1 00:00:00,360 --> 00:00:03,479 Let me see. Like an eight for for for convening the session. 2 00:00:03,480 --> 00:00:04,379 Hugo couldn't be here. 3 00:00:04,380 --> 00:00:13,210 And I also want to thank Hugo for the opportunity to to be a part of this humanitarian group and be able to present this some of this work today. 4 00:00:14,370 --> 00:00:18,870 A little bit about the project. My home discipline is philosophy. 5 00:00:18,870 --> 00:00:26,760 And so I'm interested in trying to address some questions of political life, in particular today, humanitarian work. 6 00:00:27,420 --> 00:00:35,309 So one of the tasks that I'm trying to do is to speak across audiences in some sense. 7 00:00:35,310 --> 00:00:43,709 And so part of this paper today attempts to do that. Also, I'm trying to use PowerPoint today, which I hope corresponds equally to my paper. 8 00:00:43,710 --> 00:00:48,630 I think it does in hopes that you were able to follow up a little bit better. 9 00:00:48,840 --> 00:00:54,060 So the paper is about 40 minutes and then we can have time for questions after that. 10 00:00:56,400 --> 00:01:05,550 So there are two hypotheses that guide this paper. First, humanitarian work is necessarily political, albeit of a realist sort that I argue for below. 11 00:01:06,420 --> 00:01:10,290 Second, the cultivation of judgement is indispensable to this work, 12 00:01:10,320 --> 00:01:15,810 and thus it plays a central role to realist politics that shapes humanitarian work. 13 00:01:16,620 --> 00:01:24,390 Accordingly, it's important to understand what I mean by craft, political and judgement and how these connect to humanitarian work. 14 00:01:24,960 --> 00:01:33,390 So I'll begin with craft. Richard, Senate has recently provided us with the best discussion of craft and its relationship to social life. 15 00:01:33,870 --> 00:01:39,860 In his book, The Craftsman. He discusses traits of craft in general. 16 00:01:39,890 --> 00:01:46,760 I want to highlight the following craft names an enduring basic human impulse and the desire to do a job well for its own sake. 17 00:01:47,330 --> 00:01:50,660 It focuses on objective standards on the thing in itself, 18 00:01:51,140 --> 00:01:57,320 but it acknowledges that these conflicting objective standards of excellence, the desire to do something well for its own sake, 19 00:01:57,830 --> 00:02:03,590 can be impaired by competitive pressure, by frustration or by obsession, craft, 20 00:02:03,590 --> 00:02:07,820 and requires particular skill, commitment and judgement in a particular way. 21 00:02:08,630 --> 00:02:12,470 The characteristics that I want to utilise for my purposes here is that of commitment, 22 00:02:12,770 --> 00:02:17,990 which is an essential element in humanitarian work and one that is central to the craft of judgement. 23 00:02:18,860 --> 00:02:22,370 Let me begin with the definition of commitment. 24 00:02:22,820 --> 00:02:27,770 Describe something worth doing includes an obligation to ourselves and something not necessarily 25 00:02:27,770 --> 00:02:33,050 of our own making and requires repetition associated with the development of aptitude. 26 00:02:34,310 --> 00:02:38,070 We judge whether something is worth doing or someone is worth being with. 27 00:02:38,510 --> 00:02:42,170 Which is to say, in other words, that there are people or things for which we would die. 28 00:02:42,650 --> 00:02:51,530 As such, commitment binds us to a particular way of life, instead of what might otherwise be called discourse solely about that way of life. 29 00:02:52,250 --> 00:02:57,530 This idea is illustrated when we speak of humanitarian work as a position and not just a theory. 30 00:02:58,280 --> 00:03:02,000 To be sure, if theoretical or philosophical discourse is not rejected. 31 00:03:02,360 --> 00:03:11,300 Rather, these are understood to originate in and always refer back to the decision to live in conformity with the commitment of one's initial choice. 32 00:03:12,260 --> 00:03:21,890 Commitment then, especially in political life, determines discourse is fragile when that involves a risk or wager and it pursues verification. 33 00:03:22,580 --> 00:03:29,120 So as a risk, commitment reflects the importance of one's choice between conflicts that have 34 00:03:29,120 --> 00:03:34,150 become rigid or hardened alternatives in the light of humanitarian work, 35 00:03:34,160 --> 00:03:43,280 risk calls for initiative and the invention to move through an impasse, that obsession with the extended rationalisation of options often produces. 36 00:03:43,760 --> 00:03:50,960 The wager is the judgement that the convictions entailed in one's commitment are viable solutions to the deadlock. 37 00:03:51,710 --> 00:04:00,590 In this way, our wager attempts verification by attempting excuse me, by attesting to the intelligibility that saturates our commitment. 38 00:04:01,160 --> 00:04:06,620 On the one hand, this involves reflective verification that provides some coherence to the commitment. 39 00:04:06,800 --> 00:04:15,290 And on the other hand, verification reflects integration where the past, like the future, as Charles L'Amour has written recently we hope for, 40 00:04:15,290 --> 00:04:21,110 is structured in the light of present commitments that form the point of departure for our reflections. 41 00:04:21,710 --> 00:04:29,270 Wager in verification finally then speak to long term commitment, which means that verification is a question of our whole life. 42 00:04:29,570 --> 00:04:34,760 No one escapes it. Second commitment involves obligation. 43 00:04:39,500 --> 00:04:44,480 Obligation in the context of humanitarian work is the responsibility we have to each other. 44 00:04:44,780 --> 00:04:47,870 A response to the suffering of others, as is often the language. 45 00:04:48,300 --> 00:04:52,850 Obligation in this sense, is prior to where the condition for things like consent, 46 00:04:53,240 --> 00:04:59,820 contract and other ideas associated with moral principles yet has that which indicates something worth doing. 47 00:04:59,840 --> 00:05:06,950 Commitment describes the normative dimension of obligation that represents what the particular commitment gives us reason to do. 48 00:05:07,670 --> 00:05:15,440 In this way, commitment has obligation is important to what I call the craft of reflection, what Bernard Williams calls truthfulness. 