Humanitarianism Genocide and Liberalism

Journal of Genocide Research
ISSN: 1462-3528 (Print) 1469-9494 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjgr20
Humanitarianism, genocide and liberalism
Michelle Tusan
To cite this article: Michelle Tusan (2015) Humanitarianism, genocide and liberalism, Journal of
Genocide Research, 17:1, 83-105, DOI: 10.1080/14623528.2015.991209
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2015.991209
Published online: 24 Dec 2014.
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Journal of Genocide Research, 2015
Vol. 17, No. 1, 83– 105, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2015.991209
REVIEW ARTICLE
Humanitarianism, genocide and

liberalism
MICHELLE TUSAN
The 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.
Introduction
Brutal, systematic acts of widespread violence against targeted civilian minority
populations provided a new frame for understanding mass atrocity after World
War I. This modern, twentieth-century reading of the crime that came to be
labelled ‘genocide’ in the early 1940s resulted in the eventual emergence of
human rights regimes that prosecuted perpetrators and defended victims under
the umbrella of international law.1 As recent scholarship on humanitarianism
and genocide reminds us, the international response to violence, atrocity and
exploitation committed by state and non-state actors has a longer history
embedded in Anglo, European and American imperial politics.2
# 2015 Taylor & Francis

MICHELLE TUSAN
This article assesses the changing nature of the response to mass atrocity and
genocide that in the West historically has been rooted in liberal ideas about the
role of the state in foreign interventions. The wide-ranging and interdisciplinary
scholarship under consideration here understands humanitarianism in its activist
form as a set of individual and official policy responses to human suffering. By
focusing on the longue durée of the response to humanitarian crisis, this article
suggests that scholars more closely consider the role of humanitarianism in the
making of modern human rights regimes. Placing humanitarianism and human
rights in the same field of study reorients the scholarly gaze away from debating
the origins of the human rights story towards more closely considering the histori-
cal relationship between the rise of an ideology of universal rights and the practice
of humanitarian intervention.
That humanitarianism has a history no one would deny. The interest in knowing
where contemporary notions of humanitarian intervention came from and how it
worked in the past has a new urgency in today’s geopolitical landscape where the
doctrine of ‘the responsibility to protect’, or R2P, has gained legitimacy in the
wake of the humanitarian crises of the 1990s.3 Scholars point to a change in the
way nations dealt with the question of intervention in conflicts abroad dating
from this period. Long-held concerns over violating national sovereignty in the
case of intervention codified in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) have been sup-
planted by a doctrine that privileges the rights of victim communities and individ-
uals.4 Intervening in the internal affairs of sovereign nations now is considered a
necessary part of the humanitarian response. Whereas previous generations looked
sceptically at the role of the military in managing and helping to mitigate huma-
nitarian crisis, today there is a belief that there is a moral obligation to use force to
stop human suffering.5 The appointment as US ambassador to the United Nations
of Samantha Power, who has advocated that the US play a more prominent role in
managing humanitarian crisis abroad, demonstrates the contemporary link
between humanitarianism and foreign policy.
Studying the history of the response to atrocity and genocide can help us to
understand this seemingly recent moral embrace by the nation-state of the respon-
sibility to protect.6 One of the critiques of this doctrine codified in 2005 is that
liberal ideals and institutions have determined how and when to intervene in the
affairs of sovereign states in the case of genocide, war crimes, crimes against
humanity and ethnic cleansing. Some have gone as far as to charge that this
type of intervention looks more like colonialism than disinterested humanitarian-
ism.7 This current debate over the implications of implementing R2P on a broad
scale has led to attempts to disentangle the historical relationship between huma-
nitarianism, the nation-state and international institutions. Scholars have expanded
the study of humanitarianism beyond the familiar story of the episodic engage-
ment of the West in particular humanitarian campaigns to include in-depth
studies of the rhetoric, institutions and objectives of humanitarian intervention
by state and non-state actors.8
Recent scholarship, then, focuses primarily on questions regarding why indi-
viduals and states would care about distant suffering in the first place and the
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HUMANITARIANISM, GENOCIDE AND LIBERALISM
problem of what actions taken on behalf of suffering strangers would mean in pro-
moting domestic, foreign policy and imperial interests. Starting with the end of the
European wars of religion, this work takes a long view of humanitarian interven-
tion in theory and practice. This article considers the humanitarian response as a
story of continuity and change in campaigns led by the West to stop slavery,
provide humanitarian relief and prevent genocide across the early modern and
modern periods.
There is an unavoidable politics to the study of humanitarian intervention. The
focus in much of the literature has been on the West. Interdisciplinary in approach,
this scholarship on the response to atrocity has one eye on public policy and often
self-consciously engages in debates over how and when to intervene abroad. This
has been taken up by historians, sociologists, anthropologists and literary critics
who see the stakes as particularly high when it comes to telling the story of inter-
ventions past and present.9 Humanitarianism is in the process of redefining itself in
the wake of a series of post-Cold War disasters from Africa to the Balkans and the
Middle East. The attempt to recapture a lost sense of universality of the humani-
tarian ideal has led to what Michael Thomas calls an ‘identity crisis’ that requires
scholars to reengage ‘politics, power and ethics’ in the study of the West’s engage-
ment with the rest of the world.10
Understanding the response to atrocity and genocide necessarily requires consid-
ering the relationships of power that inevitably shadow any thinking about interven-
tion on behalf of persecuted populations. The history of humanitarianism
importantly is also the history of those who suffer. Hannah Arendt used the
tragedy of postwar European society to illustrate the power of totalitarianism to
strip individuals of their basic humanity.11 More recently, moral histories of huma-
nitarian action and the study of the object of suffering have added theoretical tools to
interdisciplinary humanitarian scholarship. Giorgio Agamben has offered a way of
understanding the power of the state to mediate the lives and status of the suffering
subject using the camp as a site of study. The concentration camp operates as a ‘state
of exception’ or ‘the no-man’s land between public law and political fact’ which
defines the status of the suffering subject.12 This mediation also takes place in nar-
ratives of sufferings that create what Lynn Festa calls a ‘sentimental humanity’ that
reinforces unequal power relations between slave and abolitionist and elides the
possibility of true subjectivity for the victim.13 Power, however, does not remain
only in the hands of the sentimental observer. Seemingly voiceless victims have
the power to shape the response of humanitarian actors. Rightly claiming humani-
tarianism as a ‘potent force in our world’, Didier Fassin explores the ‘strength of the
weak’ to move human sympathy.14 Using an anthropological lens, he interrogates
the world of the aid worker and victim in order to understand the place where
moral reason meets public policy.15 Case studies of the contemporary spaces
where what Fassin calls ‘humanitarian government’ operates shed new light on
the West’s response to excluded and marginalized populations, which include
asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants, the poor and children.16 In this way,
the power of these powerless subjects is in their ability to affect the humanitarian
response by engaging the observer.
