UC Irvine

Responding to humanitarian crises is a prominent global domain, spanning thousands of relief agencies and billions of US dollars. Amidst the potentially infinite needs arising in these crises, how are humanitarian priorities constructed? Existing answers are dominated by functionalist and critical perspectives, stressing obvious needs or geopolitics. This paper builds on sociocultural approaches to examine the changing understandings of humanity that underpin humanitarian priorities. Analysis of 659 United Nations humanitarian resolutions from 1946 to 2018 reveals an evolving vision of human life in crisis that shifts from initially narrow foci on displacement, survival, and livelihood towards a multidimensional vision today, anchored in rights-bearing and agentic personhood. Underpinning the evolution are striking expansions in how crisis-affected persons, and their needs, agency, and entitlements are imagined. The trends are not reducible to function and geopolitics but reflect macro-cultural shifts towards individualised and globalised conceptions of society, stretching humanitarian imaginations of a universally shared humanity.