Humanity as Concept and Method: Reconciling Critical Scholarship and Empathetic Methods

In Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, Keith Watenpaugh tells us that modern humanitarianism began in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the interwar period. This is the moment, in other words, that religiously-inspired charity shifts to what he calls “organized compassion,” enacted in bureaucratic, professionalized form.

With this history, Bread from Stones offers a number of important insights into our understandings of humanitarianism. First, even as the book sees humanitarianism as deriving from European and North American ideologies, it relocates the origins of humanitarianism outside Europe, in its intersections with other systems of care and in its encounter with a form of violence that has since been called a “crime against humanity,” that is, the Armenian Genocide. Second, it inserts the United States into the history of humanitarianism. The origins of humanitarianism have largely been located in Europe, from Switzerland’s Henri Dunant, who tried to civilize warfare by providing aid on the battlefield, which led to the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC); to the British project of abolitionism; and to the French founders of contemporary humanitarianism (or “the new humanitarianism”) by way of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) or Doctors Without Borders. Bread from Stones demonstrates how the humanitarian project in the interwar period was led by Americans, who felt it could also help them build a new modern, moral community—the vanguard of a new Near East. Third, following on this insight about US engagement, the book helps sharpen our understanding of the relationships between humanitarianism and colonialism. The American humanitarians were not trying to occupy the region or establish a colony—but they were attempting to further their project of modernity by way of relief. Rather than send Americans, they engaged in making new Americans in the Middle East. This demonstrates both the overlap between—and distinct nature of—humanitarian intervention and colonialism.

While these are important interventions, I want to focus this brief essay on how Bread from Stones reveals a continued tension in scholarship on humanitarianism between the critical examination of humanity as concept, that is, the ethico-moral project of humanity as universal, shared suffering, and humanity as method, that is, an approach that relies on an assumed shared humanity with one’s research subjects, expressed through empathy and compassion. More specifically, the book convincingly demonstrates that humanitarianism as shared suffering is not incompatible with a racialized understanding of humanity and with political programs of inequality. It gives us a rich understanding of the complexities and contradictions of humanity as ethical subject in the interwar period—complexities we inherit today. But then, why does it hold onto humanity as moral imperative despite these contradictions and call on it as an essential methodological tool? Are these approaches—one critical, one moralist—compatible?

Humanity as Concept: A Moral and Racialized Order

Bread from Stones explores the development of humanity as both “subject” and “object”; it traces the humanity of those providing humanitarian assistance, as well as the humanity of those receiving it. One of the book’s most interesting and important arguments is that the humanity of humanitarianism in its early incarnation was not simply composed of suffering individuals; it was at once ethical and political, individual and collective. Humanity as the subject of shared suffering was not incompatible with humanity as a collective political entity.

Let me back up to give some context to this important intervention. Contemporary humanitarianism—by which I mean the now largely hegemonic form of secular humanitarianism that began in the early 1970s, with MSF¹—is largely understood to address humanity as a collection of suffering victims, abstracted from their political contexts, and recognizable only through forms of individual, bodily suffering. The history of MSF reveals how this happened. The founders of MSF—doctors and journalists, largely Marxist and Maoist inspired—were initially guided by the belief in a universal humanity grounded...