Humanitarianism as liberal diagnostic

Humanitarian reason and the political rationalities of the liberal will‐to‐care

Bibliographic Data

ID8962633
AuthorsSimon Reid‐henry (Queen Mary University of London, corresponding author), S M Reid‐Henry (Department of Geography Queen Mary, University of London London E1 4NS)
Year2013
Volume39
Issue3
Pages418-431
Publication date2013-10-25
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTransactions of the Institute of British Geographers (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0020-2754 • E-ISSN: 1475-5661
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/tran.12029
OpenAlexW2026950882
LanguageEN
Citations received71
References cited69

Images of catastrophe and the suffering of others form an important part of the contemporary western imagination. Such images trace the geography of an uneven world at the same time as they assert the moral and political horizons of liberal forms of care towards it. Drawing upon Foucault's notion of political rationality, I revisit the emergence of this distinctively liberal moral geography to show how a modern form of ‘humanitarian reason’ (Fassin 2011) developed in concert with the rise of capitalism and the liberal state. In particular, I explore the processes that, during the course of the long 19th century, invoked both a market‐driven moral economy and a state‐driven political morality within humanitarian endeavour. The final part of the paper then applies these reflections on humanitarianism's past to its much‐debated present. I move away from what is sometimes a rather binary focus on humanitarianism as a problem of Western intervention in other spaces to draw attention instead to its strategic function as a ‘liberal diagnostic’: a recursive moral practice that helps constitute a liberal politics as much as it projects that politics onto other people and places. I sketch out the implications of this by examining some of the ways that contemporary humanitarianism fulfils this role with respect to issues of global order and capital accumulation

Capitalism · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Humanitarian intervention · Morality · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Rationality · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty

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