The new book on the leading scholars on my journey studies with a particular expertise in protection,
civilians, humanitarian ethics and peace process.
And in the 25 year period, both academia and international aid, whose work has been served as well as the UN in Morocco,
Ethiopia and Bangladesh, and has also worked with the U.S. in Geneva II, as well as with Oxfam and as an advisor to the Red Cross.
I also publish numerous, numerous articles that you must read, as well as how to write fabulous books and most recently,
protection provided humanitarian agency and killing civilians.
That goes along with the morality. We've also the director priority of tolerance for crisis in solidarity with you here
though when we talked about 45 minutes or so and then he is actually thank you very much.
And I've actually been very modest about the Oxford Humanitarian Group because it's something that she her idea, which she wanted to start.
And so we like to think that this is the sort of first meeting of it and that
people will go on from all that sort of humanitarian institutions here in Oxford,
not just adoption groups that we hear from groups here.
And Oxfam is the world's leading humanitarian agencies here as well.
So hopefully that group will take off. And and people, as I've actually said,
will start networking and just presenting their work to each other and making Oxford a sort of centre of thinking and activism on the issue.
And in that spirit is, if you'll permit me, I thought I would start in a sort of work in progress way,
which is code for not very prepared way and also staff not with sort of a straight into an issue.
But I thought it might be helpful for the first meeting of the Oxford Humanitarian Group if I start started sort of a back of basics,
a bit sort of things that we all know, but maybe thinking about being humanitarian, what does it mean?
What is our project?
And I thought I would try and talk about it, looking at two aspects of being humanitarian that probably exist for us and in the world.
And one is the very personal part of being humanitarian.
What does it mean for me, for you, for us? What is the sort of eye experience of being humanitarian?
And then me? And look, in some ways that the more complicated aspects of when one tries to make humanitarianism a political project in the world,
amongst other competing political projects. So that's what I'm going to try to do and perhaps think a little bit in that respect,
if this is a good and useful distinction between what it is to be a third party humanitarian,
someone who is coming into someone else's war as a third party, and what it means to be a main party humanitarian.
How is it to try and be humanitarian when you are one of the sides in that war where you are one of these parties?
So I think I'm trying to draw that distinction and see if it helps us at all.
I thought I'd also say I'm one of the themes of this lecture is that I have not
read anything about humanitarianism for about three years because I'm a punchy,
aggressive, very commercial businessman, a novelist.
And so every time out of touch with where the thinking is and if you've been writing, you've been evaluating all that sort of thing.
So any definition of humanitarianism that readily came to mind when I sat down to
write about this on an aeroplane from Madagascar to Johannesburg for 30 days,
and I've just been in Madagascar working for a major mining company who's asked us to help them with conflict resolution with the local community.
And that's a pretty fascinating new adventure. And I was actually doing the Martin Griffiths feasibility monitoring too.
So this big commercial company had these two of, you know, very few in terms of that strength and blockades.
Anyway, as I sat on this aeroplane flying over Madagascar, I was faced with this blank page in humanity who told us, I can't have anything.
I haven't been book Bukavu paper. You know, if I'd done this a few years ago, you say easy,
because I just thought of John Piketty and I started with sort of definition of the principle of humanity, like an aeroplane.
And I would have ended up to conduct my age panel and I might have left some of
my old papers and I might have read some of your papers and that sort of thing.
And I'm going to give you an easy lecture. I actually thought I could do this stuff.
All my books are sort of sleeping on the shelf in Oxford, and I haven't touched them for three years.
But then I did remember one of breakfast some time ago,
given my children were quite small and could be that they were quite small and I was lecturing books and
I was about to give a lecture about humanitarianism and was struggling as usual with the definition.
And I remember my daughter Jessie was. The name of David Hatch reflects My son Solly was sitting on his cornflakes and I.
I don't ask him because, you know, sometimes out of the mouths of babes and children, you get extraordinary insights.
