields, see Thompson 2016b, especially 824–826;
Thompson 2018. For further debates about the entanglement of the histories
of humanitarianism and human rights, see also Cabanes 2014; Tusan 2014;
Watenpaugh 2015, 19–23; and especially the chapters by Stephen Hopgood
and Samuel Moyn in this volume.
7. Leebaw 2017.
8. In this chapter, I will follow Jeff L. Holzgrefe, who defines humanitarian
intervention as the “threat or use of force across state borders by a state (or
group of states) aimed at preventing or ending widespread and grave
violations of the fundamental human rights of individuals other than its
own citizens” (Holzgrefe 2004, 18). Holzgrefe’s definition is closely linked

to the more general conceptual deﬁnition proffered by R. J. Vincent, who

regards humanitarian intervention as “that activity undertaken by a state,
a group within a state, a group of states or an international organization
which interferes coercively in the domestic affairs of another state”
(Vincent 1974, 13). According to these definitions, humanitarian
intervention is also associated with the use of military force, and is
explicitly distinguished from other forms of humanitarian action. For
more discussion, see Wheeler 2003, 1–2; Welsh 2006, 3; Hehir 2010,
11–21; Weiss 2012, 6–15.
9. While other disciplines such as international law and political science have
already focused on the issue of humanitarian intervention for quite a while,
this is a rather new topic for historical research. However, in the last couple of
years there has been a growing number of publications approaching the topic
from a genuine historical perspective. For these approaches, see Bass 2008;
Simms and Trim 2011; Rodogno 2012; Klose 2016 and 2019.
10. See for instance Martinez 2012; Simms and Trim 2011, 21–22.
11. On the concept and practices of humanity in historical perspective see: Klose
and Thulin 2016.
12. Johnson 1755. As a fourth definition the dictionary referred to “Philology,
grammatical studies.”
13. Ibid. In Diderot’s famous Encylopédie the term “humanity” is also closely
related to social practice. For the English translation: “Humanity. Is
a feeling of good will toward all men. Ordinarily only great and
sensitive souls are consumed by it. This noble and sublime enthusiasm
is tortured by the sufferings of others and tormented by the need to
relieve such suffering; it fills men with the desire to traverse the world in
order to do away with slavery, superstition, vice, and misfortune” (Hoyt
and Cassirer 2003).
14. Here I refer to the term “humanitarian revolution” in the sense of the
revolutionary emergence of humanitarian sensibility and activities rather
than as a decline in violence, as it is interpreted by Pinker 2011, 129–188.
15. Laqueur 1989, 176–204; Moyn 2006; Hunt 2007; Wilson and Brown 2009;
Festa 2010; Fiering 1976; Halttunen 1995, 304–307; Haskell 1985a and
1985b. On this, see also Samuel Moyn’s chapter in this volume.
16. Malik 2014, 189–217. At the end of the nineteenth century, Henry S. Salt,
a British social reformer and founder of the association of the Humanitarian
League defined the term “humanitarianism” with the words: “by
humanitarianism I mean nothing more and nothing less than the study and
practice of humane principles – of compassion, love, gentleness, and
universal benevolence.” Salt 1891, 3; Salt 1907, 178–188. On this, see also
Jeffrey Flynn’s chapter in this volume.
17. The abolitionists constituted indeed a crucial humanitarian movement in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but were, as Alan Lester’s chapter in this
volume shows, by far not the only ones.
18. Clarkson 1808, 255–258; Klingberg 1926, 73; Stamatov 2013, 155–174.
19. For this reason most studies explicitly relate the campaign against the slave
trade in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the history of

humanitarianism instead of the history of human rights. See Moyn 2012a,

559–561. For two exceptions, see Martinez 2012; Blackburn 2011.
20. Quote by Wilberforce during the debate in the House of Commons on April
18 and 19, 1791 (Great Britain, Parliament, House of Commons 1791, 37).
21. Festa 2010; Stevenson 2017, 414–417. Concerning this idea the abolitionist
referred to the older tradition of the Quakers and their campaign against the
slave trade. See for instance Benezet 1784.
22. Clarkson 1808, 450; Guyatt 2000; Bourke 2011, 120.
23. Act of the British Parliament for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, March
25, 1807, BFSP 5, 559–568. See also Farrell 2007.
24. Act of the British Parliament, BFSP 5, 567.
25. On this deployment of the Royal Navy, see Lloyd 1968; Ward 1969; Rees
2009.
26. “Déclaration des 8 Cours, relative à l’Abolition Universelle de la Traite
des Nègres,” February 8, 1815, BFSP 3, 971–972. For a detailed
description of these negotiations, see Reich 1968, 137–140; Clark 2007,
37–60.
27. For the beginning of these negotiations from 1816 to 1819, see The National
Archives of the UK (TNA), Foreign Office (FO) 84/1 and TNA, FO 84/2;
“Note sur le projet d’une ligue maritime pour assurer l’abolition de la traite et
la répression de la piraterie des Barbaresques,” n.d, Le Ministère des Affaires
Étrangères, Archives des Affaires Étrangères (MAE), MD A15; Kielstra
2000, 64–67.
28. For this international treaty regime against the slave trade, see Nadelmann
1990, 491–498; Keene 2007; Mason 2009; Law 2010. For an overview of all
treaties concerning the slave trade in the period between 1776 to 1863, see
“Slave Trade Suppression Tables; or A Chronologically arranged Statement
of the Measures taken by different Nations for the Abolition of the Slave
Trade,” in Her Majesty’s Stationery Office 1865, 131–142.
29. Wheaton 1836, 114–115.
30. “[A] traffic so justly stigmatized by every civilized and Christian powers as
a crime against humanity” and “Public opinion stigmatizing the traffic as
a crime against humanity,” in Wheaton 1842, 4 and 16; Wheaton 1845, 594.
The British Navy officer Joseph Denman, who was on duty with the Royal
Navy in West Africa, also used the term “crime against humanity” in his
publication in 1850: “Public opinion urged on an unwilling government all
the efforts against the traffic at the Congress of Vienna; which, in declaring it
a crime against humanity and universal morality, spoke the sentiments of the
people of England” (Denman 1850, 10).
31. Bassiouni 2011.
32. “Though all but forgotten today, these slave trade courts were the first
international human rights courts,” in Martinez 2012, 6 and especially
148–157. Also Farida Shaikh speaks in the context of the Mixed
Commissions of “one of the earliest attempts to enforce international
human rights law.” See: Shaikh 2009, 42.
33. Simms and Trim 2011, 22.
34. Bluntschli 1872, 20, 265 and 269.

35. Rolin-Jaequemyns 1876, 675.

36. At this point, I agree with Samuel Moyn’s view that transnational anti-slavery
and humanitarian intervention were clearly part of the history of
humanitarianism. See Moyn 2016, 4. For the importance of the long
nineteenth century for a broader perspective, see Hoffmann 2016, 4 and
30–32.
37. For the eventual abolition of slavery, see Drescher 2009, 245–266 and
333–371; Blackburn 2011, 391–454.
38. For the significant entanglement of humanitarianism and European
colonialism/imperialism in the nineteenth century, see Paulmann 2016b;
Lester and Dussart 2014; Skinner and Lester 2012; Thompson 2016a;
Barnett 2011, 29–30 and 47–94. On this issue, see also Alan Lester’s
chapter in this volume.
39. See, for example, Lingelbach 1900; Rougier 1910.
40. Lingelbach 1900. Not all international legal scholars agreed on the doctrine
of humanitarian intervention. For this opposition, see Heraclides and Dialla
2015, 60–61 and 67–69.
41. Lingelbach 1900.
42. Neff 2014, 297.
43. Rougier 1910, 408–525.
44. “Les droits de l’homme seraient les droits antérieurs et supérieurs à toute
organisation politique, placés sous la garantie de toutes les nations . . . . Seule
la violation de ces droits essentiels serait une juste cause d’intervention.”
Ibid., 517.
45. Graham 1924, 320–321; Stowell 1932, 148. The historian Bruno Cabanes
identifies the interwar period as an important transformative moment, in
which an international rights discourse significantly arose. In his opinion
debates about “humanitarian rights” emerged during this time, which
strongly influenced the further history of human rights. Cabanes 2014.
46. Graham 1924, 320–321.
47. See “There exists now, therefore, not a subjective Law of Nature nor
a sentimental Law of Humanity to sanction interventions of a humanitarian
character, but a substantive Law of Nations defining the right of
humanitarian intervention in a new light” (Ibid., 321–322).
48. Ibid., 326.
49. For a discussion of Mandelstam and his importance, see Burger 2000, 69–82;
Aust 2014; Adak 2018.
50. Mandelstam 1931; Aust 2014, 1115–1117. Mandelstam’s position on
international human rights protection is also described in Mandelstam 1930.
51. Mandelstam 1931, 367–368.
52. Ibid., 375.
53. See Mazower 2006; Pedersen 2014, 107–194; Betts 2016, 53–58.
54. Article 2, Par. 4 and Par. 7 of the UN Charter.
55. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann argues that “Between the end of the Second World
War and the early 1990s there was not a single humanitarian, political or
military intervention that was justified through human rights” (Hoffmann
2016, 285). However, the legal debates about humanitarian intervention to

protect human rights indeed existed in this period and as shown emerged
already in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century.
56. Koskenniemi 1997, 244.
57. Lauterpacht 1943.
58. Ibid., 27–28. On his repeated references to humanitarian interventions
against slavery and on behalf of the protection of minorities in the
nineteenth century, see also Lauterpacht 1950, 120–121.
59. Lauterpacht 1943, 28.
60. Lauterpacht 1945, 169–178.
61. Ibid., 194–213.
62. Ibid., 209–210.
63. On this see also Oppenheim 1948, 280–287.
64. See Klose 2013.
65. See The International Law Association 1967, 744–754.
66. Lillich 1969. See also Lillich 1967.
67. Reisman and McDougal 1973, 167–195.
68. Ibid., 194–195. Instead of “Ibos” the correct term is “Igbos.”
69. Reisman and McDougal 1973, 179–183.
70. Paxman and Boggs 1973, 103–148; Wiseberg 1974, 61–98; de Schutter
1972; Franck and Rodley 1973; Fonteyne 1973; Murphy 1996, 135–142.
For a critical debate, see especially Brownlie 1974; Lillich 1974; Behuniak
1978; Hassan 1981; Bazyler 1987.
71. Bruch 2016; Hehir and Murray 2017; Menon 2016, 22–24; Frei, Stahl, and
Weinke 2017; Eckel 2017.
72. On this see also Beitz’s chapter in this volume.

7 Mobilizing Emotions: Shame, Victimhood, and Agency

1. Plato 2003, 338c2–3.
2. Pitkin 1993.
3. Barnett 2011; Boltanski 1999; Redﬁeld 2006. See also chapters by Barnett,
Beitz, Flynn, Givoni, Ticktin, and Feldman in this volume.
4. Keck and Sikkink 1999.
5. Locke 2016.
6. Lebron 2015.
7. Brysk 1993.
8. Goodman and Jinks 2013; Finnemore and Sikkink 1998; Sikkink 2011.
9. Roth 2004.
10. Foucault 1995; Kahan 2006; Lightfoot 2016; Milgram 1974.
11. Braithwaite 1989; Cohen 2007; Lifton 1973.
12. Dunant 1939, 13.
13. Ibid., 13.
14. Ibid., 13.
15. Arendt 1990; Boltanski 1999.
16. Singer 1972.
17. Pictet 1967.
18. Ibid.

