ABSTRACT
Humanitarianism is usually promoted without much elaboration of what the word itself means. It is often suggested that humanitarianism is what humanitarians do, but that is misleading. It is not just action taken to save lives. It is an ideology. As such, it allows contradictory ideas about neutrality to combine with ideas about the need for enforcement, without contradictions being confronted. Thus, humanitarian assistance is associated with non-military aid to those in need, while humanitarian intervention is associated with military deployment to assist those experiencing terrible atrocities. Confusingly, both may occur at the same time. Also, partly because humanitarianism is grounded in neo-Christian ideas about helping strangers for transcendental reasons, it tends to be resistant to critical scrutiny. It is so associated with good intentions that adverse consequences of humanitarian actions are rarely interrogated closely in such a way as to hold humanitarians to account. The chapter discusses examples of humanitarian assistance and intervention which are generally viewed as having had very mixed results. They have led to a great deal of soul-searching by humanitarian analysts. Yet humanitarianism is a robust combination of values and beliefs, and has proved impossible to replace.
