ABSTRACT
For some time there has been a growing literature focused on deconstructing the concept of the ‘human’ in the ideas of ‘human rights’ and of ‘humanitarianism’ that have played such a significant part, both rhetorically and practically in post-Cold-War politics.1 There has also been the growth of a major literature focused specifically on the rights and wrongs of military humanitarian intervention,2 including feminist work addressing humanitarian legitimations of war.3 This chapter draws on these literatures in order to examine the assumptions that enable ethical humanitarianism, philosophically and in practice, especially when it takes a violent form. In particular, I am interested in how assumptions about moral authority and agency necessary for humanitarian ethics are underpinned by gendered discriminations of the human. And in the implications that, from a feminist perspective, follow from challenging those assumptions, for humanitarianism in general and humanitarian war specifically. Of all of the developments in international politics in the past twenty years it is humanitarianism (a category that increasingly encompasses a range of practices from emergency aid to peacekeeping and war making) that apparently relies most clearly on a universal conception of the human, since it is the violation of the human as such that triggers the requirement for a humanitarian response. As many scholars have argued however, if we examine the humanitarian script, we find not a notion of the ‘human’ as such, but rather sets of criteria through which the simply ‘human’ are differentiated from other sorts of human. In the first two sections of what follows, I will argue that this is true across the range of humanitarian practices, from famine relief to military intervention for humanitarian purposes, but that it becomes particularly stark and consequential in the case of military humanitarian intervention, where the script of a politics of rescue meets the script of just war. I will argue that the only way in which the script of military humanitarian intervention can be sustained is by reproducing differences between people, most reliably through the naturalising effects of familiar gendered narratives. These gendered narratives replay, and thereby embed and reinforce, understandings of moral authority and moral agency that permit a way of thinking about war that keeps it at a distance. On these accounts the ‘just warrior’ remains untouched by war, even as he makes war.
