The provocation of the humanitarian social imaginary

This article reviews recent attempts to analyse the visibility that is brought to human suffering within 'social imaginaries' committed to humanitarian concerns. It questions the conventions of critique that operate to cast the humanitarian social imaginary as a negative development within our political culture. It is designed to encourage a more critically reflexive and historically informed approach to the work of critique. It also argues that it is possible to trace a tradition in which humanitarian campaigners operate with the aim of appropriating the critical reaction to their work as part of their political strategy. In this regard, campaigners are more concerned to provoke moral controversy than to fashion 'winning arguments'. Here the visualization of human suffering is valued more for its potential to generate value conflicts than for the extent to which it serves as an authentic or ideologically uncontaminated representation of social reality.