49 00:05:15,860 --> 00:05:24,349 Among other things, it's thinking clearly and without self deceit about the occasions when deceit is required in keeping a sense of those among them. 50 00:05:24,350 --> 00:05:31,490 When something is lost by it, much of one's thought looks outward to the people involved into the relations they have the one. 51 00:05:31,820 --> 00:05:39,410 But at the same time it involves a sense of oneself and of the respect one might have or lose from people one can respect. 52 00:05:40,670 --> 00:05:46,070 So third commitment requires repetition without mere mimicking. 53 00:05:46,550 --> 00:05:54,080 Senate. Again, helps us to see that the craft involved. That craft involves a constant dialogue between concrete practices and thinking, 54 00:05:54,440 --> 00:06:00,709 a dialogue that evolves into sustaining habits and habits that establish a kind of rhythm between problem solving, 55 00:06:00,710 --> 00:06:05,330 but equally that of problem finding, which in terms of humanitarian work, 56 00:06:05,870 --> 00:06:10,820 means that repetition of one's commitment establishes a pattern of experience. 57 00:06:11,510 --> 00:06:18,890 But as is often the case with humanitarian work, the obligation is often to commit error in order eventually to get things right. 58 00:06:19,820 --> 00:06:25,460 In the end, commitment as it relates to humanitarian work is best viewed as cultivating a craft like this, 59 00:06:25,760 --> 00:06:32,150 rather than being obsessed with getting the right principles to map on to the right corresponding practices. 60 00:06:33,170 --> 00:06:37,850 So claiming that humanitarian work is a craft would likely not be very contentious, 61 00:06:38,030 --> 00:06:45,320 especially for those that find themselves in humanitarian spaces where they are defined as conflict of interpretations. 62 00:06:46,130 --> 00:06:51,410 The assertion that humanitarian work should insist on the craft of political judgement, 63 00:06:51,410 --> 00:06:56,480 however, is potentially more controversial from at least two standpoints. 64 00:06:56,960 --> 00:07:04,070 First, from a humanitarian perspective, the insistence that humanitarian work is political is at odds with foundational, 65 00:07:04,190 --> 00:07:07,520 its own foundational principles, and therefore should be rejected. 66 00:07:08,060 --> 00:07:15,530 Specifically, the principles of impartiality make no discrimination, and especially neutrality. 67 00:07:15,530 --> 00:07:21,110 Do not take political sides, make the appeal to the political difficult at best. 68 00:07:21,680 --> 00:07:29,180 Second, employing a realist framework, which I do, and what follows opens the criticism that such thinking undermines the importance 69 00:07:29,180 --> 00:07:33,590 of normative standards that govern what we ought to do in political life. 70 00:07:34,160 --> 00:07:41,390 So let me talk about these. Each there is a consistent claim in humanitarian work that it should not be political. 71 00:07:41,960 --> 00:07:48,680 Doing so, the argument goes, makes it exceptionally difficult and carries with it unsatisfactory implications. 72 00:07:49,340 --> 00:07:53,600 One of the most vexing cases in recent humanitarian activity out of Sri Lanka, 73 00:07:54,110 --> 00:07:58,400 among other things, whether or not to be political is one of the key challenges. 74 00:07:59,090 --> 00:08:04,040 The Norwegian Refugee Council concludes that the right to receive humanitarian assistance and 75 00:08:04,040 --> 00:08:09,080 to offer it is a fundamental humanitarian principle which should be enjoyed by all citizens. 76 00:08:09,620 --> 00:08:16,970 Hence, the need for impeded access to affected populations is a fundamental importance and exercising that responsibility. 77 00:08:18,210 --> 00:08:26,370 And then it says provision of the ICRC, humanitarian aid is not a partisan or political act and should not be viewed as such. 78 00:08:26,790 --> 00:08:29,910 The prime motivation is to alleviate human suffering, 79 00:08:30,870 --> 00:08:35,399 and this response reiterates both the commitment to remaining neutral and also 80 00:08:35,400 --> 00:08:39,630 the way that the question of the political poor man's humanitarian activity. 81 00:08:40,410 --> 00:08:46,200 More recently, Fiona Terry reminds us precisely why being political is also problematic. 82 00:08:46,980 --> 00:08:54,690 Discussing the transitional work in Afghanistan, she writes that if aid is provided as a part of political or military strategy, it's treated as such. 83 00:08:55,230 --> 00:09:03,000 And the policy backfires when villages are punished for having received it, or aid agencies are attacked as agents of the enemy agenda. 84 00:09:04,140 --> 00:09:09,630 A lot could be said about both of these quotations, but the implication and the implications they have for humanitarian work. 85 00:09:09,990 --> 00:09:14,399 My interest is whether there is a way to understand the political that works in 86 00:09:14,400 --> 00:09:19,530 concert with humanitarian work and an understanding on which we should insist. 87 00:09:19,890 --> 00:09:27,180 My answer is yes, and it is a notion of the political that's associated with what has recently been called realist political philosophy. 88 00:09:28,440 --> 00:09:31,350 So what is the political and what makes it realist? 89 00:09:33,030 --> 00:09:37,950 The understanding of the political on this view begins with security as the first political question. 90 00:09:37,950 --> 00:09:44,520 And here I'm addressing. I'm drawing on some thinkers as a name mentioned Bernard Williams, Raymond Gause, 91 00:09:45,090 --> 00:09:53,220 Mark Philip and other people who are working out some of these kinds of ideas and called that's been called realist political philosophy. 92 00:09:53,610 --> 00:09:57,840 So security is the first political question in this notion of the political. 93 00:09:58,020 --> 00:10:05,280 It is following. Williams because answering the question of security is the condition for posing the questions that security is. 94 00:10:05,280 --> 00:10:12,720 The first question does not, however, mean that it has never to be solved again as a question that is required all the time, he says. 95 00:10:12,960 --> 00:10:19,440 It's affected by historical circumstances not arriving at a solution to the first question at the level of state of nature, 96 00:10:19,680 --> 00:10:24,910 and then going on to the rest of the agenda with regards to humanitarian work. 97 00:10:24,930 --> 00:10:28,080 Security is not the security of nation states necessarily, 98 00:10:28,410 --> 00:10:34,050 but instead that of actual people or what the United Nations Development Program calls personal security, 99 00:10:34,380 --> 00:10:36,900 the security of human beings and violent upheavals. 