Let me see. Like an eight for for for convening the session.
Hugo couldn't be here.
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.
A little bit about the project. My home discipline is philosophy.
And so I'm interested in trying to address some questions of political life, in particular today, humanitarian work.
So one of the tasks that I'm trying to do is to speak across audiences in some sense.
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.
I think it does in hopes that you were able to follow up a little bit better.
So the paper is about 40 minutes and then we can have time for questions after that.
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.
Second, the cultivation of judgement is indispensable to this work,
and thus it plays a central role to realist politics that shapes humanitarian work.
Accordingly, it's important to understand what I mean by craft, political and judgement and how these connect to humanitarian work.
So I'll begin with craft. Richard, Senate has recently provided us with the best discussion of craft and its relationship to social life.
In his book, The Craftsman. He discusses traits of craft in general.
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.
It focuses on objective standards on the thing in itself,
but it acknowledges that these conflicting objective standards of excellence, the desire to do something well for its own sake,
can be impaired by competitive pressure, by frustration or by obsession, craft,
and requires particular skill, commitment and judgement in a particular way.
The characteristics that I want to utilise for my purposes here is that of commitment,
which is an essential element in humanitarian work and one that is central to the craft of judgement.
Let me begin with the definition of commitment.
Describe something worth doing includes an obligation to ourselves and something not necessarily
of our own making and requires repetition associated with the development of aptitude.
We judge whether something is worth doing or someone is worth being with.
Which is to say, in other words, that there are people or things for which we would die.
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.
This idea is illustrated when we speak of humanitarian work as a position and not just a theory.
To be sure, if theoretical or philosophical discourse is not rejected.
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.
Commitment then, especially in political life, determines discourse is fragile when that involves a risk or wager and it pursues verification.
So as a risk, commitment reflects the importance of one's choice between conflicts that have
become rigid or hardened alternatives in the light of humanitarian work,
risk calls for initiative and the invention to move through an impasse, that obsession with the extended rationalisation of options often produces.
The wager is the judgement that the convictions entailed in one's commitment are viable solutions to the deadlock.
In this way, our wager attempts verification by attempting excuse me, by attesting to the intelligibility that saturates our commitment.
On the one hand, this involves reflective verification that provides some coherence to the commitment.
And on the other hand, verification reflects integration where the past, like the future, as Charles L'Amour has written recently we hope for,
is structured in the light of present commitments that form the point of departure for our reflections.
Wager in verification finally then speak to long term commitment, which means that verification is a question of our whole life.
No one escapes it. Second commitment involves obligation.
Obligation in the context of humanitarian work is the responsibility we have to each other.
A response to the suffering of others, as is often the language.
Obligation in this sense, is prior to where the condition for things like consent,
contract and other ideas associated with moral principles yet has that which indicates something worth doing.
Commitment describes the normative dimension of obligation that represents what the particular commitment gives us reason to do.
In this way, commitment has obligation is important to what I call the craft of reflection, what Bernard Williams calls truthfulness.
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.
When something is lost by it, much of one's thought looks outward to the people involved into the relations they have the one.
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.
So third commitment requires repetition without mere mimicking.
Senate. Again, helps us to see that the craft involved. That craft involves a constant dialogue between concrete practices and thinking,
a dialogue that evolves into sustaining habits and habits that establish a kind of rhythm between problem solving,
but equally that of problem finding, which in terms of humanitarian work,
means that repetition of one's commitment establishes a pattern of experience.
But as is often the case with humanitarian work, the obligation is often to commit error in order eventually to get things right.
In the end, commitment as it relates to humanitarian work is best viewed as cultivating a craft like this,
rather than being obsessed with getting the right principles to map on to the right corresponding practices.
So claiming that humanitarian work is a craft would likely not be very contentious,
especially for those that find themselves in humanitarian spaces where they are defined as conflict of interpretations.