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MICHELLE TUSAN
If, as David Kennedy claims, humanitarianism starts as an ‘impulse’ that trans-

forms into practice, its power remains rooted in its origins as an idea.17 As one of
the great ideologies of the modern era, humanitarianism like other ideologies, or
‘isms’, of the post-Enlightenment moment has struggled to find its footing as a
practical project, as indicated by the critique of Fassin, Festa and others. Humani-
tarianism in practice more often than not stumbles when faced with the complex-
ities of geopolitical realities, leading advocates to call for pragmatic ‘fixes’ to the
humanitarian programme and critics to question its viability as a guiding principle
in the twenty-first century. Regardless, understanding the history of humanitarian-
ism as both idea and practice offers an important way of thinking through the role
of the humanitarian nation in the making of modern human rights regimes.
Histories of humanitarian intervention

Intervention in conflict on humanitarian grounds dates back, according to the col-
lection of essays edited by Bernard Simms and D. J. B. Trim in Humanitarian
intervention, to early modern Europe.18 This collection reassesses the Treaty of
Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War in 1648 as a starting point for study-
ing the foundation of the now accepted doctrine of intervention in the internal
affairs of other nations. Michael Barnett’s Empire of humanity examines the ideol-
ogy and practice of humanitarian intervention starting in the mid nineteenth
century.19 The narrative arcs towards the present day, as Barnett attempts to
explain modern humanitarian practices as they evolved over the past 150 years.
Thomas Weiss’s study is firmly rooted in present day concerns. His relatively
short survey, Humanitarian intervention, interrogates changing norms of humani-
tarian intervention based on a growing belief that the responsibility to protect
overrides state sovereignty in the attempt to ‘rescue suffering civilians’.20 The
distinct periodization of these assessments reveals the contested nature of deter-
mining how, why and when humanitarian intervention first emerged.
It is important to note that each of these works focuses primarily on the Euro-
pean origins of humanitarian intervention. But rights discourse, as Micheline
Ishay demonstrates, has its roots in distinctive traditions from regions including
Asia, Africa and Europe; secular and religious influences and socialist and
liberal ideologies.21 While acknowledging that the West does not have an exclu-
sive claim to the humanitarian ideal, the scholarship under consideration here
draws lessons for the present day regarding humanitarian intervention from the
western experience. The question of how non-western entities and states have
dealt with the issue of intervention on the grounds of a common humanity
remains limited and is a topic that deserves more detailed treatment in the litera-
ture on the humanitarian response.22 The study of humanitarian intervention in
practice through an Anglo-European lens, as opposed to the politically, ethnically
and religiously diverse rights discourses studied by Ishay, has remained guided by
a concern over the issue of sovereignty and the attempt to enforce the doctrine of
the ‘laws of humanity’ as it evolved starting in early modern period in Europe. Out
of this context emerged normative western values and practices regarding
86
humanitarianism which have shaped the policies of international institutions,

including the United Nations, today charged with upholding the doctrine of the
responsibility to protect.23 For Barnett and Weiss, the persistent reliance on
western models remains problematic in the practice of humanitarian intervention
in the twenty-first century.24
A shared concern with the ultimate sustainability of this humanitarian model as
practised by the West animates each of these accounts. The attempt to give huma-
nitarian intervention a history thus centres on past and contemporary geopolitical
concerns. Essays in the first part of the Simms and Trim collection date the politics
of humanitarianism to the sixteenth century when monarchs interfered in the
internal business of their neighbours to change policy regarding persecuted min-
orities, not to force regime change. Religion was the primary factor in determining
which groups were deemed worthy of protection. For example, Queen Elizabeth
I as head of the Anglican Church in England made pleas on behalf of Protestant
subjects living in other lands. As Trim’s opening essay, subtitled ‘interventions
on behalf of foreign populations in early modern Europe’ asserts, religious perse-
cution motivated early humanitarian interventions as tyranny was viewed largely
through a confessional lens. This theme is taken up in a subsequent essay by
Andrew Thompson entitled ‘The Protestant interest and the history of humanitar-
ian intervention’, which focuses on humanitarianism as an obligation of kingship
during the first half of the eighteenth century. Rather than making claims of a
‘common humanity’, early modern rulers defended the rights of particular confes-
sional groups whom they deemed it their obligation to protect.25
This chronologically organized collection of essays moves to the nineteenth
century in Part II to consider the involvement of the Great Powers in the internal
affairs of the Ottoman Empire. John Bew’s study of British diplomacy, ‘From an
umpire to a competitor: Castlereagh, Canning and the issue of international inter-
vention’ reveals how geopolitics and humanitarianism seemingly accidentally
become tied together as a result of concerns over the balance of power in
Europe after the Napoleonic wars. The politics of humanitarianism hinged on
the security interests of each of the Great Powers in the case of the Greek Wars
of Independence. At the same time, nations began to construe intervention as
having a moral foundation in protecting oppressed minorities from Ottoman
tyranny. Gradually, Britain’s early reluctance to act on behalf of the Greeks trans-
lated into a rhetorical commitment to protect Ottoman Christians through a series
of treaty agreements driven by worries about maintaining the integrity of the
Concert of Europe and British constitutionalism.