So I said, I'm sitting. And I said, What do you think it is to be humanitarian in the war?
I think being humanitarian and war is being kind to people in war, especially children, women and those people.
It's not bad. And I can see my little boy dying to say something to him.
What do you think being a humanitarian in war is?
And he said, I think I think being humanitarian in war is being paid in war and sharing your guns and bombs with your friends.
And is to me, actually is I really thought about the Mozambique Channel on Saturday.
I thought, well, yeah,
I think this is the problem because it depends where you sit on what your just cause causes in a war and how humanitarian you can be,
and whether you feel that the morality you're fighting for requires you to share guns and bombs and wind, or whether the morality you're fighting for.
And as we all said, we came as you try to fight a war.
So that is the most immediate definition I had,
and I thought we might try and work between those two today as I try and think about the personal and and the political.
And I will say, as I was flying in my little plane scribbling in this book, I also remember basically that humanitarianism is about two things,
really, because I remember it is about giving people things as part of you, trying to be kind to them, which people call systems.
And it's also about trying to protect people from other things which we have increasingly over the last few years called protection.
And I remember also the great mantra of the ICRC that being humanitarian is about putting limits to violence.
It's trying to put boundaries around human violence.
So, as they say in ICRC, even war has exhibits.
So I did remember that much. And that I think is important.
But really I was aware on this aeroplane that I sort of returned to a sort of pre humanitarian state as an academic or a thinker or a person.
And I couldn't just easily trot out a lecture anymore.
So I thought I would take advantage of that and start from scratch again.
And I would be like Rousseau's Noble Savage.
I'd be a sort of naval humanitarian savage who hadn't read anything that we've all written,
hadn't read books, but was going to be a humanitarian without being an expert on humanitarianism.
And so what would that look like? How would you discover what it means to be humanitarian?
And then I did have one book with me actually, which I don't know if is the Christian New Testament, which still sits in my rucksack.
And I remember I did have that book with me and I didn't know how many of, you know,
Christian parables, but they're all two parables, which of course Jesus gives,
which if you had to live in Christian texts for basic ideas of what it is to be humanitarian,
there are two stories which would put that basic stuff done.
The first is a parable about the sheep in the gates of Charles Judgement Day.
Jesus says that people will be divided two ways on a rather grim one on those good one,
and the goats will go one way to have the sheep with that one way to heaven.
And a criteria on which that selection will happen is quite simply on whether when he was destitute,
you get your chance when he was hungry and delivering food and when he was in prison, you visited him.
And of course, that's really a pretty basic humanitarian injunction to you, that that is what it means to be humanitarian.
It's that simple. But there's another parable which is interesting and of course, more famous, which is the parable of the Good Samaritan.
And I'll just recap in case some of you there may and it's the very famous story of about a Jewish guy who sets
off down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho and gets halfway and he gets beaten up and beaten up very bad.
So he's lying with all his stuff next and lying, bleeding on the road.
And of course,
the famous thing is that a very devout Jew that comes along and sees him and crosses the road and does not help or touch him and walks off,
and a Samaritan who at the time considered very low rent,
despicable creatures by first century Judaism, comes along and he does stop and he does help.
And what's interesting about that, I think, is that it illustrates another issue with humanitarianism in the world that would be charity.
Humanitarianism is that actually it's not easy. It doesn't happen very often.
We decide not. Often we walk across the other side of the road.
So humanitarianism is a difficult project. It's by no means guaranteed.
It's quite tricky. If I can go back to my main source for this extra game, which is my daughter when she was a tiny girl.
I remember most of the book of that from some church,
I think cathedral we visited once and she always knew the story as the good American
because she conveyed the mass marriage so she would refer to the good American.
And I remember asking everyone to let me drive with them in the kind of thing they want.
Now, do you think the first is going to stop? Which is why?
Because a lot of people won't get involved in the black community at that point about contaminants,
which actually was true because in Jewish voice you run to wait from the rabbi.
