PSCI 420
Humanitarianism as Ideology and Strategy Spring 2020
Division II
This is not the current course catalog

Since the mid-1980s, humanitarianism has been one dominant way that powerful countries, organizations and people have approached disaster elsewhere. Humanitarianism aims at immediate rescue, striving to keep people alive until some solution can be found. It aims not to address crises’ causes nor to assist with solutions–which it considers political–just to keep human bodies alive. Critics contend that humanitarianism produces harm, providing structural incentives for people to do more or less than they need to, and that it deepens and restructures inequality between subjects and objects. They contend also that it justifies the way of things. This course confronts humanitarianism through reading its defenders and critics, by looking at accounts by individuals and organizations, and by assessing its usefulness as an international political strategy from realist, liberal, materialist, and constructivist points of view.