Historians have focused primarily on European claims to defend Ottoman
Christians but as Abigail Green demonstrates in her essay, ‘Intervening in the
Jewish question’, the defence of minority communities also extended to the
Jews starting in the 1840s. Britain’s ‘self-appointed role as champion of
Ottoman Jewry’ after the Damascus Affair played out in European relations
with the Ottoman Empire that continued to influence diplomacy up to the ill-
fated Treaty of Berlin that ended the Russo-Turkish War in 1878.26 Matthias
Schultz’s study of the Russo-Turkish War reveals both geopolitical and
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MICHELLE TUSAN
humanitarian motivations for intervention and demonstrates how the war itself
was a product of these dual concerns. Two essays by Davide Rodogno further
connect European diplomacy with humanitarian intervention. Rodogno argues
that the case of European intervention in Syria and Lebanon in 1860– 1861
should be understood as a key event in shaping responses to the subsequent mas-
sacre of Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire. Later in the collection he
draws a parallel between the Armenian Question and the Macedonia Question
to criticize the one size fits all approach taken by the European powers to the min-
ority issue in the Ottoman Empire. As Rodogno argues, these so-called solutions
would have ended up displacing far more people than they ever possibly could
have helped.27
Any study of European humanitarian intervention in this period necessarily
must include the case of Africa. By the late nineteenth century, Africa stood para-
doxically at the centre of both European conquest and humanitarian intervention
spearheaded by missionary and secular organizations. The Scramble for Africa
divided the continent into a patchwork of badly administered European-led
states where indigenous peoples found themselves victims of large-scale, systema-
tic atrocities resulting from exploitative labour practices and imperial meddling in
regional conflicts. The horrors of Belgian rule in the Congo, for example, have
been well told by Kevin Grant in A civilised savagery (2004) and Adam Hochs-
child in King Leopold’s ghost (1999).28 For Antony Anghie, this pattern of exploi-
tation motivated by the so-called ‘civilizing mission’ and codified in the 1884 –
1885 Treaty of Berlin had implications beyond Africa and shaped the very foun-
dations of international law. The imperial roots of international law remain, in
Anghie’s assessment, imbricated in the colonial story and served to legitimate
imperialism and support intervention in the internal affairs of former colonies
after independence.29
There is little room for considering the effects of colonial exploitation in this
collection, however. Maeve Ryan in ‘The price of legitimacy in humanitarian
intervention’ instead examines the British campaigns to seize slave ships of
other nations in order to demonstrate that Britain remained at the forefront of abol-
ition after outlawing the slave trade in 1807. This reading casts the British Empire
as liberator, not oppressor, in Africa. William Mulligan also attempts to rehabili-
tate British anti-slavery activism, arguing that scholars have ‘played down the
humanitarian bent of British policy’. Here Mulligan credits British public
opinion for actively pressing governments to commit to ending the practice of
slavery.30 Mulligan’s account of nineteenth-century interventionism portrays
state policy as being driven by pressure from an outraged public. This points to
a shift in the second half of the nineteenth century away from a policy of interven-
tion largely determined by the religious and political concerns of individual rulers,
as was the case in the early modern period, to the will of the people armed with
information from the press and eyewitness accounts of atrocities. A final essay
in this section by Gideon Mailer on missionary activism in Sudan argues for the
importance of non-state agents in determining the form that humanitarian inter-
vention took in the twentieth century.
88
Several essays dealing with the twentieth century look at non-European state
actors and raise the question of how humanitarian intervention operates outside
the confines of Europe. The United States and American foreign policy in particu-
lar are the focus of two essays that examine the Spanish-American War and the
history of the Jackson-Vanik Amendment.31 Only one essay by Sophie Quinn
Judge on Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in the late 1970s and 1980s pulls
the reader out of the American-European model of humanitarian intervention. A
final essay in the ‘postscript’ takes the reader up to the present day with an
essay by Matthew Jamison entitled, ‘Humanitarian intervention since 1990 and
“liberal interventionism”’ that focuses on the ideological and policy shifts of
liberal interventionism undertaken by Prime Minister Tony Blair and President
Bill Clinton in the 1990s. In this reading of the history of humanitarian interven-
tion, the conclusion drawn by D.J.B Trim in ‘Conclusion: Humanitarian interven-
tion in historical perspective’ is that acting morally and ethically has always been
in the national interest. It will be left to future scholars to explain what the story of
humanitarian intervention looks like outside of this western-focused imperial
frame.
In sum, this collection provides a broad portrait of humanitarian intervention as
an evolutionary and modern concept intimately tied to geopolitical concerns. The
effect of these various state and non-state actors working in the name of a common
humanity on the communities in which they operated is never fully discussed. The
reader is left wondering how and why these interventions mattered on the ground,
particularly in the twentieth century. How did two world wars, both of which wit-
nessed genocide and the mass displacement of civilian populations, complicate
notions of intervention on behalf of a common humanity? Unfortunately, chan-
ging standards regarding the laws of war and intervention during the first half
of the twentieth century are not discussed in detail by any of the authors in this
collection.
The long view of the history of intervention taken by Simms and Trim, while
drawing some important parallels and differences between modern and early
modern interventionism, tends to flatten out very real differences that have motiv-
ated humanitarian intervention in the past. Barnett takes a shorter view of this
history, starting his study with the Enlightenment when ‘organized compassion
became part of the everyday’.32 Here he joins scholars including Thomas
Laqueur and Lynn Hunt who understand the end of the eighteenth century as
the moment when new modes of understanding the human condition emerged
and produced a modern humanitarian sensibility.33 Thomas Haskell, Sam Moyn
and others have interrogated how, why and even if this turn towards empathy
had any effect on the response to distant suffering.34 Although the roots of Bar-
nett’s story can be found in the Enlightenment, Barnett sees the founding of the
International Committee of the Red Cross and the Geneva Conventions that
emerged in the wake of the Battle of Solferino in 1859 as a ‘tipping point’ in
the idea and performance of compassion. Claiming his as ‘one of the first histories
of humanitarianism’, Barnett treats ‘humanitarianism as a morally complicated
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MICHELLE TUSAN
creature, a flawed hero defined by the passions, politics, and power of its times
even as it tries to rise above them’.35
Barnett’s ambivalent stance on the costs and benefits of humanitarian interven-
tion comes from his contention that the ‘widening circle of sympathy’ often ends
up looking like paternalism.36 He divides his investigation into three distinct sec-
tions that trace what he calls the ages of humanitarianism. The ‘Age of imperial
humanitarianism’ describes the early paternal motivations of European imperial
powers in engaging in humanitarian intervention during the nineteenth century.
World War II offers a dividing line when ‘neo-humanitarianism’ replaces imperial
forms, having a ‘transformative effect’ on the practice of humanitarianism.
Finally, Barnett explores the rise of what he calls ‘liberal humanitarianism’
after the Cold War in order to take the story and critique to the present day. It
is here that the weight of the narrative rests, with Barnett offering his assessment
of the successes and failures of modern humanitarian regimes that risk looking like
empires in a new age of ‘humanitarian governance’ that operates outside of the
state. The devastating humanitarian crises of the 1990s in the Balkans and
Africa created new opportunities to deploy humanitarian ideology and practice
as powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and non-state actors
began openly engaging in political battles.37
In this final assessment, Barnett seems to offer more of a warning than anything
else about the transformation of a noble idea into a tool for politics. Tom Weiss,
who collaborated with Barnett on an earlier project, has an even more urgent
message in his book, Humanitarian intervention. A volume in the policy-
focused ‘War and Conflict in the Modern World’ series by Polity Press, the
book explores the state of humanitarianism in the post-Cold War era. It asks if
we are ‘at the dawn of a new era’ faced with the issue of offering aid on a
global scale to those ‘who live in a state that is unable or unwilling to protect
and succor them’.38 At the centre of Weiss’s analysis is an interrogation of the
responsibility to protect that he studies as a necessary and urgent response to
the humanitarian disasters of the 1990s.39 This survey of contemporary humanitar-
ian doctrines that guide international policy self-consciously does not look back in
an attempt to understand the origins of a concept. Instead, Weiss concludes with a
directive of sorts that asks readers to consider how to move from ‘rhetoric to
reality’ in matters of humanitarian intervention today.