The assertion that humanitarian work should insist on the craft of political judgement,
however, is potentially more controversial from at least two standpoints.
First, from a humanitarian perspective, the insistence that humanitarian work is political is at odds with foundational,
its own foundational principles, and therefore should be rejected.
Specifically, the principles of impartiality make no discrimination, and especially neutrality.
Do not take political sides, make the appeal to the political difficult at best.
Second, employing a realist framework, which I do, and what follows opens the criticism that such thinking undermines the importance
of normative standards that govern what we ought to do in political life.
So let me talk about these. Each there is a consistent claim in humanitarian work that it should not be political.
Doing so, the argument goes, makes it exceptionally difficult and carries with it unsatisfactory implications.
One of the most vexing cases in recent humanitarian activity out of Sri Lanka,
among other things, whether or not to be political is one of the key challenges.
The Norwegian Refugee Council concludes that the right to receive humanitarian assistance and
to offer it is a fundamental humanitarian principle which should be enjoyed by all citizens.
Hence, the need for impeded access to affected populations is a fundamental importance and exercising that responsibility.
And then it says provision of the ICRC, humanitarian aid is not a partisan or political act and should not be viewed as such.
The prime motivation is to alleviate human suffering,
and this response reiterates both the commitment to remaining neutral and also
the way that the question of the political poor man's humanitarian activity.
More recently, Fiona Terry reminds us precisely why being political is also problematic.
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.
And the policy backfires when villages are punished for having received it, or aid agencies are attacked as agents of the enemy agenda.
A lot could be said about both of these quotations, but the implication and the implications they have for humanitarian work.
My interest is whether there is a way to understand the political that works in
concert with humanitarian work and an understanding on which we should insist.
My answer is yes, and it is a notion of the political that's associated with what has recently been called realist political philosophy.
So what is the political and what makes it realist?
The understanding of the political on this view begins with security as the first political question.
And here I'm addressing. I'm drawing on some thinkers as a name mentioned Bernard Williams, Raymond Gause,
Mark Philip and other people who are working out some of these kinds of ideas and called that's been called realist political philosophy.
So security is the first political question in this notion of the political.
It is following. Williams because answering the question of security is the condition for posing the questions that security is.
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.
It's affected by historical circumstances not arriving at a solution to the first question at the level of state of nature,
and then going on to the rest of the agenda with regards to humanitarian work.
Security is not the security of nation states necessarily,
but instead that of actual people or what the United Nations Development Program calls personal security,
the security of human beings and violent upheavals.
This includes violence, natural disasters, diseases and poverty, all of which expose humans to potential peril.
The view here is that insecurity is a fundamental threat to human dignity.
But if security is the first political question, then we should be sceptical that something like fairness or privileging a rights
based theory is the default position of what political life should consist.
The craft of reflection in this sense entails questioning whether something like fairness,
however it's construed or equality in something like an abstract sense,
has uncompromising priority priority over all the political and moral values, Raymond always says,
such as survival, security, agency and transparency, efficiency and self esteem.
Realist like Joyce will ask, Does fairness take priority no matter what?
Is fairness clearly more important than the satisfaction of genuinely vital human interest?
It's not that fairness is unimportant. Rather, it's asking whether or not in humanitarian work in particular,
there is rendered a more faithful understanding that could be embraced even as it finds itself in tension
with and potentially even contradictory to the principles that are believed to guide such practices.
Consider the following. The issue of security shaped the work of Doctors Without Borders, MSF in Somalia,
whether in the form of co-opting aid or limiting access to certain areas.
Given the advise not to talk politics, the question is what is meant by the phrase do humanitarian work and not politics.
The MSF appeared to view talking politics as something akin to what we might call a political liberal project associated with fairness or equality,
one that's often thought to be the subtext of certain international military intervention.
Now, my point here is not to debate the merits of political liberalism vs Soviet humanitarian work.
Rather, my point is that it's not the full story of the political.
