Paper details

Paper authors	Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Tammam Aloudat
In panel on	The end for humanitarianism? Budget cuts, altered humanitarianism(s), and affected populations (Roundtable)
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Humanitarianism’s spatiotemporal zone of action and habitus is crisis. Humanitarianism and humanitarians should therefore be in their element when faced with a world in crisis. However, humanitarianism is also facing attacks on its liberal internationalist foundations and financial security, increasingly destructive ecological collapse, ongoing brutal wars, and active genocide and appears increasingly unable to help. Building on scholarship unsettling apocalyptic narratives about the end of the world this article interrogates the current state of humanitarianism, arguing that humanitarianism has reached the limits of its capacity for action. It argues humanitarianism, as liberal internationalism’s security enforcer, cannot hope to address the collapse of the machine of which it is an intrinsic part. This failure is rooted in humanitarianism’s colonial ontologies and geographies of intervention that are unable to address the collapse of its normative order, the planetary scale of destruction, the recalibration of the humanitarian subject beyond racialised bodies, and the unmasking of genocide as intrinsic rather than exceptional to liberalism as modernity/coloniality. We argue that if humanitarianism wishes to respond to the ends-of-worlds, it must acknowledge its origin in and adherence to modernity/coloniality’s epistemic dominance and to delink from it in a radical praxis of epistemic and material disobedience.

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