As these histories of humanitarianism make clear, there has never been a con-
sensus regarding how, when or even whether to intervene to stop genocide and
mass atrocity. The answer to these questions emerged largely out of decisions
made by state and non-state actors that constituted what Barnett calls the
‘crooked timber of humanitarianism’.40 In the early modern period, monarchs
determined the course that any potential intervention in the affairs of foreign
powers would take on behalf of the dispossessed. That changed with the Enlight-
enment when broad claims of a universal humanity offered new ways of under-
standing the obligation to act. By the nineteenth century, an activist sensibility
found voice in campaigns that looked to undo long-held practices like slavery
through pressuring governments to abolish slavery on humanitarian grounds.
90
The mode of response shifted away from the state after World War II with the
founding of international institutions, most notably the United Nations, which
provided forums for the consideration of rights claims on behalf of victims.
Today it seems we are asked again to reconsider how humanitarianism will
operate in a globalized world in light of the wars in the Balkans, genocide in
Rwanda and the post-9/11 War on Terror. The important role played by the
United States and Britain in this shifting story of humanitarian action and inaction
cannot be denied. This has as much to do with these nations’ status as world
powers as it does with the problematic liberal casting of the state as having a
role in defending freedom abroad that characterized humanitarianism’s early
and sustained development in the Anglo-American tradition. Indeed, Britain
and the United States played a crucial role in determining the course of arguably
the most important humanitarian intervention of the modern period: the campaign
to end slavery.
Humanitarianism, slavery and abolition

Anti-slavery campaigns remain of central importance to the history of the huma-
nitarian response as a number of recent studies demonstrate. Scholars in the huma-
nities and social sciences have shown renewed interest in the topic of slavery from
a global perspective, which has opened up a space to consider the lasting and
widespread effects of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century abolition
movement.41 These studies decentre the story of the United States’ experience
with slavery and ask readers to take a broader look at the origins and aftermath
of slavery in its geopolitical and imperial context.42 Robin Blackburn’s ambitious
American crucible places the history of slavery and its abolition in one frame of
study. Jenny Martinez, a specialist in international law at Stanford, focuses her
lens much more narrowly on British attempts to enforce its own ban on trading
slaves among its European and American allies starting in 1807 in The slave
trade and the origins of international human rights law. Joel Quirk, a lecturer
in political science and member of the UNESCO Slave Route Project, outlines
the long, uneven journey towards the eradication of slavery and slave-like
labour practices in The anti-slavery project, which begins by considering the
Atlantic slave trade and ends with current day concerns over human trafficking.
Each of these authors views the past and present humanitarian response to
slavery as crucial to understanding modern day human rights regimes.43
Blackburn continues his work in what he admits is a crowded field.44 The well-
told history of anti-slavery agitation in Britain and the Americas has influenced
generations of scholars looking to understand why and how the widely accepted
ancient institution of slavery first came to be questioned in the eighteenth
century. American crucible engages previous scholarship on how ideas about indi-
vidual freedom and natural law rooted in the Enlightenment as well as changing
economic practices brought on by the rise of capitalism played an important
role in challenging slavery as an institution. For Blackburn the ‘rise of colonialism
and capitalism’ during this period explains why slavery thrived in the Americas or
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MICHELLE TUSAN
the ‘New World’ and later was undone.45 This massive general history of slavery
and its abolition offers a sweeping view of the abolition of slavery in the late eight-
eenth century and the rise of the new slaveries in Africa at the end of the nine-
teenth century. Blackburn’s stated objective is to insert anti-slavery agitation
into the history of human rights. Here he takes on Sam Moyn’s claim in The
last utopia (2010) that human rights belongs squarely to the latter part of the twen-
tieth century by arguing that modern human rights regimes came out of anti-
slavery movements.46 Blackburn takes particular exception to the idea that anti-
slavery agitation failed to move forward rights discourse inspired by a belief in
natural law.47 However, while much is made from the anti-slavery movement
as a new starting point for beginnings of human rights, it remains unclear
exactly what present day human rights regimes, embodied in international insti-
tutions like the United Nations and the International Court of Justice, end up
taking institutionally, practically or intellectually from the movement to end
slavery. Fourteen chronologically driven chapters trace the rise and fall of
slavery as a central story in the history of human rights.
To secure these claims, Blackburn puts colony and metropole in one analytical
frame. Slavery was not something that ‘happened over there’ but, as scholars such
as Catherine Hall have shown, had a deep and profound effect on the societies that
supported slavery regimes abroad.48 Blackburn’s largely synthetic and economi-
cally determinist reading of slavery uses this framework to attempt to refine the
influential and strikingly resilient thesis put forth by Eric Williams in his book
Capitalism and slavery published in the 1940s that holds that slavery financed
the Industrial Revolution.49 Plantation economics, Blackburn argues, made a
‘strong contribution’ to the domestic economy and thus what happened in the
colony mattered to what happened at home.50 The rise of a new ‘humanitarian sen-
sibility’ further contributed to the questioning of a mercantilist model of empire
sustained by slave labour.51 But Blackburn also includes what he calls ‘an extra
ingredient’ that sustained campaigns against slavery: slave revolts. Almost a
quarter of the book focuses on ‘the Haitian pivot’. Here he credits the first success-
ful slave revolt in Haiti in 1793 with radicalizing the rights of man discourse of the
French Revolution.52 These forces put ‘slavery on notice’ and created a space for
new notions of human unity and freedom to emerge, allowing slavery to
emerge as the first case of human rights injustice on the global stage.53
For Jenny Martinez, Britain’s decision to abolish the slave trade in 1807 marked
a crucial moment in the origins of international human rights law. Her book
focuses on the large number of tribunals spearheaded by the British government
after it abolished the trade in 1807 to prosecute those accused of illegally
trading slaves, an offence labelled by the British as ‘piracy’. Here the state, not
revolutionary actors like the Haitian revolutionaries, drives abolition campaigns.
