In his 2012 book Humanitarian Reason, Didier Fassin argues that the lasting presence of religion, specifically Christianity, can be seen in the ascendency of humanitarian values in Western democratic societies. The primacy of “humanitarian reason,” Fassin contends, elevates the redemptive work of individual and state humanitarian actors and virtues of compassion and charity over the political actions, historical struggles, and subjectivities of those Howard Thurman calls the “disinherited.”This form of response to an unequal world order all too often reifies victimhood and dominant power relations, and commodifies/valorizes the suffering of “others.” Inspired by and in dialogue with Fassin’s work, this panel examines the historical and ongoing relationship between religion, coloniality, and humanitarianism across global locales and in dialogue with decolonial scholarship.
This paper takes up decolonial and liberationist praxis to examine human agency in humanitarian work. Sylvia Wynter’s formulation of the coloniality of being frames the investigation. Humanitarian power, this paper argues, moves along colonial lines: it accrues to professional humanitarians from or trained in the West. I analyze the global humanitarian response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to argue that this formulation of humanitarian agency is more effective at managing the status quo than it is at preventing harm and relieving suffering. I focus on Wynter’s formulation of decolonial critical reflection and action shaped by a gaze from below. I conclude that liberationist movements and decolonial thought offer possibilities for praxis that provides ways humanitarians to exercise new forms of agency beyond roles prescribed by the coloniality of being.
On May 28, 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed into law “An Act to Provide for an Exchange of Lands with the Indians Residing in Any of the States or Territories, and for their Removal West of the River Mississippi,” more commonly known as the Indian Removal Act. This law would lead to the often-violent expulsion of over 80,000 Native people from their homes and lands east of the Mississippi River, but it was premised on a problematic humanitarian claim: Native peoples would disappear in the face of White settler expansion and could flourish outside the influence of White Americans. This paper interrogates the policy and practice of “Indian Removal” through the work of Didier Fassin (Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present) and Kathryn Gin Lum (Heathen: Religion and Race in American History) to ask how salvation for the heathen inflects and changes the contours of humanitarian reason.
Over the past three decades, the development sector’s approach to Faith Based Organisations (FBOs) has shifted from active exclusion to embracing them as partners and collaborators. Indeed, in 2015 the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) established its own ‘Refugee Zakat Fund’ in conjunction with the Tabah foundation, an Islamic FBO based in Abu Dhabi. This development, however, has been rejected by the World Zakat and Waqf Forum (WZWF) as both un-Islamic, as a secular agency should not collect zakat, and as a cynical cash grab. Such accusations beg the question, is the UN partnering in bad faith? To answer this question the paper draws on 20 interviews with aid practitioners from both secular and Islamic multilateral agencies and Islamc charities. In doing so, the paper argues that the shift by secular agencies into overseeing Islamic donations represents a form of neo-colonialism and calls for decolonisation.
During the late-nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, many African American Christians fostered a renewed sense of purpose by committing their lives to the “redemption of Africa.” At missionary gatherings such as Atlanta’s 1895 Congress on Africa, Black Christians insisted that they had a special role to play in uplifting their “heathen” kin across the Atlantic. Drawing upon Didier Fassin’s framework of “humanitarian reason,” this paper analyzes how humanitarian discourses and practices among African American Christians were mobilized to justify American humanitarianism in Africa and to trivialize the value of African religious and social contributions. This paper argues that, for leaders such as Alexander Crummell and M.C.B. Mason, religious concepts such as “providence” became key resources for articulating their perceived religious and racial duty to Africa. By examining the various logics animating the 1895 Congress on Africa, this paper explores the understudied intersection of religion, race, and humanitarianism.
How is it that “the weak,” those who are marginalized by an economic system which produces mass inequality and precariousness, can hold a “deeply paradoxical strength” (xii)? This paper suggests that by exploring interpretative-critical accounting theory, accounting’s unsuspected role as a potent social imaginary can illuminate this foundational paradox at the core of Didier Fassin’s humanitarian reason. By examining an accounting framework in contrast to gift theory, the paper illuminates the distinct spaces of the economy, where actors operate out of self-interest, and humanitarianism or charity, where agents are driven by moral concerns. Accounting logic creates the distinction between otherwise similar actions in these realms. It is this distinction that allows humanitarian actions driven by moral compulsion to flourish while simultaneously preventing those same moral inclinations from being turned toward the very systems creating “the weak” in the first place.