Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Humanitarianism, genocide and liberalism

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14623528.2015.991209

1469-9494

Michelle Tusan,

International Law and Human Rights

AbstractThe international response to genocide and human rights violations has received increasing attention by scholars in the humanities and social sciences. This article explores the history of the response to mass atrocity by assessing recent work on humanitarianism as an idea and in practice in the West. It argues that the impulse to defend the rights of others historically has been tied up with geopolitical and imperial concerns that shaped European politics. The current embrace of the responsibility to protect, or ‘R2P’, and debates over whether or not to recognize and prosecute perpetrators of past atrocities from the Armenian genocide to Rwanda remain embedded in this longer history of humanitarianism and geopolitics. As recent work on humanitarian intervention, the anti-slavery movement and humanitarianism and foreign policy demonstrates, the pressing need to understand the response to atrocity has called scholars to more fully participate in the contemporary conversation over human rights by exploring its roots in humanitarian practices of the recent and not so recent past. Understanding the history of humanitarianism as it connects both with the history of human rights and liberal ideals offers an important way of reassessing the role of the nation-state and international institutions in responding to human rights crisis. The article concludes by suggesting that scholars move away from the question of the origin of human rights as an idea to focus on historicizing the response to humanitarian crisis in order to problematize the story of the rise of western-led human rights regimes. AcknowledgementThe author would like to acknowledge the journal editors and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments regarding this article.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Notes on contributorMichelle Tusan is Professor of History at the University of Nevada Las Vegas where she writes about and teaches the history of Europe, empire, gender and human rights. Her most recent article is ‘Crimes against humanity: human rights, the British Empire and the origins of the response to the Armenian genocide’, American Historical Review (February 2014). She is the author of Smyrna's ashes: humanitarianism, genocide and the birth of the Middle East (2012) and Women making news: gender and journalism in modern Britain (2005). Her co-authored textbook, Britain since 1688, is out with Routledge.Notes1 A. Dirk Moses and Donald Bloxham (eds.), Oxford handbook of genocide studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).2 The role of the British Empire in guiding this response is explored in Michelle Tusan, ‘“Crimes against humanity”: human rights, the Armenian genocide and the British empire’, American Historical Review, Vol. 119, No. 1, February 2014, pp. 47–77. The series of articles in the ‘Empire and humanitarianism’ special issue that appeared in the Journal of Imperial Commonwealth History (Vol. 40, No. 1, December 2012) demonstrated the intimate link between imperialism and the humanitarian impulse as it developed particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period when European empires began their greatest expansion. The historical connection between the rise of imperialism and the development of international law is explored in Antony Anghie, Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).3 Thomas Weiss, Humanitarian intervention (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 88–118.4 Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, ‘Military and humanitarian government in the age of intervention’, in Fassin and Pandolfi (eds.), Contemporary states of emergency (New York: Zone Books, 2010), pp. 10–11.5 David Kennedy explores this shift in thinking about the use of military intervention in humanitarian crisis in The dark sides of virtue: reassessing international humanitarianism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. xii–xiii; see also Weiss, Humanitarian intervention, p. 1.6 Though not comprehensively covered in this article, the growing literature on R2P necessarily relies on this recent scholarship on humanitarian intervention. See for example the collection of essays organized along historical and regional lines in Jared Genser and Irwin Cotler (eds.), The responsibility to protect: the promise of stopping mass atrocities in our time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).7 Lloyd Axworthy, ‘RtoP and the evolution of state sovereignty’, in Genser and Cotler, The responsibility to protect, pp. 3–17; and Nicole Deller, ‘Challenges and controversies', in Genser and Cotler, The responsibility to protect, pp. 