This brings to mind Eric Williams’ critique of British historians who he claimed
sidelined the issue of culpability by arguing that the British invented the slave
trade only to have the satisfaction of later having it abolished.54 Britain negotiated
a set of treaties with other western powers to mutually agree to the end of the trade.
Although France and the United States did not sign, the British nevertheless went
92
ahead and established tribunals in Sierra Leone and other locations to try perpe-
trators who came from the nations that did sign the treaties and recognized the
abolition of the trade. Martinez’s history of these tribunals is a heroic story of
the British leading an unpopular campaign to eradicate the slave trade based on
nascent human rights principles. Calling the Freetown tribunals ‘the original
crimes against humanity’ prosecution, Martinez boldly argues that these tribunals
were ‘the first international human rights’ courts’.55 She locates the term ‘crime
against humanity’ in a legal treatise by an American legal scholar, Henry
Wheaton, describing public sentiment in relation to slavery in 1842 to argue
that people at the time understood slavery as an issue of human rights.
However, it is not entirely clear that all of those running these tribunals to
convict illicit slave traders as pirates would have conceived of their work in
exactly the way Martinez describes.
Martinez’s account rejects any economic motivation for the legal pursuit of
slave traders for the crime of piracy in favour of a reading that casts Britain as
the ‘indisputable star of the international abolition movement’.56 Here, the term
‘abolitionist’ is used interchangeably with ‘lawyer’, a group that emerges as the
real star of the narrative due to the pursuit of slave traders in courts as pirates.
This is an engaging read that uses little-tapped evidence from the slavery tribunals
to argue for the centrality of Britain in placing human rights on the international
agenda. But there is a larger geopolitical context that Martinez does not consider
in her analysis of the tribunals. Other scholars, including William Mulligan whose
work is considered above, and my own work, have looked to re-evaluate the role
that Britain and its Empire played in advancing the cause of human rights. Kevin
Grant’s work on the new slaveries in Africa cautions scholars to consider the
multi-varied motivations that the British had in advancing humanitarian inter-
ests.57 Lauren Benton more directly challenges Martinez’s triumphal story of Brit-
ain’s rise as the global defender of human rights by arguing that these tribunals
were more an attempt to strengthen imperial legal authority and less about defend-
ing the rights of slaves.58 Imperial interests thus need to be taken into account
when attempting to resolve the seeming paradox that humanitarianism grew up
in an age of empire. Rather, these two nineteenth-century institutions were
often mutually constitutive and helped give birth to modern human rights
regimes.59 Nineteenth-century European empires, including the British Empire,
have been more associated with exploitation rather than liberation when it
comes to the question of the defence of individual rights.
The leap made by Martinez from a humanitarianism that declared slavery in
violation of a common humanity to anti-slavery as the beginning of modern
human rights regimes needs more careful consideration. The stories of slave
traders, politicians and some of those who escaped slavery that pepper Martinez’s
account show the contours of a powerful humanitarian movement emboldened by
an Enlightened sensibility that embraced natural law and the rights of man. Still,
the question of race and a self-interested empire loom large. At one point, Marti-
nez wonders why the transcripts from the trials do not contain any African voices,
calling them ‘curiously absent’.60 This underlies an assumption throughout the
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MICHELLE TUSAN
book that these trials were held to liberate individual slaves from a discredited
institution, not to punish slave traders for violating maritime law, a point
addressed by Lauren Benton. What is more certain, it seems, is that these trials
opened up a space to consider slaving for the first time both as a moral and prop-
erty crime. In this way, the story of Britain’s leadership in establishing tribunals to
try slave traders demonstrates the central role that humanitarian ideology played in
nineteenth-century political discourse rather than the beginning of a new human
rights regime.
Joel Quirk’s The anti-slavery project begins where Martinez’s narrative leaves
off and explores the history of humanitarian activism against modern slave
systems. Divided into three chronologically organized parts that show the evol-
ution of modern anti-slavery activism, the book offers a sweeping look at move-
ments against slavery starting with the British campaigns of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries to present day protests against human trafficking.
Quirk, however, rejects teleological accounts that this organizational framework
seems to suggest of anti-slavery campaigning as a slow, steady and ultimately tri-
umphant success of activists’ efforts to make illegal all forms of forced labour
across the globe. Rather, Quirk sees the anti-slavery project that he identifies as
a series of starts and stops that still today has not achieved its goal. This is a
book about slavery very broadly defined, whose focus remains firmly set on
post-emancipation forms of forced labour. Calling human trafficking modern
day slavery, Quirk looks to explain how and why this form of sexual exploitation
persists as part of the underground global economy. Quirk is uninterested in the
subtle and not so subtle distinctions between slave systems past and present or
in how these distinctions shaped attempts by the humanitarian movement to era-
dicate the practice. In this framework, the legal end of slavery in the nineteenth
century was just the beginning of modern attempts to eliminate forced labour as
an economic and cultural system that still operates today.
This ongoing anti-slavery project, according to Quirk, hinges on the distinction
between ‘legal emancipation’ and ‘effective emancipation’.61 The focus on effective
emancipation casts slavery as an urgent contemporary issue, not a problem that
existed in the distant past and that has since been solved. Although legal emancipa-
tion delegitimized slavery as a form of labour, it opened the door for creative and not
so creative ways of making exploitative labour systems conform to new humanitar-
ian sensibilities. In the end, these post-emancipation labour systems often end up
looking like the old slavery, a point illustrated well by historians of colonial
Africa. Both Kevin Grant and Adam Hochschild in their studies of the so-called
new slaveries in late nineteenth-century Africa show how international agreements
like the Brussels Conference and the Congress of Berlin on Africa in the 1880s legiti-
mated slave-like labour systems under the guise of humanitarianism.62
Quirk attempts to square the seeming paradox of the simultaneous rise of huma-
nitarianism and imperialism in the modern period. He analyses the rise of modern
slave systems by showing how colonialism and anti-slavery were compatible in
the nineteenth century. European proclamations against slavery were used in
part to demonstrate Europe’s status as part of the ‘civilized world.’ The anti-
94
slavery project started as an anomaly in the late eighteenth century during a time
when slaves were just one of many exploited groups. Europeans began to use the
language of anti-slavery to redeem themselves in the context of Enlightenment
claims regarding a common humanity. They did not use this rhetoric to overturn
the existing order of exploitation that existed both at home and in the colonies.63
Quirk uses the example of the history of Britain’s role in the anti-slavery move-
ment as evidence. The British as the biggest slave traders took the lead in
pushing their European and American allies to abolish the slave trade under a mor-
alizing rhetoric of humanitarianism when confronted by anti-slavery sentiment at
home. The abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and later slavery in 1833 thus runs
counter to Martinez’s account of Britain as a benevolent actor that promoted the
rise of international human rights law. Instead, the anti-slavery campaign for
Quirk marks an important moment in the rise of paternalist colonialism. The
anti-slavery project thus reads as one embedded in the story of European excep-
tionalism rather than as a starting point in the history of human rights.64 According
to Quirk, anti-slavery was not a product of a belief in human equality but was
about colonial priorities.65
The powerful resurgence of slavery in the twentieth century comes somewhat
ironically as a result of the legal abolition of slavery during the nineteenth
century. Part II of Quirk’s book describes how legal abolition took the wind out
of the sails of anti-slavery activism, paving the way for the continuation of exploi-
tative labour systems worldwide. Rejecting a ‘minimalist’ understanding of anti-
slavery in favour of a ‘maximalist’ view that sees practice as crucial to definition,
Quirk sees colonial labour systems that emerge after emancipation as slavery.66
The attempt to define slavery in the 1920s under the auspices of the League of
Nations did not go far enough. The expansion of the definition of slavery after
World War II, on the other hand, cast slavery in too broad a category where the
practice of slavery lost any contextual significance. Observing that slavery in prac-
tice has changed very little over time, Quirk reserves his criticism instead for how
the West has read and reread slavery historically according to its own geopolitical
priorities. The international community’s schizophrenic treatment of an institution
rhetorically delegitimated in Enlightenment discourse is part of the reason why
slavery continues today.
