The Paradox of Humanitarianism and its Politics

This thesis looks at the question of humanitarianism within a theoretical perspective that refrains from essentialism and the universalist tradition of thought. Humanitarianism is treated as a locale where tension, inconsistency, and inequality can be identified. It is a locale where discourses of humanity, suffering, compassion, rescuing, accountability, and right are examined in the course of discussing the current humanitarianism paradox and its practical challenges. By bringing those notions into focus, the thesis argues that humanitarianism should be conceptualised as a politics of life in that it occupies a totalitarian type of thinking. Central to this politics is humanitarianism’s call to operationalise and standardise its interventions through adopting the moral, political, and principled horizons of the Western paradigm of “care and rescue”. The implication of such a position fixes certain historically, politically, and culturally unequal relations in subjects’ positions- namely those of the rescuer and the distant ‘Other’- the rescued. This configuration is fuelled by the contemporary notion of aid assistance that conceptualises and restrains the category of ‘suffering’ to ‘bodily human needs’- attributed to the abstract conception of humanity. As such, humanitarianism confines its approach to “one more blanket” or “a bed for the night”. Consequently, the identity of the ‘victims’, ‘beneficiaries’, and ‘rescued’ have been transformed from political, historical, social, and cultural beings to the natural universal imagery of the biological self. Related to this is the discussion of the separation of politics and humanitarianism. To overcome these humanitarian trajectories, there is a need to politicise philanthropic humanitarianism through the human rights approach, precisely that of rights-based humanitarianism. Yet, the thesis argues that neither of these should be considered the absolute proper answer to the humanitarianism crises, as both are usually reconfigured through a Western subjectivity embedded in a relationship of power and domination. The thesis concludes with the importance of theorising the politics and practice of humanitarianism, and central to this is the critique of Eurocentrism and the foundationalist embrace of truth, progress, and common humanity.