Humanitarian Space and International Politics

The Creation of Safe Areas

Hikaru Yamashita

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138383661
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351929479
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The creation of safe areas poses a number of difficult challenges to the spatial and normative organization of contemporary international politics. As a result, academics, practitioners and NGOs alike will find the case studies in this informative book essential reading. Hikaru Yamashita firstly looks at the case of northern Iraq after the first Iraqi war, where safe areas represented a major departure from the conventional notion. The different understandings of the Srebrenica safe areas, especially with regard to the role of security, are also assessed to ascertain how they eventually destroyed this humanitarian space. A much-needed account of the extent to which humanitarian space, intended as shelter in response to Rwandan genocide, consequently destabilized the area and provided cover for the genocideurs is additionally provided. This well-researched book, through the prism of safe areas, allows a measured assessment to be made of the place of human rights and humanitarianism in the contemporary world.

Chapter 1

A Conceptual Analysis of
Humanitarian Space

In this chapter, a framework of analysis will be developed that will form the basis of the case studies in the following chapters. Two points are worth emphasizing. Firstly, all these concepts are almost always contested. Secondly, the framework needs to be specifically geared to the analysis of safe areas in the context of international politics. Taken together, the intention is to redefine and organize the concepts in order to investigate safe areas from the perspective of International Politics. This chapter aims to identify the major conceptual underpinning of safe areas and to locate the idea in theories of International Politics. It starts with consideration of the interconnectedness of spatiality and normativity, and then applies this framework to the notion of humanitarian space. On this basis it develops three models of humanitarian space.

Spatial Practice and Humanitarian Space

In what sense are space and norms intertwined? An important clue has already been given in the above description of space. If space is something created on the basis of an appeal to certain norms, an element of human action—‘creation’, ‘appeal’, and ‘justification’—is essentially involved in what we call space. Then, one can understand space in terms of space-related action, i.e., the act of creating, sustaining and abolishing a space through employing a certain justification. To recast space as involving human action is important because, as something involving moral, legal or political justification, it indicates the normative dimension of space. Through this element of action, in other words, spatiality and normativity are intertwined: space is normative insofar as it involves the act of justification.

To look into the internal workings of space as normative action, the notion of practice seems to provide a useful guide. Practice can be defined as a repeated action governed by certain conditions intelligible and communicable to other humans.¹ Because human action presupposes other human beings understanding it, the meaning of a human action can only be a social meaning. In the social world, then, actions ‘constitute a practice within which certain acts or utterances “count” as something’.² Of course there will always be a possibility of misunderstanding in the actor’s or others’ part, and indeed practice itself is not something that can be fixated indefinitely. The point, however, is that despite all these potential misunderstandings he/she still needs to take his/her action as a practice for it to make sense as ‘something’ among humans. A practice ceases to ‘exist’ when no one regards it as worth acting upon, and it is something to be learned, acknowledged and subscribed to. In this way, different individuals perform an action that they think is based on a shared understanding; and repeated performance by different actors in turn solidifies the shared nature of this understanding. Repeated performance is thus essential to making an understanding a common sense: a one-off action cannot qualify as a practice.

All in all, space as normative action is a practice that must be communicable to other humans concerned. Space is a type of human action intended to acquire a social meaning through justification.³ And justification becomes possible only on the basis of an appeal to certain shared understandings or conditions. What have been called norms, i.e., accepted principles or standards, such as human rights and self-determination, that guide political action in a certain way,⁴ are a vital part of such conditions because of their prescriptive character and strong appeal. As, for instance, the historical role of the norm of self-determination suggests (see below), they mobilize and inspire human action in a significant manner.

It should then be possible to view a humanitarian space as a practice. The practice of humanitarian space can be defined as the repeated action of creating or sustaining a space through the justification that this action meets certain conditions including human rights. Obviously, the practice is not yet clear in detail except that it involves the creation of space and the norm of human rights as one of its constitutive conditions. There are two broad areas of research. One is to articulate these conditions, not limited to the norm of human rights, that constitute the practices of humanitarian space. What are these conditions and their characteristics? Articulation of the conditions will make it possible to positively identify what humanitarian spaces would look like. Later in this chapter three different models of the practice of humanitarian space will be sketched out at the theoretical level. However, theoretical articulation is not enough because safe areas are human practices: it is necessary to trace how these different conceptions of humanitarian space have been applied in specific cases—the tasks of the next three chapters.

The Spatial Order of International Politics

Attention has so far been paid almost exclusively to safe areas. As hinted earlier, however, safe areas are not created in a vacuum; rather, they are created in the context of international politics. There may well be economic, cultural, environmental or other factors to which safe areas are related, but the chief interest here is in how safe areas are created through political processes at the international level. It follows that the notion of spatial practice, already used to describe safe areas as practices of humanitarian space, should also be applied to international politics. This will place humanitarian spaces and their political context on the same footing.⁵ The task here is to identify the key spatial practice that constitutes the spatial order of international politics.

