Is humanitarianism a feature of modernist utopias? Does international humanitarian law express utopian designs? Certainly, global consensus about humanitarian interventions, namely of the military kind, does not exist, and these interventions have always involved strategic, normative, and empirical considerations. Still, humanitarianism is deployed in the name of humanity (Feldman and Ticktin 2010), and different routes are open to us if we wish to explore its links with the utopian trope: the religious moorings of humanitarianism that instruct us to help those in need, the idea of the sacredness of human life, a secular common humanity that transcends all nationalities and boundaries, the core principles of humanitarian action, or the universality of human rights. All are symbolic horizons that inform a myriad of humanitarian configurations and gestures on the ground. No doubt, when seen as an ethos, humanitarianism has had sweeping ambitions, propelling the end of the slave trade, the creation of the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the so-called “laws of humanity.” The humanity that grounds humanitarian law, and the humanness that informs humanitarian moral reasoning, have sanctioned all sorts of saving interventions in post-disaster and conflict settings (Fassin 2011). Discursive and visual tropes have also been deployed at great length to galvanize global compassion and the “gift” of aid. The constellation that emerges from this cursory review is quite extraordinary, but this is not to say that institutional humanitarianism is devoid of all sorts of self-interested, neo-imperialistic, hypocritical, and power-driven ambitions. However, this is not the point. The idealistic, universalizing, and aspirational contours of humanitarian reasoning are readily identifiable; what needs to be elucidated here is its relation to utopia.
In common parlance, utopia refers to a desirable yet impossible state. One could argue that were we to live in a fully realized utopia, there would be no need for humanitarianism because suffering and injustice would have been eradicated. Conversely, qualifying humanitarian goals as utopian stresses their unrealistic features. This stance adopts a partial and reductionist view of utopia’s theoretical, political, symbolic, and affective potential, and ignores the vibrant scholarship around utopia’s semantic reach and practices of collective engagement. The gist of the matter lies partly in utopia’s relation to the real. Recent works seek to pull the concept of utopia back to the everyday, not to re-enchant the world, but rather to revitalize intellectual imagination. Key proposals reconsider utopia as an analytical category of experience of time, space, and relationality that brings to the fore those frictions between the desired and the concrete that shape specific encounters (Cooper 2014; Gardiner 2013; Maskens and Blanes 2018). Methodologically, utopia becomes a non-essentialized evaluative term that is apt to characterize the qualities and configurations of future-oriented projects or praxis (Levitas 2013). Intentional neo-rural communities come to mind as an example of this, along with many other social projects that seek to foster human betterment. The proposal of empirical utopias is not to ascertain utopian achievements, but rather to reveal the politics of possibility, and this often entails an ethical orientation toward a shared becoming (Wright 2010). Ultimately, the utopian trope seeks to galvanize the politics of social critique.
These comments invite us to shift our analytical gaze away from the (unrealistic) end goal of humanitarianism’s (flawed) ethics of care, and to consider instead localized encounters, where, as a frame of mind that guides action, humanitarianism’s aspirational gestures toward better futures are rendered visible, however imperfect they may be.
References
Cooper, D. (2014) Everyday Utopias: The Conceptual Life of Promising Spaces. Duke University Press.
Fassin, D. (2011) Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. University of California Press.
Feldman, I. , Ticktin, M. eds. (2010) In the Name of Humanity: The Government of Threat and Care. Duke University Press.
Gardiner, M. (2013) Weak Messianism: Essays in Everyday Utopianism. Peter Lang.
Levitas, R. (2013) Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. Palgrave Macmillan.
Maskens, M. , Blanes, R. eds. (2018) Utopian Encounters: Anthropologies of Empirical Utopias . Peter Lang.
Wright, O.E. (2010) Envisioning Real Utopias. Verso.