100 00:10:37,320 --> 00:10:44,070 This includes violence, natural disasters, diseases and poverty, all of which expose humans to potential peril. 101 00:10:44,880 --> 00:10:50,130 The view here is that insecurity is a fundamental threat to human dignity. 102 00:10:51,150 --> 00:10:57,840 But if security is the first political question, then we should be sceptical that something like fairness or privileging a rights 103 00:10:57,840 --> 00:11:02,940 based theory is the default position of what political life should consist. 104 00:11:03,780 --> 00:11:08,939 The craft of reflection in this sense entails questioning whether something like fairness, 105 00:11:08,940 --> 00:11:12,750 however it's construed or equality in something like an abstract sense, 106 00:11:13,200 --> 00:11:20,790 has uncompromising priority priority over all the political and moral values, Raymond always says, 107 00:11:20,790 --> 00:11:25,920 such as survival, security, agency and transparency, efficiency and self esteem. 108 00:11:27,180 --> 00:11:31,440 Realist like Joyce will ask, Does fairness take priority no matter what? 109 00:11:32,010 --> 00:11:37,590 Is fairness clearly more important than the satisfaction of genuinely vital human interest? 110 00:11:38,550 --> 00:11:44,730 It's not that fairness is unimportant. Rather, it's asking whether or not in humanitarian work in particular, 111 00:11:44,730 --> 00:11:51,090 there is rendered a more faithful understanding that could be embraced even as it finds itself in tension 112 00:11:51,090 --> 00:11:56,730 with and potentially even contradictory to the principles that are believed to guide such practices. 113 00:11:57,480 --> 00:12:05,010 Consider the following. The issue of security shaped the work of Doctors Without Borders, MSF in Somalia, 114 00:12:05,550 --> 00:12:09,930 whether in the form of co-opting aid or limiting access to certain areas. 115 00:12:10,530 --> 00:12:18,690 Given the advise not to talk politics, the question is what is meant by the phrase do humanitarian work and not politics. 116 00:12:20,140 --> 00:12:28,030 The MSF appeared to view talking politics as something akin to what we might call a political liberal project associated with fairness or equality, 117 00:12:28,390 --> 00:12:33,160 one that's often thought to be the subtext of certain international military intervention. 118 00:12:34,100 --> 00:12:39,490 Now, my point here is not to debate the merits of political liberalism vs Soviet humanitarian work. 119 00:12:39,910 --> 00:12:43,600 Rather, my point is that it's not the full story of the political. 120 00:12:44,200 --> 00:12:52,090 On a closer examination, the question of security as a political one was in fact fundamental to humanitarian work in Somalia, 121 00:12:52,420 --> 00:12:58,420 and as such provides a much more realistic understanding of the conditions in which the MSF operated. 122 00:12:59,020 --> 00:13:04,570 It is no less political, but it's a different understanding, one that is already present in such work. 123 00:13:05,950 --> 00:13:11,469 Security, then, is a condition for legitimate action, not just actions that involve violence, 124 00:13:11,470 --> 00:13:16,030 but collective decisions or arrangements that are affected by humanitarian action. 125 00:13:16,390 --> 00:13:21,610 Excuse me. Human action. Legitimacy as the object of reflection in myself. 126 00:13:21,760 --> 00:13:27,820 Is MSF asking why we should act in one way or another as the object of decision? 127 00:13:28,300 --> 00:13:35,530 Legitimacy is the process by which MSF exchanges reasons with various constituents to decide the best course of action. 128 00:13:36,910 --> 00:13:43,690 So if security is the first political question in this realist view, then the close quite second question is that of power. 129 00:13:45,070 --> 00:13:49,299 We understanding of the political that is derived from and best characterises humanitarian 130 00:13:49,300 --> 00:13:55,390 work is one that considers the essential relationship between power agency and interest. 131 00:13:55,990 --> 00:14:03,639 Once offered two salient descriptions here the word designates the sum total of man's relation in connection with power. 132 00:14:03,640 --> 00:14:07,150 Conquest of power. Exercise of power. Preservation of power. 133 00:14:07,540 --> 00:14:11,649 Power is the central question of politics. Who commands for whom? 134 00:14:11,650 --> 00:14:19,120 Within what limits and under what restrictions? This was written in the 1950s by the French philosopher Paul Ridker. 135 00:14:19,570 --> 00:14:23,740 With World War Two fresh in his mind and having been a prisoner of war, 136 00:14:23,980 --> 00:14:30,520 it informed Richter's pacifism throughout the remainder of his life and shaped his understanding of practical life as well. 137 00:14:31,840 --> 00:14:39,250 More recently, Noyce has offered a very similar definition when he defines power as who does what to whom, for whose benefit. 138 00:14:39,430 --> 00:14:45,070 With four distinct variables to fill in who, what to whom, for whose benefit. 139 00:14:45,190 --> 00:14:55,450 And that's written in 2008. The clearest line of contact between questions of power and humanitarian work is the objective to save human lives, 140 00:14:55,720 --> 00:15:01,360 alleviate suffering, and maintain human dignity during the aftermath of crises and disasters. 141 00:15:02,170 --> 00:15:09,460 On the one hand, the stated objectives save human lives, alleviate suffering and maintain human dignity. 142 00:15:09,730 --> 00:15:17,260 Are political in the sense that humanitarian work is always related to the conquest, exercise and preservation of power. 143 00:15:18,100 --> 00:15:24,340 On the other hand, this kind of work is a value judgement about the nature of power. 144 00:15:25,030 --> 00:15:30,550 To the degree that human humanitarian action engages in activities that constitute power. 145 00:15:31,120 --> 00:15:36,850 It does so with the goal of exercising power in common rather than power as domination. 146 00:15:37,570 --> 00:15:43,060 Whether this is explicitly clear is in asking the relationship between force and humanitarian aid. 147 00:15:43,630 --> 00:15:50,660 One more tactic examples like what it means to hire or drive a particular vehicle that carries with it certain symbolism. 148 00:15:50,680 --> 00:15:55,000 As was the case in Somalia and the so-called white car syndrome in Cambodia. 149 00:15:55,720 --> 00:16:00,790 The question of power as a political question is proven again back to Somalia. 