19. Barnett 2011, 23

20. Ibid., 25.
21. Ibid.
22. Dunant 1939, 13.
23. Slim 2015.
24. Berlant 2011.
25. Cohen 2015.
26. Rubenstein 2016, 14.
27. Beltrán 2009.
28. Ibid.; Ticktin 2011a.
29. Anghie 2004; Khalili 2013; Kinsella 2011; Teitel 2011.
30. Arendt 1963.
31. Brauman 1993.
32. Binet 2015.
33. Power 2001, 106.
34. ICISS 2001.
35. See Power 2019.
36. Bali and Rana 2018.
37. Arendt 2007, 269.
38. Pictet 1967.
39. Benenson 1961.
40. Hopgood 2006.
41. Chakravarti 2014; Douglas 2001.
42. Rothberg 2009, 178.
43. Hausner 1977, 341.
44. Segev 1993; Zertal 2006.
45. Keck and Sikkink 1999.
46. Ticktin 2016.
47. Kinsella 2016.
48. Taylor 2001, 100.
49. Ibid., 100.
50. See Teitel 2011.
51. Roth 2004, 68.
52. TRC 1998, 41.
53. Brudholm 2008; Chakravarti 2014; Mihai 2016.
54. Du Bois 1919.
55. Locke 2018, 12.
56. Wells 1900.
57. Ibid.
58. Gooding-Williams 2011.
59. Quoted in Regan 2013, 115.
60. Du Bois 1947.
61. See Bullard 2005; Pellow 2007.
62. COPINH 2019.
63. Montes 2019.
64. Ibid.
65. Aesop 2012.

8 At Odds? Human Rights and Humanitarian Approaches

to Violence Against Women During Conflict
1. Swaine 2004.
2. The term “conflict-related sexual violence” (CRSV) is used to refer to forms
of sexualized harms that may be directly or indirectly related to a conflict,
may be enacted by armed and non-armed/civilian actors and take place in the
context of a conflict setting. Swaine 2019.
3. See, for example, UNOHCHR 2018; MONUSCO and UNOHCHR 2013.
4. See Commission of Inquiry report, for example, United Nations Human
Rights Council 2017; UNOHCHR 2014.
5. See Justice Rapid Response, JRR Expert Roster, www.justicerapidresponse.org
/what-we-do/jrr-roster/.
6. For example, see United Nations Human Rights Council 2013.
7. CEDAW 2013.
8. United Nations General Assembly 2015.
9. United Nations Security Council 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013.
10. IASC 2005 and 2015.
11. See Global Protection Cluster – Gender Based Violence, www.globalprotec
tioncluster.org/en/areas-of-responsibility/gender-based-violence.html.
12. UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2014.
13. UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office 2013.
14. See, for example, Inter-Agency Standing Committee Gender Marker, www
.humanitarianresponse.info/en/topics/gender/page/iasc-gender-marker.
15. Development Initiatives 2014.
16. The term “conflict-related violence against women” (CRVAW) is used here
to refer to all forms of physical, sexual, economic, psychological, emotional
harms, and abuse that may be directly or indirectly related to a conflict, may
be enacted by armed and non-armed/civilian actors and take place in the
context of a conflict setting. It is used as an umbrella term to capture all forms
of harm women and girls might experience in the conflict, distinctive from
CRSV, which only focuses on sexualized harms (see note 2).
17. O’Rourke and Swaine 2018.
18. Teitel 1997, 302–303.
19. Teitel 1997.
20. Leebaw 2007, 224.
21. For example, see UNOHCHR Country Offices, www.ohchr.org/EN/Count
ries/Pages/CountryOfficesIndex.aspx. And for an overview of UN system
human rights bodies, see Human Rights Bodies, www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBo
dies/Pages/HumanRightsBodies.aspx.
22. Leebaw 2007, 224.
23. Barnett 2013, 382.
24. See Inter-Agency Standing Committee on Humanitarian Action, https://int
eragencystandingcommittee.org.
25. Barnett 2013, 380.
26. Labbé 2012.
27. Ibid., 6.
28. Nickel 2002; Barnett 2012.

29. Engle 2014; Eriksson Baaz and Stern 2013.

30. Engle 2018.
31. Ní Aoláin 2009.
32. Engle 2018.
33. Alston and Goodman 2013, 166.
34. United Nations General Assembly 1967.
35. United Nations General Assembly 1979.
36. CEDAW 1989 and 1992.
37. United Nations General Assembly 1993.
38. Edwards 2011.
39. CEDAW 1992.
40. IASC 1999.
41. United Nations Economic and Social Council 1997.
42. IASC 1999, Para 2, c.
43. Ibid., Para 4, a.
44. IASC 2008, 3.
45. IASC 2006, 2010, 2017, 2019.
46. UNHCR 1995, 2003.
47. IASC 2015, 5.
48. Sphere 2018.
49. United Nations Security Council 2009, para 12 (1889).
50. United Nations Security Council 2013, para 19 (2106).
51. Charlesworth and Chinkin 2000.
52. Engle 2018; Meger 2016.
53. Engle 2018.
54. See United Nations Security Council 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013.
55. UK Foreign and Commonwealth Ofﬁce 2013.
56. See, for example, United Nations Development Programme nd; Justice
Rapid Response and UN Women 2018.
57. United Nations Security Council 2010.
58. Ibid.
59. See, for example, United Nations Security Council 2018.
60. Engle 2018, 4–5.
61. Médecins Sans Frontières 2014.
62. Freedman 2014, 136.
63. Read-Hamilton 2014.
64. Charlesworth and Chinkin 2000.
65. Ibid.
66. Engle 2018.
67. Anholt 2016, 3.
68. Ticktin 2011b, 251.
69. Freedman 2014.
70. Anholt 2016, 4.
71. Ibid., 3, citing Tiktin 2011b, 260.
72. See Flynn in this volume.
73. Buss 2014; Swaine 2018.
74. Charlesworth and Chinkin 2000; Sideris 2001.

75. Cockburn 2004; Kelly 1998; Moser 2001.

76. Swaine 2018.
77. Ibid.; Urban Walker 2009.
78. Ball 1996, 13.
79. Swaine 2016.
80. Henttonen et al. 2008.
81. IASC 2015.
82. See Flynn in this volume.
83. See Global Protection Cluster, Human Rights in Humanitarian Action, w
ww.globalprotectioncluster.org/en/areas-of-responsibility/human-rights-i
n-humanitarian-action.html.
84. See Barnett’s Introduction and Conclusion this volume.
85. Beitz in this volume.
86. Ibid.
87. COFEM 2017.
88. Gouws 1996.
89. Molyneux 1985, 231.
90. Ibid.
91. Ibid., 232.
92. Ibid., 233.
93. IASC 2006
94. Molyneux 1985, 233.
95. Scully 2011, 17.
96. Dobash and Dobash 1983; Swaine 2018.
97. Ticktin 2011b, 250–251.
98. See Ticktin in this volume.
99. IASC 2015; Global Protection Cluster 2019.
100. Fineman 2008, 5.

9 Innocence: Shaping the Concept and Practice

of Humanity
1. Le Pape and Salignon 2003, x.
2. Oxford English Dictionary, sv “innocence, n.,” www.oed.com/view/Entry/96
292?redirectedFrom=Innocence.
3. Ariès 1962.
4. Bernstein 2011.
5. Locke 1975.
6. Malkki 2010.
7. Public lecture at the New School for Social Research, New York, November 5,
2013.
8. Meyerson 2017.
9. Bernstein 2011, 30–35.
10. Fassin 2010.
11. de Torrenté 2004, 4.
12. Redﬁeld 2013, 39.
13. Bouris 2007.

14. Le Pape and Salignon 2003.

15. Redﬁeld 2013; Ross 2002; Vallaeys 2004.
16. Caldwell 2009.
17. MSF, however, grew out of a revolutionary context in which populations in
danger, not simply individuals, were also part of its mandate (Redﬁeld 2013).
18. Ticktin 2011a.
19. I am primarily speaking of the type of medical humanitarianism that was
shaped by MSF and that includes, for example, Médecins du Monde
(Doctors of the World).
20. Brauman 1993, 154.
21. Le Pape and Salignon 2003.
22. Bradol 2003, 11.
23. Ticktin 2011b.
24. Abu-Lughod 2013; Volpp 2015.
25. Fassin 2011, 167.
26. Miller 2004; Rubin 1993.
27. For Joanna Faulkner (2011, 333), carnal knowledge assumes a kind of
ignorance that in turn makes way for pleasure.
28. Kincaid 1998, 55.
29. Vance 2012.
30. Ibid., 207.
31. Ibid.
32. Ticktin 2011a.
33. Kelly 2015.
34. Roth 2004, 67; see also Kelly 2014, 323.
35. Kelly 2014.
36. Taken from an interview I conducted with Meryl Schwartz at the Innocence
Project in NYC, August 8, 2016.
37. According to the OED, Thomas Hobbes invoked this meaning in Leviathan
(1651) in speaking of a sovereign prince who put to death an innocent subject.
38. Halley 1993.
39. Smith 2010, 321.
40. Ibid., 322.

10 Reckoning with Time: Vexed Temporalities in Human

Rights and Humanitarianism
1. UNRWA Archives Box RE 67, RE 500, part 7, Petition from Mukhtar of
Balata camp to UNRWA Commissioner General, August 6, 1981. In
UNRWA’s response to the petition, budget constraints were referenced as
the reason no restoration was possible.
2. Käpylä, and Kennedy 2014; Fassin 2005; Ticktin 2011a.
3. Cabanes 2014.
4. Ibid., 6.
5. UNHCR 2010.
6. Final act of the United Nations Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Status of
Refugees and Stateless Persons. July 28, 1951. www.unhcr.org/en-us/3b66c2aa10

7. Kuwali 2013a. See also Kuwali 2013b.

8. Moyn 2018.
9. Rancière 2004, 307.
10. David 2017, 298.
11. Lanegran 2005, 112.
12. Ibid., 112.
13. Huyssen 2011, 611.
14. Ibid., 607.
15. See also Dudai 2012.
16. David 2017, 297.
17. Bosco 2004.
18. Slyomovics 2005.
19. Ibid., 12.
20. Sayigh 2013; Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014.
21. See also Rashed, Short, and Docker 2014.
22. Butler 2009.
23. Sayigh 2013, 58.
24. Khalidi 1991.
25. Davis 2010.
26. The group Zochrot (memory) is a dissident Israeli organization that insists
precisely on a reckoning both with Palestinian presence and Israeli
responsibility for Palestinian loss. See http://zochrot.org/.
27. Published as Ashrawi 2002.
28. Al-Majdal double issue 39/40 (Autumn 2008/Winter 2009).
29. A reporter in Gaza during this attack recounted that “the paramedic we were
with referred to the current displacement of over 46,000 Gazan Palestinians as
a continuation of the ongoing Nakba, the dispossession and exile seen through
generation after generation enduring massacre after massacre” (Butterly 2009).
30. Hartman 2011.
31. Full ofﬁcial text of President Mahmoud Abbas’ speech at the UNGA,
Palestine News & Information Agency (WAFA), September 23, 2011.
32. This section includes material from Feldman 2018.
33. Calhoun 2004; Cooper 2015.
34. Eyal Weizman refers to the “humanitarian present” to characterize “our”
time. That humanitarianism’s time is the present may then also impact this
wider experience of time (Weizman 2012).
35. Zetter and Long 2012. This analysis was written before the full unfolding of
the Syrian refugee crisis, but there is no reason to think this displacement will
be short.
36. Brun 2016.
37. Brun 2015.
38. Redﬁeld 2005.
39. McKay 2012.
40. Norum, Mostafanezhad, and Sebro 2016.
41. Time is also a problem for humanitarian workers, often experienced as
boredom. See De Lauri 2014.
42. Chan and Loveridge 1987; Dunn 2014.