But more importantly, it means a lot a lot of humanitarian action is actually opted out of because it means potential
real escalation and a real engagement for which you can't tell the consequences politically.
Does it mean greater entanglement? Are you getting sucked in? Is it Vietnam syndrome?
All the stuff it creates with meditation? Now that's quite a good answer.
There is a few other reasons why it might have stopped, and she thought she had been sitting in her handbag.
I said, Well, maybe he was getting off safe enough that his government is going to have a big job to do.
I need to actually, because in many ways, in humanitarian action, let me make it a political project.
We make choices and we actually prioritise one over another for all sorts of mixed interests reasons.
And I thought Boris has been quite well elected lecture that and I feel betrayed again.
I said, Well, Jesse, what any other reason that he he might he might have just crossed over the other side of the rage.
Maybe he knew this American was coming along behind.
And that's another interesting thing, because actually a lot of the politicisation of humanitarian action,
people do leave the responsibility to others or they assume someone else will pick it up.
And the whole question of responsibility, state and international responsibility is very important.
And people often share that responsibility and others.
And I thought, I'll give it one last shot. So I said, okay, yes. Any other reasons why he may cross the road, walk past this guy?
He thought you said because he was a man. If he was a woman, she would definitely stopped.
So maybe there are gender issues, too, in this subject that if we had more women running offshore and the UN Security Council and state governments,
maybe there'd be more humanitarian action. Who knows? We'll have to wait and see.
So I was thinking also, if I was to start defining what it meant to be humanitarian, what would what would I be talking about?
And this is where I want to make a distinction to a third party humanitarian and a main party person trying to be humanitarian.
And at this point in my aeroplane, if I was flying over Mozambique, we'd crossed the mainland and I looked and I saw Mozambique and I thought,
my God, and there are people in this room who remember that war in the eighties.
That was the 1990. That was the one of the most brutal civil wars of all time.
And so I thought, right, well, what does it mean to be a humanitarian if I am perhaps Oxfam in that war?
And what does it mean to be humanitarian if I am? RENAMO In that war, which was a terrible armed group.
What sort of sense does being humanitarian make to Renamo?
Because we are asking another management project that both sides be there to solve the Geneva Conventions, and that's what we all ask.
So I then I thought, I think about that for a bit, and so let's do that.
And as a third party humanitarian, as my I began to remember my own story as an aid worker.
And again, I'm afraid, because I haven't been in books lately, I'm going to rely on a bit of autobiography here.
So let me please do that, if you don't mind. And I remember my own story as an aid worker started when I was seven and I was sitting as a little
boy after school watching an old black and white television and having a boiled egg for tea.
And I remember suddenly being completely mesmerised by these images that came up on the screen,
which was the televised moves at the finalisation of the Biafran Civil War, the Nigerian Civil War.
And I stood there all sat and watched it, egg telly watching this thing.
And it was very striking because there were lots of thousands of really skinny and dying but African people.
And then there were these rather articulate, nice white doctors from Save the Children and nurses talking to the camera about it all.
And I was incredibly struck by that moment. And I think in some ways it was sort of the projection of the founding moments,
my projection of fantasy to become a humanitarian that I wanted to be like these white doctors who were doing such good things.
And so what did I feel in that sort of finding humanitarian moment in.
We can call it that. I think and this is where maybe the humanitarian personal motive comes from.
I felt immediately an urge to pity. I felt extraordinary pity for these people.
I've never seen such skinny, dying people, and I felt an urge to save.
So I felt and urged her to reach out and do something.
I also still felt an urge to be good because that felt quite nice.
If I could actually be like one of these guys who was quite good as MSF has proved, because they as they met in France,
the Met and this sense of a doctor or nurse is the most desirable marriage prospect.
They didn't want anything if you want to percentage and that was one of them.
So even at seven, I had a hunch were maybe worse, you know, playing this good card and I feel good and I might even be famous actually,
because I could get on telly and I would be heroic because to do that would be heroic.