150 00:16:01,210 --> 00:16:06,970 What instruction does MSF give hired guards by giving sums of money to certain representatives? 151 00:16:07,870 --> 00:16:12,970 How is need understood or even calculated? In Somalia, health care practices. 152 00:16:13,780 --> 00:16:18,430 How do the interests of particular parties to conflicts shape operational responses, 153 00:16:18,580 --> 00:16:24,160 especially when this response directly opposes an official assessment of the needs of the population? 154 00:16:24,580 --> 00:16:34,239 We could go on, but the point returns. Humanitarian work as an instance of modern politics is about power, its acquisition, distribution and use, 155 00:16:34,240 --> 00:16:40,060 but also importantly, how human action is also at times co-operative and coordinated. 156 00:16:41,590 --> 00:16:45,190 There are two immediate implications for approaching the political in this way. 157 00:16:45,790 --> 00:16:51,630 First, politics is not a value free enterprise, as is familiar in humanitarian work itself, 158 00:16:51,640 --> 00:16:56,260 contingencies and the history of situations dictate the possibilities of response. 159 00:16:56,800 --> 00:16:59,320 Moreover, whether they are reflected on or not, 160 00:16:59,740 --> 00:17:05,680 political actors pursue what they believe to be conceptions of the good life which inevitably generate conflict. 161 00:17:06,430 --> 00:17:12,520 Second, and related to this, the political is not an isolated domain from ethical activity, 162 00:17:12,850 --> 00:17:20,110 but rather the political is understood in relation to the many considered convictions that are brought into the political domain. 163 00:17:20,560 --> 00:17:26,050 By considered again, I do not necessarily mean those ideas that are reflected upon, 164 00:17:26,410 --> 00:17:31,030 but instead those persuasions that determine what it means to live in particular ways. 165 00:17:32,080 --> 00:17:40,720 In this way, the humanitarian appeal to alleviate suffering can be seen as a considered conviction enacted not just in a local manner. 166 00:17:40,750 --> 00:17:44,950 Decisions, for example, are made to as to who will receive certain aid over others. 167 00:17:45,580 --> 00:17:50,350 But it is a consideration that orients the very efforts to respond to and to judge 168 00:17:50,350 --> 00:17:55,060 conditions of insecurity into which humanitarian workers insert themselves. 169 00:17:56,470 --> 00:18:04,299 So this is why we can say, finally, that a realist understanding of the political that characterises humanitarian work with its questions of security, 170 00:18:04,300 --> 00:18:11,800 legitimacy and power, it considers what we would call the real motivations that shape individuals as they engage each other. 171 00:18:12,880 --> 00:18:19,000 We do not start, as Boyce has said recently, with how people ought ideally or ought rationally to act, 172 00:18:19,000 --> 00:18:23,110 what they ought to desire or value, the kind of people they ought to be, etc. 173 00:18:24,460 --> 00:18:27,310 Realist political philosophy begins with questions above. 174 00:18:27,310 --> 00:18:36,730 As I've said, it starts with the way the social, economic, political and other institutions actually operate in some society at some given time. 175 00:18:37,030 --> 00:18:40,720 And what really does move human beings to act in given circumstances? 176 00:18:41,500 --> 00:18:49,870 So this understanding of realism then differs. From what we might call a metaphysical doctrine about the reality of the world beyond the empirical. 177 00:18:50,500 --> 00:18:57,130 It also differs from realpolitik, which has in general no interest in ethical considerations. 178 00:18:57,640 --> 00:19:02,500 And it also differs from wishful thinking, which I will return to in my conclusion. 179 00:19:03,310 --> 00:19:09,970 Instead, instead, realism here refers to our existing motivations and our political and social institutions, 180 00:19:10,270 --> 00:19:17,290 both from a historical and an evaluative perspective, rather than a set of abstract rights or from our intuitions. 181 00:19:18,070 --> 00:19:21,940 But here's the rub. Focusing on questions of security, 182 00:19:21,940 --> 00:19:28,870 power and its relationship to agents opens this view to the criticism that it engages in descriptive 183 00:19:28,870 --> 00:19:34,630 finesse at the expense of providing normative principles that guide our thinking and practice. 184 00:19:35,290 --> 00:19:43,480 Moreover, proponents of this view do not help themselves. The evaluative aspect is sometimes downplayed because proponents emphasise, 185 00:19:44,170 --> 00:19:48,550 beginning with questions of power, security and actual institutional practices. 186 00:19:48,910 --> 00:19:55,510 A result of this de-emphasis is the criticism that while it might be realistic to focus mainly on existing conditions, 187 00:19:55,990 --> 00:19:59,080 what results is what David Stone has called hopeless realism. 188 00:20:00,190 --> 00:20:03,550 It's not enough to tell us what is the case in such settings. 189 00:20:03,940 --> 00:20:07,330 The role of political thought is to tell us what should be the case. 190 00:20:08,170 --> 00:20:12,219 I want to take up this point and argue that the primacy of the political up political 191 00:20:12,220 --> 00:20:16,360 judgement shows that the criticism that realism focus is solely on decision. 192 00:20:16,360 --> 00:20:24,610 Excuse me, description is not entirely accurate. What emerges is not an argument against traditional normative political philosophy, 193 00:20:24,880 --> 00:20:30,720 but instead an understanding of judgement that is essential to realist politics and a view that is more plausible, 194 00:20:30,730 --> 00:20:35,080 I contend, for addressing the real political problems of humanitarian work. 195 00:20:36,520 --> 00:20:43,030 So judgement. Judgement is important because it provides a response to the criticism. 196 00:20:43,030 --> 00:20:50,170 As I say above, more positively, articulating the realist role of judgement enables those to whom it might appeal, 197 00:20:50,530 --> 00:20:57,130 namely humanitarian workers to engage their situations already marked by power and powerless. 198 00:20:57,640 --> 00:21:02,860 Where engage here means both to understand the demands of the situation and evaluate 199 00:21:02,860 --> 00:21:08,410 its participants is already intimate in judgement is a craft to be cultivated. 200 00:21:08,650 --> 00:21:11,290 But I would like to add the following in this section. 