Research Network on Humanitarian Politics and Culture

aim of the group is to found a transdisciplinary forum for research in contemporary humanitarian culture. If humanitarianism designates a specific rationality that prescribes help for strangers in times of crisis, humanitarianism today appears at every level of the social formation, including the economic, political, social, and cultural. Still more military and political interventions are framed as humanitarian assistance. And still more narratives or images of suffering among crisis-affected populations are made available to us in the less risk-prone Western societies to contemplate. A recurring observation in the recent research literature is that we are living in a humanitarian age. Our aim is to develop an interpretive framework for the ubiquitous culture of humanitarianism.