Review essay: On the politics of our humanitarian present

摘要

Humanitarianism has become such a central feature of international politics over recent decades that we are in danger of taking it for granted. Yet not only is humanitarianism an increasingly popular, and by no means unproblematic, way in which Western citizens are invited to respond to the world around them; its ready purveyance of moral absolutes-we shall do something-is no less useful to their governments. There is a distinctly liberal moral geography at work here: emerging power humanitarianisms having neither the public airs nor quite the moral precepts attached to the endeavour in the West (though see Hirono and O'Hagan, 2012). But even if the dominant Western form of humanitarianism may constitute no settled doctrine itself, it does present a consistently fertile way of framing political issues in a moral vernacular and vice versa (for a helpful recent overview, see Collinson and Elhawary, 2012, pages 5-6; see also Barnett and Weiss, 2011).