On a closer examination, the question of security as a political one was in fact fundamental to humanitarian work in Somalia,
and as such provides a much more realistic understanding of the conditions in which the MSF operated.
It is no less political, but it's a different understanding, one that is already present in such work.
Security, then, is a condition for legitimate action, not just actions that involve violence,
but collective decisions or arrangements that are affected by humanitarian action.
Excuse me. Human action. Legitimacy as the object of reflection in myself.
Is MSF asking why we should act in one way or another as the object of decision?
Legitimacy is the process by which MSF exchanges reasons with various constituents to decide the best course of action.
So if security is the first political question in this realist view, then the close quite second question is that of power.
We understanding of the political that is derived from and best characterises humanitarian
work is one that considers the essential relationship between power agency and interest.
Once offered two salient descriptions here the word designates the sum total of man's relation in connection with power.
Conquest of power. Exercise of power. Preservation of power.
Power is the central question of politics. Who commands for whom?
Within what limits and under what restrictions? This was written in the 1950s by the French philosopher Paul Ridker.
With World War Two fresh in his mind and having been a prisoner of war,
it informed Richter's pacifism throughout the remainder of his life and shaped his understanding of practical life as well.
More recently, Noyce has offered a very similar definition when he defines power as who does what to whom, for whose benefit.
With four distinct variables to fill in who, what to whom, for whose benefit.
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,
alleviate suffering, and maintain human dignity during the aftermath of crises and disasters.
On the one hand, the stated objectives save human lives, alleviate suffering and maintain human dignity.
Are political in the sense that humanitarian work is always related to the conquest, exercise and preservation of power.
On the other hand, this kind of work is a value judgement about the nature of power.
To the degree that human humanitarian action engages in activities that constitute power.
It does so with the goal of exercising power in common rather than power as domination.
Whether this is explicitly clear is in asking the relationship between force and humanitarian aid.
One more tactic examples like what it means to hire or drive a particular vehicle that carries with it certain symbolism.
As was the case in Somalia and the so-called white car syndrome in Cambodia.
The question of power as a political question is proven again back to Somalia.
What instruction does MSF give hired guards by giving sums of money to certain representatives?
How is need understood or even calculated? In Somalia, health care practices.
How do the interests of particular parties to conflicts shape operational responses,
especially when this response directly opposes an official assessment of the needs of the population?
We could go on, but the point returns. Humanitarian work as an instance of modern politics is about power, its acquisition, distribution and use,
but also importantly, how human action is also at times co-operative and coordinated.
There are two immediate implications for approaching the political in this way.
First, politics is not a value free enterprise, as is familiar in humanitarian work itself,
contingencies and the history of situations dictate the possibilities of response.
Moreover, whether they are reflected on or not,
political actors pursue what they believe to be conceptions of the good life which inevitably generate conflict.
Second, and related to this, the political is not an isolated domain from ethical activity,
but rather the political is understood in relation to the many considered convictions that are brought into the political domain.
By considered again, I do not necessarily mean those ideas that are reflected upon,
but instead those persuasions that determine what it means to live in particular ways.
In this way, the humanitarian appeal to alleviate suffering can be seen as a considered conviction enacted not just in a local manner.
Decisions, for example, are made to as to who will receive certain aid over others.
But it is a consideration that orients the very efforts to respond to and to judge
conditions of insecurity into which humanitarian workers insert themselves.
So this is why we can say, finally, that a realist understanding of the political that characterises humanitarian work with its questions of security,
legitimacy and power, it considers what we would call the real motivations that shape individuals as they engage each other.
We do not start, as Boyce has said recently, with how people ought ideally or ought rationally to act,
what they ought to desire or value, the kind of people they ought to be, etc.
Realist political philosophy begins with questions above.
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.
And what really does move human beings to act in given circumstances?
So this understanding of realism then differs. From what we might call a metaphysical doctrine about the reality of the world beyond the empirical.
