Humanitarianism
Pedro Silva Rocha Lima and Malay Firoz
2025. “Humanitarianism”. In The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Hanna Nieber.
This encyclopaedic entry outlines some of the main anthropological contributions to the study of humanitarianism, broadly understood as a concern with human suffering and a moral desire to alleviate it. It highlights four key areas within the anthropology of humanitarianism: critical perspectives on the management of populations, tensions within humanitarian ethics, the politics of ‘crisis’, and the de-centring of Western humanitarianism. As climate change impacts prospects for human life in vulnerable areas of the world, humanitarianism’s definitions, boundaries, and limits will also shift in response, offering anthropologists an important terrain of inquiry into how societies frame, mitigate, and manage the suffering of others.