Humanitarianism: Histories, Erasures, Repetitions

Who is the human that humanitarianism seeks to aid? Speaking of the failures of human rights in the post–Cold War era, Jacques Rancière asks: “What lies behind this strange shift from Man to Humanity and from Humanity to the Humanitarian?”¹ Rancière’s critique of human rights invites us to scrutinize who the subject of the rights of man is. But this is not quite the same as asking: Who is the human in human rights, and who is the human in humanity? Shifting the query in this direction might allow us to challenge, as Sylvia Wynter puts it, “our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself,” and on which the coloniality of power is based.²

Keith Watenpaugh’s Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism tells a complicated story about the history of humanitarian aid in the Middle East and its entanglement with other ideologies in the interwar period. It makes important contributions by bringing the region into the larger history of humanitarianism and human rights and decentering the post–World War II and Holocaust. It might well be reframed as a history of US imperialism in the Middle East, with orientalist humanitarian narratives contributing to understandings of Muslim behavior as barbaric and the need for reform and civilization in the region. Watenpaugh’s history raises some crucial questions: How does humanitarianism conceive of humanity? And how (and why) do we write its histories? Offering different narratives of the histories of humanitarianism—and the ways in which it constructs knowledge—allows us to better understand its present iterations and the myths it tells about itself. This non-Western history of human rights as an ideology imbricated within humanitarian efforts also presents new ways of entering into the question of the human.

Watenpaugh distinguishes what he calls modern humanitarianism from its predecessors, which sought to alleviate suffering based on sentimental appeals and were grounded in an ethics of Protestantism. Contra Hannah Arendt, who maintained that the reason for humanitarianism lay in the transfer of compassion to the generic stranger, he argues that “at the center of humanitarian reason is a project of unstrangering the object of humanitarianism . . . helping those found to be knowable, similar, and deserving.”³ US humanitarianism in the Middle East sought to “unstranger” the other—to make them identifiable, familiar, and deserving, whether across lines of class, society, or religion, and to restore them to humanity, making their problems a problem for humanity (15–19). But does Watenpaugh’s retelling of this history minimize the erasures and disastrous possibilities harbored in the act of unstrangering?

Making Humanity

Modern humanitarianism was “envisioned by its participants and protagonists as a permanent, transnational, institutional, neutral, and secular regime for understanding and addressing the root causes of human suffering” (5). Watenpaugh is in part able to argue what he does about modern humanitarianism by definitional sleight of hand, and his argument about modern humanitarianism also depends on how we periodize it. Many humanitarian efforts in the twentieth century did not seek to address root causes, but simply to offer relief where needed. The construction of humanitarian objects as morally worthy was in fact the basis for suggesting that aid was to be temporarily offered to alleviate suffering, for example, in the case of aid for the Russian famine of 1921.⁴ It might be more useful to point out how development projects grew out of humanitarian ones and represented a shift in political thinking about how best to alleviate suffering. Nevertheless, if the root cause of Armenian suffering was defined as Muslim hatred of non-Muslims (68–69), this framing of the humanitarian problem has serious implications.

Bread from Stones pulls back the curtain on the supposed universality of humanitarian ideals. But in doing so, and in defining humanitarianism under the umbrella of secularism, it writes most of the world out of them. We are told that the bureaucratization of Waqf and the addressing of suffering by Muslim communities does not count as humanitarianism proper, because...