And so I think that's probably what began as my sort of humanitarian reach out moment.
And then, of course, 17 years later, I found myself in a place called Ward County,
which was a really terrible refugee camp from the Ethiopian to Grand Sudanese border.
And I was doing it and I had everything.
And my wife, Tony, is actually a member of this committee, the British. They broke André, the huge staff.
Lots of television cameras would come by. And I was doing this stuff.
And at that moment, in being humanitarian, I suppose I was still labouring under this sort of literally this white knight,
this chivalric knight delusion, probably.
I thought it was quite heroic what I was doing, and it was quite a lot about me.
But then one day I did find myself going to be a medical doctor about something.
I find myself alone in one of the massive hospitals there.
And in what kind of when it began, there were about 200 people dying a day.
In what kind of which was an awful lot of people. And I'm in the city.
I really I went into a ward and a four person line, and it was a really, really emaciated, dying young adolescent boy.
And I got his name.
And so I went over and I just held his hand for a bit. And he was really near death.
It was the death rattle, and you could hear him and he must have had TB as well.
And I held his hand for a bit. And if I think back to that moment, that physical reach, that moment of humanitarian action,
I suppose what we do as humanitarians is we accept the appalling tragedy of war.
We accept the terrible unfairness of war that it takes people who often have no direct responsibility in war.
And the other thing it said to me that moment and it's still done, is that the reasons we.
Have a humanitarian project has because we do feel that every life is so precious and that there's
something so precious about each life that we have to fight for each life if we get the chance.
And I went back the next day and he was no longer there because he had died and thousands did not die.
Once Save the Children, then Oxfam and Sudanese workers and people in Tigrayans got that can't go.
But that's why we did. Because the life of every person is is precious.
Maybe a little in my little biography, I then married into a Jewish family and I have a Jewish family,
so my children are Egyptian, my wife is Jewish, a bit Jewish going on.
And that was interesting, too, because then I encountered the Holocaust, not objectively,
abstractly, but on account of the Holocaust from inside a Jewish family.
It's a very different place to encounter it from. And it all the tragedy of that boy's death and came home in millions of people's individuals lives.
And then I began to write a book about civilians. And then I spent five years well,
three or four years just reading a current and a current account of hundreds
and thousands of those lives being lost because of war and writing about it.
And then, I suppose my my humanitarianism, my humanitarian project at a personal level changed a bit.
You begin to you read as you all do, and now you read about so many lives being lost.
You get a feeling of being devastated by this, and then you get a feeling of being quite outraged and angry.
And I suppose that's the time when I became probably a bit more passionate and outraged as a humanitarian.
And I suppose you could say that one enters a humanitarian fury at some level.
I certainly did when I was writing that book, because it was just so appalling,
all the accounts and it's for every one of us when we read the Human Rights Watch document or something, we do understand that.
And I suppose I began to move to think more about human rights as well,
and say that these things are rights and we must struggle with people to ensure that those rights are protected in war,
say my own humanitarian motivation began to probably politicise a little more in that way.
And then I also read a little about rescuers. I don't know if any of you have read the rescue literature from the Holocaust and from other places.
And of course, what's sad about today's wars is because so few extraordinary acts of humanitarian action by
ordinary people in these wars are ever told because they're in the country writing about them.
They didn't have researchers in universities who wrote retrospectively about them.
But of course, when you read the Holocaust literature, you do come across this group of rescuers who did take in Jewish people and hid
them for four years or something for smuggling across borders or did whatever.
And what was interesting about the rescue literature is that rescuers are not of a particular group.
It's quite hard to anticipate what sort of a person a rescue will be.
Some would be very dramatic and heroic and humanitarian, be outraged, others just wait.
And when they talk about taking in a family or something, they often do survive.
It is the right thing to do. I don't know why you're asking me. It's just obvious to them.
They're extraordinary people and what they talk about and what they show us about being humanitarian is it's about kindness.
