Why Fight? Humanitarianism, Principles and Poststructuralism

Abstract

Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan: names that signify irruptions of violence and the insufficiency of international responses as much as they designate territorial states. In this context of crisis ± or what the International Crisis Group has dramatised as `millennial chaos’ ± the conventional political architecture and discursive resources of International Relations are being radically problematised.<sup>1</sup> Integral to this development is the way in which the political violence of the post-Cold War era (perhaps better understood as the `post-Cold War yet pre-epithet new era’) is both deployed through and gives rise to multiple sovereignties, parallel economies, and privatised militias, all of which involve non-traditional forms of political authority in ceaseless contestation with state practices.² Within the context of complex political emergencies, we thus see the formation of `emergent political complexes’ which disturb the conventional cartography of international order.³ While such formations are neither conceptually nor politically novel, their importance can no longer be dissimulated by geopolitical modes of representation.