Humanitarian Futures

This chapter grows out of an engagement between scholars and practitioners interested and invested in questions about humanitarian futures, that is, questions around the future of humanitarianism as both a normative, ethical commitment to life and a practice concerned with saving lives, relieving suffering, and upholding human dignity. These urgent questions are increasingly being considered by scholars and practitioners. While there is an ever-growing body of work concerned with the politics of humanitarianism, both as a normative ideal and as a practice of intervention, recent interventions related to decolonizing humanitarianism have been keen to stress the importance of understanding the differences between them. Recent exposes made by those who have worked in the humanitarian industry have shone a light on the racist and white supremacist practices rooted in humanitarianism’s liberal universalizing claims. Shining a light on racism and white supremacy in the humanitarian industry requires an interrogation of the human subject at the heart of humanitarianism.