43. Roy 1995, 104–106.

44. The editorial argued they would then be “persons who have been resettled
into something approaching normal circumstances” (UA OR 60 OR 215 (IS-
1) part 3, 25 December 1972). UNRWA’s Gaza director commented on the
editorial that “it is strictly propaganda in my opinion” (from Director of
Operations, Gaza, to Commissioner-General, December 26, 1972).
45. UA OR 60 OR 215 (IS-1) part 3, December 26, 1972, extracts from Jerusalem
Post.
46. UA, Box OR 60 OR 215, report from UNRWA General Services Ofﬁcer,
Gaza, to director of UNRWA operations, Gaza, July 24, 1971.
47. UA OR 60 OR 215 (IS-1) part 1, letter from President of UNRWA staff
association to Commissioner General, July 28, 1971.
48. Ibid.
49. UA OR 60 OR 215 (IS-1) part 1, from UNRWA to Israeli Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, August 8, 1971.
50. UA OR 60 OR 215 (IS-1) part 1, UNRWA special report to General
Assembly, September 17, 1971.
51. UA OR 60 OR 215 (IS-1) part 1, from Commissioner-General to General
Gazit, August 21, 1971.
52. UA OR 60 OR 215 (IS-1) part 1, from teacher in Jabalia elementary school to
director of UNRWA operations, Gaza, July 29, 1971.
53. UA OR 60 OR 215 (IS-1) part 2, from Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to
Commissioner-General, April 24, 1972.
54. UA OR 60 OR 215 (IS-1) part 3, draft memo from UNRWA to Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, October 16, 1972.
55. UA, RE Box 4, RE 200, part 2, memorandum by Department of Relief
Services, Cabinet memorandum 7/82.
56. As Arendt puts it: “Privileges in some cases, injustices in most, blessings and
doom are meted out to them according to accident and without any relation
whatsoever to what they do, did, or may do” (1951, 296).
57. Jelin 1994, 39.
58. Ibid.
59. Nussbaum 2016.
60. Laguardia 2017, 194.
61. Ibid., 212.
62. Babul 2012, 33.
63. Hopgood 2013.
64. Weiss 1990, 200.
65. Hiskes 2005, 1346.
66. Worland 2016.
67. Parker 2017.
68. Hiltermann, cited in Allen 2013, 59–60.
69. Allen 2013, 123–124.
70. Ibid., 104.
71. HRCRT Policy, 6.
72. Bajaj 2011. Human Rights Education Associates is one organization
dedicated to advancing this mission (www.hrea.org/).

73. UNRWA reports that there are almost 500,000 students currently in its schools.
74. UNRWA 2013, 8.
75. Oguzertem and McAdams 2015.
76. UNRWA 2013, 7.
77. In detail these are:
1. Human dignity: all human beings, by virtue of being human, deserve to be
respected and treated well.
2. Universality: human rights are universal. All people everywhere in the
world are entitled to them.
3. Equality and nondiscrimination: all individuals are equal as human beings
and by virtue of the inherent dignity of each person. No one should
therefore suffer discrimination.
4. Participation and inclusion: all people have the right to participate in and
access information relating to the decision-making processes that affect
their lives and wellbeing.
5. Tolerance: tolerance is respect, acceptance and appreciation of the rich
diversity of our world’s cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being
human. (Toolkit 10)
78. Hamas objected to the program in Gaza in precisely these terms, and it also
objected to teaching about the Holocaust (https://prrnblog.wordpress.com/
2010/12/20/hamas-unrwa-and-human-rights-education/).
79. Pinto 2014.

11 Between the Border and a Hard Place: Negotiating

Protection and Humanitarian Aid after the Genocide
in Cambodia, 1979–1999
* I am very grateful to the feedback from colleagues involved in the workshops
that took place in GWU and to Michael Barnett for his challenging and
attentive reading of drafts of this chapter.
1. Interview with Rob Overtoom, November 10, 2017, Kampot. Cambodia.
2. On paternalism, see Barnett 2016.
3. Arguably the 1990s were a hiatus between two phases of political instrumen-
talization of the genocide. Since the late 1990s, however, the genocide has become
part of the legitimacy of the regime led by Hun Sen. The Prime Minister Hun Sen
made considerable use of the genocide in the 2018 electoral campaign, www
.phnompenhpost.com/national-politics/analysis-new-propaganda-documentary-
hun-sen-attempts-rewrite-history. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj3dAlpf7ls
released on January 3, 2018 or the re-enactment of Genocidal acts in the
National Day or remembrance on May 21, 2018, www.phnompenhpost.com/na
tional/national-day-remembrance-held. Hun Sen’s party won all 125 seats in the
Cambodian parliamentary election of 2018.
4. The ofﬁcial name of Cambodia was its Khmer shortened name “Kampuchea”
between 1975 and 1989 when the transitional “State of Cambodia” was
established.
5. On this, see Richmond and Franks 2007.

6. “Operation Plan, Repatriation of Cambodian Refugees and Displaced

Persons” January 1992, Archives MSF, Paris, Thailande, Khao I Dang
1990–1992 rapports Kit Medi RP1.
7. www.websitesrcg.com/border/border-camps.html, a website by Richard Rowat.
8. Terry 2002, 131; Mason and Brown 1983.
9. Barber 1997, 8–14; French 2002, 427–470.
10. Locard 2005, 136–137.
11. Roberts 2010.
12. MSF grew from being a small French NGO to becoming a major
confederation of operational centers in that era. MSF’s logistics also dates
from the work done in camps, as did its logistics department
13. Gilles Germain, “Note de synthèse à François Jean,” February 3, 1993,
Archives MSF, Papiers François Jean, Boite ABILE.
14. Thailand was not a signatory of UN refugee convention and displaced
Cambodians had an ambiguous legal status throughout the period.
15. The term and its uses in relation to refugees are object of contention, see
Agamben 1998; Owens 2009.
16. Kraus 1944, 5–17. Kraus calls some of the more sophisticated interventions
“building community services,” beyond and above protection.
17. The concept of nonrefoulement, from the French, was coined it seems by
Stéphane Rousseau, protection officer of UNBRO, see Stéphane Rousseau,
“Protection Officer’s Legal Framework on the Thai-Cambodian Border,”
1992, Private archive S. Rousseau, Bangkok. The official archives of
UNBRO no longer exist. Many thanks to Stéphane Rousseau for sharing
this invaluable private archive.
18. Oesterheld 2014.
19. Shawcross 1984, 52–71.
20. Interview with Philippe The Long, Kampot, November 2017.
21. See the testimonial published on Khmerization.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/thai-
massacre-of-khmer-refugees-at-html or the Cambodia watch attempt at
compiling memoirs: http://camwatchblogs.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/thai-
armys-atrocity-at-mount-dangrek.html.
22. https://cwcinternational.wordpress.com/2010/05/17/khmers-in-norway-com
memorate-the-deaths-of-khmer-refugees-dumped-in-dangrek-mountains-by-t
hai-troops/.
23. Jean-Pierre Hiégel who worked originally for the ICRC developed a very
original response to the mental health needs of Cambodian patients by
integrating Kru Khmer traditional healing. Hiégel was supported by a range
of NGOs over the 1980s. See Hiégel-Landrac and Hiégel, 1996.
24. Gyallay-Pap 1989, 261.
25. Ibid., 267.
26. Arguably the 1924 declaration hinted as much but education featured
explicitly only in the 1959 UN declaration. Throughout the 1980s
preparatory texts leading to the 1989 declaration of the right of children
were taking place. www.humanium.org/fr/normes/declaration-1959/texte-
integral-declaration-droits-enfant-1959/.
27. Gyallay-Pap, “Reclaiming,” 273.

28. Ibid., 273–274.

29. Rithy Panh, “‘La Famille Tan’ La Sept [Arte], 1995, 31’56,” Archives
Televisuelles Bophana (Phnom Penh), Collection ITI 20H, fonds Rithy
Panh, RIPA VI 871,
30. Boehnlein, Kinzie, Ben, and Fleck 1985.
31. There was considerable divergence of opinion on the validity of PTSD
categories. According to my informants working in the camps, humanitarians
in the ﬁeld were skeptical and thought the diagnostic premature. Rob Overtoom
interview.
32. Mollica et al. 1993, 581–586; Mollica et al. 2002, 158–166; Sack et al. 1986,
377–383.
33. Sack et al. 1994, 387–395; Nann 2009, 55. Boehnlein 2002, 712.
34. Fassin and Retchman 2007.
35. Blair 2000, 23–30; Carlson and Rosser-Hogan 1994, 43–58.
36. Rechtman 2004, 913–915; also, for a distinct interpretation of the invention
of PTSD, see Young 2004, 127–146.
37. Guillou 2012, 212.
38. Bophana, INA VI 1445, Les Dossiers de l’écran, November 27, 1979.
39. Shawcross 1984, 95–111. The famine had been claimed by the Vietnamese
and Cambodian authorities but it soon became reinterpreted as a genocidal
weapon of war when the Vietnamese proved unwilling to allow food to be
delivered. Ultimately there was severe malnutrition but no famine.
40. Davey 2015, 201–209.
41. Follézou was a French communist party and trade unionist leader. See his
biographical notice on Maitron, http://maitron-en-ligne.univ-paris1.fr/spip
.php?article195255.
42. www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/1980/01/30/la-querelle-des-organisations-
humanitaires-une-polemique-sterile-en-marge-du-drame-de-tout-un-peu
ple_3070716_1819218.http. Davey 2015, 201; also Shawcross 1984,
207, 253.
43. Brodiez 2006, 151–167.
44. Interview with Jean-Pierre Hocké, High Commissioner 1986–1989.
May 2017.
45. Refugee policy group, “Repatriation, Cambodia a Time for Return, Reconci-
liation and Reconstruction,” unpublished report, Washington and Geneva,
October 1991, Archives MSF (Paris), papiers François Jean, ABILE.
46. “Feeding Peace or Feeding War?” Diakonia, Bangkok, News from the Jesuit
Refugee Services, November 1989, 1.
47. Minutes of the 6th NGO forum, September 1989, “report from the Border,”
Archives MSF (Paris), papiers François Jean, Droits de l’homme, 7.
48. Mouvement d’entraide pour le Tiers Monde et la coopération, minutes of the
meeting of November 29, 1989, Archives MSF (Paris), papiers François Jean,
ABILE.
49. Brown 1992, 88–95.
50. Doyle and Suntharalingam 1994, 118–119.
51. To summarize, the United Nations Advance Mission in Cambodia was
subsumed in 1992 within a new larger mission UNTAC (United Nation

