Editorial

Humanitarianism is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and The Future of Humanitarian Design, a research project of the Geneva Graduate Institute, the University of Copenhagen, the Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève, and the EssentialTech Lab at EPFL Lausanne, funded by FNS Sinergia. It features contributions by Claudia Aradau and Margie Cheesman; Jonathan Luke Austin and Maevia Griffiths; Jacob Burns; Javier Fernández Contreras and Damien Greder; Nora Doukkali, Anna Leander, and Silke Oldenburg; Andrew Herscher and Daniel Bertrand Monk; Rachel Howell, Grégoire Castella; Irit Katz; Benjamin Meiches; Malkit Shoshan; and more.

Humanitarianism is indefensible. This is what the bureaucrats in Geneva and New York fret about today. That in itself is not too serious. What is serious is that humanitarianism has become morally and spiritually indefensible. This discourse on humanitarianism has been murmuring in the background for many decades.1 But today, claims that it has failed, that it is a fraud, that its dreams of compassion across borders are naïve, even dead, have turned those murmurs into screams. Amplified by mass media economies of attention, refracted through digital platforms, and entangled with technological infrastructures of surveillance and algorithmic governance, humanitarianism now circulates within a regime that both exposes and commodifies suffering. At the same time, genocides are being livestreamed, late-capitalist predation is consuming our humanity, and states everywhere retreat into their atavistic pasts. Within this context, the future of humanitarianism has never been more uncertain. 

Humanitarianism’s failures are by design. Its slow and steady mechanization through processes of neoliberal professionalization has imported an assembly-line-like logic into questions of who lives and dies. Yet this faceless bureaucratic “triaging” of life still cynically advertises the old modernist, late capitalist, neocolonial “package trip to the promised land of happiness.”2 The weight of that industrialization has also entangled humanitarianism with the oldest form of design—design for killing, for violence, for death. Every time a new technology, tool, program, or process is invented to alleviate suffering, it further feeds the rise of design for violence.3 Gleaming designs for more humane refugee shelters make rampant displacement permanent. High-nutrition plastic tubes of paste-like “food” sustain the continued functioning of hellish detention centers across the world. Lightweight bulletproof vests distributed in Geneva sustain the presence of humanitarians amid the ever-deepening political abyss of the world. Humanitarian design most often feeds its own existence, not its abolition.

Yet what is humanitarianism? Stripping away what Frantz Fanon terms its contemporary “mechanization” reveals a different history, one of a human practice that has existed long before it was associated with the bureaucrats and bunkers of New York and Geneva.4 Humanitarianism, in this sense, is something that “germinate[s] in the open mouth of the barefoot child in the midst of restive crowds.”5 It is found in entanglements beyond the human that cultivate an equilibrium of care, one which has survived against all odds through a furtive, even fugitive “great game of hide-and-seek.”6 It is another stage in the ongoing global struggle for the rise of a “politicized people.”7

The pressures placed on humanitarianism today are simultaneously simple and complex. It is urgent to critique what has become of the humanitarian-industrial complex. It is also urgent to convert that critique into a different—radical, yet pragmatic—future. The roots of this future exist far outside any metropole, and require gentle cultivation to germinate their political vitality and dreams of a collective “rise of humanity.”8 But above all, we must avoid a retreat to the pathologies of the imperial forgetting machine (l’oublioir) that is already seeking to restore life to today’s dying humanitarian order.9 If humanitarianism’s failures are by design, then a different future for humanitarianism must also be by design.

This experimental kind of design might be a conjectural form of intervention that subverts a “longing for stability… the desire to turn pulp and flesh” into bureaucratic certainty.10 It might dabble in border crossings to generate alliances across the “chaotically pluralistic” postcolonies.11 It may generate radical technical, political, and social projections of the future by articulating the instrumentality of engineering, the protocols of the social sciences, the imaginaries of the humanities, the negotiations of diplomacy, and the practices of non-hegemonic digital media. This is a kind of design that escapes the temptation to let politics “wither in ivory towers and in college classrooms.”12 Instead, it designs a humanitarianism that does not dehumanize the people it purports to serve.