Quirk’s expansive understanding of slavery as a system that is never really era-
dicated leads him to critique modern humanitarian movements against slavery as
largely being caught up in old colonial debates about the nature of slavery rather
than focusing on root causes. This allows modern day slave systems to thrive,
according to Quirk, and leads to a one size fits all solution that does not take
into account the historical and contemporary context under which modern slave
systems thrive. Using a case study approach in the last third of the book, Quirk
provides textured accounts of forced labour systems in Africa and on the Indian
subcontinent. Contemporary anti-slavery efforts are deemed largely ineffective
in part due to an inability to reconcile vestiges of the colonial past with contem-
porary practice that makes it difficult to eliminate modern slave systems. The
stakes are high, particularly in the consideration of human trafficking that
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MICHELLE TUSAN
emerges as the central focus of the anti-slavery project after the Cold War. Modern
day campaigns against the practice harken back to the anti-white slavery and anti-
Contagious Diseases Act campaigns of the late nineteenth century.67 A language
of ‘obligation’ dominates the discourse, overshadowing the underlying problem of
human inequality.68
These recent accounts of anti-slavery campaigns makes clear the importance of
considering the role played by legal, political and popular movements against
slavery in the history of humanitarianism. They also ask the reader to consider
anti-slavery as part of a larger history of human rights. Each of these works in
different ways uses anti-slavery activism and debates to challenge current thinking
about the relationship between humanitarianism and human rights discourse and
practice. For Blackburn and Martinez, anti-slavery campaigns mark a crucial
moment in the history of human rights in global economic and legal terms,
respectively. Quirk understands the contribution of anti-slavery activism as impor-
tant for a different reason. Rather than viewing the anti-slavery project as crucial
in the march towards modern human rights regimes, these campaigns sideline the
question of equality in favour of paternalist solutions that prize normative ideals
over individual liberty. The problematic legacy of nineteenth-century humanitar-
ianism becomes murkier when it is placed in the same frame as human rights and
foreign policy.
Foreign policy and the humanitarian response

Humanitarianism historically has held an important place in foreign policy con-
cerns. Scholars, including those in the Simms and Trim collection, have located
the roots of contemporary interventions in the internal affairs of other states on
humanitarian grounds in the early modern past. A number of studies focused on
humanitarian intervention by western powers point to the strengthening of this
impulse starting in the nineteenth century. Attention increasingly has turned to
the inextricable link between humanitarianism and foreign policy today. The una-
voidable politics of writing about the history and nature of the humanitarian
response is most clearly evident in this body of work. Literature on the response
to mass atrocity in the nineteenth century and the first large-scale genocide of the
twentieth century provides a window onto the origins of the contemporary appli-
cation of humanitarianism as foreign policy.
Books by Davide Rodogno, Peter Balakian, Gary Bass and Samantha Power
reveal how the humanitarian ethos found one of its earliest and most profound
expressions in the public and official response to massacre and genocide.69
These studies take as their starting point that liberal democracies in the United
States and Europe have come to understand humanitarianism as part of their
national inheritance. The modern nation-state, as conceived in this tradition,
remains understood as a geographically bound region organized by laws that
govern an engaged citizenry. This activist humanitarianism rooted in nine-
teenth-century politics has come to represent a core value of liberalism that is
called upon to act in the defence of victims of manmade and natural disasters.
96
As the case of the Armenian genocide most explicitly shows, the uneven response
that has characterized when and why the West responds to crisis abroad further
complicates the relationship between the humanitarian movement and the rise
of modern human rights regimes.
Giving genocide a history necessarily involves chronicling the event itself as
well as the response. Interestingly, the Armenian genocide has become an impor-
tant focal point for scholars who want to make the contemporary case for interven-
tion on humanitarian grounds. As Peter Balakian argues in The burning Tigris,
casting the 1915 Armenian genocide as a human rights issue today has everything
to do with its status as the first global humanitarian relief campaign. Public
response to the genocide in the US and Britain in particular was extensive. New
organizations were founded as soon as news of the massacres reached the West,
including Near East Relief in the US and the Armenian Red Cross in Britain, to
raise money for relief. The US and Europe officially condemned the killings in
public statements, most famously in the May 1915 European joint declaration
that accused the Ottoman Empire of ‘crimes against humanity’. Scholars including
Balakian, Bass and Power have come to understand the origins of the public and
official response to the genocide as part of a larger story of contemporary human
rights advocacy. The crime of genocide remains mired in an inability to recognize
and resolve what has become a crisis of representation, recognition and reconci-
liation of human rights abuses. It is a problem, as Gary Bass claims, that has
very powerful repercussions for how we treat subsequent human rights crisis. In
his book on the history of war crimes tribunals, Stay the hand of vengeance
(2000), he argues strongly that justice necessarily must come in the form of
truth and reconciliation as mediated through international institutions.70
Gary Bass presses this activist agenda to promote the concept of humanitarian
intervention in Freedom’s battle. This ambitious book sets out to describe an atti-
tude and set of beliefs about foreign intervention on behalf of humanitarian con-
siderations that started in the mid nineteenth century that he believes today has
been lost. Bass’s purpose is to write a history that teaches a lesson. He uses his-
torical precedents to influence policy-making today in the case of intervening to
stop mass atrocity. Clearly influenced by lessons learned and not learned during
the humanitarian interventions in Africa and the Balkans during the 1990s, Bass
asks, ‘Why do we let evil happen?’ His book looks back to British interventions
in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century to understand why we some-
times rally to stop acts of atrocity and how today we can make intervention more
effective.71 Rejecting the notion that Britain acted out of self-serving imperial
motivations, Bass points to the rise of an active citizenry that pressed its govern-
ment to act on behalf of oppressed Ottoman minorities. Interventions on behalf of
the Greeks, Syrians and Bulgarians make up the set of examples that Bass uses to
outline a programme of humanitarian action based on nascent human rights prin-
ciples. The conclusion considers the failed case of the response to the Armenian
genocide during World War I.