Transition Authority in Cambodia) 16,000 soldiers strong and 3,500

policemen strong. See Curtis 1993.
52. Ponchaud 1977.
53. Hall and Getlin 1992.
54. “International Aid Workers in Cambodia on the Thai Cambodian Border
demand UN Cambodian Seat to be challenged,” August 6, 1990, Archives
MSF (Paris), papiers François Jean, Droits de l’Homme.
55. It was occasionally voiced, however: Asian Watch, a US human Right NGO
had produced a report in 1988 entitled “Khmer Rouge Abuses along the Thai
Cambodian Border,” February 1988, Archives MSF (Paris), papiers
François Jean, ABILE.
56. Shawcross, Quality of Mercy, 155–156.
57. Walter 2007, 143.
58. Jackson 1987, 2.
59. Ibid., 14–16.
60. Ibid., 21.
61. Walker 2007, 155.
62. The forum’s initial budget was 48,000 dollars in 1990, with funding
originating from seven large INGOs.
63. Davey 2015.
64. “Au Cambodge Ils reviennent,” Opération Cambodge, November 16, 1989,
Archives MSF (Paris), papiers François Jean, ABILE; “Les Khmers Rouges
Reviennent: Avons-nous le Droit de ne Rien Faire?” Handicap International,
24, 1990, 2–5.
65. Minutes of the 6th meeting of the NGO Forum, Quaker House,
Brussels, September 4–6, 1989, Archives MSF (Paris), papiers François
Jean, Droits de l’Homme.
66. Memorandum letter from Lucile de la Brabandere to members of the forum,
Oxfam Belgium, October 2, 1990. Archives MSF (Paris), papiers François
Jean, Droits de l’Homme.
67. Convention entre Lucile de la Brabandere au nom du Forum des ONG et
Raoul Jennar, March 29, 1990, Archives MSF (Paris), papiers François Jean,
Droits de l’Homme.
68. Jennar 1995.
69. Peschoux 1992.
70. Quaker United Nations Ofﬁce, “Policies and Procedures Relevant to the
Representation of Cambodia in the United Nations,” Archives MSF
(Paris), papiers François Jean, Droits de l’Homme.
71. Minutes of the 7th meeting of the NGO Forum, Quaker House,
Brussels, February 26–27, 1990, Archives MSF (Paris), papiers François
Jean, Droits de l’Homme.
72. Fax from Action Nord-Sud and Handicap International to MSF, reporting
on the meeting of February 2, 1993, Archives MSF (Paris), papiers François
Jean, Droits de l’Homme.
73. “Standard Operating Procedures for Medical Activities during the
Repatriation Process,” March 18, 1992, Archives MSF (Paris), Thailande,
Khao I Dang 1990–1992 rapports Kit Medi RP1.

74. February 4, 1991, Archives MSF (Paris), papiers François Jean, Droits de
l’Homme.
75. Hall, John, and Taylor 2003. Lawn et al. 2008.
76. Strangio 2014, 138–139.
77. http://sithi.org/admin/upload/law/Unofﬁcial-Translation-LANGO.pdf.
78. www.cambodiadaily.com/news/two-years-on-ngo-law-remains-ambiguous-
132456/.
79. Strangio 2014, 210–213.
80. Taithe 2016, 335–358
81. Jansen 2015.
82. This is rather different from the more commonplace take on the militarization
of humanitarianism argued by many in the aftermath of the 1990s military
interventions. See, for instance, Chandler 2001.
83. See Guillou 2012, 216–222.
84. See Chandler 2008, 355–369.
85. Rechtman 2006, 1–11; Rechtman 1993, 259–269.
86. Hughes 2007.
87. Far from original hopes: Duffy 1994; Hughes 2007.
88. www.khmertimeskh.com/50517663/people-support-a-multiparty-democ
racy-hun-sen-says/.

Conclusion: Practices of Humanity

1. www.oed.com/view/Entry/89262?redirectedFrom=human+right
s#eid1123373.
2. This is the second entry. The ﬁrst refers to the belief that Christ was both divine
and human. www.oed.com/view/Entry/272189?redirectedFrom=humanitaria
nism#eid.
3. Hunt 2007, 20. Also see Lauren 1998; Ishay 2008; Beitz 2009; Schmitz and
Sikkink 2002.
4. See, for instance, Barnett 2011; Paulmann 2016a; Skinner and Lester 2012.
5. Patten 2014, 41. For the distinction between natural and social kinds, see
Hacking 1998.
6. Barnett 2011.
7. This section draws from Barnett 2018.
8. For various statements on practices, see Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina, and von
Savigny 2005; Rouse 2007; Nocilini 2012; Ortner 2006; and Adler and
Pouliot 2011. For applications to human rights, see Goodale and Merry
2007; Meierhenrich 2013; Schaffer 2014; Beitz 2009; Karp 2013; Lamb
2019; Redhead and Turnbull 2011; Nash 2015; Kurasawa 2007; and
Dudai 2019. And for humanitarianism, see Stein 2011; Barnett 2005;
Krause 2014; Roth 2015.
9. For discussions of boundaries, see Tilly 2004; Abbott 1995; Helte 2012;
Lamont and Molnar 2002; Pachuki, Pendergrass, and Lamont 2007;
Wimmer 2008.
10. Wegner 1998.

11. Carruth; Gottlieb, Filc, and Davidovitch 2012.

12. Nussbaum 2001, 306, 314.
13. However, see Ignatieff 2001 on the blurry relationship between rights and
needs.
14. Campbell 1974, 9. Also see Willen 2007.
15. For bare life, see Agamben 1988. For regime of life, see Stevenson
2014, 68.
16. Calhoun 2008.
17. Lauren 1998; Hunt 2007; Moyn 2012b; Wilson and Brown 2009; Ishay
2008; Hopgood 2013; Beitz 2009; Karp 2013; Schmitz and Sikkink
2002.
18. Beitz and Goodin 2009; Shue 1980.
19. Zald 1996, 262. Also see Goffman 1974, 21; Snow et al. 1986, 464.
20. Also see Watenpaugh 2015, 57–90; Lidchi 2016; Zacher,
Brehm, and Savelsberg 2014; Hoijer 2004; Spelman 2001; Moon
2012.
21. Also see Feldman 2009; and Ticktin 2016.
22. Dudai 2019, 275.
23. Burke 2017; Taithe 2019. Burke, 2019.
24. For an extended discussion, see Ross 2018.
25. See Brown 2006; Keys 2014; and Burke 2017.
26. Sontag 2003.
27. Twomey 2012; Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015.
28. For discussions of the “victim,” complex and otherwise, see Lacerda 2016;
Baines. 2009; Govier and Verwoerd 2004; Dean 2010, 1–30; Fassin and
Rechtman 2009; and van Wijk 2015.
29. Halttunen 1995.
30. Kennedy 2009; Photographers without Borders, nd.
31. Also see Clark 2016.
32. Ticktin 2016
33. Stein 2011, 89.
34. Wilson and Brown 2009, 7; Wilson 2008, 342, 351; Joas 2013, 186,
195; McManus 2017, 8; Dembour, and Kelly 2017; Bruch 2014, 41;
Slim 2015, 17; O’Flaherty and Ulrich 2010, 16; Cody, Wilson, and
Rasmussen 2001.
35. Hurwitz 2013, 513; Cody, Wilson, and Rasmussen 2001; Neier 2013.
36. Beitz 2009, 209–210; Goodale 2008, 6.
37. Slim 2015, 17.
38. Moon 2016.
39. Redﬁeld 2015 and 2016.
40. For overviews and assessments of naming and shaming,
see Kiznelbach and Lehmann 2015; McEntire, Leiby, and Krain
2015.
41. Slim 2015, 17. Also see Kellenberger 2004; Forsythe 2005a; Magone,
Neuman, and Weissman 2011; Pease 2016; Minear and Smith 2007; Slim
2019.
42. Sykes 2012.

43. Schauer 2009.

44. There also is evidence of growing technical reasoning. See Dale and Kyle
2016.
45. Kratochwil 2014, 200.
46. Hurwitz 2003, 510.
47. Niezen 2007. Also see Kurasawa 2007, 194; O’Flaherty and Ulrich
2010; Redhead and Turnbull 2011; Buchanan 2013.
48. Shklar 1964, 1.
49. Fassin 2012, 1.
50. Sphere 2018, 2.
51. Lohne and Sandvik 2017, 14.
52. Willen 2007.
53. Lohne and Sandvik 2017, 16; Rubenstein 2016.
54. Dale and Kyle 2016.
55. Stein 2011; Hopgood 2008; Barnett 2012.
56. Hopgood 2008.
57. Rouse 2007, 503; Adler and Pouliot 2011, 8.
58. Pictet 1979. Also see Weiss 1999.
59. Hilhorst and Jansen 2010.
60. Leebaw 2007; Forsythe 2013.
61. Leebaw 2007; Brown 2004, 453.
62. Leebaw 2007, 226.
63. Ibid., 227.
64. Barnett and Weiss 2013; Cutts 1998; Warner 1999.
65. Although in some religious teachings, it is the sinful behavior of
communities that causes God to unleash such destruction. Moreover,
often there are parties that are responsible for creating conditions that
make some populations more vulnerable to natural disasters, hence,
destabilizing the idea of the natural and interjecting the political and
social.
66. Schatzki 2005a, 3; Schatzki 2005b 42–55.
67. Wuthnow 1989, 40. Also see Fligstein and McAdam 2002, 43–45.
68. Cladis 2008, xxviii. Also see Joas 2013, 5, 7; Agamben 1998; Levy and
Snzaider 2006.
69. Dewey 1934, 19.
70. Taylor 2004, 15–16.
71. Ibid., 456; Casanova 2011.
72. Berger 1967; Frankel 1984.
73. Wydra 2015.
74. Taithe 2004, 156.
75. Arendt 1986, 299.
76. Seligman and Montgomery 2019.
77. Orwell 1949.
78. Sikkink 2018, 10.
79. Alston 2017; Dudai 2017.
80. Hopgood 2019.
81. Bennett 2019.