It also differs from realpolitik, which has in general no interest in ethical considerations.
And it also differs from wishful thinking, which I will return to in my conclusion.
Instead, instead, realism here refers to our existing motivations and our political and social institutions,
both from a historical and an evaluative perspective, rather than a set of abstract rights or from our intuitions.
But here's the rub. Focusing on questions of security,
power and its relationship to agents opens this view to the criticism that it engages in descriptive
finesse at the expense of providing normative principles that guide our thinking and practice.
Moreover, proponents of this view do not help themselves. The evaluative aspect is sometimes downplayed because proponents emphasise,
beginning with questions of power, security and actual institutional practices.
A result of this de-emphasis is the criticism that while it might be realistic to focus mainly on existing conditions,
what results is what David Stone has called hopeless realism.
It's not enough to tell us what is the case in such settings.
The role of political thought is to tell us what should be the case.
I want to take up this point and argue that the primacy of the political up political
judgement shows that the criticism that realism focus is solely on decision.
Excuse me, description is not entirely accurate. What emerges is not an argument against traditional normative political philosophy,
but instead an understanding of judgement that is essential to realist politics and a view that is more plausible,
I contend, for addressing the real political problems of humanitarian work.
So judgement. Judgement is important because it provides a response to the criticism.
As I say above, more positively, articulating the realist role of judgement enables those to whom it might appeal,
namely humanitarian workers to engage their situations already marked by power and powerless.
Where engage here means both to understand the demands of the situation and evaluate
its participants is already intimate in judgement is a craft to be cultivated.
But I would like to add the following in this section.
Judgement is recognising the possible open excuse me, the possibility recognising the possibilities open in the materials that are available.
By recognise I mean prepared. Being prepared and open to facts in the world that enable one to perform best in doing so.
Judgement also refers back to the original context of individual and institutional action and it occurs occurs as
a part of beliefs and other judgements that are interconnected with forms of individual and institutional action.
I do not mean that either the role of theory is dismissed or that judgement is not sometimes even a rule governed activity.
A part of recognition involves understanding the contentious nature of these activities and
how materials available dictate the degrees of success we might expect in certain situations.
Judgement, however,
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.
If not the same, it becomes a part of one's character if we follow what Senate is saying about craft.
Whereas the invocation of principle is thought to apply similarly to all situations is more akin to the skill of calculation.
This is likewise not a view where we will discover principles.
For example, those of justice that are thought to apply universally to the decisions, policies or institutions are lying to the contrary.
The view here that I'm proposing rejects the idea that there are invariant principles
that can do this kind of work in general and humanitarian work in particular,
at least do it in a way that's faithful to the actual practices involved.
On this point, voice is especially helpful. I think politics, he writes, requires judgement, he says that cannot easily be imparted by simple speech.
It cannot rely readily be codified or Routinised judgement requires being flexible in a
way that is responsive to the features of a given situation in a particular environment,
and is transformed that environment in ways that he says are positively valued.
Thus, he says, that assign we are exercising a craft rather than simply mechanically repeating things or having seen others do.
Applying something like a handbook or just appear to be lucky is that we can attain again
interesting and positively valued results in a variety of different and unexpected circumstances.
So with the discussion of craft a little clearer,
we can turn to what it means to speak of the craft of political judgement and how it relates to humanitarian work.
Not surprisingly,
political judgements involve questions of power that exist between persons and groups involved in humanitarian interaction as a part of judgement.
However, the aim, when appropriate, is to correct the abuses of power.
I use the term correct here intentionally to designate the need to evaluate something as being better or worse than other systems.
And this factor should be a part of what should be done.
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.
Now, this could appear to undermine humanitarian work, especially given the humanitarian principles are often discussed as if they alone
can calibrate contingent situations the language of principles over practice.
The need for a single measurement, however, has the opposite effect on humanitarian law.
One result of trying to differentiate like this puts NGOs in particular in the
unnecessary position of having decide if they are good humanitarians or bad activists.
