Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality - Chapter 07 - Human rights and humanitarianism

Every two weeks I am going to feature one of the chapters of our Handbook on Humanitarianism and Inequality which was published in spring 2024.

This week we are taking a closer look at Chapter 07 - Human rights and humanitarianism - contributed by Bandana Purkayastha.

From the introduction
This chapter examines the convergence and divergence of human rights and humanitarian visions and actions. Both human rights and humanitarianism emphasise the humanity of all people and broadly intend to support human beings’ ability to survive with material resources and freedoms that enable them to build lives of human dignity. Yet, the relationships between the action to sustain human rights and humanitarianism are both complementary and contradictory since safeguarding human rights has also been used as rationale to justify actions that generate significant humanitarian crises. The chapter focuses on the rhetoric and the realities, and discusses how inequalities arise and are sustained, despite the lofty claims to the contrary.
The chapter begins with a brief overview of the quest for human rights in the mid-twentieth century amidst significant humanitarian crises including genocide, famines, wars, and prolonged exploitation by distant colonial powers. This section and the next briefly outline the development of an international bill of human rights (IBHR) and the protracted struggles to establish political, civil, social, economic, and cultural human rights for all individuals irrespective of the political regime under which they live. The next section shifts to the logics, lineage claims, as well as the critiques of dominant Global North viewpoints on human rights and humanitarianism by authors in the Global South and critical scholars in the North.
The last section focuses on the promise vs realities of human rights and humanitarianism in the case of migrants who were forcibly displaced and need access to human rights and humanitarian aid. Since nation-states were made the arbitrators of human rights, the case of migrants foregrounds the uneasy relationship between the expectations of IBHR vs realities of migrants located within nation-states that do not wholly accept them. In the conclusion, I emphasise the unequal power structures that make it possible to channel selected humanitarian actions towards the Global South, and that globally powerful actors undermine human rights, and reorient humanitarianism to sustain their strategic political and economic interests.

Note on contributor
Bandana Purkayastha is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Asian & Asian American Studies at the University of Connecticut.
Her research on human rights, intersectionality, migrants, violence, and peace appears in over 75 books, articles, and chapters.
She has been recognised for research excellence and teaching and mentoring, including American Sociological Association’s Jessie Bernard award, ‘which recognises significant contributions to improving the lives of women’.
She serves on the executive committee of the International Sociological Association.

Overviews are already available for the following chapters:
Introduction: humanitarianism and inequality – a re-orientation

Humanitarianism and colonialism

Humanitarianism and the global Cold War, 1945–1991

Humanitarianism and the new wars: humanitarianism, security, and securitisation

Humanitarianism, development and peace: a southern perspective

Localisation and the humanitarian sector