201 00:21:11,920 --> 00:21:20,320 Judgement is recognising the possible open excuse me, the possibility recognising the possibilities open in the materials that are available. 202 00:21:21,640 --> 00:21:30,010 By recognise I mean prepared. Being prepared and open to facts in the world that enable one to perform best in doing so. 203 00:21:30,020 --> 00:21:37,329 Judgement also refers back to the original context of individual and institutional action and it occurs occurs as 204 00:21:37,330 --> 00:21:44,560 a part of beliefs and other judgements that are interconnected with forms of individual and institutional action. 205 00:21:45,400 --> 00:21:51,610 I do not mean that either the role of theory is dismissed or that judgement is not sometimes even a rule governed activity. 206 00:21:52,030 --> 00:21:57,370 A part of recognition involves understanding the contentious nature of these activities and 207 00:21:57,370 --> 00:22:02,830 how materials available dictate the degrees of success we might expect in certain situations. 208 00:22:03,730 --> 00:22:04,660 Judgement, however, 209 00:22:04,660 --> 00:22:14,139 is not to be confused with the mastery of a set of principles or theories then applied to contexts that are thought or assumed to be similar. 210 00:22:14,140 --> 00:22:19,570 If not the same, it becomes a part of one's character if we follow what Senate is saying about craft. 211 00:22:20,140 --> 00:22:27,220 Whereas the invocation of principle is thought to apply similarly to all situations is more akin to the skill of calculation. 212 00:22:28,810 --> 00:22:31,629 This is likewise not a view where we will discover principles. 213 00:22:31,630 --> 00:22:38,740 For example, those of justice that are thought to apply universally to the decisions, policies or institutions are lying to the contrary. 214 00:22:38,740 --> 00:22:43,360 The view here that I'm proposing rejects the idea that there are invariant principles 215 00:22:43,360 --> 00:22:47,410 that can do this kind of work in general and humanitarian work in particular, 216 00:22:47,530 --> 00:22:51,310 at least do it in a way that's faithful to the actual practices involved. 217 00:22:51,880 --> 00:22:59,920 On this point, voice is especially helpful. I think politics, he writes, requires judgement, he says that cannot easily be imparted by simple speech. 218 00:23:00,160 --> 00:23:05,559 It cannot rely readily be codified or Routinised judgement requires being flexible in a 219 00:23:05,560 --> 00:23:10,570 way that is responsive to the features of a given situation in a particular environment, 220 00:23:11,410 --> 00:23:15,850 and is transformed that environment in ways that he says are positively valued. 221 00:23:17,080 --> 00:23:24,370 Thus, he says, that assign we are exercising a craft rather than simply mechanically repeating things or having seen others do. 222 00:23:24,580 --> 00:23:30,190 Applying something like a handbook or just appear to be lucky is that we can attain again 223 00:23:30,190 --> 00:23:35,860 interesting and positively valued results in a variety of different and unexpected circumstances. 224 00:23:37,360 --> 00:23:39,489 So with the discussion of craft a little clearer, 225 00:23:39,490 --> 00:23:45,670 we can turn to what it means to speak of the craft of political judgement and how it relates to humanitarian work. 226 00:23:46,420 --> 00:23:47,440 Not surprisingly, 227 00:23:47,440 --> 00:23:55,989 political judgements involve questions of power that exist between persons and groups involved in humanitarian interaction as a part of judgement. 228 00:23:55,990 --> 00:24:00,070 However, the aim, when appropriate, is to correct the abuses of power. 229 00:24:01,000 --> 00:24:09,040 I use the term correct here intentionally to designate the need to evaluate something as being better or worse than other systems. 230 00:24:09,460 --> 00:24:12,520 And this factor should be a part of what should be done. 231 00:24:13,390 --> 00:24:22,000 It is, however, accepting also that there is no single measurement we can invoke to distinguish the good, the bad, the better, the worse or the best. 232 00:24:22,870 --> 00:24:30,939 Now, this could appear to undermine humanitarian work, especially given the humanitarian principles are often discussed as if they alone 233 00:24:30,940 --> 00:24:36,550 can calibrate contingent situations the language of principles over practice. 234 00:24:37,900 --> 00:24:42,520 The need for a single measurement, however, has the opposite effect on humanitarian law. 235 00:24:43,000 --> 00:24:47,799 One result of trying to differentiate like this puts NGOs in particular in the 236 00:24:47,800 --> 00:24:53,230 unnecessary position of having decide if they are good humanitarians or bad activists. 237 00:24:54,490 --> 00:24:58,090 This is precisely what happened with Doctors Without Borders in the 1990s, 238 00:24:58,390 --> 00:25:03,730 when it began to offer advice and social services and legal support to foreign nationals living in France. 239 00:25:04,330 --> 00:25:11,260 Fearing that MSF were becoming too actively involved, the French government, with its own immigration policy, began to apply. 240 00:25:11,260 --> 00:25:15,400 What was said is an increasingly clear distinction between good humanitarian organisations, 241 00:25:15,910 --> 00:25:23,290 those that provided assistance and compassionate treatment, superfluous people reduced to silence and bad activists. 242 00:25:23,710 --> 00:25:28,210 Those that were political organisations seeking to give voice to the excluded poor. 243 00:25:28,630 --> 00:25:36,160 In the end, humanitarian action was deemed legitimate as long as it did not lead to any criticism of public policy. 244 00:25:36,160 --> 00:25:44,500 And this is from the book Humanitarian. Negotiations that has various situations to discuss is the role of MSF in these kinds of instances. 245 00:25:45,550 --> 00:25:50,440 Now one may respond that this also then opens the door to something like a sophomore relativism, 246 00:25:50,440 --> 00:25:53,950 where there is no way to distinguish among competing positions. 247 00:25:54,700 --> 00:25:58,660 But this would be wrong. I am not suggesting that there is no right answer. 248 00:25:58,960 --> 00:26:01,870 Rather this we learn from humanitarian work itself. 249 00:26:02,110 --> 00:26:09,820 There is no single measurement of that right answer, and the right answer that we do pursue is often elusive and contested. 