This is precisely what happened with Doctors Without Borders in the 1990s,
when it began to offer advice and social services and legal support to foreign nationals living in France.
Fearing that MSF were becoming too actively involved, the French government, with its own immigration policy, began to apply.
What was said is an increasingly clear distinction between good humanitarian organisations,
those that provided assistance and compassionate treatment, superfluous people reduced to silence and bad activists.
Those that were political organisations seeking to give voice to the excluded poor.
In the end, humanitarian action was deemed legitimate as long as it did not lead to any criticism of public policy.
And this is from the book Humanitarian. Negotiations that has various situations to discuss is the role of MSF in these kinds of instances.
Now one may respond that this also then opens the door to something like a sophomore relativism,
where there is no way to distinguish among competing positions.
But this would be wrong. I am not suggesting that there is no right answer.
Rather this we learn from humanitarian work itself.
There is no single measurement of that right answer, and the right answer that we do pursue is often elusive and contested.
This is why I speak of judgement as a craft that's cultivated and not an algorithmic calculation of principles.
One consequence of this, then, is that a lot of judgement will be exposed.
Let's let's consider the difficult case of Sri Lanka again.
Out of all the things that MSF, Doctors Without Borders could have done, knowing that uncertainty would be unquestionably attached to their action.
It's only by saying what MSF have done and what they're able to bring about through their decision in Sri Lanka,
that we can make more confident judgements about what in fact could have been done in the moment.
Now there are to be sure, standards for those judgements,
but ones that refer to objectives that are linked to the conditions and the political actors in the situations.
But this is not to say, however, that ex-post judgements do not affect how one decides beforehand what to do.
Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. representative killed in Iraq in 2003, was well aware of this.
Addressing the problem of Cambodian refugees, he wrote.
Never forget that what may be obvious after the fact requires a great deal of soul
searching and debate and involves a lot of anxiety and uncertainty before the fact,
especially when a decision affecting the lives of people is about to be taken so well.
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
story of the hero de Mello and his work in various hot spots around the world,
the last of which was Iraq in 2003. Well,
Vieira de Mello helps us to understand is that the actions of MSF in Sri Lanka say
something about the role of ex-post judgements in humanitarian political life,
but equally the illusive and contested nature of doing the right thing from the beginning.
Now, as challenging as these cases are, will begins to emerge, though, when we consider actual humanitarian work is a central place for judgement,
which can take place in multiple ways and does not need mean only moral evaluation,
but can include assessments of efficiency measured in a variety of ways something like simplicity, clarity and so on.
So in my discussion earlier, I alluded to the fact that a craft becomes a part of our character.
This is especially true of the craft of political judgement.
One way that this occurs is that political judgement requires what Mark Felt called settled.
This was a settled disposition which helps us to bring about valued state of affairs most optimally.
In general, this settled disposition is a reference to one's emotional and intellectual response to the world in
terms of judgement gets our response in a way that's driven by something other than instrumental game.
If our response is driven by instrumental gain, it looks like we have reduced qualities of judgement to a mere skill set.
Now I agree with Phelps general point,
but I want to specify this trade in political judgement a little more by calling it the disposition of sincerity.
The phrase that I borrow from Bernard Williams sincerity is important for political judgement,
especially as it informs humanitarian work in the following way.
In general, sincerity is another way of understanding the rejection of what I've been calling unreflective illusion.
As such, it takes seriously the considered convictions and real motivations that influence behaviour.
Sincerity is the pursuit of the transparency of these reasons, however desires and intentions, and especially how they can easily become fantasies.
In this way, sincerity then evaluates our real motivations and becomes an important condition for
social cooperation and is indispensable for making judgements about what should be done.
This disposition then indicates how we are oriented to certain questions central to the political,
especially those that involve the distinction of power over versus power with someone.