62–84.8 Michelle Tusan, Smyrna's ashes: humanitarianism, genocide and the birth of the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 4–7.9 The collection of essays edited by Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler (Human rights in global politics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999]) examines whether the attempt to apply universal human rights ideals to foreign policy and international intervention remains a ‘fundamentally flawed enterprise’ and detracts from the task of seeking more practical ways of bringing perpetrators of atrocities to justice. See also Alex Bellamy's interrogation of the notion of ‘civilian immunity’ in armed conflicts as a guiding principle in international law, in Massacres and morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). On the geopolitics of humanitarian intervention, see Mark Duffield, Development, security and unending war: governing the world of peoples (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); Jennifer M. Welsh (ed.), Humanitarian intervention and international relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Simon Chesterman, Just war or just peace? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).10 Michael Thomas and Thomas Weiss (eds.), Humanitarianism in question: politics, power, ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), pp. 5–6.11 Hannah Arendt, Origins of totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), pp. 295–296.12 Giorgio Agamben, State of exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 1.13 Lynn Festa, ‘Humanity without feathers', Humanity, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2010, pp. 1–27.14 Didier Fassin, Humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), p. xii.15 This includes most notably the case of the political refugee. See also Mahmood Mamdani, From citizen to refugee: Uganda Asians come to Britain (Cape Town: Pambazuka Press, 2011).16 Fassin, Humanitarian reason, pp. 1–2. For a philosophical treatment of the rights of the dispossessed in the modern context, see Michael Rosen, Dignity: its history and meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).17 Kennedy, Dark sides of virtue, p. xiv.18 Brendan Simms and D.J.B. Trim (eds.), Humanitarian intervention: A history (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).19 Michael Barnett, Empire of humanity: a history of humanitarianism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).20 Weiss, Humanitarianism in question, p. 2.21 Micheline Ishay, The history of human rights: from ancient times to the globalization era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).22 Jonathan Benthall's work on Islamic charities challenges the notion that humanitarianism was a western invention. Benthall, The charitable crescent: politics of aid in the Muslim world (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009).23 Edward Luck's study of the UN's role in implementing R2P concludes that it remains ‘a work in progress', a project still ‘in its infancy’. Luck, ‘From promise to practice: implementing the responsibility to protect’, in Genser and Cotler, The responsibility to protect, p. 85.24 Barnett, Empire of humanity, p. 8; Weiss, Humanitarian interventien, p. 143.25 Andrew Thompson, ‘The Protestant interest and the history of humanitarian intervention’, in Simms and Trim, Humanitarian intervention, p. 67.26 Abigail Green, ‘Intervening in the Jewish question’, in Simms and Trim, Humanitarian intervention, p. 146.27 Davide Rodogno, ‘The European powers' intervention in Macedonia’, in Simms and Trim, Humanitarian intervention, pp. 222–225.28 Kevin Grant, A civilised savagery: Britain and the new slaveries in Africa 1884–1926 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's ghost: a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa (New York: Mariner Books, 1999).29 Anghie, Imperialism, sovereignty and the making of international law, pp. 204–207. According to Martti Koskenniemi, at the Berlin Conference, ‘law became part of the moral and political controversy about the justice of colonialism’. Koskenniemi, The gentle civilizer of nations: the rise and fall of international law (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 121.30 William Mulligan, ‘British anti-slave trade and anti-slavery policy’, in Simms and Trim, Humanitarian intervention, p. 262.31 Mike Sewell, ‘Humanitarian intervention, democracy, and imperialism: the American war with Spain, 1898, and after’, in Brendan Simms and D. J. B. Trim (eds.), Humanitarian intervention, pp. 303–322; Thomas J.W. Probert, ‘The innovation of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment’, in Brendan Simms and D. J. B. Trim (eds.), Humanitarian intervention, pp. 323–342.32 Barnett, Empire of humanity, p. 50.33 Thomas Laqueur and Lynn Hunt have explored the roots of compassion in the Enlightenment. For