250 00:26:10,360 --> 00:26:16,300 This is why I speak of judgement as a craft that's cultivated and not an algorithmic calculation of principles. 251 00:26:17,080 --> 00:26:21,220 One consequence of this, then, is that a lot of judgement will be exposed. 252 00:26:22,180 --> 00:26:25,100 Let's let's consider the difficult case of Sri Lanka again. 253 00:26:25,960 --> 00:26:33,370 Out of all the things that MSF, Doctors Without Borders could have done, knowing that uncertainty would be unquestionably attached to their action. 254 00:26:33,520 --> 00:26:40,540 It's only by saying what MSF have done and what they're able to bring about through their decision in Sri Lanka, 255 00:26:40,900 --> 00:26:46,330 that we can make more confident judgements about what in fact could have been done in the moment. 256 00:26:47,020 --> 00:26:49,660 Now there are to be sure, standards for those judgements, 257 00:26:50,170 --> 00:26:56,110 but ones that refer to objectives that are linked to the conditions and the political actors in the situations. 258 00:26:57,490 --> 00:27:05,710 But this is not to say, however, that ex-post judgements do not affect how one decides beforehand what to do. 259 00:27:07,120 --> 00:27:13,450 Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. representative killed in Iraq in 2003, was well aware of this. 260 00:27:14,900 --> 00:27:18,230 Addressing the problem of Cambodian refugees, he wrote. 261 00:27:18,260 --> 00:27:23,270 Never forget that what may be obvious after the fact requires a great deal of soul 262 00:27:23,270 --> 00:27:28,250 searching and debate and involves a lot of anxiety and uncertainty before the fact, 263 00:27:28,520 --> 00:27:37,690 especially when a decision affecting the lives of people is about to be taken so well. 264 00:27:37,700 --> 00:27:44,569 Vieira de Mello helps. And the book here. That's helpful. About Vieira de Mello is the book by a woman named Samantha Power recounts the 265 00:27:44,570 --> 00:27:49,549 story of the hero de Mello and his work in various hot spots around the world, 266 00:27:49,550 --> 00:27:55,470 the last of which was Iraq in 2003. Well, 267 00:27:55,470 --> 00:27:59,910 Vieira de Mello helps us to understand is that the actions of MSF in Sri Lanka say 268 00:27:59,910 --> 00:28:03,870 something about the role of ex-post judgements in humanitarian political life, 269 00:28:03,870 --> 00:28:07,800 but equally the illusive and contested nature of doing the right thing from the beginning. 270 00:28:08,550 --> 00:28:15,990 Now, as challenging as these cases are, will begins to emerge, though, when we consider actual humanitarian work is a central place for judgement, 271 00:28:16,350 --> 00:28:21,090 which can take place in multiple ways and does not need mean only moral evaluation, 272 00:28:21,420 --> 00:28:27,690 but can include assessments of efficiency measured in a variety of ways something like simplicity, clarity and so on. 273 00:28:29,250 --> 00:28:33,870 So in my discussion earlier, I alluded to the fact that a craft becomes a part of our character. 274 00:28:34,410 --> 00:28:37,200 This is especially true of the craft of political judgement. 275 00:28:37,830 --> 00:28:42,530 One way that this occurs is that political judgement requires what Mark Felt called settled. 276 00:28:42,550 --> 00:28:49,290 This was a settled disposition which helps us to bring about valued state of affairs most optimally. 277 00:28:50,040 --> 00:28:55,829 In general, this settled disposition is a reference to one's emotional and intellectual response to the world in 278 00:28:55,830 --> 00:29:01,200 terms of judgement gets our response in a way that's driven by something other than instrumental game. 279 00:29:01,680 --> 00:29:07,620 If our response is driven by instrumental gain, it looks like we have reduced qualities of judgement to a mere skill set. 280 00:29:08,370 --> 00:29:10,109 Now I agree with Phelps general point, 281 00:29:10,110 --> 00:29:16,230 but I want to specify this trade in political judgement a little more by calling it the disposition of sincerity. 282 00:29:16,380 --> 00:29:21,840 The phrase that I borrow from Bernard Williams sincerity is important for political judgement, 283 00:29:21,960 --> 00:29:25,710 especially as it informs humanitarian work in the following way. 284 00:29:26,580 --> 00:29:31,830 In general, sincerity is another way of understanding the rejection of what I've been calling unreflective illusion. 285 00:29:32,250 --> 00:29:37,680 As such, it takes seriously the considered convictions and real motivations that influence behaviour. 286 00:29:38,460 --> 00:29:47,520 Sincerity is the pursuit of the transparency of these reasons, however desires and intentions, and especially how they can easily become fantasies. 287 00:29:48,210 --> 00:29:55,890 In this way, sincerity then evaluates our real motivations and becomes an important condition for 288 00:29:55,890 --> 00:30:00,780 social cooperation and is indispensable for making judgements about what should be done. 289 00:30:01,350 --> 00:30:07,200 This disposition then indicates how we are oriented to certain questions central to the political, 290 00:30:07,350 --> 00:30:12,720 especially those that involve the distinction of power over versus power with someone. 291 00:30:13,680 --> 00:30:21,660 More precisely, sincerity refers to the way we sustain and develop relations with others that involve different kinds of degrees of trust. 292 00:30:22,560 --> 00:30:27,390 So importantly, then, the disposition of sincerity denotes how we comport ourselves to each other. 293 00:30:27,630 --> 00:30:33,570 That is the kinds of trust, this is the way that Williams describes it, that shape our interactions. 294 00:30:33,960 --> 00:30:38,730 This is why, then, sincerity is an ethical value informed by a sense of the political. 295 00:30:39,780 --> 00:30:44,939 Understood in this particular manner the disposition of sincerity as a function of judgement plays a 296 00:30:44,940 --> 00:30:50,100 significant role for the way the ethical and the political come together in humanitarian activity. 297 00:30:50,610 --> 00:30:58,170 Sincerity, for instance, was important to, again, Vieira de Mello approach to others with whom virtually no one else would negotiate. 298 00:30:59,280 --> 00:31:06,750 In particular, sincerity for him took the form of treating those who were characterised as irrational, as rational actors. 299 00:31:07,370 --> 00:31:11,280 Now, this was not easily accepted when granted to someone like Radovan Karadzic. 