Paper details

Paper authors	James Smith
In panel on	‘Real’ Humanitarian Governance: Accountability, Advocacy, and Alternatives
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Genocide has marked the late modern and post-modern periods. So too has humanitarianism. The latter has emerged as a dominant form of global governance and state foreign policy, in what Fassin refers to as "humanitarian reason", and is pressed to respond to the destruction and suffering inflicted amid the former. This emergence of both calculated and extreme violence, and states of supposed compassion and humanity, are revealing of the contradictions that are baked in to humanitarianism as both an idea and a practice. As the humanitarian system as we have come to know it, begins to crumble - both from within, and under external pressure - there is an urgent need to determine whether we seek to celebrate the end of humanitarianism, or lament its demise. Drawing from the scholarship of abolitionist thinkers, and those who have long rejected the notion that there is a singular humanitarianism, this intervention will deepen existing explorations of the fundamental flaws inherent to contemporary humanitarian action, while weaving threads between emergent and established forms of counter- and anti-humanitarian resistance and solidarity.

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