Laqueur, the ‘humanitarian narrative’ offered a way of understanding distant suffering in a moment when new modes of feeling and engaging humanity had started to shape western political and cultural thought. Hunt contends that human rights were ‘invented’ during the French Revolution and emerged in part as a product of new modes of feeling. Lynn Hunt, Inventing human rights (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008); Thomas Laqueur, ‘The humanitarian narrative’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The new cultural history (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 176–204.34 Thomas Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the origins of humanitarian sensibility, part 1’, American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 2, 1985, pp. 339–361; Haskell, ‘Capitalism and the origins of humanitarian sensibility, part 2’, American Historical Review, Vol. 90, No. 3, 1985, pp. 339–361; Samuel Moyn, ‘Empathy in history: empathizing with humanity’, History and Theory, Vol. 45, 2006, pp. 397–415; Richard D. Brown and Richard Wilson (eds.), Humanitarianism and suffering: the mobilization of empathy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009).35 Barnett, Empire of humanity, pp. 1, 7.36 Barnett, Empire of humanity, p. 14.37 On the rising importance of non-state humanitarian actors, see Keith Watenpaugh, ‘The League of Nations' rescue of Armenian genocide survivors and the making of modern humanitarianism, 1920–1927’, American Historical Review, Vol. 115, No. 5, 2010, pp. 1315–1339; Duffield, Development, security and unending war, pp. 32–65. On the role of international institutions in promoting the rule of law in sovereign states, see Daniela Piana, Judicial accountabilities in new Europe: from rule of law to quality of justice (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010); Michelle Tusan, ‘The business of relief work’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 51, No. 4, 2009, pp. 633–662.38 Weiss, Humanitarian intervention, p. 2.39 The responsibility to protect is the title of the 2001 report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Weiss, Humanitarian intervention, p. 1.40 Barnett, Humanitarian intervention, p. 1.41 See Seymour Drescher's Abolition: a history of slavery and anti-slavery (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), a tightly woven synthesis of the global demise of slavery from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. See also the essays in William Mulligan and Maurice Bric's edited collection that deal with the issue of slavery from the perspective of Britain and the United States along with czarist Russia and a number of colonial European powers. Mulligan and Bric (eds.), A global history of anti-slavery politics in the nineteenth century (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).42 Laurent Dubois' Avengers of the new world (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004) tells the story of anti-slavery through the lens of the Haitian Revolution. Others, including the essays in the collection edited by Christopher Brown and Philip D. Morgan (Arming slaves: from classical times to the modern age [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006]) and Edward Rugemer (The problem of emancipation: the Caribbean roots of the American Civil War [Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2008]) reveal the complexity of the temporal and geographic reach of the institution of slavery and its eventual undoing.43 Robin Blackburn, American crucible: Slavery, emancipation and human rights, (London 2011); Jenny Martinez, The slave trade and the origins of international human rights law, (oxford 2012; Joel quirk, The anti-slavery project from the slave trade to human trafficking, (Philadelphia, 2004).44 Blackburn's early work on slavery includes The making of new world slavery (London: Verso, 1997) and The overthrow of colonial slavery (London: Verso, 1988).45 Blackburn, American crucible: slavery, emancipation and human rights (London: Verso, 2011), p. 2.46 Sam Moyn, The last utopia: human rights in history (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).47 Blackburn, American crucible, p. 5.48 Catherine Hall, Civilizing subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).49 Eric Williams, Capitalism and slavery (University of North Carolina Press, 1994).50 Blackburn, American crucible, pp. 101, 113.51 Blackburn, American crucible, p. 49.52 Blackburn, American crucible, p. 197. Dubois tells this story from the perspective of the revolutionaries, arguing that the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ energized the insurrection against the French on Saint Domingue. Dubois, Avengers of the new world, pp. 102, 105.53 Blackburn, American crucible, p. 267.54 Eric Williams, Slavery and capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).55 