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83. Latour 2018.
84. www.economist.com/open-future/2019/04/25/how-genetic-engineering-will
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abolition, 123, 130, 131, 132–134 aid, 1, 21, 148, 159, 160, 190, 191
as humanitarian intervention in conditionality of, 1
nineteenth vs. twentieth centuries, humanitarian aid, 98, 194, 223, 225
128, 134 organizations, 1, 2, 4–5, 28,
legitimization of colonialism and 244–245, 246
imperialism, 133 workers, 3, 12, 18, 28, 194, 244
Slave Trade Act (1807), 131 see also recipients of aid
Slavery Abolition Act (1833), 133 amalgamation, as “humane” alternative to
abolitionism extermination, 109, 117, 121, 122,
British, 9, 63, 130, 240 124–125
abolitionists, 62, 130, 131, 133 amelioration, 107, 110, 112–114,
as advocates for colonialists and 123–124
missionaries, 20 ameliorative codes, 112, 123
“Am I not a man and a brother?” as of slavery, 24, 109, 110
emblem for, 131 Amnesty International (AI), 66, 68, 78–79,
humanity as moral category for argument 96, 97–98, 150
of, 131 Campaign against Torture, 44
sentimental appeals by, 53 anti-Palestinianism, 207 see also racism
Aboriginal languages, vocabulary of, 118 anti-slavery, 35, 36, 41, 116, 120, 123 see
Aboriginal people, 113 also slavery
of Australia, 113, 118, 119, 120, 266n75 “Appeal to the World, An” (Du Bois),
of Bruny Island, 113, 264n31 155–156
“extermination” of, 114, 119 Arendt, Hannah, 9, 15, 35, 43, 54–55, 57,
of Flinders Island, 115, 264n31 61, 144, 146, 148, 159, 213, 249,
of Van Diemen’s Land, 113 255n17, 277n56
abortion, 196–197, 198 Argentina, 150–151, 206
accountability, 141, 142–143, 152, 154, Arish, El, 211, 212–213
165–166 Arthur, George, 24, 109–117, 119, 122,
legal accountability, 26, 147, 162, 169, 123–124, 125, 265n68
171, 176 Atlantic Revolutions, 38, 255n18
of states, 174, 178, 180 atrocities, 40, 44, 45, 100, 103, 206
activism, 44 see humanitarianism, activism international tribunals for, 205
of; human rights, activism of lynching as institutionalized atrocity, 155
Africa in refugee camps, 224
“Scramble for Africa,” 40 in Van Diemen’s Land, 2, 116
slave trade with, 121, 131, 132, 133 see also genocide; massacres
see also entries for various African countries
Africans BAAS (British Association for the
paternalistic treatment of, 133 Advancement of Science), 119
Agamben, Giorgio, 5, 223 background knowledge, 237, 245, 261n11
Age of Reason, 1 see Enlightenment human rights vs. humanitarianism,
AI, 66 see Amnesty International 29, 245

330

principles as, 245 Cambodia, 28, 101, 219–222, 223,

see also humanitarianism, principles of; 227–230, 231–232, 233–234,
human rights, principles of 281n51
“bare life,” 10, 43, 69, 122, 223, 239 end of wars in, 222
Barnett, Michael, 46, 50, 73, 75, 85, 123, Kampuchea (former name of), 28,
128, 145, 201, 263n1 220–221, 279n4
Beitz, Charles R., 23, 60, 96, 178 see also Cambodians; Khmer Rouge
beneficence Cambodians, 224, 226, 229, 230, 232, 233
appeals for, 148, 151, 154 diaspora of, 224
duties of, 71, 80–81, 82–83 displaced persons in Thailand, 279n14
of privileged audiences, 86, 152, 154 genocide of, 219
see also human rights and Kru Khmer and mental health of, 279n23
humanitarianism refugee camps, 221
justice and beneficence of Khao-I-Dang in Thailand, 221
Benenson, Peter, 148–150 under Khmer Rouge control, 221
“The Forgotten Prisoners,” 148 see also Cambodia; Khmer people;
Biafra, 44, 66, 67, 137–138 Khmer Rouge
as “African Auschwitz,” 67 Canada, 109–110, 116–117, 155, 199, 206
civil war and famine in, 50, 66, 67, Cape Colony, 109, 117, 120–121, 122
127, 137 capitalism, 18–19, 36, 100–101, 189
Igbo people of, 138 carceral feminism, 169 see also feminists
infants of, 44, 65, 67 Casablanca (film), 18
see also Nigeria Catholic Relief Services (CRS), 97,
Biafra Story, The (Forsyth), 67 224, 230
Boltanski, Luc, 61–62, 259n52 CEDAW, 161 see Convention on the
boundaries Elimination of Discrimination
ethical significance of, 7 Against Women
“forces of compassion” and dissolution charity, 5
of, 145 as a Christian ethic, 145
for human bodies, 54 dark side of, 148, 150
for public and private spheres of women’s as distinct from human rights, 203
lives, 172 extended to animals and robots
for violence against women, 168, 174, possibility of, 10
176 as fulfillment of obligations to others, 7
see also human rights and in humanitarianism, 5, 12, 19, 23,
humanitarianism 107, 127
boundaries of justice in conflict with, 76
Bradol, Jean-Hervé, 18, 193 paternalism and, 14
Brauman, Rony, 18, 147, 193 as a theological virtue, 81
Britain, 38, 108, 118, 123, 133, 136 China, 101, 233
British Association for the Advancement of Christian Aid, 230
Science (BAAS), 119 Christian and Missionary Alliance
British Empire, 24, 108, 115, 117–118, (CAMA), 224
258n27 Christianity
Bruny Island, 113–114, 264n31 concept of humanity and as ethical basis
Buxton, Thomas Fowell, 113, 115 of human rights and
bystanders, 77, 144, 155, 241 humanitarianism, 9, 18
passivity of, 142, 145, 146–148 “reclaiming” Aboriginal people for, 113
shamefulness of, 147 Christians
see also shame collective rights of worship, 256n23
common morality and duties of, 81
Cabanes, Bruno, 204, 269n45 humanitarianism for white Christians, 40
Cáceres, Berta, 156 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 80
CAMA (Christian and Missionary On Duties (De Officiis), 80
Alliance), 224 citizenship, 22, 24, 33, 38–39, 42–43

Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous CRS, 97 see Catholic Relief Services
Organizations of Honduras CRSV, 160 see conflict-related sexual
(COPINH), 156–157 violence
civilians, 1, 3, 97, 98, 193, 205 CRVAW, 272n16 see conflict-related
cluster system of United Nations, 1 see violence against women
protection
Cold War, 1, 40, 165, 222, 228 Darfur, 3, 175 see also Sudan
colonialism, 20, 117, 133 Darwin, Charles, 120
combatants, 97, 150, 174, 176, 222 see also David, Lea, 206
noncombatants Davis, David Brion, 34–35, 36
compassion, 8–9, 51, 61–64, 91, 145–146 The Problem of Slavery in Western
humanitarian compassion, 47, 218 Culture, 34
complex political victims, 192, 195 see also Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the
victims Citizen (1789), 54, 61
complicity, 67, 68, 101, 103–104, 194, 196 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence
conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), Against Women (DEVAW), 166 see
160–161, 164, 167, 169–170, 172 also violence against women
as distinct from conflict-related violence democracy
against women, 272n16 freedom vs., 109–110
conflict-related violence against women as human rights principle, 98
(CRVAW), 26, 161, 163–164, Hun Sen and his belief in, 234
167–169, 171, 173, 176–177 for returning Black soldiers, 154
definition of, 272n16 DEVAW (Declaration on the Elimination
see also violence against women of Violence Against Women), 166 see
Congo (Brazzaville), 192 also violence against women
Congo (Democratic Republic), 101 dichotomies, of women’s lives, 176, 177
as “rape capital” of the world, 20 dignity, 10, 56, 60, 185–186, 201, 203
Congo, of King Leopold, 40, 241 equal dignity, 56, 69, 191
Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), politics of, 58
131–132, 268n30 of humans, 37, 56, 69, 217, 278n77
Convention on the Elimination of discrimination, 10, 26–27, 59, 84, 98,
Discrimination Against Women 165–166
(CEDAW), 165, 196 distant strangers, 7 see strangers
General Recommendation regarding Doctors of the World, 230 see Médecins du
women’s rights in conflict, 161 Monde
COPINH (Civic Council of Popular and Doctors without Borders, 241 see Médecins
Indigenous Organizations of Sans Frontières
Honduras), 156–157 Dominican Republic, 137
cosmopolitanism, 14 Dreyfus Affair, 155
of human rights and humanitarianism, drones, 2, 77, 243, 261n18
14, 15 Du Bois, W. E. B., 26, 143, 153–154,
meaning of, 14 155–156, 159
of suffering, 15, 249 “An Appeal to the World,” 155–156
as threat to nation-states in nineteenth “Returning Solders,” 153, 155
century, 15 Dunant, Henry, 11, 41, 51, 57, 72,
crimes against humanity, 93 143–144, 146, 149, 163
crises, 2, 96–97, 99, 103, 141 Memory of Solferino
conflict settings as, 168 A, 41, 51, 72, 143
humanitarian crises, 137, 163, 174, duties
180, 184 of beneficence, 71, 80–81, 82–83
life in crisis, 192, 194 human rights vs. humanitarianism, views
migration as, 47 of, 75
Western complicity in creation of, 2, 101 imperfect duties, 23, 80, 86
see also emergencies; entries for various of justice, 71, 80, 81, 82
locales in crisis to others, 7, 80

perfect duties, 6, 10, 23, 82, 85, 86–87 of life, 11–12

of states, 73, 180 shame as an ethic of obligation, 141
see also Cicero; obligations ethnography, 47, 60, 119, 120, 122, 124
Dworkin, Ronald, 76 European Economic Community
(EEC), 231
EEC (European Economic
Community), 231 famine, 50, 63, 64, 144
Eichmann, Adolf, war crimes trial of, 149 Cambodian fear of, 227, 229,
emergencies, 27, 209, 239–240, 241, 280n39
242, 246 victims of, 50, 64, 65, 240
complex emergencies, 166, 177, 178 see also under Biafra
humanitarian emergencies, 1, 2, 8, Fassin, Didier, 108, 194
73, 171 Feinberg, Joel, 51, 59, 82
tsunami and Médecins Sans Frontières Feldman, Ilana, 27, 47, 151, 152, 238
view of, 2, 241 feminism, carceral, 169
see also crises feminists, 172, 179, 194
emotions, 6, 150, 240 as activists, 169, 176
anger and outrage in response to human as scholars, 168, 174, 177, 178
rights violations, 9 Festa, Lynn, 53, 54, 57
emotional distancing in response to Flinders Island, 115, 264n31
appeals for compassion, 146 Flynn, Jeffrey, 10, 22–23, 141, 148, 177
humanitarianism tied to compassion “Forgotten Prisoners, The”
pity, and guilt, 9 (Benenson), 148
shame Forsyth, Frederick, The Biafra Story, 67
as emotional response to suffering, 25 Foucault, Michel, 5, 7, 36, 108
mobilization of, 6, 142, 152 frames, 39
see also entries for various emotions for confronting racial injustice, 155
emptiness definition of, 239
in Buddhism, 94 emotion and effectiveness of, 240
experience of, 247 for fetal innocence, 197
of innocence as concept, 187 for gender-based violence, 167, 170, 194
enforcement, 75, 87, 128, 131, 137, 159 human rights vs. humanitarianism
law enforcement, 87, 157, 245 and, 174
mechanisms of, 137, 141, 151 to mobilize action
Engels, Friedrich, 19, 20 human rights vs. humanitarianism
Enlightenment, 16, 35, 37, 102, 130, and, 241
185–186 for sex trafficking as human rights
equality, 24, 53–54, 55–57, 60, 173, 186 issue, 196
of status, 1, 22–23, 52, 53, 54, 56–58, for suffering
68–69 human rights vs. humanitarianism
see also inequality; status and, 240
equalizing principle, 27 for women’s lives
essentialism, 236 human rights and, 165
biological essentialism, 95 France, 36, 110–111, 196, 223,
definition of, 235 226, 228
social constructionist position versus, 5 French Revolution, 36, 51–52, 110,
ethics 112, 125
beneficence and justice as duties, 71 Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross,
care as an international ethic, 75 The (Pictet), 13, 145
charity as Christian ethic, 145
of death, 11, 12 Gacaca courts in Rwanda, 205 see also
global ethics and human rights vs. Rwanda
humanitarianism, 7, 11 Gaza, 208, 211, 212, 216–217, 276n29,
of human rights, 8 278n78
of humanitarianism, 34, 42, 93, 261n12 GBV, 176 see gender-based violence