This section argues that the spatial order of international politics is best explained through the concepts of state territory, based on the norm of state sovereignty, and homeland, based on the norm of self-determination. These twin concepts represent two important versions of the prevailing spatial practice in international politics that will be called the practice of sovereign space. It will first be articulated what the practice of sovereign space is and how this practice leads to the construction of homelands and state territories. This will be followed by a examination of why they are important in thinking about the spatial framework of international politics.

The Practice of Sovereign Space

In order to explain the notion of sovereign space, it is useful to start with a brief review of Kant’s discussion of space that provided a unique foundation upon which the core ideas of international politics have been implicitly built. Put simply, the importance of his argument is that space is both objective and subjective. Space, as something empirically real, singular, infinite and homogenous, is the foundation upon which we can obtain objective knowledge; on the other hand, as the condition of our cognition, it is ultimately rooted in human cognitive faculties (sensibility and the understanding)⁶ The argument lies at the heart of Kantian philosophy (transcendental idealism) that intends to ground both human autonomy/freedom and the objectivity of sciences. By validating the conformity of objects as appearances to our faculties of cognition, his philosophy confirms the status of human autonomy and freedom unhindered by nature. And at the same time, by clarifying the necessary connections between the transcendental conditions given a priori in human cognition and its objects, it also provides an answer to the questions of what kind of knowledge is universally valid and in what ways it can be ascertained.⁷

This relatively simple argument has a series of crucial implications. The objectivity of space implies that knowledge obtained on the spatial plane is valid. More crucial to the present discussion, however, is another implication: the author of validity is the human subject. Since space provides true knowledge of the external world and yet belongs ultimately to the working of our cognitive faculties, the human subject is here established as the source of true knowledge of the external world. This authorship of the human subject in the production of external knowledge implies its supremacy over the world. Against the human subject, the external world is now reduced to nothing more than the ‘manifold’ to be grasped through space. Moreover, as the only author of the validity of knowledge, the subject is not subordinate to external laws, principles or rules other than those created by himself. In Kant’s doctrine, the individual thus becomes ‘the very centre, the arbiter, the sovereign of the universe’.⁸

This human authorship of space has consistently found expression in terms related to sight, such as perspective, gaze and vision. A combination of the ideas that space derives its constitution from the human subject and that we cognize all external things as appearing in space makes a spatial ‘domain’ where all representations are placed and the human subject sees them.⁹ Ó Tuathail describes this domain as follows: ‘The visual field is two-dimensionalized, with the suspended eye witnessing, not interpreting. There is no need to process the stimuli from the outside world, since they “possess an intelligibility fully formed and theirs by virtue of the inherent intelligibility of the outer world”.’¹⁰ Since space is singular, infinite and homogeneous, there is one gazing point; and since there is no other source of knowledge, it has a sweeping (totalizing) power of bringing the world in its truth to our eyes.¹¹ On its part, the spatial domain is thus rendered transparent and neutral, because things are now placed so that the human subject can ‘see through’ them and because this space provides objective knowledge of things ‘as they are’. And once this domain is assumed, things look independent of us or (in Kantian terminology) empirically real. According to Ó Tuathail and Agnew, this is exactly the supposition underpinning traditional geopolitics, geography and the discipline of International Politics:

Geopoliticians have traded on the supposed objective materiality of geopolitical analysis...It addresses the base of international politics, the permanent geopolitical realities around which the play of events in international politics unfolds. These geopolitical realities are held to be durable, physical determinants of foreign policy. Geography, in such a scheme, is held to be a non-discursive phenomenon: it is separate from the social, political and ideological dimensions of international politics.¹²

Chart 1

Sovereign Space

This spatial imagery (illustrated in Chart 1) is deeply rooted in modern life.¹³ For instance, Ruggie calls ‘the invention of single-point perspective’ in visual arts ‘the single most important’ of developments toward new forms of spatial differentiation in modernity. Through this invention, which Ruggie says is ‘generally credited to Filippo Brunelleschi about 1425’, it is the artist t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• List of Charts
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Beginning of a New Era?
• 1 A Conceptual Analysis of Humanitarian Space
• 2. ‘Safe Haven’ in Northern Iraq: From Shelter to Homeland
• ‘Safe Area’ in Srebrenica: The Dilemma of Military Protection
• ‘Safe Humanitarian Zone’ in Rwanda: A Nebulous Humanitarian Space
• Conclusion: The End of an Era?
• Bibliography
• Internet Sources
• Index