It's really also about that old motto from the Vatican's from the Jewish scriptures, do as you would be done to you, the golden rule.
And it's also about a fundamental recognition that you do this because the person in front of you is like you.
These people are like us and that's why we it, because they are equally precious.
So if I was to sum up this third party, humanitarian, the personal humanitarian,
what it means to be humanitarian as an individual, as a person, as you, me and us.
Maybe that's what I would say, that it is a mixture of pity and of valuing the preciousness of every life.
It's got a bit of vanity in that minded anyway, maybe yours doesn't fury it's got a bit of fury.
It's got a bit of political passion and outrage and it's got a very deep sense of kindness.
That kindness is important because we might need it one day ourselves or we might want that for our children if war came to Oxfordshire.
So it's also got this very profound point that each person in front of us is like us.
I don't know whether any of you have read Emmanuel Levinas, the French philosopher.
It's probably right to say if you have to try to be in that role. It is because he is a French philosopher, which is a nightmare for me.
But he believes very profoundly that the whole question of being philosophically is not a complex.
The logical question of, you know, the meaning of my life.
What does it mean? You know, sort of Cartesian stuff. I think that therefore I am.
It's not all about me. He believes that the whole question of being is instantly informed.
It only becomes a question when you're faced with the face of the other, which is his great faith phrase in the face of the other being.
It doesn't become an existential question. It instantly becomes an ethical and moral question.
Ontology is ethics, and I think that's what we as humanitarians trying to well, I think that's where we start.
That's what we believe that in the face of the other, the other who is like us,
that brings what some people call this imperative to recognise the preciousness.
So there we are. If I say that, that in a sense is the first part.
That is how I understand being a humanitarian person as you and me as us.
Then that's what you can do when you're a third party humanitarian.
You can rush into people's worlds, wages,
aeroplanes and things like that because you don't have a few places that you can arrive and you can start acting on these feelings and those beliefs,
and you do your best to save as many lives as you can in that context.
But then what about and at this point in my flight, I kind of made them,
because one of the lovely things about travelling so much that you do find these amazing people walking through it.
I mean, I think it's an incredible descent into Johannesburg.
And suddenly, after the clear skies of the Mozambique Channel,
we have these huge cumulus nimbus clouds, extraordinary times like mountains all around us.
And it seemed appropriate to me at the time with my second glass of wine at that point, that we should be entering more cloudy territory.
When I was about to start thinking about what it means to be humanitarian.
If you are one of the sides in the war because it is more difficult.
So I then thought back about, Well, how do I learn about this in my life?
And I remembered 9/11. And I remember watching 911, actually, funnily enough, an ICRC head office in Geneva where I happened to be in evaluation.
And we had gathered around and saw the Twin Towers.
And then I remember thinking a bit later I thought, Wow, there are people who would really like to kill me and my family.
And I remember thinking I didn't want them to. You know, I'm quite happy we fight a war against these people.
I think it's probably rather good we try and stop them. That might mean killing some of them.
And I think you should kill them first before they kill us. And I remember sitting in my room at the time, oh, god, I'm not one of the combatants.
And actually, I'm not thinking of humanitarianism from a rather different perspective because I'm thinking about it full on, not as a third party,
but as one of the main parties in the war say, how am I going to fight this war but also be humanitarian because I really want to win this war.
And I suddenly thought, God, I'm like a Somali,
and I can see these itineraries that I'm like a Sierra Leonean born Israeli or Palestinian or Serbian or Kosovo.
It's quite easy to be a third party humanitarian, but what does it mean to be humanitarian when you're a main party?
How do you how do you do that? Can I be humanitarian?
So my moral life, I mean, ethically, at that point, my concern came not so much about censoring other people's behaviour in war.
As a third party humanitarian. It actually became thinking, how do I control my own violence or as a as a combatant, as one of the sides in a war?
And how do I manage this very difficult trade-off between winning and sinning in
the sense that's what the main party person who is trying to be humanitarian,
it's really tough because they have to balance winning and sinning and trying to make sure that they win.