Both Bass and Balakian credit the rise of the mass media and democracy with
determining responses to humanitarian crisis. Starting in the nineteenth century,
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MICHELLE TUSAN
new media forms began to play an important part in influencing the response of
state and non-state actors to massacres happening abroad. This affected the
United States and Britain in particular, where improvements in education and
the expansion of the electorate led to a more informed and engaged citizenry.
While Bass is more interested in citizens’ role in influencing Great Power politics,
Balakian tells the story of genocide through the lens of humanitarian intervention
by individual philanthropists and political advocates. But at the centre of concern
in both accounts is the question of foreign policy and how it intersected with
humanitarian activism at crucial moments. Both authors chart the failures and suc-
cesses of attempts by the Great Powers and the US to act on behalf of victims of
massacres. With the 100 year anniversary of the Armenian genocide in 2015
around the corner, mired in Turkish denials that the event ever happened, it is
no surprise that books about intervention in the Ottoman Empire would have
the question of action and inaction front and centre.72
This focus in recent literature on humanitarianism on the story of the response
to the Ottoman Empire’s treatment of minorities is important. As Donald Bloxham
has argued, understanding the Armenian genocide as an early culminating
moment in the history of genocide has opened up the possibility of exploring sub-
sequent genocides, including the Holocaust, through a broader historical lens.73
The ineffectual response to Ottoman atrocities against minority civilians
remains central to historical explanations of how genocide came to be understood
as a crime against humanity. Crucial to this story is the role played by humanitar-
ianism. As Keith Watenpaugh demonstrates in his examination of the League of
Nations’ attempt to provide aid for victims of massacre in the Ottoman Empire,
humanitarianism became defined in relationship to genocide after World War
I.74 The move to consider atrocities against civilians in the nineteenth century
as ‘massacres’ to ‘genocide’ in the twentieth century came in part from the acti-
vism of self-fashioned humanitarians who spoke out against and attempted to stop
the mass killings of Ottoman Christian minorities, including United States Ambas-
sador Henry Morganthau, Clara Barton and Lord James Bryce. Bryce, in particu-
lar, was central in defining and using the Armenian case to describe the killings as
an ‘exceedingly systematic’ ‘premeditated’ crime committed with the intent to
exterminate an entire population.75 This framing of the massacres against Arme-
nians would come to influence Raphael Lemkin’s coining of the term genocide in
the 1940s to describe crimes against Ottoman Armenians and German Jews.76
The nineteenth-century story, then, proves important for understanding both
how and why liberal democracies took a more activist role in defending the
rights of others in the twentieth century. In Against massacre, Rodogno shows
the significance of Great Power politics in determining the nature of modern
humanitarian intervention. Shifting focus from popular movements to high poli-
tics that revolved around the diplomatic and military priorities of the European
nations in the so-called Concert of Europe, Rodogno understands humanitarian
interventions in the Ottoman Empire as a case of realpolitik. As Rodogno con-
cludes, sometimes humanitarian intervention simply should be understood as a
matter of geopolitics.
98
Like Bass, Rodogno’s ‘political history of humanitarian intervention’ attempts

to separate imperial from humanitarian interests.77 Focusing on British and
French interventions in the Ottoman Empire during the long nineteenth
century, Rodogno notes the Christian and imperial roots of humanitarianism
and acknowledges the importance of public opinion in debates over intervention.
However, Rodogno is careful not to concede too much influence to any of these
forces. For him, the engine driving humanitarianism in this period is Concert of
Europe diplomacy, not increased democracy and a free press. This offers a very
different view of European humanitarian interventions in Ottoman affairs than
Bass and Balakian. Arguing that these interventions were as much about assert-
ing European superiority against a ‘barbaric’ non-European other, the narrative
begins by questioning the humanitarian motivations of the defence of Christian
populations by the Great Powers. British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone’s cam-
paign against the Bulgarian atrocities in 1876 looks more like an attempt to dis-
credit Ottoman civilization and the ‘barbarous Turk’ than an authentic defence of
Bulgarian civilians massacred on the eve of the Russo-Turkish war by Ottoman
military forces. Here Rodogno marshals the conventional account made popular
over a generation ago by diplomatic historians that Great Power politics trumped
humanitarian motivations when it came to dealing with the minority question in
the Ottoman Empire.78
Rodogno’s portrait of humanitarianism in the service of a self-interested
foreign policy is intended in part as a critique of humanitarian intervention
today. He leaves very little room to consider the role played by private organiz-
ations or humanitarian activism in determining the course of high politics
before World War I.79 In an epilogue, Rodogno extends these findings to the
present day where he sees state actors through the auspices of international insti-
tutions that determine when and how to intervene in the affairs of sovereign states
in the face of humanitarian crisis. The contemporary notion of a ‘responsibility to
protect’ in the international community that Rodogno ends with is cast as a
continuation of a nineteenth-century policy that privileges state sovereignty
over the principle of interventionism. This means that there can be no guarantee
that intervention on humanitarian grounds will take place today as each case
must be understood in light of geopolitical considerations.
Samantha Power begins with this question of intervention. Her book,
‘A problem from hell’: America and the age of genocide, makes a strong case
for an activist foreign policy that responds to humanitarian crisis as an urgent
matter of human rights. Here she extends the mandate put forward by Bass and
Balakian to claim that in matters of massacre and genocide the United States
and the international community have an obligation to act. Unlike Rodogno,
Power does not see issues regarding state sovereignty and geopolitical posturing
as forever standing in the way of meaningful humanitarian intervention. Rather,
she puts her faith in international institutions propelled forward by states with a
moral obligation to act to stop and then prosecute crimes committed against min-
ority civilian populations wherever they occur across the globe.