gender, 167, 172, 173, 178, 189, 193 Holocaust

equality, 166–167, 168, 179, 184 memory of, 45, 67, 207
inequality, 175, 179–180 objection to teaching about in Gaza,
mainstreaming, 166, 232 278n78
practical interests, 179, 180–181, 184 shaming of survivors, 149
strategic interests, 179, 181, 183 Honduras, 112, 156
gender-based violence (GBV), 26, honor, 23, 80, 175, 206
166–167, 170–171, 173–174, 176, Hopgood, Stephen, 21, 23–24, 29, 68,
182–183 see also violence against 149, 157
women HRE, 214 see human rights education
Geneva Conventions, 16, 43, 72–73, 77, HRW, 90 see Human Rights Watch
78, 212 human rights, 1–8, 21–34, 36–51, 91–100,
genocide, 147–148, 219–220, 223–224, 170–179, 237–244
226–229, 233–234, 278n3 see also activism of, 2, 13, 47, 60, 68, 242
atrocities advocacy of, 67–68, 96, 102,
God 142–143, 246
acts of, 64, 239, 246, 284n65 agencies, 2, 241
as a source of human rights and Arendt’s skepticism regarding, 255n17
humanitarianism, 91 atrocities and, 2 see atrocities
Golden Rule, 91 boundary between needs and rights, 2
Good Samaritan, 11 citizenship and, 41–42, 45
governance community, 2, 17, 235, 242, 246, 250
global humanitarian governance, deﬁnition of, 235
deﬁnition of, 263n1 duties and, 75 see duties
humanitarian governance, 24, 107, 108, emotional responses to violations of, 9
109, 117, 124–125, 265n68, 266n75 forensics and, 242
as assimilation, 109 fundamental human rights, 78, 134, 205,
in the colonies, 109, 117 267n8
compared to democratic govern- future of, 24
ance, 110 gender-based violence and, 2
compared to humanitarianism, 24 see gender-based violence
human rights discourse at odds with, historiography of, 4, 36–37, 40
11, 125, 126 history of, 36–37, 44, 61, 74, 258n27,
origin of, 9 259n52, 269n45
see also Arthur, George; Grey, George Inventing Human Rights: A History
imperial forms of, 125 (Hunt), 37
Graham, Malbone W., 134, 135 rise in rhetoric, 61
Great Xhosa Cattle Killing, 121 The Last Utopia: Human Rights in
Greece, 66, 67 History (Moyn), 44
Grey, George, 24, 109, 117–118, 119–123, international human rights, 4, 42–44,
124–125, 265n59 46–47, 61, 85–86
Grotius Society, 136 intervention, 2, 25, 129, 138, 267n8
Grotius, Hugo, 74, 80 see also humanitarian intervention
justice and, 2, 5, 23, 44, 75, 85
Haitian Revolution, 110, 112, 123, 125, language of, 40, 79, 84, 172, 203, 244
266n70 memory and, 205, 206–207, 208, 211
Haq, Al- (Palestinian NGO), 216 movements, 36, 44, 65–66, 74, 79, 206
harm, 81, 176, 179, 180–181, 184, 194 “name and shame,” 2 see under shame
Haskell, Thomas, 62–63 norms of, 16, 84, 102, 246
Hausner, Gideon, 149–150 obligations and, 10, 240
health, 16, 74, 98, 112, 171, 172 organizations, 1, 79, 96, 171
health care, 85, 98, 232 practices of, 22–23, 60–61, 68–70, 79,
public health, 96, 176, 242, 245 83, 219–220
reproductive health, 26, 167, 194, 196 principles of, 151, 155, 176, 246
service providers, 26, 171–172 protection and, 1, 3, 74, 84, 89, 133

reproductive rights as, 196, 198 as social constructions, 5, 236

revolution, 4, 16, 17, 40, 44, 45 suffering and, 10–11, 14, 239, 240
scholarly disciplines and studies of, 4 technologies of, 242, 245
secularism of, 38 transformation vs. palliation, 11, 14
status and, 11, 22, 58, 60, 258n39 violence against women, conflict-related,
see also status 1, 26
systems of, 58, 60, 176, 180, see also humanitarianism; human rights
196–197, 217 human rights doctrine, international, 86
transformation and, 11 human rights education (HRE), 214,
universality of, 127, 128, 129, 133–134, 216–218
135–136, 138–139 human rights imaginary, 45 see also
violations of, 8–9, 28, 169, 175, imaginaries
214, 246–247 Human Rights in Honduras Act, 156 see also
see also humanitarianization; Honduras
humanitarian rights; human rights human rights law, 3 see international human
and humanitarianism; international rights law
human rights law human rights narratives, 1, 17, 153, 154
human rights and humanitarianism see also humanitarian narratives;
boundaries of, 21–22, 168, 174–175, narratives
233–234, 238 Human Rights Watch (HRW), 90, 96, 97,
indistinct boundaries, 23, 27 98, 151, 157
Palestinians’ temporalities and, 27 humanism
and treatment of strangers, 7 based on rights of subjects vs. citizens, 111
and violence against women, 168, in human rights and humanitarianism,
170, 177 23, 90, 103, 104
cosmopolitanism and, 14–15 as integral to Western global liberal-
differences, 1, 2–3, 6, 27, 28–29, 71–72, ism, 100
127–128 humanitarian agencies, 3, 160, 170, 177,
in background knowledge, 245 178, 241
in frames of suffering, 240 humanitarian governance, 9 see under
essentialism, 5 see essentialism governance
future of, 248–250 humanitarian imaginary, 209 see also
historiography of, 33, 37, 43 imaginaries
history of, 22, 24, 41, 44, 45–46, 49 humanitarian intervention, 2
humanity and, 9, 247–248 abolition of slave trade and, 128,
inequality 131, 134
reinforcement of, 19–20 in armed conflicts, 177
innocence see under innocence armed intervention to safeguard norms,
intervention, 25 see under humanitarian 128, 138
intervention see also humanitarian norms
justice and beneficence of, 71–72, 75–76, bystander shame and military
83–84, 86 intervention, 147
in the long nineteenth century, 128–129, definitions of, 128, 266n8
133, 138 history of, 25, 128–129, 132, 133, 136,
meanings of, 7, 236 138–139
modest effects of, 48 as human rights intervention, 129
origins of, 18, 52, 89, 90, 107, 123 human rights vs. humanitarianism, 2,
paternalism and, 14 25, 139
phases of, 22, 33 for indigenous people, 121
politics and, 12, 24 international law and, 25, 132, 133, 134,
practices of, 49, 72, 75, 177, 182, 237 135–136, 137–139
progress and, 16, 18 militarized language and, 262n42
reasoning and, 243, 244 responsibility to protect, 84
recipients and, 238 unintended consequences of, 148
scholarly disciplines and studies of, 46 for victims of atrocity, 39–40

humanitarian narratives, 35, 41, 61, 63–64, humanitarianization

65–66, 68 of human rights, 22, 33, 46, 48, 141, 236
causes of suffering in, 65 politics of suffering and, 54
dramatization of helpless victims in, 146 humanitarians, 89–90, 102–104, 218–220,
of the eighteenth century, 63 222–224, 225–229, 232–233
genres of, 64 humanity, 9, 10, 14–15, 52–53, 185, 186,
treatment of strangers in, 23, 130 187, 188, 201–203, 247–249
see also human rights narratives; belief in universality of, 190, 192
narratives claims to rights based on, 255n18
humanitarian norms, 25, 87, 129, 132, common humanity, 83, 128–129, 132,
145, 146 133, 138
enforcement of, 134 definition in Encyclopédie (Diderot and
protection of, 128, 133 D’Alembert), 267n13
see also humanitarian intervention emptiness
humanitarian revolution, 35, 130, 267n14 experience of, 247
humanitarian rights, 28, 204, 205, as an equalizing principle, 27, 186
269n45 expansion of, 9
inadequacy of relative to human innocence and, 27, 185–187, 188, 202
rights, 205 meanings of, 9, 129, 247–248
at intersection of international as moral category for abolitionists’
humanitarian law and international argument, 131
human rights law, 205 normative humanity, 186
Palestinian demands for, 203, 208, politics of, 22, 52, 68, 70
211–212, 213 practices of, 7, 185, 201
humanitarian sector, 5, 209, 244 secular humanity, 187
humanitarian sensibility, 53, 131, 267n14 sentimental law of, 134, 135
humanitarian sentiments, 46 see under slave trade as crime against, 132, 268n30
sentiments suffering and visibility of, 14
humanitarian space, 12, 59, 213 Hume, David, 80
humanitarian system, 3, 163, 164, 232 Hun Sen, 28, 222, 228, 231–234, 278n3
humanitarianism, 3–8, 9–15, 21–25, 45–50, Hunt, Lynn, 37, 53, 264n10
235–240, 245–251 Inventing Human Rights: A History, 37
activism of, 44, 67 Huyssen, Andreas, 206
armed conflict and natural disasters
focus on, 3 IASC, 161 see United Nations Interagency
definition of, 235 Standing Committee on
future of, 24 Humanitarian Action
see also human rights and Ibo people, 200 see Biafra, Igbo people of
humanitarianism, future of ICC, 3 see International Criminal Court
historiography of, 34–36, 37, 42 ICJ (International Court of Justice), 78, 136
history of, 38, 44, 63, 127, 128, 130 ICRC, 78 see International Committee of
humanitarian work as failure, 209 the Red Cross
interdisciplinary study post-Cold War, 36 ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for
militarization of, 282n82 Rwanda), 205
modern humanitarianism, 38, 51, 53, ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for
76, 123 the Former Yugoslavia), 205
as origin of animal protection move- idiots, 20 see “useful idiots”
ments, 35 Igbo people, 138 see Biafra, Igbo people of
practices of, 49, 67–69, 83, 85, 209, IHL, 84 see international humanitarian law
233–234 IHRL, 3 see international human rights law
pragmatism of, 12 ILA, 127 see International Law Association
principles of, 1, 191, 193, 245 imaginaries
see also humanitarian rights; human rights of human rights, 45
and humanitarianism; international of humanitarians, 209
humanitarian law of the social realm, 51