So I realise now that being at war and being humanitarian at the same time is not so easy.
It always seems easy when you're a third party. Sometimes it seems easy.
And so I looked briefly and thinking, What do people who are in war, at war, what is their approach to being humanitarian?
And I thought maybe there are four approaches. If you're the main party in war.
And the first is that most people simply don't bother, they reject it.
They think winning is so important. I think it is stuff by the other things.
And that was a big part of writing my book about killing civilians.
I realised that most people in war and if you look at a lot of water in the world through history most.
Operate with an anti civilian ideology, not oppressive ideology.
So I realise that. And what does that mean? They actually opt in order to win.
They opt to take a genocidal mentality.
They make arguments of necessity on the basis of asymmetry.
They say, Look, we're such a small person, group of people being so oppressed, whether you're al Qaeda or Hamas or whatever you say.
Right. It's necessary for us to use targets that tend to use strategies that are not humanitarian.
And that's fine and fair because we've got to win. And you get other people taking much more consequentialist arguments ethically.
They say, Look, this is such a huge thing. We've got to do that. We have to do everything required to make sure what we win.
And some people just decide, I'm not interested in being humanitarian because it looks weak and I need to look really powerful.
So I'm just going to use a lot of power around the place and put my foot down on all sorts of people.
So there's the first category of main party people who actually decide not to be humanitarian.
The second part probably are a group of people who say, well, to be nice,
to be humanitarian as much as we can and must judge on a case by case basis in this war how I can be.
If you take the example of our own society of World War Two, you get the Brits saying,
Yeah, we can be humanitarian prisoners of war, so we treat prisoners of war very well.
But actually grabbing humanitarian civilians would kill hundreds of thousands of them from the air and Japanese as well.
It's a case by case thing. So in business speak, they would say, yeah, being humanitarian is a nice to have, but it's not a must have.
And in a way, that's how some main parties approach being humanitarian.
It's sort of optional.
And the third group, I think, do there are a third group of combatants who work very hard to respect humanitarian and be it as much as they can.
And there are those in Afghanistan which get an idea because I need to talk.
But you could look at NATO and say, well, this is a force that has really tried hard to limit its funds and think about it
and fight in a way that is being humanitarian as much as it is trying to win.
So that's the third approach you can take. And there's probably a fourth approach people as the main party can take to being humanitarian.
And that is probably to decide to really use humanitarianism, to really use it, and in our terms, perhaps sometimes abuse it, but to really use it.
And of course, they don't have much choice now because if you look at the last 50, 60 years,
probably particularly since that the Afghan war that I watched as a child on telly,
we have created out of Western money and Western moral ambition a massive international welfare system of humanitarian action,
which now has agencies and staff and budgets,
which means that wherever the war happens in the world, that welfare system will reach out and try and address it and be there.
So if you're a main party now, that system is going to arrive, whether you like it or not, as a system,
it's interfered with the way wars are fought to a great degree,
and it's interfered physically because now you get massive refugee camps and IDP camps.
You get food distributions. You get all sorts of changes to the battlefield physically.
And it's interesting. I mean, when the Turks decided to kill, the Armenians were as many as they could.
They followed the usual strategy of terrorising their villages and just pushing them to walk out into the desert.
And the famous phrase they used, the word is that the sun and starvation do the rest.
And it did for most of them. Now, that doesn't really have anything to do.
It's not a strategy you can pursue, because if you do as happened in Darfur or push people out to sea, there's hope.
They just wander off. They'll be caught by this huge system that will set out these things without having to feed them and everything.
So the demography of the battlefields changed dramatically by this welfare system.
The other area which humanitarianism and the system and the new norms, if you like, have changed.
The battlefield is reputationally because you can be humanitarian politically and wage is a badge of respectability as a main party,
which is what native would be trying to do. But you can also be constantly under a spotlight of international shame and blame games if you're not.