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MICHELLE TUSAN
This former war reporter turned human rights advocate argues for a more inter-
ventionist foreign policy. As she asks in the introduction to her Pulitzer Prize
winning book, why has the US been a bystander to the crime of genocide?80
Her case studies use a biographical approach, like that of Bass and Balakian, to
trace the history of responses to genocide through the eyes of the small number
of those who did stand up. Starting with the Armenian genocide, Power traces
the rise of the concept of genocide and how it came to be understood over time
in the thinking of Raphael Lemkin and others. The remainder of the book is a
series of case studies that trace the general pattern of warning, recognition,
response and aftermath of genocide in the Holocaust, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia,
Rwanda, Srebenica and Kosovo. In each case, the failure of international justice
looms large, as does the question of whether intervention worked or resulted in
more problems for victims.81
The use of history as a means of showing the way forward in determining the
humanitarian responses to genocide and mass atrocity leads inevitably to action-
able lessons. Ending with the trial of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes com-
mitted during the recent Balkan wars, Power reflects on the role of the
international community in stopping the continued problem of sectarian violence.
Power, however, is most concerned with what humanitarian intervention to stop
human rights abuses means for the US. The inability to stop genocide, she con-
cludes is ‘not a lack of knowledge or influence but a lack of will’. Genocide,
she continues, ‘has never secured top-level attention on its own merits’.82 Here
the role of an informed, active citizenry takes centre stage. The book ends with
a detailed bibliography of sources on each of the cases she discusses to encourage
further reading. Without pressure from informed citizens, Power demonstrates,
much like Balakian and Bass, few politicians find it necessary to stake their pol-
itical careers on defending the rights of others. But as the tragic stories told in
these books remind us, the humanitarian response is not a one size fits all prop-
osition. If the goal is to stop human suffering, the effects of an activist foreign
policy on the people that it intends to help must always be weighed alongside
the underlying motivations that drive such interventions.
Conclusion
The study of humanitarianism, genocide and liberalism poses particular scholarly
and moral dilemmas. Humanitarianism as an immediate and pressing concern for
the foreseeable future will remain entwined with current policy debates in the
international community led by the West over who to help and when to intervene.
The act of recognizing, remembering and prosecuting crimes against humanity is
further mediated by media representations and domestic and foreign policy con-
siderations in the US and Europe which historically have guided the international
response.83 Writing the history of the relationship between humanitarianism and
geopolitics, then, remains embedded in the present. Scholars who want to offer
nuanced, textured and accurate portraits of the past while engaging in contempor-
ary debates over intervention have to tread carefully. Analysing responses to acts
100
of atrocity as a historical problem disconnected from contemporary realities can

lead to a sort of moral relativism embraced by some scholars that understands
massacre and genocide as a perennial problem of modernity and a tool of geopo-
litics.84 This approach can stand in the way of any meaningful consideration of
inhumane acts, including massacre and genocide, as deeply embedded in historical
realities with real consequences and victims. At the same time, failing to under-
stand the contemporary relevance of these events, both those well known and
those forgotten, obscures the continued power of the stories of victims and
those who defend them as lessons for the future.85
Part of the problem in writing the history of the response to genocide and atro-
city is the difficult task of understanding the relationship between humanitarian-
ism and human rights. Sam Moyn has cautioned scholars against reading the
two as interchangeable and made a strong case for considering the latter as a dis-
tinctly late twentieth-century invention. Many of the books under review at first
blush play fast and loose with the terms humanitarianism and human rights, at
times seeming to use them to mean the same thing. Such a move muddles
current scholarly debates over the origin of human rights. Do its beginnings rest
in the Enlightenment as Lynn Hunt claims, the anti-slavery campaigns as Black-
burn and Martinez argue, or the political activism of the 1970s, as Sam Moyn con-
tends?86 But perhaps it is time to get away from the thorny and possibly
unproductive debate over origins. Moving away from the question of the origin
of human rights as an idea to focus on the history of the response to humanitarian
crisis can more fully explain the dialogues and interactions that lead state and non-
state actors to intervene on behalf of a universal standard of rights.
As recent writing on the anti-slavery movement and genocide demonstrates,
there is room in this discussion to consider the historical role of modern and
early modern humanitarianism in the making of present day human rights
regimes. Such an approach opens up new possible avenues for research, particu-
larly in the relatively understudied period of the nineteenth century when geopo-
litics became tethered to humanitarianism in a powerful and concrete way. This
approach is not without its pitfalls. Several of the works under review here
point to the need to re-evaluate the strident evangelicalism and moralizing liberal-
ism that characterized late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century humanitarian
movements alongside the rise of European colonialism, a practice more associated
with the violation of human rights than their advocacy. To fully historicize the
humanitarian response, scholars must recognize the important role played by
empire in shaping human rights norms in the twentieth century.87
Although the relationship between the two is far from being wholly understood,
the study of humanitarianism and human rights has sharpened our consideration of
why state and non-state actors respond to atrocity in the global arena. Perhaps it is
time to reassess the humanitarian movement as a problematic but crucial link on
the way to forging an idealized human rights regime that supports what Stephen
Hopgood has called ‘a globally unowned and unownable claim of human moral
equality’.88 Regardless, the increasingly pressing need to understand the response
to atrocity has called scholars to more fully participate in the current conversation
101
MICHELLE TUSAN
about human rights by exploring its roots in humanitarian practices of the recent
and not so recent past, beyond the familiar story of western intervention on behalf
of suffering subjects.89
Acknowledgement
The author would like to acknowledge the journal editors and anonymous
reviewers for their constructive comments regarding this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Endnotes
1 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 par-
ticularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period when European empires began their great-
est 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: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2012), pp. 4– 7.
9 The collection of essays edited by Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler (Human rights in global politics [Cam-
bridge: 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 prin-
ciple in international law, in Massacres and morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). On the geo-
politics 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.
102
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 Uni-
versity 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: Univer-
sity 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 inter-
vention, 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 huma-
nitarian 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: Cam-
bridge 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,
103
MICHELLE TUSAN
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 Uni-
versity 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 collec-
tion 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 emanci-
pation: 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 Mar-
tinez, 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.
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.
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 Penn-
sylvania 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.
66 Quirk, The anti-slavery project, pp. 136– 137.
67 Judith Walkowitz, City of dreadful delight (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
69 Rodogno, Against massacre: humanitarian interventions in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity 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,
104
(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 Univer-
sity 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).
Notes on contributor
Michelle 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 geno-
cide’, 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.
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