In the final Big Ideas panel April 25, and explored 鈥淗umanitarianism and its Discontents鈥 in Klarman Hall鈥檚 Groos Family Atrium.
While honoring the good intent of humanitarianism, the panelists emphasized that it is also fraught with risks.
, associate professor of English in the 麻豆视频 and 麻豆视频 and associate member of the Cornell Law School faculty, illustrated her point with a series of examples from film, literature and popular culture. These examples, she argued, highlight how some global failures of human rights today are structural and systemic 鈥 damaging byproducts of phenomena like capitalism and free trade, neoliberalism, and regimes of global governance.
Human rights, Anker said, have come to be associated with qualities like enlightenment, truth, reason 鈥 and civilization鈥檚 progress. Regions of the world afflicted by human rights abuses are therefore imagined to be trapped in something like a moral 鈥渄ark ages鈥 and their peoples seen as less fully human. Humanitarian discourse tends to reinforce the belief the Westernized way of life is superior, more advanced and educated. Humanitarianism ironically can affirm larger ideas about Western exceptionalism even though the West has often played a negative role in producing socioeconomic and political conditions that lead to failures to observe human rights.
One example is development aid (as opposed to emergency aid) in Africa, which disempowers, immobilizes and disables its recipients and acts as a dehumanizing force, said , professor of Africana studies. Rather than enhancing the capacity of recipients to exercise autonomy in their own affairs, development aid in Africa keep recipients dependent.
鈥淪tripped of all its finery, what I call the aid model is built on the assumption that Africans will always need aid and the rest of the world will always have to provide it,鈥 said 罢谩铆飞貌. 鈥淭he tragedy is that, at the present time, many African leaders and intellectuals are content to remain permanently at the receiving bottom end of the aid dyad. 鈥
For 罢谩铆飞貌, humanitarianism crosses the line when emergency aid becomes institutionalized and there is no commitment to an end date or to working toward enabling autonomy for aid recipients.
Anker identified another concern with humanitarianism: the way it can serve to quell or palliate Western guilt.
鈥淥ur challenge is to feel sympathy without feeling superior, or without buying into deceptive fantasies about how our ways of life and values are somehow 鈥榖etter鈥 than the rest of the world,鈥 she said.
To spur us into action, Anker said, human rights activism routinely vilifies certain actors and often entire cultures, while characterizing others, like women and children, as victims.
鈥淏ut those depictions deprive those populations of a certain agency and self-determination,鈥 she said.
罢谩铆飞貌 pointed out that aid programs and projects are chosen at the behest of donors, often with little or no mind paid to what recipients want or need. 罢谩铆飞貌 urged an end to the African aid industry so that 鈥淎fricans can assume agency, again, with all its dangers and uncertainties.鈥
In her conclusion, Anker emphasized why the humanities are necessary to address the challenges of humanitarianism: 鈥淭he humanities train us to critique and ask hard questions about exactly the disturbing biases I鈥檝e been addressing,鈥 she said.
By deconstructing those misconceptions, said Anker, 鈥渨e can avoid invoking them in our own reasoning and thinking 鈥. And we can begin to craft a new language, a new social imaginary for talking about human rights 鈥 ideally in a language that might leave us feeling a little less self-congratulatory and a little more implicated.鈥
Linda B. Glaser is a staff writer for the 麻豆视频 and 麻豆视频.
This article also appeared in the
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