So reputationally, it creates new issues to you. But most importantly perhaps is that strategically the big welfare system of
humanitarians that gives you new strategic choices in the way you run the world.
And it probably does this in three main ways. The first is that you can do big clearing strategies, clearing out a population,
and somebody will do your country for you because the international community
will come and create the ghettos that might serve your purpose quite well.
So you can use humanitarianism to win demographic battles on the battlefield.
You can push your population into camps where they'll be localised and fed by
humanitarianism so you can create new urban realities by using humanitarian action.
The second way you can use humanitarianism as a main party is that you can create a sort of populist front against these interveners.
So it can really help your populism to constantly attack this great welfare system from the international monetary Western community.
As a sort of invading force and you can criticise it later and creating a popular ism against it, but it serves to boost your power base.
And then maybe the third way you can use it is for liberal state building.
And this we know because that's what our own counterinsurgency coin operations
have been trying to do for a long time in Afghanistan and Iraq and other places,
because you can use this great humanitarianism and humanitarian projects and because the boundary between humanitarianism development is very broken.
Now you get the sweep of girls education and food distribution.
That is the humanitarian project. So you can instrumentalize that to build a liberal state, which is part of your war aims anyway.
So that's the other way you can use humanitarianism as the main party.
And of course, engineers do that too, because most engineers are liberal, progressive, western driven ones with the dosh.
So a lot of them are trying to build liberal states as well, and they do the same things in war as part of the humanitarian system.
So you can use humanitarian development actually as a crucial part of your war ends to win and create a liberal state.
And of course, it's also the same for insurgents, you know,
asymmetric warfare and things that insurgents have often been able to use humanitarian infrastructure as core bases for themselves.
Refugee camps, whatever, food supplies, you know, the chance to step back into somebody else's country and refresh,
really ideologies galvanise your group who can't move anywhere and start fighting again.
So insurgents use it to not just counterinsurgency.
So there we are. I tried to think about being humanitarian as a third party and being humanitarian as a main party.
And there is surprise, surprise. We find that being humanitarian is as ambiguous as being human.
When we begin to make it a political project internationally, personally, we understand that being humanitarian is all about that kindness,
that recognition of the precious, precious nature of human life, that recognition that people are like Earth but as political project.
In a war, there are always mixed motives, as in everything else.
And being humanitarian as a as a warring party involves it as being one of the things you are trying to achieve in your strategy,
your political strategy of winning.
So one of the reasons we get so many complications in the application of being humanitarian internationally and in wars is because the
immediate duty based morality of being kind clashes with wider consequentialist morality is the causes of a war and the desire to win a war.
And this is what creates the turbulence and the failures and the successes in humanitarianism.
So just for the last minute, if I can try and sum up this midday ramble, I'm being humanitarian at a personal level is a very deep,
vital and compassionate response to the other, to the human other who you recognise in some way as yourself.
And you can do that as a third party and you can pursue that goal singularly as a third party.
That is what you're trying to do, and you can do it impartially, just basing your approach on need.
But as a main party, politically, a limiting approach to war is what you're trying to do.
If you're being humanitarian, you're trying to mitigate the worst effects of war.
But being humanitarian when you're a main party is never something that is pursued singularly as your only goal.
It's always been pursued alongside other often much more deeper held goals, consequentialist goals of winning the war.
So I suppose if I'm trying to conclude about being humanitarian personally and politically,
I would always have to say that being humanitarian is always going to be being competing with being many other things in war and that it always will.
It will always compete with other moralities, other big causes.
And that's why it seems difficult and that's why it is genuinely a struggle.
And in a sense, that struggle, I think, is well captured in the Geneva Conventions.
And I. We are lucky to have them because they are realistic documents saying let's try and limit these wars.
We know that won't always be the primary aim of combatants because they'll be trying to win them, but that's trying to limit them.
And I think that's it really is probably the best thing we can hope for.
The political project of humanitarianism. And I'll stop there.
Thanks.