Martinez, The slave trade and the origins of international human rights law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 6.56 Martinez, The slave trade, p. 16.57 Grant, A civilised savagery.58 Lauren Benton, ‘Abolition and imperial law’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2011, pp. 356–357.59 Tusan, ‘“Crimes against humanity”’.60 Martinez, The slave trade, p. 99.61 Quirk, The anti-slavery project: from the slave trade to human trafficking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 7.62 Grant, A civilised savagery. Adam Hochschild's treatment of the British response to atrocities in King Leopold II's reign in the Congo emphasizes the drive of the individual men who led campaigns against the new slaveries. Hochschild, King Leopold's ghost.63 Quirk, The anti-slavery project, p. 53.64 Quirk, The anti-slavery project, p. 59.65 Quirk, The anti-slavery project, p. 82.66 Quirk, The anti-slavery project, pp. 136–137.67 Judith Walkowitz, City of dreadful delight (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).68 Quirk, The anti-slavery project, p. 242.69 Rodogno, Against massacre: humanitarian interventions in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Peter Balakian, The burning Tigris: the Armenian genocide and America's response (New York: Harper Collins, 2003); Gary Bass, Freedom's battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention, (New York: Vintage, 2009); Samantha Power, ‘Problem from hell': America and the age of genocide, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002).70 Gary Bass, Stay the hand of vengeance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).71 Bass, Freedom's battle, p. 5.72 There is a growing literature on the response to the Armenian genocide and the event itself. See most recently Michelle Tusan, ‘“Crimes against humanity”’; Raymond Kevorkian, The Armenian genocide: a complete history (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Ronald Suny, Fatma Muge Gocek and Norman Naimark (eds.), A question of genocide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Vahakn Dadrian and Taner Akçam, Judgment at Istanbul: the Armenian genocide trials (New York: Berghahn Books, 2011).73 Donald Bloxham, The final solution: a genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Russell Wallis, for example, has recently studied the Holocaust through the lens of the early British response in Britain. Wallis, Germany and the road to the Holocaust (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014).74 Watenpaugh, ‘The League of Nations' rescue’, pp. 1315–1339.75 Lord James Bryce, The treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire: 1915–16 (London: GP Putnam's Sons, 1916).76 Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin on genocide, Steven Leonard Jacobs, ed. (New York: Lexington Books, 2012).77 Rodogno, Against massacre, p. 2.78 Rodogno, Against massacre, p. 168.79 On the importance of private organizations and humanitarian activism, see Tusan, Smyrna's ashes; Keith Watenpaugh, ‘Are there any children for sale: genocide and the transfer of Armenian children’, Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2013, pp. 283–295.80 Power, ‘A problem from hell’: America and the age of genocide, p. xvi.81 For a more nuanced look at the issue of justice and genocide in the case of Rwanda, see Mahmood Mamdani, When victims become killers: colonialism, natives and the genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).82 Power, ‘Problem from hell’, pp. 508–509.83 On the roots of this influence, see Mark Mazower, No enchanted palace: the end of empire and the ideological origins of the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).84 The essays in Tom Crook, Rebecca Gill and Bertrand Taithe (eds.), Evil, barbarism and empire explore ‘evil and barbarism’ as a cultural construction ‘subject to discursive mediation’ (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 2.85 Rene Lemarchand, Forgotten genocides (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), pp. 1–2.86 Hunt, Inventing human rights; Moyn, The last utopia.87 Tusan, ‘“Crimes against humanity”’, pp. 50–52.88 Stephen Hopgood, The endtimes of human rights (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 22.89 See Kenneth Cmeil, ‘The recent history of human rights', American Historical Review, Vol. 109, No. 1, 2004, pp. 117–135; John Headley, The Europeanization of the world: on the origins of human rights and democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Ishay, The history of human rights; Jack Donnelly, Universal human rights in theory and practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Lynda Schaefer Bell, Andrew James Nathan and Ilan Peleg (eds.), Negotiating culture and human rights (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Richard Bauman, Human rights in Ancient Rome (New York: Routledge, 2012).