Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (review)

Michael Barnett has written an ambitious and highly useful book. Already the author or editor of numerous insightful works related to humanitarianism, he has long displayed discernment and diligence in ample measure. An energetic organizer with an omnivorous sense of curiosity, he has likewise demonstrated a cosmopolitan willingness to cross the borders of his native discipline, nurturing relations with practitioners, policy analysts and academics well beyond political science. Now he has harvested these long fields of association, gathering together and sifting through the collective work of many scholars and the records of multiple organizations. The result is a wide-ranging survey that chronicles the general sweep of humanitarianism and summarizes key issues, all in a relatively compact 239 pages of text. As such, it offers not only a particular perspective on the rise of contemporary concern for the suffering of others, but also an array of access points into the debates that have accompanied it.

Empire of Humanity displays a tidy architecture, divided into three parts and ten chapters as well as an introduction and conclusion. At the outset, its author announces his intention to move beyond the received wisdom of potted histories, and on the very first page he sets about dethroning the mythic moment of Henry Dunant's vision that led to the founding of the Red Cross. Barnett's real target is the "semi-tragic narrative" of abbreviated conventional accounts, which skip quickly forward from Dunant to the 1990s, bemoaning an era of innocence betrayed. Such moral fables suggest that whereas once humanitarians might have counted on clear guidelines and well-defined roles, the present offers only a confusing morass of uncertainty, political manipulation and Faustian bargains with the interests of states. Barnett rejects the allure of retroactive romanticism and casts a more skeptical eye on the supposed innocence of the past. At the same time he resists the ahistorical temptation to view moral compromise as a timeless constant, or dismiss humanitarian action as simply a naïve delusion. Connecting this recent tale of disillusionment to a longer and more turbulent history, Barnett seeks to place humanitarianism into a global context of shifting political conditions, framed between forces of empire, capitalism and ethics. Within this historical landscape he identifies a set of enduring tensions related to the worldly nature of this idealized, civilizing project, emphasizing its plurality; its long gyrations between principles and circumstances, its mix of emancipation and domination, and its attempt to satisfy the desires of donors when administering to the needs of recipients.

Barnett also establishes clear limits for his endeavor. Here the term humanitarianism describes compassion enacted across boundaries, increasingly organized in relation to governance. His is a selective history, not a universal "theory," and tilted towards Western forms. At the same time it circumvents the topic of human rights by focusing instead on appeals to human needs, and does not restrict itself to the contemporary form of the nongovernmental organization. By avoiding conflation on both those fronts, the author makes a case for viewing humanitarianism as a distinctive "revolution in the ethics of care."¹ At the same time he acknowledges inadequacy in fully accounting for religion or matters of faith that swirl around and through the practice of such care. Between destructive forces of violence and productive forces of global capital and state formation, humanitarians struggle to offer a compassionate response to human suffering. Barnett distinguishes between two overarching types of humanitarian approach, one of which he links to emergency, the other to "alchemy." The first designation is familiar enough, describing efforts to offer immediate relief to those in some sort of peril. Exemplified by organizations such the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) or Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), this sort of action operates with relatively limited and short-term aims. By contrast the "alchemical" approach seeks to address root causes as well as symptoms, and so attempts to transform social, political and economic conditions behind suffering. The author notes that this is...