imperialism, 24, 38, 39–40, 124, 125, 133 International Court of Justice (ICJ), 78, 136
imprisonment, 5, 44, 149, 201 see also International Covenant on Civil and
prisoners; prisons Political Rights, 165
Indian Residential School System (of International Covenant on Economic and
Canada), 155 Social Rights, 165
Ineffabilis Deus (Pope Pius IX), 92 International Criminal Court (ICC), 3, 93,
inequality, 13, 18–20, 178–179, 181, 97, 101, 205, 224
183–184, 202 see also equality International Criminal Tribunal for
INGOs, 224 see international non- Rwanda (ICTR), 205
governmental organizations International Criminal Tribunal for the
injustice Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), 205
conditions for, 13 international human rights law (IHRL), 2,
humanitarianism and, 141 71, 74–75, 78, 87, 205 see also
international roots of local suffering human rights
and, 20 international humanitarian law (IHL), 2,
mobilization of emotion and 73, 75–78, 84–85, 86–87, 205
accountability for, 140 international law, 25, 128–129, 132, 134,
shaming and, 141, 148 136, 137–139
structural and institutionalized injustice, jus in bello principles of, 84, 153
13, 125, 143, 148, 152, 155–156, scholars of international law, 2, 127, 129,
201 132, 134, 136, 138–139
see also justice see also humanitarian intervention;
innocence, 27 humanitarianism; humanitarian
central to notions of humanity, 185–186, norms
188, 202 International Law Association (ILA),
of child soldiers, 188 127, 137
of civilians in conflict, 97 international nongovernmental
as a concept, 187, 189, 193 organizations (INGOs), 69, 220,
emptiness of, 187 225, 228–229, 231–232 see also
definition of, 187 nongovernmental organizations
of the fetus, 197 International Rescue Committee (IRC),
in human rights and humanitarianism, 167, 224, 225
27, 144, 186–187, 190–191, International Year of Human Rights
192–193, 194–195, 201–202 (1968), 137
language of, 201, 202 Inventing Human Rights: A History
legal vs. actual (factual) innocence, (Hunt), 37
199–200 Iraq, 101
of the Madres, 150 IRC, 90 see International Rescue
see also Madres de Plaza de Mayo Committee
moral distinctions of, 27, 186–187, 189 Israel, 208, 211
presumption of, 198, 199, 200
of saviors, 190 Jackson, Tony, 229–230, 231
sexual innocence, 195–198 James, C. L. R., 266n70
sympathy as proclamation of, 64 Jebb, Eglantyne, 63
theological interpretations of, Jesus Christ, 35, 92
185–186 justice, 2
of victims, 150, 185, 191 beneficence and, 71–72, 75–76, 80,
of women and children, 150, 188, 83–84, 86
189–190, 195 carceral vs. distributive justice, 17
Innocence Project, 198–201, 202 charity and, 13, 76
Institut de Droit International, 135 duties of, 71, 80, 81, 82
International Committee of the Red Cross human rights and, 2, 12–13, 22, 23,
(ICRC), 4, 16, 72, 96–97, 99, 205, 235
236 human rights narratives and, 17
principles of, 98 humanitarianism and, 13

justice (cont.) liberty, 1, 10, 13, 16, 74, 101

humanitarianization of human rights Libya, 101, 148
and, 22 Lideres Campesinas, 157
as integral to progress, 17 life in crisis, 192, 194 see also crises
international criminal justice, 3, 132, 152 Lillich, Richard B., 127, 137, 139
local forms of, 205 Lingelbach, William E., 134
meaning of, 17, 140 livelihood, 1, 167, 171
retributive justice and memory, 205 Locke, Jill, 141, 154
social justice, 82, 85, 141 Locke, John, 80, 130, 188
Socrates and Thrasymachus debate lynching in America, 153, 154–155
regarding, 140
see also injustice Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 150–151, 206
Virgin Mary and the, 151
Kampuchea, 220 see Cambodia, Mandelstam, André N., 129, 135, 139
Kampuchea Marx, Karl, 19, 20, 121
Kant, Immanuel, 80, 94 massacres, 18, 67, 276n29 see also atrocities
Kelly, Lisa M., 196–197 maximalism, 12, 248 see also minimalism
Khao-I-Dang, 221 see Cambodians, refugee Médecins du Monde, 230, 275n19
camps Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), 67–68,
Khmer people, 223–224, 225, 230 see also 98–99, 147, 191, 192–193, 230
Cambodians medicalization of gender-based violence,
Khmer People’s National Liberation 26, 170, 173, 194 see also
Front, 221 gender-based violence
Khmer Rouge, 220–222, 223, 228–229, Memory of Solferino, A (Dunant), 41, 51,
230, 231, 233–234 see also 72, 143
Cambodia; Cambodians Merivale, Herman, 121–122, 124
Killing Fields, The (movie), 229 minimalism, 141, 201
Klose, Fabian, 25, 107, 125 of human rights, 152
Kodak camera, “incorruptible,” 241 of humanitarianism, 248
Kosovo, 84, 160, 183 moral minimalism, 12, 141
Kouchner, Bernard, 67, 192 see also maximalism
Kurdi, Alan, 189 see under victims, images of models, multisectoral, 183 see under vio-
lence against women
Laqueur, Thomas, 35, 63–64, 65 Molyneux, Maxine, 179
Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, morality, common-sense, 72, 80–81, 88
The (Moyn), 39 Moyn, Samuel, 3, 5, 22, 65, 107, 125, 141,
Lauterpacht, Hersch, 129, 136–137, 139 205, 236, 269n36
Law of Humanity, sentimental, 134, 135 The Last Utopia: Human Rights in
Law of Nations, 134 History, 39
Law of Nature, subjective, 134 MSF, 13 see Médecins Sans Frontières
laws of war, 40 multilateralism, post-World War II, 164
humanization of, 40
see also international humanitarian law Nakba. see Palestinians, Nakba
League of Nations, 42, 134–135 “name and shame” as human rights
Leebaw, Bronwyn, 11, 25–26, 79, 240, 243 strategy, 25 see also shame
Lester, Alan, 11, 24, 241 narratives
liberalism, 18, 39, 89, 249 causality in, 65, 67
assault on, 100 of innocence, 196
human rights and, 17, 250 sentimentality of, 51, 53
human rights and humanitarianism, see also humanitarian narratives; human
249–250 rights narratives
humanism and, 100, 102 nation-states, 15, 38, 43, 58, 61
humanitarianism and, 250 NATO, 102 see North Atlantic Treaty
justiﬁcation for imperial conquest, 39 Organization
neoliberalism, 19, 45 neoliberalism, 19, 45 see also liberalism

“new” wars of post-Cold War era, 1 see also future of, 215–216
war; new wars of post-Cold War era Haq
NGOs, 75 see nongovernmental Al- (NGO), 216
organizations human rights education for, 216
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 35 humanitarian condition of, 28, 43, 47
Nigeria, 67, 127, 138 see also Biafra Nakba
Nightingale, Florence, 41, 120 memory of, 207, 211
noncombatants, 73, 77, 84 see also ongoing nature of, 208, 211, 276n29
combatants refugees, 27, 203
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), types of rights claims by, 203, 210
167, 172, 225, 229–230, 232, paternalism, 13–14, 15, 125
233–234 perpetrators, 2
of human rights, 99, 234 as “complex political victims,” 192, 195
of humanitarianism, 66, 75, 96, 97 drones used by human rights organiza-
see also international nongovernmental tions and, 2
organizations human rights frames for suffering and
nonrefoulement, 205, 279n17 see also punishment of, 240
refoulement human rights vs. humanitarianism
normative practices, 75, 76, 88 see also treatment of, 2
humanitarianism, practices of; humanitarian agencies and avoidance of
human rights, practices of assigning blame, 246
North Atlantic Treaty Organization indignation as an emotional response to,
(NATO), 102, 160 62, 70
injustice and impunity of, 13
obligations “one victim one violation, one
to assist as moral imperative, 144–145 perpetrator” paradigm, 175
of cosmopolitanism, 14 stigma of, 150, 151
for environmental protection, 215 Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s
to future generations, 213, 215 treatment of, 153
human rights and, 10, 196, 240, 243 violence against women and prosecution
human rights vs. humanitarianism of, 26
views of, 10 Pictet, Jean, 13, 76, 145, 147, 148, 150, 245
humanitarianism and, 205, 213 The Fundamental Principles of the Red
of non-state actors in armed conflict, 77 Cross, 13, 145
to others beyond borders, 7 Pinker, Steven, 35
in presence of suffering, 145 pity, 9, 55, 64–65, 249, 250
regarding women’s rights, 161, 197 politics of, 54, 56, 57, 61, 65, 144
shame as “felt ethic” of, 6, 141 Pius IX, Pope, Ineffabilis Deus, 92
see also duties Plato, The Republic, 140
O’Connell, Daniel, 118 PLO (Palestine Liberation
Office of the High Commission for Human Organization), 215
Rights (OHCHR), 160, 162 Pol Pot, 222
On Duties (De Officiis) (Cicero), 80 political constructions, 62 see also social
“other,” the, 5 see under social constructions constructions
Ottoman Empire, 39, 135, 256n23 politics, 12, 49–50, 54–55, 64–66,
Oxfam, 42, 96, 99, 228, 229–231, 232 192–193, 246
of citizenship, 33, 55, 58, 255n17
PA (Palestinian Authority), 208, 215 of death, 11
Palestine Liberation Organization of human rights, 37, 38, 43, 46, 50,
(PLO), 215 259n52
Palestinian Authority (PA), 208, 215 of human rights and humanitarianism,
Palestinians, 27 12, 18, 50, 65, 218, 246
displacement and dispossession of, of humanitarianism, 38, 192
203, 207 of innocence, 191, 192
first intifada and mobilization of, 215 of memory, 152–153

politics (cont.) scientiﬁc racism, 123

Palestinian lives and, 7, 207 wartime rhetoric and, 154
see also under dignity; humanity; pity; rape, 167, 181, 183, 192, 194, 196
status; suffering mass rape, 26, 175
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 226 systematic rape, 169
validity of categories, 280n31 tactical rape, 175
poverty, 69, 108, 118, 154, 265n59 victims of, 26, 160, 171, 175, 193, 197
pragmatism, 12, 15 Rawls, John, 36
pregnancy, 181, 194, 196, 198 reason, humanitarian, 2, 46, 194
Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative reasoning
(PSVI), 169 rise of technical reasoning in
prisoners humanitarian sector, 244
of conscience, 68, 149 types of, 243–244
“The Forgotten Prisoners” recipients of aid, 13, 148, 159, 238 see
(Benenson), 148 also aid
images of, 240 Red Crescent, 73, 98
of war, 73, 240 Red Cross, 4 see International Committee of
see also imprisonment the Red Cross
prisons, 99, 102, 115, 201, 207 Redﬁeld, Peter, 18
Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, refoulement, 28, 73, 223 see also
The (Davis), 34 non-refoulement; repatriation
progress, 9 refugees, 27–28, 210–211, 212–213,
as a concept, 16, 248 222–224, 225–227, 229–230
human rights and, 16–17, 201 camps of, 3, 5, 203, 207, 211, 221
humanitarianism and rejection of, 249 Reisman, Michael, 138, 139
justice as integral to, 17 repatriation, 220, 226, 227, 228
material and moral progress, 16, forced, 221, 224
17, 248 of Uighur refugees, 220, 233
real vs. illusory nature of, 18 see also refoulement
protection, 3, 27–28, 73, 99–100, 124–125, Republic, The (Plato), 140
222–223 “Returning Solders” (Du Bois), 153, 155
of civilians, 205 rights, 12–13, 58–59, 85–87, 202–205,
of human rights, 2, 74, 128–129, 139, 233–236, 239
177, 196 associated with American and French
humanitarian protection, 223, 225–226, Revolutions, 125
229, 233 political rights, 1, 20, 74, 101, 150, 165,
of indigenous peoples, 110, 116 171
of minorities, 132 see also humanitarian rights; human
PSVI (Preventing Sexual Violence rights; human rights and
Initiative), 169 humanitarianism
PTSD, 226 see post-traumatic stress Robinson, George Augustus, 113–115,
disorder 116, 264n37
public health, 96 see under health Roosevelt, Eleanor, 156
Roosevelt, Franklin, 74
Quakers, campaign against slave trade by, Roth, Kenneth, 151–152, 197
268n21 see also slave trade Rougier, Antoine, 129, 134
rule of law, 169
racism Rwanda, 104
denial of human rights for American Gacaca courts in, 205
Negroes, 155 genocide in, 147
see also Du Bois, W. E. B.
institutionalized racism, 143 Salt, Henry S., 267n16
language for mobilization and, 20 Sayigh, Rosemary, 207
of ongoing Nakba, 208 “Scramble for Africa,” 40 see also Africa;
see also Palestinians, Nakba imperialism

