Humanitarianism at the End of (This) World

Western humanitarianism’s spatiotemporal zone of action and mode of operations is crisis. Western humanitarianism and humanitarians should be in their element when faced with a world in crisis. However, western humanitarianism is also facing attacks on its liberal internationalist foundations and financial security, increasingly destructive ecological collapse, ongoing brutal wars, and active genocide and appears increasingly unable to help. Building on scholarship unsettling apocalyptic end-of- the-world narratives, this article interrogates the current state of western humanitarianism, suggesting it has reached the limits of its capacity for action. It argues that western humanitarianism, as liberal internationalism’s security enforcer, cannot address the collapse of the machine of which it is an intrinsic part. This failure is rooted in western humanitarianism’s colonial ontologies and geographies of intervention that cannot address the collapse of its normative order, the planetary scale of destruction, the recalibration of the humanitarian subject beyond racialised bodies, and the unmasking of genocide as intrinsic rather than exceptional to liberalism as modernity/coloniality. We argue that if western humanitarianism wishes to respond to the ends-of-worlds, it must acknowledge its origin in and adherence to modernity/coloniality’s epistemic dominance and to delink from it in a radical praxis of epistemic and material disobedience.