300 00:31:11,730 --> 00:31:21,990 For Vieira de Mello, sincerity was the precise way central to how he viewed parties important to bringing about peace in conflict ridden areas. 301 00:31:22,860 --> 00:31:28,650 Sincerity, however, went both ways for him, especially in terms of its political importance. 302 00:31:29,130 --> 00:31:34,020 As he did in Sarajevo, Vieira de Mello treated the Taliban as rational actors, 303 00:31:34,200 --> 00:31:40,530 meeting with them in Kabul and creating what he called a test of sincerity in order to receive U.N. aid. 304 00:31:40,800 --> 00:31:44,970 They had to allow five schools for girls to be built, along with five for boys. 305 00:31:46,050 --> 00:31:53,220 But when he returned to New York, he received a letter from the Taliban informing him that they had no intention of educating girls and foreign female 306 00:31:53,220 --> 00:31:59,520 U.N. employees would no longer be permitted to work in the country unless they were accompanied by male relatives. 307 00:31:59,940 --> 00:32:04,070 Unsurprisingly, the Taliban had flunked his sincerity test. 308 00:32:04,080 --> 00:32:11,220 Again, this is part of the book from Samantha Power. So in the end, judgement is a craft that involves the disposition of sincerity, 309 00:32:11,460 --> 00:32:18,510 is a partisan intervention where partisan refers to the commitment to specific questions security, 310 00:32:18,510 --> 00:32:22,500 legitimacy and power that are already inherent in humanitarian work. 311 00:32:23,310 --> 00:32:27,240 The partisan intervention, however, is what I want to call strategic intervention. 312 00:32:27,450 --> 00:32:29,130 And now what I want to discuss. 313 00:32:31,540 --> 00:32:39,340 Strategic intervention, especially in humanitarian work, is the task of uncovering alternatives to present ways of doing things. 314 00:32:40,030 --> 00:32:46,630 There are, I think, three, at least three interrelated components to the strategic intervention of humanitarian work. 315 00:32:47,540 --> 00:32:53,870 First, there is the utopian function of strategic intervention as the work of constructive imagination, 316 00:32:54,470 --> 00:32:59,210 the aim of which is to create distance both collectively and individually from the beliefs, 317 00:32:59,420 --> 00:33:03,500 values and attitudes of one's surroundings that impede action. 318 00:33:05,400 --> 00:33:11,340 As Vieira de Mello and himself show, this is bridging activated imagination with effective political engagement, 319 00:33:11,790 --> 00:33:18,149 which requires that we see how things really stand, but also perhaps sympathise with how others see them. 320 00:33:18,150 --> 00:33:21,960 Even if we know, as Joyce and others say, they are deluded in what they think. 321 00:33:22,770 --> 00:33:28,110 In this sense, then, strategic intervention unsettles by asking, among other things, 322 00:33:28,110 --> 00:33:34,380 how does humanitarian work avoid getting caught up in the web of powerful fantasies that are often spun around it? 323 00:33:34,980 --> 00:33:43,020 How can one get the appropriate distance from one's own agency organisations or society, its practices, norms and conceptions? 324 00:33:43,290 --> 00:33:45,170 And then what is appropriate in the sense. 325 00:33:46,280 --> 00:33:51,710 Our most cherished beliefs are disturbed in a particular kind of way here that have become forms of imagination, 326 00:33:52,040 --> 00:33:57,680 that are determined by the ideas that were perhaps once operative in situations but are now absent. 327 00:33:59,210 --> 00:34:07,370 So the disruptive work of strategic intervention then refers to what we would call the inventive nature that is important humanitarian activity. 328 00:34:08,300 --> 00:34:13,940 It is said that Vieira de Mello kept a copy of Emmanuel Khan's essay on Perpetual Peace close by. 329 00:34:14,600 --> 00:34:21,200 Powell recounts what I think is a really helpful story here, only because it mentions Khan primarily so, she says. 330 00:34:21,200 --> 00:34:24,829 Vieira de Mello argued that citizens could not afford to wash our hands of the 331 00:34:24,830 --> 00:34:29,670 construction of real peace and leave the important decisions to statement statesman. 332 00:34:31,010 --> 00:34:36,380 Regular people simply had to participate. Are we to abdicate this responsibility? 333 00:34:36,410 --> 00:34:41,060 He asked. We are all you and me, a fluid and destitute peoples. 334 00:34:41,180 --> 00:34:48,590 We are all jointly responsible for the opportunity, which is a right to fully participate in the formation of progress. 335 00:34:49,490 --> 00:34:55,340 He closed out his lecture with words that would foreshadow his approach to negotiation in conflict zones. 336 00:34:56,060 --> 00:35:03,530 You must act as if perpetual peace is something real, though perhaps it is not, the Ira de Mello said, quoting Khan. 337 00:35:04,220 --> 00:35:08,090 Then he added His own code to the future is to be invented. 338 00:35:10,090 --> 00:35:18,820 Sylvia for Vieira de Mello, this kind of ingenuity was linked to what I've been arguing his judgement, especially the ability to foresee or predict, 339 00:35:19,120 --> 00:35:21,940 to evaluate and to exercise creativity, 340 00:35:22,180 --> 00:35:29,590 all of which constitutes practical what we would call practical imagination that creates new possibilities for constructive responses. 341 00:35:30,250 --> 00:35:37,300 In this particular way, strategic intervention as constructed imagination seeks what is called positive legitimacy, 342 00:35:37,570 --> 00:35:45,370 which articulates the illicit impermissible and makes the case for the valuable nature of particular humanitarian work. 343 00:35:46,990 --> 00:35:52,860 But second, strategic intervention as constructive imagination is still realism. 344 00:35:53,740 --> 00:35:58,270 And here I return to something I noted earlier when I when I was discussing how I'd use realism. 345 00:35:58,990 --> 00:36:06,190 Realpolitik shuns imaginative constructs and responds in what we might call an instrumentally rational way to the facts alone. 346 00:36:07,750 --> 00:36:11,530 This is one of the reasons this kind of realism is not helpful to humanitarian work. 347 00:36:11,890 --> 00:36:15,700 Not always helpful. I want, however, to make a different point. 348 00:36:16,180 --> 00:36:25,330 The opposite of realism as constructive imagination central to humanitarian work is not idealism, but instead wishful thinking. 