The Humanitarian, Protest of Cosmopolitanism ?
This article explores the sources and consequences of a constitutive tension of the humanitarian discourse, that between the recognition of socio-cultural egalitarianism (which emerges from critical cosmopolitanism) and attachment to an individualistic moral universalism oriented toward a suffering person (that comes from liberal humanism). We begin by analyzing the ethnocentric origins of the humanitarian project, which made the call for charity and sympathy compatible with a hierarchy of peoples along racial or ethnocultural humanism. The second part of the paper investigates a key but underestimated mechanism of humanitarianism, a sentimentally-based visual system through which the suffering person is represented as a victim deserving to be saved as long as its image evokes pity or sympathy in the public sphere. Finally, we explain how the humanitarian visual system highlights the paradox between the morally sentimental individualism of liberal humanitarianism and the project of global justice cosmopolitanism favored by critical cosmopolitanism.