Sharing a universal ethic: The principle of humanity in war

Abstract

This article makes the case for a much broader ownership of the principle of humanity in war. It observes how enshrining the principle within institutionalized humanitarianism has limited the ideal of humanity to a consecrated priesthood of relief agencies and their relatively small range of relief activities in war. Instead, the article argues that the principle of humanity is a cosmopolitan or universal ethic and so humanitarian responsibility extends to all parties involved in war and with war. To illustrate this, the article uses the idea of stakeholder analysis to identify the direct and indirect stakes that perpetrators, international politicians, international business and every global citizen has in war. Having identified these stakes and the inevitable humanitarian responsibility which flows from them, the article then examines the most common alibis and excuses for avoiding such responsibility and a more prophetic form of contemporary humanitarianism is called for which actively challenges all the main stakeholders in war to embody the principle of humanity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.