More precisely, sincerity refers to the way we sustain and develop relations with others that involve different kinds of degrees of trust.
So importantly, then, the disposition of sincerity denotes how we comport ourselves to each other.
That is the kinds of trust, this is the way that Williams describes it, that shape our interactions.
This is why, then, sincerity is an ethical value informed by a sense of the political.
Understood in this particular manner the disposition of sincerity as a function of judgement plays a
significant role for the way the ethical and the political come together in humanitarian activity.
Sincerity, for instance, was important to, again, Vieira de Mello approach to others with whom virtually no one else would negotiate.
In particular, sincerity for him took the form of treating those who were characterised as irrational, as rational actors.
Now, this was not easily accepted when granted to someone like Radovan Karadzic.
For Vieira de Mello, sincerity was the precise way central to how he viewed parties important to bringing about peace in conflict ridden areas.
Sincerity, however, went both ways for him, especially in terms of its political importance.
As he did in Sarajevo, Vieira de Mello treated the Taliban as rational actors,
meeting with them in Kabul and creating what he called a test of sincerity in order to receive U.N. aid.
They had to allow five schools for girls to be built, along with five for boys.
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
U.N. employees would no longer be permitted to work in the country unless they were accompanied by male relatives.
Unsurprisingly, the Taliban had flunked his sincerity test.
Again, this is part of the book from Samantha Power. So in the end, judgement is a craft that involves the disposition of sincerity,
is a partisan intervention where partisan refers to the commitment to specific questions security,
legitimacy and power that are already inherent in humanitarian work.
The partisan intervention, however, is what I want to call strategic intervention.
And now what I want to discuss.
Strategic intervention, especially in humanitarian work, is the task of uncovering alternatives to present ways of doing things.
There are, I think, three, at least three interrelated components to the strategic intervention of humanitarian work.
First, there is the utopian function of strategic intervention as the work of constructive imagination,
the aim of which is to create distance both collectively and individually from the beliefs,
values and attitudes of one's surroundings that impede action.
As Vieira de Mello and himself show, this is bridging activated imagination with effective political engagement,
which requires that we see how things really stand, but also perhaps sympathise with how others see them.
Even if we know, as Joyce and others say, they are deluded in what they think.
In this sense, then, strategic intervention unsettles by asking, among other things,
how does humanitarian work avoid getting caught up in the web of powerful fantasies that are often spun around it?
How can one get the appropriate distance from one's own agency organisations or society, its practices, norms and conceptions?
And then what is appropriate in the sense.
Our most cherished beliefs are disturbed in a particular kind of way here that have become forms of imagination,
that are determined by the ideas that were perhaps once operative in situations but are now absent.
So the disruptive work of strategic intervention then refers to what we would call the inventive nature that is important humanitarian activity.
It is said that Vieira de Mello kept a copy of Emmanuel Khan's essay on Perpetual Peace close by.
Powell recounts what I think is a really helpful story here, only because it mentions Khan primarily so, she says.
Vieira de Mello argued that citizens could not afford to wash our hands of the
construction of real peace and leave the important decisions to statement statesman.
Regular people simply had to participate. Are we to abdicate this responsibility?
He asked. We are all you and me, a fluid and destitute peoples.
We are all jointly responsible for the opportunity, which is a right to fully participate in the formation of progress.
He closed out his lecture with words that would foreshadow his approach to negotiation in conflict zones.
You must act as if perpetual peace is something real, though perhaps it is not, the Ira de Mello said, quoting Khan.
Then he added His own code to the future is to be invented.
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,
to evaluate and to exercise creativity,
all of which constitutes practical what we would call practical imagination that creates new possibilities for constructive responses.
In this particular way, strategic intervention as constructed imagination seeks what is called positive legitimacy,
which articulates the illicit impermissible and makes the case for the valuable nature of particular humanitarian work.
But second, strategic intervention as constructive imagination is still realism.
And here I return to something I noted earlier when I when I was discussing how I'd use realism.