349 00:36:26,200 --> 00:36:33,069 Wishful thinking is the general incapacity to respond well to one situation and the particular failure of political 350 00:36:33,070 --> 00:36:40,690 action to be philosophically informed by the kind of reflexivity that rejects unreflective illusion wishful thinking. 351 00:36:40,690 --> 00:36:47,049 Whether in Williamsburg most recently, Gore is forgetting that whatever questions we put to others must put, 352 00:36:47,050 --> 00:36:50,350 we put ourselves with exactly the same kind of rigour. 353 00:36:51,250 --> 00:36:55,690 It is avoiding the temptation to look too quickly for the failure of imagination 354 00:36:55,690 --> 00:36:59,559 in our opponents and looking for the failure of imagination in our own 355 00:36:59,560 --> 00:37:04,990 perspective as such wishful thinking in the context of the craft of reflection 356 00:37:04,990 --> 00:37:09,070 and judgement is not just a lack of imagination on the part of someone else, 357 00:37:09,310 --> 00:37:15,530 or simply the incapacity to face up to the challenges challenges that the world represents or presents. 358 00:37:15,550 --> 00:37:21,160 Rather, it is, as Jonathan Lear describes it, he is also written on this topic in a different way. 359 00:37:21,520 --> 00:37:27,880 It is stubbornly clinging to a dreamlike fantasy as a way of wishfully avoiding those challenges. 360 00:37:28,860 --> 00:37:32,910 This is what it means to say the humanitarian work must face up to reality. 361 00:37:33,450 --> 00:37:39,660 It's grasping the situation that has in many instances fundamentally changed and through experiencing, 362 00:37:39,900 --> 00:37:46,350 through experience, exercising political judgement in the service of what we ought to do in that situation. 363 00:37:47,880 --> 00:37:52,110 Finally, then the craft of strategic intervention will rely on hope. 364 00:37:53,330 --> 00:38:00,390 I want to conclude the paper with this point, because it was raised in the beginning, namely that understanding the political in this way. 365 00:38:01,880 --> 00:38:06,040 Results in hopeless realism. Vieira de Mello. 366 00:38:06,040 --> 00:38:13,780 His work, as well as that of MSF and other humanitarian agencies, embody what I think following Jonathan Lear calls radical hope. 367 00:38:13,880 --> 00:38:17,920 He wrote a book he has a book called Radical Hope Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, 368 00:38:17,920 --> 00:38:24,969 in which he discusses the demise of the Native American Crow and how hope was used 369 00:38:24,970 --> 00:38:29,020 in some sense to recreate or create new situations that were no longer liveable. 370 00:38:30,040 --> 00:38:32,830 And I'm appropriating that for this particular kind of context. 371 00:38:33,640 --> 00:38:39,370 Radical hope, then, is directed toward a future of goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. 372 00:38:40,420 --> 00:38:48,190 It anticipates a good for those who have it, but yet lack the appropriate concept, we might say, with which to understand the situation. 373 00:38:49,120 --> 00:38:54,579 Radical hope is not necessarily succumbing to that which is critically engaged in the service 374 00:38:54,580 --> 00:39:00,310 of asking the question How do we live after the events that bring destruction or loss? 375 00:39:01,030 --> 00:39:08,680 Rather strategic intervention as imaginative engagement with things that are seen as potentially disruptive, cynical, and even desirous. 376 00:39:08,830 --> 00:39:15,100 It establishes for us what we might legitimately hope at a time when the sense of purpose and meaning has collapsed, 377 00:39:15,490 --> 00:39:18,640 or at least collapsed in the ways that might once have worked. 378 00:39:20,060 --> 00:39:27,320 Humanitarian work at its best in response to conditions by calling on its participants to turn to the challenges that the world presents. 379 00:39:27,620 --> 00:39:35,720 Instead of stubbornly clinging to these fantasy of something once might have worked but no longer does, in a way the wistfully avoids the challenges. 380 00:39:36,230 --> 00:39:41,210 This is what makes radical hope different from something like optimism and even perhaps idealism. 381 00:39:41,630 --> 00:39:47,600 The latter, ultimately, one might say, failed to turn toward lived existence, whereas the former takes up those conditions. 382 00:39:48,860 --> 00:39:54,739 Humanitarian work of MSF and Vieira de Mello then is constructively hopeful in its 383 00:39:54,740 --> 00:39:58,910 attempts to facilitate creative and appropriate responses to the world's challenges. 384 00:39:59,240 --> 00:40:03,890 In the service of asking the question How will we go on or how should we go on? 385 00:40:05,550 --> 00:40:09,960 This capacity is essential not only because it possesses an image of what humanity might be, 386 00:40:10,530 --> 00:40:14,790 but it's also the ability to take seriously the anxiety and the vulnerability that 387 00:40:14,790 --> 00:40:19,380 characterises the radically altered circumstances that shape humanitarian work. 388 00:40:20,070 --> 00:40:26,820 For all of their failures. Vieira de Mello and MSF invent new ways to potentially enable those most affected 389 00:40:26,970 --> 00:40:30,930 to go forward into a future that they are only able to grasp retrospectively, 390 00:40:31,530 --> 00:40:36,690 which they can then re-emerge with concept with which to understand themselves and their experience. 391 00:40:38,440 --> 00:40:43,389 So the humanitarian work that I've appealed to throughout the latter part especially allows us to see, I think, 392 00:40:43,390 --> 00:40:47,590 practically what I've tried to argue for conceptually that is an understanding of political 393 00:40:47,590 --> 00:40:52,630 philosophy as a way of thinking and acting that takes seriously the realist concerns with power, 394 00:40:52,990 --> 00:40:59,170 security, legitimacy and other elements that are so-called first questions and political thinking. 395 00:41:00,230 --> 00:41:06,080 I've also tried to argue throughout the paper this is the way of approaching political excuse me, 396 00:41:06,080 --> 00:41:09,770 a way of approaching political life that quickly admits that a, 397 00:41:09,770 --> 00:41:16,850 if not the last word perhaps on politics is the work of strategic intervention as constructive imagination and hope, 398 00:41:17,240 --> 00:41:23,750 not just for our own corners of the world, for all of those that are the weakest and most powerless among us. 399 00:41:24,440 --> 00:41:30,650 This view already informs humanitarian work and should continue to characterise it as resolutely political. 400 00:41:31,650 --> 00:41:31,950 Thank.