security, 170, 172, 211, 213, 248, 250 solidarity, 15, 23, 55, 68, 143, 148
sentiments, 8 Sontag, Susan, 64, 70
“politics of pity” and compassion, 144 South Africa, 122 see Cape Colony; Truth
compassion and sympathy as moral sen- and Reconciliation Commission
timents, 51, 62 sovereignty, 14
humanitarian sentiments, 46, 53, human rights and humanitarianism
130, 190 views of, 15–16
abolitionism and, 130 of states, 7, 14, 136, 138
pity and sympathy as, 79 Sphere Project, 79
social action galvanized by, 240 status
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadera, 207 politics of, 22–23, 49–50, 52, 56–57, 58,
shame, 25, 26, 141, 142, 146–147, 60, 68–69, 82
151–152, 154–155 see also equality, of status
Arendt’s view of, 148 Stephen, James, 118
of bystanders, 11, 147–148 strangers
of courts and lynching in America, 154 as distant strangers, 7, 235, 236, 240,
of Holocaust survivors, 149 249, 250
human rights vs. humanitarianism duty of beneﬁcence toward, 81
use of, 2, 25, 141, 150 global ethics and what is owed to, 7
internalizing of, 155, 157, 159 humanitarian narratives and treatment
mobilization of, 142, 152 of, 130
“name and shame” as human rights as slaves, 123
strategy, 25 suffering of, 8, 9, 62–63
power of, 142, 152, 155–156, 159 Sudan, 3, 175, 189, 220 see also Darfur
as result of “Kastner Affair,” 149 suffering
risk of backﬁring in humanitarian of bodies
appeals, 146 as apolitical injury or harm done to
shamefulness of systems as human rights women, 173
strategy, 143, 154, 156 in humanitarian narratives, 63, 65
stigma of, 150, 151, 152 in international human rights
Shoah, 67 see Holocaust movement, 65–66
Sidgwick, Henry, 81 of cosmopolitanism, 15, 249
Singer, Peter, 8, 144 of individuals, Médecins Sans Frontières
slave trade vs. Amnesty International views, 68
with Africa, 121, 131, 132, 133 politics of, 22, 51
transatlantic slave trade, 130, 131, 133 as a problem, 238
Slave Trade Act (1807), 131 see also shame as emotional response to, 25
abolition social suffering
slavery, 40, 111, 115, 124, 267n13, 270n58 idioms of trauma and, 226
amelioration of, 24, 109, 110 struggle for equal status and,
colonial slavery, 133 56, 57
“white slavery,” 40 violence against women and, 173
see also anti-slavery of strangers, 8, 9, 62–63
Slavery Abolition Act (1833), 133 see also of victims, 87, 191, 192–193
abolition Jacobin view, 55
Slim, Hugo, 4, 145, 261n12 presumed passivity, 65, 69
Smith, Adam, 80 see also humanitarian narratives;
social constructions human rights narratives
of human rights and humanitarianism, 5, survivors
29, 236 of Cambodian genocide, 28
of the “other,” 2 frames to mobilize action, human rights
social imaginary, 51 see also imaginaries vs. humanitarianism, 241
Socrates, 140, 157–158 of genocide and presence of the dead, 233
Solferino, Battle of (1859), 72 see Memory of of the Holocaust, 149
Solferino, A (Dunant) of sexual violence, 167, 171, 193

survivors (cont.) UNHCR, 96 see United Nations High

testimonies for Eichmann trial and, 110, Commissioner for Refugees
149 United Nations, 136–139, 160, 203,
see also victims 221, 231
Swaine, Aisling, 3, 11, 26, 141, 237 United Nations Advance Mission in
Syria, 98, 101, 102, 148 Cambodia, 281n51
bombing of hospitals in, 102 United Nations Border Relief Operation
breakdown of diplomatic initiatives, 148 (UNBRO), 221, 222, 224–225, 227,
social practices of human rights and 228, 229–230
humanitarianism in, 98 United Nations Charter (1945), 84, 136,
137, 139, 162
Taithe, Bertrand, 3, 28, 237 United Nations General Assembly, 84, 161,
technologies, 199, 237, 242, 244 212, 217, 256n29
of care, 108 United Nations High Commissioner for
dissolution of boundaries by, 145 Refugees (UNHCR), 96, 99, 205,
material and mental technologies, 24, 29, 209, 221, 224
237, 243, 245 United Nations Human Rights Council,
temporalities, 27, 107, 204, 206, 209, 102, 160–161, 162
210–211 United Nations Interagency Standing
terror, 77, 98, 110, 149, 214, 223–224 Committee on Humanitarian Action
humanitarianism as fomenting, (IASC), 161, 166, 176, 177
255n17 United Nations Office for the Coordination
US use of torture in “War on Terror,” 77, of Humanitarian Affairs
214 (UNOCHA), 163
see also atrocities; torture United Nations Peacekeeping Mission,
Thailand, 221–222, 223–224, 228, 147, 169
279n14 United Nations Population Fund
Thrasymachus, 140, 157–158 (formerly United Nations Fund for
Ticktin, Miriam, 27, 47, 150, 241, Population Activities, UNFPA), 167
261n13 United Nations Relief and Works Agency
Tokyo war crimes tribunal, 104 for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA),
Torrenté, Nicolas de, 185, 191, 193 203, 211–213, 216–217
torture, 65, 67, 125 forcible removal of employees, 212
Amnesty International Campaign schools, 216–217
against, 44 United Nations Security Council, 161,
in Greece, 66 167, 169
perfect duties and, 10, 23, 86 United Nations Transition Authority in
by the US government, 102, 214 Cambodia (UNTAC), 281n51
victims of, 66, 102–103 United States, 20, 101, 155, 156,
trafficking, 195 198, 199
of humans, 132, 133 leaders as shameful bystanders to
for sexual exploitation, 40, 195 genocide, 148
slave trade as, 131, 268n30 racial injustice in, 155, 189
Truth and Reconciliation Commission support of torture in Greece, 67
(TRC, South Africa), 153, 206 undocumented children referred to as
Turkey, 214 minors by, 188
Twain, Mark, 241 Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR, 1948), 36, 43, 58, 61,
UDHR, 36 see Universal Declaration of 74, 93
Human Rights UNOCHA (United Nations Office for the
UNBRO, 221 see United Nations Border Coordination of Humanitarian
Relief Operation Affairs), 163
UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund, UNRWA, 203 see United Nations Relief
formerly United Nations Fund for and Works Agency for Palestine
Population Activities), 167 Refugees

UNTAC (United Nations Transition persecution based on presumed guilt

Authority in Cambodia), 281n51 of, 150
“useful idiots,” humanitarian and human of rape, 26, 160, 171, 175, 193, 197
rights organizations as, 18, 20 right to relief for, 2
as speechless objects, 69
Van Diemen’s Land, 110, 113–116, 119 status of, 68
Van Diemen’s Land Company, 113 of torture, 66, 102–103
Vance, Carole, 195–196 Truth and Reconciliation Commission
VAW, 3 see violence against women urging of victims’ forgiveness, 153
victims, 2 view of “gross violations” and empathy
of armed conflict or war, 21, 73, 191 for victims
of atrocity, humanitarian intervention see also humanitarian narratives;
for, 39–40 suffering
cultivation of empathy by human rights of victims; survivors, 153
organizations for, 150 Vienna Conference on Human Rights, 165
data for donors, 182 see World Conference on Human
expected characteristics of, 15 Rights (Vienna, 1993)
of famine, 64, 65, 240 Vietnam
forensic human rights and identification end of war with Cambodia, 222
of, 242 occupation of Cambodia, 101, 219, 222,
helplessness of, 142–143, 146, 147, 159 223, 226, 280n39
of human rights violations see human see also Cambodia
rights violence against women (VAW), 165–166,
violations of, 8 168, 172–173, 174–175, 178–179,
humanitarian action vs. human rights 181–182
and, 174 defined as violation of human rights, 166
humanitarian diplomacy and access as discrimination, 166
to, 243 multisectoral models and services, 3, 167,
humanitarian practice in conflict and 183
natural disasters, 163 see also conflict-related violence against
humanitarian rights of, 204 women; gender-based violence
humanitarian triage of, 193
humanitarianism war
apolitical stance and aid for, 12 changing nature of, 76
images of “new” wars of post-Cold War era, 1
Alan Kurdi’s body on a beach (photo- and peace paradigms compared, 77
graph), 189 war crimes, 93, 148, 152
ethical dilemmas regarding, 146 trials, 149, 152, 154, 199, 201, 205
human rights vs. humanitarianism of Adolf Eichmann, 93, 149
and, 26 see also entries for various courts and
impartiality of humanitarian care for, 192 tribunals
innocence of warfare
children as recipients of care and, 185 anti-revolutionary warfare, 110
as ideal characteristic, 150, 183 guerilla warfare, 222
medicalization of sexual violence humanization of, 41
and, 194 international law and focus on violence
instrumentalization of aid organizations of, 174
and access to, 21 violence against women during, 26, 175
memorialization of, 206 Wells, Ida B., 154–155, 159
“one victim, one violation, one perpetra- West Bank, 203, 208, 211, 213, 215–216
tor” paradigm, 175 Wilberforce, William, 115, 130
perpetrators witnessing, 67–68, 90, 111, 177
as “complex political victims,” women, 163–167, 171–172, 173–177,
192, 195 178–179, 180–184
shifting stigma from victims to, 150 dichotomies and lives of, 176, 177

women (cont.) World Conference on Human Rights

discrimination against, 165, 166 (Vienna, 1993), 165
equality of, 164, 178 World War I, 1, 134, 204
innocence of, 27 see under innocence World War II, 42–43, 67, 73, 74, 77, 136
international law regarding, 172 see post-World War II, 164, 204, 270n55
international humanitarian law; WPS (Women, Peace and Security),
international human rights law 167, 169
rights of, 164, 165–166, 168, 172–173,
183, 195 Xhosa, 121, 122
reproductive rights, 3, 196, 198 Great Xhosa Cattle Killing, 121
see also conﬂict-related sexual violence;
conﬂict-related violence against Youth With A Mission (YWAM), 224
women; gender-based violence; vio- Yugoslav wars, 165
lence against women Yugoslavia, former, 1, 167
Women Protection Advisors, 169 YWAM (Youth With a Mission), 224
Women, Peace and Security (WPS),
167, 169 Zochrot (Israeli dissident organization),
Woolman, John, 62 276n26

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