Realpolitik shuns imaginative constructs and responds in what we might call an instrumentally rational way to the facts alone.
This is one of the reasons this kind of realism is not helpful to humanitarian work.
Not always helpful. I want, however, to make a different point.
The opposite of realism as constructive imagination central to humanitarian work is not idealism, but instead wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking is the general incapacity to respond well to one situation and the particular failure of political
action to be philosophically informed by the kind of reflexivity that rejects unreflective illusion wishful thinking.
Whether in Williamsburg most recently, Gore is forgetting that whatever questions we put to others must put,
we put ourselves with exactly the same kind of rigour.
It is avoiding the temptation to look too quickly for the failure of imagination
in our opponents and looking for the failure of imagination in our own
perspective as such wishful thinking in the context of the craft of reflection
and judgement is not just a lack of imagination on the part of someone else,
or simply the incapacity to face up to the challenges challenges that the world represents or presents.
Rather, it is, as Jonathan Lear describes it, he is also written on this topic in a different way.
It is stubbornly clinging to a dreamlike fantasy as a way of wishfully avoiding those challenges.
This is what it means to say the humanitarian work must face up to reality.
It's grasping the situation that has in many instances fundamentally changed and through experiencing,
through experience, exercising political judgement in the service of what we ought to do in that situation.
Finally, then the craft of strategic intervention will rely on hope.
I want to conclude the paper with this point, because it was raised in the beginning, namely that understanding the political in this way.
Results in hopeless realism. Vieira de Mello.
His work, as well as that of MSF and other humanitarian agencies, embody what I think following Jonathan Lear calls radical hope.
He wrote a book he has a book called Radical Hope Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation,
in which he discusses the demise of the Native American Crow and how hope was used
in some sense to recreate or create new situations that were no longer liveable.
And I'm appropriating that for this particular kind of context.
Radical hope, then, is directed toward a future of goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is.
It anticipates a good for those who have it, but yet lack the appropriate concept, we might say, with which to understand the situation.
Radical hope is not necessarily succumbing to that which is critically engaged in the service
of asking the question How do we live after the events that bring destruction or loss?
Rather strategic intervention as imaginative engagement with things that are seen as potentially disruptive, cynical, and even desirous.
It establishes for us what we might legitimately hope at a time when the sense of purpose and meaning has collapsed,
or at least collapsed in the ways that might once have worked.
Humanitarian work at its best in response to conditions by calling on its participants to turn to the challenges that the world presents.
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.
This is what makes radical hope different from something like optimism and even perhaps idealism.
The latter, ultimately, one might say, failed to turn toward lived existence, whereas the former takes up those conditions.
Humanitarian work of MSF and Vieira de Mello then is constructively hopeful in its
attempts to facilitate creative and appropriate responses to the world's challenges.
In the service of asking the question How will we go on or how should we go on?
This capacity is essential not only because it possesses an image of what humanity might be,
but it's also the ability to take seriously the anxiety and the vulnerability that
characterises the radically altered circumstances that shape humanitarian work.
For all of their failures. Vieira de Mello and MSF invent new ways to potentially enable those most affected
to go forward into a future that they are only able to grasp retrospectively,
which they can then re-emerge with concept with which to understand themselves and their experience.
So the humanitarian work that I've appealed to throughout the latter part especially allows us to see, I think,
practically what I've tried to argue for conceptually that is an understanding of political
philosophy as a way of thinking and acting that takes seriously the realist concerns with power,
security, legitimacy and other elements that are so-called first questions and political thinking.
I've also tried to argue throughout the paper this is the way of approaching political excuse me,
a way of approaching political life that quickly admits that a,
if not the last word perhaps on politics is the work of strategic intervention as constructive imagination and hope,
not just for our own corners of the world, for all of those that are the weakest and most powerless among us.
This view already informs humanitarian work and should continue to characterise it as resolutely political.
Thank.