Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (review)

At a recent meeting to refine public-health guidance in humanitarian emergencies, an expert in disaster relief leaned toward me and whispered that although he worked for humanitarian organizations, he did not really know how to define humanitarianism. He might do well to read Barnett's Empire of Humanity, at least to find some justification for his uncertainty. The closest that Barnett comes to defining his subject is his notion that "different traditions of humanitarianism, and different kinds of humanitarian organizations with different missions make different decisions . . . and project different kinds of moral imaginations that challenge themselves and the world in different ways" (33). Although this definition is maximally ambiguous, it is, nevertheless, accurate. Barnett tries to sort through these differences, catalog them, classify them, and analyze them. He does so with varying degrees of originality, and at different levels of depth, but overall his book is a convincing and, most of the time, entertaining history of a significant (although not as significant as Barnett claims it to be) area of global activity that has been grossly underrepresented in the academic literature.

There are, indeed, many different perspectives on how to try to provide assistance to the unfortunate millions around the world who are caught up in circumstances that leave them in the most vulnerable state imaginable. From a historical standpoint, Barnett presents three: imperial humanitarianism, practiced from the early nineteenth century (encompassing the age of slavery and abolition, and the savagery of the colonial era) through the end of World War II; neo-humanitarianism, the guiding principle of the Cold War period, which included the rise to independence of most of today's developing countries; and liberal humanitarianism, practiced in an age relatively free of interstate conflict but increasingly characterized by ethnic strife, terrorism, and the failure of established states.

Insofar as the philosophical and political trends that have helped to shape humanitarianism are concerned, this historical breakdown makes sense, though many nuances within the field could be taken into account. The field of public health in humanitarian crises began to develop at the time of the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s; it continued to take shape during the refugee crisis in Somalia, which extended from that time (after the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie and the establishment of the communist Dergue regime in neighboring Ethiopia) until the mid-1980s.

Serious attempts to grapple with "failed states" and to provide even minimal levels of assistance to those affected by the collapse of their political system (as ineffectual or inequitable as it might have been) became the focus of humanitarianism after the debacle of foreign intervention in Somalia in 1991. A move to "professionalize" humanitarian workers— to ensure minimal levels of competence for international aid workers, as opposed to relying mostly on good will and generous spirits—began after the colossal failure of the "humanitarian community" to provide effective relief to Hutu refugees fleeing Rwanda to Goma, in then Zaire, after the overthrow of the genocidal regime in Kigali in July 2004.

Barnett presents his history of humanitarianism in broad strokes, largely for the benefit of those unfamiliar with the sometime strange land of humanitarianism rather than for the handful of knowledgeable, but often heavily opinionated, observers and commentators who more permanently inhabit the humanitarian world. For this general audience, Empire of Humanity is an excellent and thought-provoking introduction.

In his attempt to deconstruct the larger picture into its smaller pixels, Barnett's other principal distinction is between those organizations and individuals who practice "emergency relief" and those who use "alchemical" processes to address the root causes of humanitarian crises and transform stagnant and struggling societies into budding, even thriving, success stories. The emergency groups, typified by the International Committee of the Red Cross and Medecins Sans Frontieres, purportedly supply immediate relief in a politically independent manner to those affected by catastrophe; they bandage the wounded, care for the sick, and so forth. However, they do not seek to alter the underlying circumstances [End...